El ojo ornamental del modernismo

Abstract

This article explores some images in Latin American modernist poetry—associated with the ornamental gesture—and their inscription in the arts at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe. I read the notion of ornament both as a material movement in poetic language (in texts by Rubén Darío, Julián del Casal, and Julio Herrera y Reissig) and as a practice on tradition and its repertoires, from its appearance in the scene, indoors, and in nature, but also in the body. Moreover, I will analyze the ornament as a means to articulate ways of seeing during the period and as means to oppose the present of industrialization.