Tàpies, Antoni: 1923—: Artist

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Antoni Tàpies: 1923—: Artist

Art critics hail Spanish painter Antoni Tàpies as his country's greatest living artist. Since the 1950s Tàpies has been creating large, emotionally resonant abstract works that owe much to the cultural heritage of his native Catalonia. "Tàpies is one of a number of post World War II European artists who, in their attempt at breaking through the constraints of cubism and geometric abstraction, came out with revolutionary seminal styles that roughly paralleled the development of Abstract Expressionism in the United States," noted an essay in Contemporary Artists.

The painter and sculptor was born Antoni Tàpies Puig on December 13, 1923, in Barcelona. A military dictatorship rose to power in Spain that year, but when he was eight, its royal family fled and a republic was established. Barcelona became the capital city when Catalonia won autonomy for a brief period thereafter. Tàpies's father, a lawyer, was a committed Republican and served in the Catalonian government, and there was some conflict in the home between his father's atheism and his mother's devout Roman Catholicism. When civil war erupted in Spain in 1936, forces led by the fascist Generalissimo Francisco Franco harassed the Republicans, and Tàpies's father was interrogated but released unharmed.

Joined Avant-Garde Group

Tàpies's father was determined that his son follow in his professional footsteps, and he dutifully studied law for five years. In an interview for the UNESCO Courier with Serafin García Ibañez, he confessed that art had always been his first passion. "When I was a child I loved drawing," Tàpies recalled. "I lacked the basic skills, but as time went by I became consumed by a desire to do better than all my classmates." Before he turned twenty, Tàpies was diagnosed with tuberculosis after a surprise heart attack. He spent two years recuperating between 1942 and 1943, and used much of the time to draw, read, and listen to the classical operas of nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner.

Tàpies recovered from his illness and re-emerged on Barcelona's cultural scene. By the end of World War II, Spain was firmly a dictatorship, and the Franco regime took harsh measures against Catalonia and its proud spirit, including repression of its Catalan language. Around 1948 Tàpies became involved in a group of artists and poets in Barcelona who were drawn to the Dada and Surrealist movements. They included poet Joan Brossa, philosopher Arnau Puig, and three other painters, Modest Cuixart, Joan Ponç, and Joan-Josep Tharrats. Calling themselves Dau al Set, or "Die at Seven," the group put out a daring avant-garde magazine of the same name, and began showing their work in the city. Tàpies's first exhibition with them, in 1948, included his painting "Collage of the Crosses," which provoked controversy among the more conservative elements in Barcelona; Catholic leaders even attempted to have the show shut down by authorities. The crucifix would continue to appear in many works of Tàpies's throughout his career, giving them a ghostly religious mood. He explained his fascination with the form many years later in an interview with the New York Times 's Alan Riding. "At the time, Spain was truly a cemetery," Tàpies said, after so many years of civil war and the political repression. "The presence of the cross was very intense and I used it as a symbol of primitive Christianity as well as to criticize what we called National Catholicism."

At a Glance . . .

Born Antoni Tàpies Puig on December 13, 1923, in Barcelona, Spain; married Teresa Barbara, 1954; children: Antoni, Miguel, Clara. Education: Studied law at the University of Barcelona, 1943, 1945-46; studied drawing at the Academia Valls, Barcelona, 1944.

Career: Artist, 1948–. Held first group exhibition in Barcelona, 1948; first U.S. exhibition, Marshall Field Art Gallery, Chicago, 1953; showed at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1958 Venice Biennale; the Museo de Arte of Bilbao, Spain, hosted his first museum show, 1960; retrospectives held in his honor include the Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1962; Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts, Vienna, 1968; Musee d'Art Modern, Paris, 1973; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1977; Museo Espanol de Arte Contemporano, Madrid, 1980; Tàpies Foundation established in Barcelona, 1984.

Awards: Academia Breve prize, Madrid, 1950, 1951; First Prize, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh 1958; Guggenheim Foundation Award, 1964; Stephan-Locher Medal, Cologne, West Germany, 1974; Plastic Arts Prize, City of Barcelona, 1979; Gold Medal for Fine Arts, Ministry of Culture, Madrid, 1981; Wolf Foundation Prize, with Marc Chagall, Israel, 1982.

Addresses: Office— Saragossa 57, Barcelona-6, Spain. Agent— Galeria Maeght, Calle Montcada 25, Barcelona-3, Spain.

