Timely Wisdom

José Ortega y Gasset (Spanish, 1883–1955) was one of the great essayists of the twentieth century. His writings ranged across metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, politics, history and ethics. In 1929 he published his best known work, The Revolt of the Masses, in which he claims the rise of the "mass man" to be the "greatest general crisis that can afflict peoples, nations and civilization": "The average man finds himself with 'ideas' in his head, but he lacks the faculty of ideation." Ortega was an astute and sensitive critic of the new art of his day, and the ideas put forward in his 1925 work, The Dehumanization of Art, were particularly prescient, supplying much of the basic conceptual framework within which modern art would be theorised by later writers.