José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist. His many books include What is Knowledge? and The Revolt of the Masses. Anthony J. Cascardi is dean of arts and humanities and professor of comparative literature, rhetoric, and Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley. A classic work on radical aesthetics by one of the great philosophers of the early twentieth century
No work of philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset has been more frequently cited, admired, or criticized than his response to modernism, "The Dehumanization of Art." The essay, originally published in Spanish in 1925, grappled with the newness of nonrepresentational art and sought to make it more understandable to the public. Many embraced the essay as a manifesto extolling the virtues of vanguard artists and promoting efforts to abandon the realism and the romanticism of the nineteenth century. Others took it as a denunciation of everything that was radical about the avant-garde. This Princeton Classics edition makes this essential work, along with four of Ortega's other critical essays, available in English. A new foreword by Anthony J. Cascardi considers how Ortega's philosophy remains relevant and significant in the twenty-first century. "José Ortega y Gasset is certainly the greatest philosophical essayist of the first half of the 20th century, and very likely one of its few genuinely seminal minds. . . . The Dehumanization of Art is still among the best efforts to define and interpret the radical break in continuity between modern art and the whole Renaissance tradition of representation which ended in the 19th century."-Joseph Frank, New Republic "An erudite and magnanimous capitulation of the old to the young . . . both wise and noble."-Mark Helprin, New Criterion
