The Residencia de Estudiantes, literally the "Student Residence", is a centre of Spanish cultural life in Madrid. The Residence was founded to provide accommodation for students along the lines of classic colleges at Bologna, Salamanca, Cambridge or Oxford. It became established as a cultural institution that helped foster and create the intellectual environment of Spain's brightest young thinkers, writers, and artists. The students there included Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca. Distinguished guests and speakers included Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Juan Ramón Jiménez or Rafael Alberti.
It was one of the most vibrant and successful experiences of scientific and artistic creation and exchange of interwar Europe. Its activities were stopped during the Spanish Civil War. After the civil war the academic policies of Francoist Spain created around the Residencia de Estudiantes the Spanish National Research Council, where it was integrated as the guest house. Since Spain's transition to democracy, efforts have been made to reinvigorate the institution.
History
The Residencia de Estudiantes was founded in Madrid in 1910 by the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios. It became the first cultural center of Spain and until 1936 the Residencia remained a vibrant, fruitful hub for scientific and artistic work and exchange in Europe.
In 1915, it was moved to its permanent site, informally called the Hill of Poplars by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Its director, Alberto Jiménez Fraud, ran the Residencia as a meeting place open to creativity, intellectual and interdisciplinary dialogue. The Residencia and the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios were the product of the innovative ideas generated by the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, founded by Francisco Giner de los Ríos in 1876.
The mission of the Residencia was to complement university education by fostering an exciting intellectual and living environment for its students. It strongly encouraged the constant dialogue between Science and the Arts, welcomed the avant-garde ideas from abroad, and became the focal point for spreading modernity in Spain.
Some of its residents were among the leading figures of Spanish culture in the twentieth century, such as the poet Federico García Lorca, the painter Salvador Dalí, the film maker Luis Buñuel, and the Nobel Prize winner, scientist Severo Ochoa.
The first decades of the twentieth century in Spain are known as the Silver Age - a period of rich intellectual expansion of ideas, when words and images gained a new power of expression, both artistically and politically. This Silver Age is divided into three generations:
The Residencia was one of the most important institutions of the time because it allowed the great thinkers of the time to come together and fulfil their enlightened ideas. The intellectuals at the Residencia de Estudiantes also began an institution known as tertulias - groups of artists and writers who would gather together daily, during day or night, at cafes, bars and houses to discuss their ideas and opinions.
The Spanish Civil War indicated an end to this intellectual period. Scientific progress was derailed;[1] many artists and writers were exiled from the country, and censorship increased in Francoist Spain.
Today
Nowadays, the Residencia de Estudiantes is one of the most prominent cultural centres in the city of Madrid. It hosts concerts, conferences and exhibitions. In 2015, the Residencia de Estudiantes was awarded the European Union’s European Heritage Label due to the significant role it has played in the history and culture of Europe.[3]
Today, the Residencia is again a unique center in Spain’s cultural life.[4] The Spanish State through an independent foundation manages and owns the Residencia, which is one of the associated research bodies of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Trustees of the Residencia include government officials at the state, regional and local level, as well as notorious private benefactors. The Residencia's honorary president is the Prince of Asturias.
All throughout the year, the Residencia organizes numerous public events with the participation of leading figures in the Arts and Sciences, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Pierre Boulez, Martinus Veltman, Ramón Margalef, Jacques Derrida, Blanca Varela and Massimo Cacciari, among others. Conferences, workshops, round-table discussions, concerts, poetry readings, exhibitions, etc., make the Residencia a place for open debate, critical thinking and creativity, centered on the trends of our times.
Each year, over 3,000 scholars, artists and other professionals from all over the world live for short periods of time in the Residencia.
The Centro de Documentación (library and archives) holds a unique collection of documents and books, with especial emphasis on the intellectual and scientific history of Spain during the first third of the twentieth century. These documents include the private archives of Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Jesús del Bal y Gay, Fernando de los Ríos and León Sánchez Cuesta.
The archives of the Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios and the Museo Pedagógico Nacional are also kept here. Descriptions of those documents, the library and digitalized materials are available on the Red de Centros and Archivo Virtual de la Edad de Plata de la cultura española (1868–1936 ), a project led by the Residencia with financial support from the Fundación Marcelino Botín.
The Residencia is currently developing several research projects focused on two main areas: the study and dissemination of the archives and the analysis of current intellectual trends in order to explore how our culture is evolving and where is it going.
In 1990, the Residencia re-established its publishing house, which publishes research works, critical editions of the historical texts kept in its archives, poetry readings, lecturers and seminars held at the Residencia. Exceptional testimonies, such as the Archivo de la Palabra and the periodical Residencia are among its publications.
Media interest
The biopicLittle Ashes (2009) depicts the Residencia in the 1920s, and the relationship of Lorca, Dalí, and Buñuel who were there at the time.
