Gaceta de Arte

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Memory · Subcategory: Historic sites · Year: 1932

The magazine Gaceta de Arte was a milestone of the highest order within the rigid cultural landscape of the Canary Islands. Founded in 1932 by Eduardo Westerdahl, then president of the Literature section of the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife, Gaceta de Arte , throughout its four years of existence and its thirty-eight issues, enabled the opening and debate of the most innovative and avant-garde trends in the fields of literature, art, and architecture of the time.

The magazine featured contributions from the finest of the island's intellectuals of the moment: Domingo Pérez Minik, Domingo López Torres, Óscar Pestana, Francisco Aguilar, José Arozena, and Pedro García Cabrera. This group of restless art lovers established connections, from its first issue published in February 1932, with both national and international artists who were developing avant-garde concepts and new ways of understanding the world in various cultural fields. 

Gaceta de Arte , with its prestigious contributions, innovative typography, and universalist spirit, brought new life to the dissemination of European art in the fascinating decade of the 1930s, so turbulent and conflictive. More than just a magazine, it was an intellectual project of surprising vigour and richness. From Santa Cruz, the publication sought to align itself with the most advanced innovative currents of abstract art, architectural rationalism, and surrealism, thus, in the historical context of the newly established Second Spanish Republic, contributing its grain of sand to modernise the country, bring it closer to Europe, and involve it in the debate of ideas advocating the emancipation of the individual through culture and art.

The magazine promoted various exhibitions such as " El mueble moderno " (1932), where environments decorated with chromed steel furniture were recreated. It also disseminated the "First Rationalist Manifesto" (1932-1933), defending the aesthetics of functionalist architecture in the city. In 1934, the list of collaborators expanded to include names of the stature of Joan Miró, Joaquín Torres-García, and Wassily Kandinsky, among others. The connection with the Tenerife painter Óscar Domínguez was always very fluid, with him creating some covers and vignettes for the publication. After Domínguez joined the French surrealist group, it became possible to organise the international Surrealist Art exhibition in Tenerife, inaugurated on 11 May 1935 in the halls of the Ateneo de Santa Cruz, with the participation of André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, and Benjamin Péret, the great gurus of international surrealism at the time.

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 abruptly halted the publication.

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