The baroque. History of an aesthetic concept from interwar Europe to postmodernity

Abstract

Beyond the use of the term baroque in reference to a specific period of cultural history in Europe and Latin America, which would include the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the concept has served to characterize periods of profound crisis of values. This was the case in 1935 when Eugenio d'Ors, in the context of interwar Europe, denounced what he understood to be the predominance of a baroque spirit that undermined the great classicist tradition. This happened again in the midst of the postmodern crisis when various authors such as Omar Calabrese, Charles Jenks, and Gilles Deleuze recovered the concept as a tool to define the crisis of modernism. Between one moment and another, the categories of the baroque and the neo-baroque were useful to characterize Latin American culture in authors such as Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, or Alejo Carpentier. Our purpose is to show the mutations of the concept in order to understand how different periods seemed to obey the same logic and how the same aesthetic category could serve to characterize such different moments