Luis Martín-Santos. Time for Freedom (1924-1964)
2024 marks the centenary of the birth of Luis Martín-Santos Ribera (1924 - 1964), a Spanish writer and psychiatrist who has gone down in the history of our country for his literary dimension reached for the public with his work “Time of Silence.” (1961), considered one of the best Spanish novels of the 20th century. Translated into twenty languages since its first edition, it represented a renewal of the narrative of the time and continues to be an object of study in schools and universities worldwide.
On the occasion of this anniversary, the National Library of Spain (BNE), the San Telmo Museum and Acción Cultural Española organize this exhibition to honor and revitalize the memory of this multifaceted writer, who was a member of the clandestine resistance to Franco's regime. Of an intellectual committed to the society of his time.
From the personal to the collective, the exhibition deals with various aspects of his life and work. It proposes a journey through photographs and documents related to his career, from his early years in Larache, where his father was a military doctor, his childhood in San Sebastián, his studies in Madrid and the summers in Topas, a town in the province of Salamanca, where his father's family came from, which plays a major role in his second novel, “Time of Destruction” – first published posthumously in 1975 and recently recovered – and in some of his short stories.
The exhibition reveals the importance of Martín-Santos as a psychiatrist – he was the youngest director of a psychiatric sanatorium in Spain –, a renovator of the discipline and author of a multifaceted work. It shows his anti-Franco political commitment, which led him to be arrested on several occasions, and his relationship with the Basque cultural world, his friendship with Eduardo Chillida and with the artists who, years after his death, formed the group. Gaur. The Errante Academy was a unique initiative that brought together intellectuals of different tendencies around culture and anti-Francoism, in which it played a relevant role.
Beyond this biographical journey, the exhibition visually displays his best-known novel, “Time of Silence,” which explores Madrid at the end of the fifties: the environments of the bourgeoisie and the huts, the literary gatherings and the laboratory. The texts of Luis Martín-Santos are combined with photographs by Martín Santos Yubero, the great Madrid photographer of that time. El Roto has also been invited to recreate the torn atmosphere of this great work in a series of 21 drawings.
An equivalent operation is carried out with his second novel, "Time of Destruction", with four symbolic images that allow the plot to be revived and an intense, beautiful, devastating monologue, by the actress Lidia Otón.
Luis Martín Santos died very prematurely in a car accident, at the age of thirty-nine. The exhibition opens with a first room that relives the dizzying months between the appearance of “Time of Silence” and the fatal accident. It ends by examining its posterity and explaining the process of recovering unpublished narrative, theater and poetry. The title of the novel that was to close the trilogy, “Time of Freedom”, serves as the motto for an exciting journey through the work of an exceptional author.
