Máscara de Rubén Darío

Abstract

This paper examines the tradition of the modernist masks, medallions, portraits and cabezas that Darío helped to consolidate and disseminate. It holds as well that these profiles and coined literary silhouettes of artists and writers constitute a system of “parallel economy”. Masks, portraits and medallions are presented as currency without a value on the market but as a symbolic exchange value amongst the “well read” in art and literature. The exchange strengthened the gift system that ruled the literary field, which then started to reconfigure in association to the anti-market value of pure art, and contributed to generate various networking processes between artists, writers and readers. Darío joins his work to the tradition initiated by Rémy de Gourmont as well as to the new diffusion practices of art and literature’s figures, in particular, to the new representatives of the french aesthetic that was spreading out in the porteño cultural ambience at the time. Darío translated these concerns through an artistic portrait which later became a book, Los raros. Style, therefore, became a transforming method that goes from the concrete, biographical information to the artists’ lives. Right from Darío’s first works it is noticeable the output of medallions, masks, biographical sketches and profiles. His first masks appeared in Azul’s second edition and his portraits of artists and writers were interspersed through the years to the non-fictional prose forms, such as articles, chronicles, essays and critical assessments until, during the last years, the “cabezas” appeared as texts dedicated to Latin American, Spanish and European authors. The masks and medallions circulated widely among modernist magazine and newspaper networks thus outlining a sociability and exchange system of symbolic goods that worked in parallel to any other circulating form of material goods.