This is a key year in Moreno Villa’s life and work for several reasons: the artist displayed a great ability to tackle different artistic fields, alternating classic and modern styles or merging both to create his own style that now emerged with firmness.
He published his edition of Teatro de Lope de Rueda, accompanied by a prologue, in the Clásicos Castellanos collection of La Lectura and his translation from the German of H. Wolfflin’s Conceptos fundamentales en la Historia del Arte, volume VII of Biblioteca de Ideas del siglo XX directed by Ortega y Gasset, and published by Casa Calpe in Madrid. As he would recalled years later:
“With the attentive work demanded by that translation, I got used to focus subjects more rigorously, and to penetrate more deeply into them through their analysis, the relationship between them, and their overview. The result was that painting taught me to compose; the fundamental principles of the Arts appeared to me as guiding tools for writing. And even for life.”
Enrique Díez-Canedo, Alfonso Reyes, and Moreno Villa were the editors of Cuadernos literarios, a small collection of La Lectura. Moreno Villa designed the anagram, painted the portraits of the authors published in the collection, and those of his colleagues and friends, Alfonso Reyes and Enrique Díez-Canedo. He also painted portraits of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Gerardo Diego, and José Gutiérrez Solana, among others. Moreno Villa published his play in two acts, La comedia de un tímido in the same collection.
He was a member of the jury for the Premio Nacional de Literatura and, with Antonio Machado’s support (who was also a jury member), he secured the prize for Marinero en tierra, the opera prima of a young poet, Rafael Alberti, who shared the prize, ex aequo, with Gerardo Diego for his Versos Humanos. He published his poems, Colección,
(Caro Raggio). The book provoked some important reflections on modern lyric by Antonio Machado that were printed in his review of the book. Colección was a selection of his poems published in newspapers and periodicals in the previous three years, a sample of his new poetic style. This book represented a sort of passage in his poetic evolution, a reflexive summary of what he had already written seen from a different perspective. Moreno Villa published Autocrítica in Revista de Occidente as an explanation for his book. He admitted:
“My present thoughts about poetry coincide with the classic forms; which does not mean that I managed to put my thoughts into practice. Above concepts, the irrational or the instinctive usually succeed.”
His first articles on “Art Themes” appeared in El Sol followed that duality between classic and modern art, and dealt with Ribera, Velásquez, Zurbarán, and Murillo.
Moreno Villa decided to revive his affection for painting and studied life drawing with Julio Moisés, and with other young painters like Salvador Dalí and Maruja Mallo. He soon dropped out from lessons and began experimenting alone. Moreno Villa recalled his reencounter with painting as a moment of intense feeling:
“In my feeling for color I was close to Juan Gris and Braque. I loved the sepia and deep green colors in some of their paintings, playing with white or ochre. I found that using colors in the Cubist style offered a fresher and purer pleasure than the traditional way. I became such a fanatic that I was unable to contemplate a painting in the Prado Museum.”