In 1951 Tàpies won a scholarship from the French Institute that enabled him to live modestly and study in Paris. During this period he was able to meet Spain's greatest living Spanish painter at the time, Pablo Picasso. Returning to Barcelona, his creativity flourished during this decade, and his reputation as an artist accrued accordingly. In 1953 he was invited to show his works in Chicago at the Marshall Field Art Gallery, and the following year he had a show in New York City at its Martha Jackson Gallery. That show was also the occasion of Tàpies's first visit to the United States, and he found the New York art world captivated by the Abstract Expressionist style, in which painters strove to convey emotional content through reducing color and form to its simplest elements. They included the painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and as Tàpies recalled in the interview with Riding, "they were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes. I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought."

Career Languished Briefly

Tàpies gained international attention in 1958, when he and sculptor Eduardo Chillida were invited to represent Spain at the prestigious Venice Biennale. His paintings began to incorporate unusual elements that gave them the "mixed media" tag, as he affixed the thick impasto paint with rags, dirt, sand, straw, cardboard, and even x-ray film. There was often graffiti-type writing, or the letters "A" and "T," as well. In 1962 he was honored with a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but then minimalist and pop art began to gain currency on the international art scene, and expressionist works such as his fell out of favor.

Fortunately, his career was revived after the death of Franco in 1975 and the renewal of interest in Catalan culture. Barcelona became one of Europe's most dynamic cities, and Tàpies's works were suddenly viewed in an entirely new light. New York Times journalist Edward Schumacher noted that Tàpies became "a father figure and cultural hero" in the province, which was granted autonomy again in 1980, and asserted that "it is from Catalonia's extraordinarily rich Romanesque heritage that the artist draws the simplicity, powerful spirituality and frescolike techniques that for nearly 40 years have remained the basis of much of his painting."

Later in his career, Tàpies began incorporating even larger objects onto his canvases, such as buckets and mirrors. Aside from these, he explained in the UNESCO Courier interview with Ibañez, "my equipment is extremely modest—it amounts to a brush whose bristles are rather worn. That's all I need. The simplest tools can express the deepest feelings." He also spoke about the unusual materials he uses. "Gold leaf will make a totally different impression on you from that made by a piece of torn cardboard," he reflected in the same interview. "And the piece of cardboard will have different connotations, and will arouse different feelings from those produced by a piece of polished marble." He remained firm in his belief, he told the UNESCO Courier, that "there is profound wisdom in the humblest objects. The Japanese say that the whole universe is contained in a grain of sand. These objects, which seem to be nothing but rubbish, can deliver an authentic human message."

Became Elder Statesman of Spanish Art

In his later years Tàpies became increasingly interested in Eastern philosophies, particularly Zen Buddhism. He viewed his art as an extension of his personal beliefs, describing himself in the interview with Ibañez as "an anxious person. I worry about everything. I need to know everything. I tend to live in a state of anxiety with the feeling that life is some kind of great catastrophe." This attitude compels him, he told the UNESCO Courier writer, "to do something useful for society, and that is what stimulates me." He elaborated further in the New York Times profile, telling Schumacher, "My illusion is to have something to transmit. If I can't change the world, at least I want to change the way people look at it. There is a crisis of values today. In the spread of modernity, we have made great technological advances, but man at the same time has become more cruel than ever, destroys more than ever."

In 1984 the artist established the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, which formally opened with a museum and library in 1990. It holds some 2,000 works of his—though the actual career output is well above 7,000—as well as art from such masters as Louise Bourgeois, Brassaï, and Diego Rivera. The building has a tangled-wire sculpture atop it, designed by Tàpies. He has won several prestigious commissions from the government of Barcelona or its cultural institutions.

Tàpies married Teresa Barbara in 1954, and they have three grown children. He lives in a Barcelona home that has a work studio for him, and he also retreats each summer to a country house in Campins and paints there. In March of 2003 he was honored at New York City's Pace-Wildenstein Gallery in an 80th birthday retrospective.

Selected writings

El pa a la Braca, with poems by J. Brossa, Sala Gaspar (Barcelona, Spain), 1963.

La practica de l'art, Barcelona, 1970.

Suite Catalana: Poems from de Catalan, with poems by J. Brossa, introductory text by Arthur Terry and Roland Penrose, Polígrafa (Barcelona, Spain), 1973.

L'art contre L'estetica, Barcelona, 1974.

Dialogo sobre arte, cultura y sociedad, with Imma Julian, Barcelona, 1977.

Memorial personal, autobiography, Barcelona, 1978.

Conversaciones con Tàpies, with Miguel FernandezBrasso, Madrid, 1981.