Luis Cernuda Bidón was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. During the Spanish Civil War, in early 1938, he went to the UK to deliver some lectures and this became the start of an exile that lasted till the end of his life. He taught in the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge before moving in 1947 to the US. In the 1950s he moved to Mexico. While he continued to write poetry, he also published wide-ranging books of critical essays, covering French, English and German as well as Spanish literature. He was frank about his homosexuality at a time when this was problematic and became something of a role model for this in Spain. His collected poems were published under the title La realidad y el deseo.
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca, known as Federico García Lorca, was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27, a group consisting mostly of poets who introduced the tenets of European movements into Spanish literature.
Luis Buñuel Portolés was a Spanish filmmaker who worked in France, Mexico, and Spain. He has been widely considered by many film critics, historians, and directors to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.
The Generation of '27 was an influential group of poets that arose in Spanish literary circles between 1923 and 1927, essentially out of a shared desire to experience and work with avant-garde forms of art and poetry. Their first formal meeting took place in Seville in 1927 to mark the 300th anniversary of the death of the baroque poet Luis de Góngora. Writers and intellectuals paid homage at the Ateneo de Sevilla, which retrospectively became the foundational act of the movement.
Emilio Prados was a Spanish poet and editor, a member of the Generation of '27.
Dámaso Alonso y Fernández de las Redondas was a Spanish poet, philologist and literary critic. Though a member of the Generation of '27, his best-known work dates from the 1940s onwards.
Manuel Altolaguirre was a Spanish poet, an editor, publisher, and printer of poetry, and a member of the Generation of '27.
Francisco Giner de los Ríos was a philosopher, educator and one of the most influential Spanish intellectuals at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
Ian Gibson is an Irish author and Hispanist known for his biographies of the poet Antonio Machado, the artist Salvador Dalí, the bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. and particularly his work on the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, for which he won several awards, including the 1989 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. His work, La represión nacionalista de Granada en 1936 y la muerte de Federico García Lorca was banned in Spain under Franco.
Guillermo de Torre was a Spanish essayist, poet and literary critic, a Dadaist and member of the Generation of '27. He is also notable as the brother-in-law of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
José "Pepín" Bello Lasierra was a Spanish intellectual and writer.
José Bergamín Gutiérrez was a Spanish writer, essayist, poet, and playwright. His father served as president of the canton of Málaga; his mother was a Catholic. Bergamín was influenced by both politics and religion and attempted to reconcile Communism and Catholicism throughout his life, remarking "I would die supporting the Communists, but no further than that."
Little Ashes is a 2008 Spanish-British drama film set against the backdrop of Spain during the 1920s and 1930s, as three of the era's most creative young talents meet at university and set off on a course to change their world. Luis Buñuel watches helplessly as the friendship between surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and the poet Federico García Lorca develops into a love affair.
Concepción Méndez Cuesta was a leading Spanish poet and dramatist and member of the Generation of '27 who became known in the literary world under the name Concha Mendez.
María de Maeztu Whitney was a Spanish educator, feminist, founder of the Residencia de Señoritas and the Lyceum Club in Madrid. She was sister of the writer, journalist and occasional diplomat, Ramiro de Maeztu and the painter Gustavo de Maeztu.
Art and culture in Francoist Spain is a historiographic term, with little use beyond the chronological placement of artists and cultural events, or political identification. The term is used generically, without involving ideological or aesthetic evaluation of the entire art and culture of Francoist Spain (1939–1975), which would only be suitable for art and culture more identified with the Franco regime, where other expressions are sometimes used: 'Fascist art and culture in Spain', 'Falangist art and culture', or 'nationalist-catholic (nacional-católica) art and culture', and so forth. The terms 'Spanish Fascist art', 'Fascist Spanish painting', 'Spanish fascist sculpture', 'Spanish fascist architecture', 'Spanish fascist culture', 'Spanish fascist literature', and so on, are infrequently used, but there are examples, as in the writing of Spanish historian Julio Rodriguez-Puértolas. Such terms have a wide application, which can be restricted to cultural products more identified with Spanish Falangism and the azul (blue) familias del franquismo, although very often these more specific terms are generalized, to cover all of the art identified as "nacional" ('national') in Francoist Spain.
Luis García Montero is a Spanish poet and literary critic, as well as a professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada.
La Institución Libre de Enseñanza, was an educational project developed in Spain for over half a century (1876–1936). The institute was inspired by the philosophy of Krausism, first introduced to the Complutense University of Madrid by Julián Sanz del Río, and which, despite being subsequently ejected from that university, was to have a significant impact on intellectual life in Restoration Spain.
The Order of Toledo was an avant-garde association of young writers and artists studying in Madrid, Spain, who made frequent weekend trips to nearby Toledo. Members immersed themselves in the mystique of the city's labyrinthine streets and mosaic history to seek out individual and shared adventures. The Order was founded by Luis Buñuel in 1923 and continued accepting members until 1936. Some of its most successful members were Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, and Rafael Alberti.
Luis Lacasa Navarro was a Spanish architect. His work in Spain and Paris before and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was rationalist and functional. He is best known as co-designer of the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition, a work designed to showcase the modern legitimacy of the embattled Spanish Republic. After the war he went into exile in the Soviet Union.
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