The movement was launched in the tertulias of Madrid's Café Colonial, presided by Rafael Cansinos Assens.
The Ultraist core was formed, among others, by Guillermo de Torre, Juan Larrea, Gerardo Diego and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, who lived in Madrid at the time.
[1] In the trend of Russian and Italian futurism, Dadaism and French surrealism, the Ultraist movement, which ended in 1922 with the cessation of the journal Ultra (though some authors, such as Borges, continued writing in the Ultraist style for nearly a decade afterwards), proposed an aesthetic change, less ambitious than that of surrealism, trying to extend to all arts and to daily life itself.
In a manifesto published by Nosotros magazine (Buenos Aires, 1922), Borges summarized Ultraist goals thus: The expression "ornamental artifacts" was clearly a reference to Rubén Darío's Modernismo, which the Ultraists considered over-ornamented and lacking in substance.
Ultraism was akin to the creacionismo of the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, who met with the Ultraists in their tertulias.