The Canary landscape in the avant-garde: the creation of the Atlantic myth

Abstract

This work focuses on the change of paradigm that the Canarian avant-garde involved, led by the generation of the magazine Rosa de los Vientos, in relation to the representation of the landscapes. On the visual arts, the artists from the «Escuela Luján Pérez» began this new modernity. We situate ourselves during the last years of the twenties and the first half of the thirties, one of the most flourishing cultural times in the Canary Islands. The island landscape is observed with new eyes, what involves the creation of a new regionalism that puts aside the northern landscape and focuses the attention on the dryness and lack of colour of the south of the island, which reaches the spiritual dimension through the geometrical elements like the “cardon” or “pitera”. This is, in brief, an essential landscape, as it is expressed by Pedro García Cabrera in El hombre en función del paisaje.