The House-Museum Toms Morales pays tribute to the legacy of Agustn Espinosa - La Provincia
The Tomás Morales House-Museum, in collaboration with the Insular Library of Gran Canaria, opens on February 21 at its headquarters located in the municipality of Moya, at 11.00, the bibliographic exhibition The literary production of Agustín Espinosa, which will show the creative trajectory of one of the most original and important voices of our lyrics, and that, from his masterpiece Crime, published in 1934, it is consecrated as one of the main executors and representatives of French surrealism in Spain.
Said exhibition, promoted within the framework of Canarian Letters Day 2019, which the Government of the Canary Islands dedicates to the figure of Agustín Espinosa (Puerto de la Cruz, 1897 - Los Realejos, 1939), is divided into four sections in which exposes, in the first place, the works of Agustín Espinosa and the compilation of scattered and unpublished texts (active bibliography); secondly, works on the mentioned author (passive bibliography written by Luis Alemany, Maximiano Trapero, Pérez Corrales, Antonio Becerra or Fernández Agis, among others; in third place, facsimiles, magazines and catalogs; and finally, dedicated books of his personal library and documents of different nature.
The bibliographic exhibition The literary production of Agustín Espinosa It will be exhibited at the Tomás Morales de Moya House-Museum until March 31, and can be viewed with free admission, from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Parallel to the aforementioned exhibition is organized from February 21 to March 29 the didactic workshop called In praise of the camel with plow, where the students, through this text in prose of Agustín Espinosa, collected in the work Lancelot 28º-7º of 1929, will know how this singular animal of peculiar characteristics, during centuries, was the most useful tool of the islanders, especially of those of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura.
Versatility, avant-garde experimentation and the incorporation of new aesthetics to its scandalous style, they define the creative trajectory of Agustín Espinosa as one of the most original and important voices of our lyrics. Crime, that appeared at the end of 1934, consecrates it. Its publication started from the supposed automatism and irrationals of the group composed by Óscar Domínguez, Westerdahl and Pérez Minik (the so-called Spanish surrealist faction of Tenerife), and supposed a turn in the peaceful provincial cultural life of the Canary Islands. Qualified then of scandalous, many of his copies would be burned publicly and causes that Espinosa even loses his chair of institute like retaliation, as well as a recrudescence of the duodenum ulcer that kills him to the 41 years.
Espinosa was one of the main promoters of the Second Surrealist Exhibition of Tenerife, in 1935, where he was in charge of improvising the translation of the central conference of Andre Bréton. He resided in four of the seven Canary Islands, and his defense at all costs of universalism and enlightened thought ("Deepening the depth of one's own inevitably leads to centers of generality, never narrow streets of particularization," he wrote) did not prevent devotion to its original rurality, as the poet Antonio Puente points out.
"His avant-garde spirit coexisted with the study of the Canarian ballads, and he was in time to fecundate the renewed literary airs with his exhaustive knowledge of the Spanish and French literary traditions. Agustín Espinosa was a regular contributor to La Gaceta Literaria -in whose pages he published the first fragments of Crime-, and during his doctorate years in Madrid he frequented the gatherings of Ramón Gómez de la Serna at Café Pombo, "explains Puente.
