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Antoni Tapies, Catalan Mystic
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18752 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1991 |
2,263 Words |
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Alice Thorson
Alice Thorson is an art critic and educator in Washington, D.C. |
Modern art may claim Paris as its geographical home, but masses of its spiritual roots burrow considerably further southward--into the Catalan region of Spain. Though Catalonia's inhabitants take pride in possessing a cultural and intellectual history dating back to the ninth century A.D., for the rest of the world the region's most significant contribution resides in its nurture of such giants of modern art as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, and Salvador Dali, and the architect Antonio Gaudi. It is a testimonial to the area's cultural and intellectual resilience that despite the ravages of the Spanish Civil War (during much of which Catalonia provided a Republican stronghold against Franco), its artistic vitality endured. After the civil war and World War II, a second generation of vanguard artists from Catalonia claimed the world's attention, the most prominent among them being Antonio Tapies.
At sixty-eight, Tapies today is Spain's most famous living artist. In the four decades that have elapsed since his first one-person show in Barcelona, he has emerged as a giant of the international art world, with works represented in prestigious museum collections around the globe and a record of exhibits arguably second to none. In 1987 the artist established a foundation devoted to his work in his native Barcelona, where it joins the city's Picasso museum and Miro foundation in celebrating Catalonia's contribution to Modernism.
Viewed against the backdrop of twentieth-century art, Tapies' oeuvre admits elements in common with numerous well-known styles and movements--Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Arte Povera--yet, from his earliest collages of found materials and the ravaged and textured painting for which he is best known to his gestural, graffitiesque painting of the 1980s, the artist has achieved sensibility unmistakably his own, forged in the Catalan experience.
Philosophical Inquires
Perhaps the single most important a mark of Tapies' Catalan inheritance is his proclivity for mysticism. As a young man, Tapies repudiated his Catholic upbringing to study Hindu philosophy and Zen, gradually broadening his philosophical investigations to include Western as well as Eastern mystical thought. Among his abiding interests are the ideas of the thirteenth century Catalan mystic Ramon Llull, whose symbolic alphabet influenced Tapies in the development of his own repertoire of personal symbols. The doors, walls, knots, human body parts, and letters of the alphabet that appeared in his work early on continue to be the artist's
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