(b Madrid, May 9, 1883; d Madrid, Oct 18, 1955). Spanish philosopher. He studied at the University of Madrid (doctorate 1904), followed by Leipzig, Berlin and Marburg (1905–7). He was Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Madrid from 1910 to 1936. The most influential of Spain’s modern philosophers, he reacted against the positivist trends of the 19th century. His central metaphysical idea was that the individual human life is the realidad radical in which all other realities, the visual arts included, are rooted. Art has no independent status in the human condition but is founded in the need of each individual for expression and understanding. At the same time, he argued that the difference between art and other forms of culture such as science is only one of degree, in that all attempts to understand the world necessarily deform what it ‘really’ is. Similarly, there are no eternal aesthetic values by which to judge a work of art: the success of a piece is to be determined by how profoundly the artist has expressed his or her individual perspective at a concrete moment....