Styles: Iberian Resurgence

Art in Spain inexorably involves a set of attitudes to and by the government. The Civil War, cutting off a rich flowering of painting and sculpture, turned Picasso into a rebellious exile in France, Dali into a Franco sympathizer, Miró into a resister who stood his ground on Spanish soil. Until 1958, art and the government fought a wary underground war, and the world wondered whether the Spanish art had ended in 1937 with Picasso’s Guernica.

Then came a wry event. Abstract paintings by a fiery Catalonian named Antoni Tàpies won a prize for Spain at the Venice Biennale, followed by first prize at the Carnegie International. It dawned on Madrid that themeless abstractions have no power to topple a government but could serve to speak to the world of a more modern, talented and open Spain.

Embarrassing Support. Tàpies, now 40, and many others have since lived with a government that likes them more than they wish to be liked. They prosper in embarrassment; the freedom that they insisted upon is suddenly an asset to Franco. This uneasy partnership makes for strange ironies. When the government four months ago sent a striking show of new painting to the Spanish pavilion at the World’s Fair, Tàpies and one of his top followers, Modest Cuixart, would not let their work be included — even though Picasso, out of a growing nostalgia for Spain, sent three new paintings.

Instead, Tàpies and others contributed to a rump show of modern Spanish work now on at Rimini, in Italy. And the master Picasso, just to prove that he cannot be brought into camp, specifically chose for the Rimini show a 1937 surrealist condemnation of Spanish fascism called Dreams and Lies of Franco.

Head Start. From his great house on a mountain promontory northeast of Barcelona, Tàpies remains the leader of the Spanish moderns—by virtue of a head start. In 1949, in Barcelona, he put on a show of abstractions which, though dismissed by the Spanish press and ignored by the public, caught the eye of other struggling painters.

Tàpies had been going to law school while painting in emulation of Miró; he gave up school to help found a group called Dau al Set to experiment in the arts. More technicians than theoreticians, the group hoped to grapple with matter, not imagery, and Tàpies still feels the need, as he says, to “throw in sand, stone, dust—something that would give me the immediateness of a crumbling wall, the feel of its crevices and its worn surfaces.”

To the sophisticated French pursuit of paint as paint—tachisme, art brut, or art informel—Spaniards such as Tàpies brought robust energy. They not only painted the wall; they made walls. They slashed and splattered their canvases, then stitched and bandaged them up. Their palettes were a tinker’s delight, making Jackson Pollock’s drip technique seem like polite pottering. And out of that impulse grew the whole movement (see color pages). Some of the comers; >

Modest Cuixart, 39, cousin of Antoni Tàpies, paints in a richly detailed impasto that he calls “the new baroque.” Once a member of Dau al Set, he left to dabble in textile designs, returned to share the crown of Catalan craftsmanship with Tàpies. Cuixart says that “a renewal is taking place among those young artists who are distinguished by their absolute independence.”

> Joaquín Vaquero Turcios, 31, son of an established Madrid landscapist, is a bold muralist whose works form walls in churches, hospitals and universities across Spain, even an 8,611-sq.-ft. bulwark in an electrical plant in Grandas de Salime. His murals are close to “official” art, full of public consciousness, but when he won first prize at the 1963 Paris biennial, it was awarded for his feverish blend of abstraction and figuration. Vaquero Turcios fears gimmickry in the Spanish preoccupation with paint as material rather than illusion. But he himself uses a latex and plastic mixture on pressed wood, or even plaster, as in the sails of his Homage to Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor on Columbus’ Pinta who first saw the New World.

> Carlos Sansegundo, 34, is an expatriate who recently married an American and hopes to become a U.S. citizen. He is a Basque, a former sculptor who now paints romantic embroidery to pop art. “Spanish art is dead,” says Sansegundo. “The Spanish are too proud. They will not accept what other countries are doing. I think it has killed art.” He is quite happy, however, to show his work in the World’s Fair pavilion.

> Antonio Suárez, 41, shares the Spanish concern with raw materials. Says he: “We’ve got to get our hands on it—the Spanish sensuality. We’re sculptors in a way.” When he feels that he is sketching too precisely, Suárez works with his left hand just to make it rougher. His work brutally flattens torsos and landscapes in a grotesque Goyagony that invites the eye to probe.

> Antonio Saura, 34, is a slender Castilian who abandoned surrealism for the most tortured expressionism seen in present-day Spanish art. He sprays cynicism as he sprays his oils: “A renaissance of the arts in Spain today?” says he. “Oh come now. It is an art of protest against officialdom. The present cultural level is pretty grim. The artist must sell abroad if he is to survive.”

> José Guinovart, 37, is a Barcelona favorite who started with social realism, then did stage décor for García Lorca plays. The stocky artist turned to collages, attaching everyday apparel to his somber canvases. His Homage to Valdés Leal attempts to express the tremendous force of a 17th century artist in a volcanic surface that belches up actual objects.

Despite their modern idiom, contemporary Spaniards like Guinovart still live in homage to their ancestral art. None is all that distant from Goya’s black nightmare paintings. Their colors are gloomy or veiled. They rarely use oils pure from the tube but rather blend them with earths to make their impastos. They seem, like the flamenco dancer holding his head high while his feet stomp in the dust, trapped in a tragic, often elegant, dilemma between formality and earthiness.