Entitled “Psychology of Impressionism,” this article is essential to what is called “the polemic of 1904,” which, in the view of many Colombian art historians, constituted the first debate in the country on Impressionism, the most important pictorial movement in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. In his text, Colombian poet and critic Maximiliano Grillo (Marmato, Caldas, 1868–Bogotá, 1949), also known as Max Grillo, attacks the vision of Impressionism that Baldomero Sanín Cano put forth in the same publication, a vision that upheld the autonomy of the work of art. Grillo based his argument on the notions of French critic Fernand Caussy.
From the perspective of the history of Colombian literary criticism, the polemic of 1904—in which Grillo, as well as editor and critic Baldomero Sanín Cano (1861–1957) and lawyer and educator Ricardo Hinestrosa Daza (1874–1963), played a key role—constitutes a chapter in the modernization of Colombian literature. This debate, which was largely carried out on the pages of the Revista Contemporánea (1904–05), was particularly relevant to the critical categories used to assess literature.
Grillo, who had directed the Revista Gris (1892–95) at the end of the 19th century, had also played an important role in a heated polemic around the 1899 edition of the Salón de Artistas. On that occasion, Grillo opposed artist Epifanio Garay Caicedo (1849–1903) as he defended the work of Ricardo Acevedo Bernal (1867–1930). Grillo was also associated with the Gruta Simbólica group, in which a number of bohemians took part from 1900 to 1903. That group was committed to poetry and art; it resisted the suffocating political atmosphere that ensued in the early 20th century at the hands of the Hegemonía Conservadora [Conservative Hegemony] and the Catholic Church after their triumph in the so-called Thousand Days’ War (1899–1902).
