Antoni Tàpies remembered

Barcelona is in mourning for the great Catalan painter Antoni Tàpies who died in the city on Monday. Born in 1923, Tàpies was the most significant painter to emerge from Spain since Picasso and Miró.

An artist of remarkable longevity, with a career spanning nearly 70 years, Tàpies will be remembered for his powerful abstracted paintings – muscular works that often veered as close to sculpture as they did to painting – as well as for his role in the development and definition of Catalan culture and identity in the 20th Century.

Emerging from Spain, the land André Breton called ‘use terre surrealist’, in the 1940s, it was perhaps inevitable that the young Tàpies should have started out as a surrealist painter. From 1948 to 1956, he was a central figure in the Dau al Set group, a collection of artists and writers influenced by dada, surrealism and mystical tradition.

The young Tàpies painted in a style heavily influenced by Miró, but a trip to Paris in 1950 – during which he deepened his knowledge of expressionism, met Picasso and discovered new media – instigated a significant shift in direction, both artistic and philosophical.

Always a heavily intellectual artist, Tàpies began to look towards the Orient for his philosophical influences, while at the same time rediscovering his relationship with his homeland of Catalonia. These two themes, eastern thinking and Catalan identity, would become central to his work thereafter.

Also inspired by the street photography of Brassaï, which he had encountered in Paris, Tàpies began to take the wall as his muse. Having witnessed the Civil War, when crude graffiti, bullet marks and rough banners adorned every wall in sight, it seems entirely appropriate that he should see the wall as an emblematic feature of contemporary life.

Tàpies’ wall-like paintings are his most important. Heavy with pigment and marble dust, these richly textured works, sometimes bleak and austere, are resonant of gothic Barcelona. The marks and motifs that pepper the surfaces are not merely aesthetic gestures, replicating the surface of walls or doors: they are also part of a series of ciphers that Tàpies would employ throughout his work.

Many of these were lifted from the theories of the 13th Century Catalan philosopher and theologian Ramon Llull, particularly the Ars Maior, a complex system in which letters are invested with mystical significances. This schematic system is a typical and recurring feature in Tàpies’ work.

While he balked at the term ‘abstract art’ in reference to his own work, most viewers would find his painting obscure, the mysterious ciphers left unexplained. This reaction is in-keeping with the Oriental belief that the obscurity of the work will lead the viewer to participate in the creative act: as Tàpies said himself ‘the meaning of a work depends on the co-operation of the viewer’.

In many ways, this makes him a very modern artist, yet he remained rooted in tradition and craftsmanship. Some critics have even compared his graffage technique, working into the surface of the painting, with traditional Catalan leatherwork and there is something in this, too.  

In spite of the complex cerebral processes and the darkly obscure painting, Tàpies was a popular artist. The exuberance and invention of his work, as well as its beauty, caught the imagination, while his powerful painting and restless intellect made him a hero to successive generations of young Spanish painters.

In the Fundació Antoni Tàpies  he established a magnificent centre for the study of contemporary art, and of course an unrivalled collection of his own work.

In an interview with Barbara Catoir, Tàpies declared, ‘People who have found true knowledge fall silent… the only thing to do is carry on searching for the light: I haven’t found it yet and that’s why I paint.’

Perhaps now he has finally found that light.

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