In this brief article, “Con Vicente Huidobro,” Jean Emar discusses art and records the thoughts that the avant-garde Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro shared with him in conversations. They discussed matters related to Huidobro’s theory and practice, such as creationism, poetry, and contemporary artists and culture. They also talked about the different art movements and trends that were in vogue in the early twentieth century (such as Dadaism and Futurism) and their impact on the Chilean art scene. The subjects they touched on in their conversations shed light on Huidobro’s opinions on his native country regarding (and occasionally as compared to) European culture. 

“Con Vicente Huidobro” (1925) is one of many articles that the art critic and writer Jean Emar (1893–1964)—the pseudonym used by the Chilean writer Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi—published in La Nación (the Santiago newspaper founded by his father), as part of the well-known Notas de Arte series. These articles were published from 1923 to 1925 and contributed to the development of the Chilean avant-garde in the early twentieth century by encouraging debate on the academic art models that were in vogue in the 1920s. In these Notas, Emar introduced a number of subjects, problems, trends, and personalities in the field of modern art, including the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. He also wrote about Cubism, sparking conversations about ideas that were entirely new in local circles. The Notas de Arte series provided a welcoming space for the various styles, creations, and subjects broached by artists who sought a renewal of the Chilean art scene, such as the members of the Grupo Montparnasse: Luis Vargas Rosas, José Perotti, Henriette Petit, Manuel and Julio Ortiz de Zárate, Camilo Mori, Sara Malvar, and Waldo Vila, among many others.    
 
The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) is widely regarded as having promoted the literary avant-garde, not just in his own country but also in the progressive realm of Hispanic letters. His ideas, poems, and writings all helped to develop the theory of creationism, as reflected in this book Altazor (1931). The concept of creationism refers to the poetic mission of creating (from the Greek poíesin, meaning to make); it therefore counters the realist and naturalist movements that dominated the Chilean art scene in those days, as well as most of the poetry written in the Spanish language. Huidobro thus claimed that works of art should not reproduce an “external model,” but must speak for themselves as the fruit of human and artistic creation. He wrote a number of manifestos that expressed his aesthetic theory, the first of which was “Non serviam” [Nothing Enslaves Me] (1914), in which he presented his creationist ideas.