Antoni Tàpies

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Antoni Tàpies in his studio (2002)
Antoni Tàpies (2008)

Antoni Tàpies i Puig [ ənˈtɔni ˈtapjəs ] (born December 13, 1923 in Barcelona , Catalonia ; † February 6, 2012 ibid) was a Spanish painter , graphic artist and sculptor . He was considered the most important artist of the Informel of his country. In 2010 he received the hereditary title of Marqués de Tàpies.

life and work

education

Antoni Tàpies was born the son of the lawyer Josep Tàpies i Mestres and his wife Maria Puig i Guerra, daughter of a bookseller. From 1926 to 1928 he attended the primary school Colegio de las monjas de Loreto, from 1928 to 1932 the German school Escuela alemana and from 1932 to 1934 the Escuelas Pias in Barcelona. He started high school in 1934 and had first contact with contemporary art through various Catalan publications, above all through the Christmas edition of D'aci i d'alla magazine published by Josep Lluís Sert and Joan Prats , with reproductions by Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , Juan Gris , Fernand Léger , Piet Mondrian , Constantin Brâncuși , Wassily Kandinsky , Marcel Duchamp , Hans Arp , Joan Miró and others.

During the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, Tàpies continued his studies at the Liceo Prático in Barcelona and often visited the Generalitat de Catalunya for a few months , where his father worked as a legal advisor. After an accident in 1940 at the age of 17, which triggered a mental crisis, he began to draw and paint in self-tuition. The end of his school years in 1940, first at the Instituto Menéndez y Pelayo and then again at the Escuelas Pias, was often interrupted due to the aftermath of his accident. From 1943 to 1946 he completed a three-year law degree at the Universitat de Barcelona , which he broke off without a degree and resumed his painting practice, which he had started in 1936, through studies at the Acadèmia Valls in Barcelona.

Due to a lung disease in 1942, Tàpies spent a long period of convalescence in a sanatorium in Puig d'Olena until 1943 . During this time he drew a lot and practiced copying some works by Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, began to be interested in the history of philosophy , read Thomas Mann , Friedrich Nietzsche , Oswald Spengler , Henrik Ibsen , Stendhal , Marcel Proust and André Gide as well as Arthur Schopenhauer and Miguel de Unamuno and, above all, advocated the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre , whose sentence “that man as such is not born, but 'becomes'”, and which became an early world view for the artist was apart.

Influence of Surrealism and Art Informel

From 1946 on, the artist devoted himself entirely to painting, following Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, and from the same year, influenced by the works of Miró, Max Ernst and Paul Klee , turned to surrealism at times . In 1947 he met the Catalan poet Josep Vicenç Foix, with whom Tàpies exchanged ideas because of their common artistic interests. In the same year he met Joan Brossa and Joan Prats and other members of the former ADLAN (Amics de l'Art Nou), who supported him in his artistic work. In 1948 he founded the group Dau al Set with other artists, including Brossa, and an art magazine under the same name. In the same year he took part in the “Salón de Octubre” in his hometown.

A one-year scholarship in Paris in 1950 brought him into contact with the lively art scene in the French capital and thus new stimuli, for example through Marxism and social realism . Here he encountered informal painting, got to know Jean Dubuffet and his Art brut , and reduced his artistic means to the essentials. At the same time he expanded his artistic spectrum by integrating everyday objects into his paintings and modeling textures out of sand, paint and marble dust. Religious symbols as well as magical elements can also be found in his work.

Travel - first solo exhibitions

In 1951 Tàpies visited Pablo Picasso in his Paris studio on Rue des Grands Augustins, where he met Christian Zervos and Jaime Sabartés . In the spring of the same year he traveled to Belgium and the Netherlands . In 1955 he traveled again to Paris to meet the poet and critic Édouard Jaguer and Michel Tapié , who published Tàpie's first oeuvre catalog in 1956, and in the following year he traveled to Italy , where he visited Verona , Padua and Venice . This year he visited Switzerland for the first time . Back in Paris, he met Roland Penrose and Lee Miller in 1957, and in 1958 in the course of a solo exhibition by the artist in the Galleria dell'Arieta in Milan, organized by the poet and art critic Jacques Dupin , with whom he later became friends. He also met the artists Lucio Fontana and Emilio Scanavino as well as Luigi Nono , Nuria Schönberg, a daughter of Arnold Schönberg , Emilio Vedova , Will Grohmann , Alberto Burri and Marcel Duchamp, the jury member for the award ceremony at Tàpies, presented by the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1958, was. In 1959, Tàpies traveled to New York City , where he had a solo exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery, and met the painters Franz Kline , Willem de Kooning , Robert Motherwell , the architect Hans Hoffmann and the caricaturist Saul Steinberg .

In 1962, Tàpies attended the peace congress in Moscow , which set itself the task of continuing the ideas of the philosopher and activist Bertrand Russell . He spent the summer months in St. Gallen , Switzerland, where he painted a large number of large murals for the city's new university . In 1963, together with Joan Brossa, he published El pa a la banca , a collector's book for which he had made twenty-four lithographic collages. A long relationship was to follow with the Galerie im Erker in St. Gallen, which held a solo exhibition of his works this year. Here he often met Eugène Ionesco , Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Hans Hartung, as well as others.

Other exhibition participations

In 1965 Tàpies produced thirty-six lithographs for the collector's book Nouvel-la, which was created in collaboration with Brossa . He participated in the exhibitions Collage and Constructions. 4 Internationals: Burri, Nevelson , Tàpies, Van Leyden in the Martha Jacksons Gallery in New York City and the Weiss-Weiss exhibition organized by Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf , together with Joseph Beuys , Lucio Fontana , Yves Klein , Piero Manzoni , Jean Tinguely and Günther Uecker . In 1966 he took part in a secret meeting at the Capuchin monastery in Sarrià, a Barcelona's, in part, discussed with the students and intellectuals on the establishment of a first democratic university connection since the end of the Spanish Civil War. Together with the other participants, Tàpies was arrested by the police and, after several days in prison, sentenced to a fine which was ratified by the Spanish Supreme Court in 1971. In 1967 Tàpies traveled to Paris to open his first solo exhibition at the Maeght Gallery , with which a close relationship was also to develop over many years. At the end of the year he was represented at the group exhibition Dix ans d'art vivant , organized by the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence .

Demand for independent art

In 1969 he publicly took sides for an independent art and creative freedom and thus also made an impact in West Germany, for example with Joseph Beuys. He wrote and reflected in various publications on the role of contemporary art in society and polemicized certain aspects of art and culture in Catalonia and the rest of Spain. In particular in the 1970s Tàpies was also politically active and turned against the so-called "Burgos Trial" in 1970 at a secret meeting in the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria de Montserrat near Barcelona, ​​in which the military court tried the opposition of the Franco regime in his home country. In 1972 Joan Miró appointed him a member of the board of his Fundació Joan Miró, which was founded that year . Together with John Cage and Bob Thompson, Tàpies participated in the New York City exhibition Concept and Content at the Martha Jackson Gallery.

In the following year, he produced a series of lithographs for the book La clau del fauc , which contains a foreword and selected texts by Pere Gimferrer, and contributed, together with other artists, to the book L'Émerveillé merveilleuse , in homage to Joan Miró . In 1974 in the Galerie Maeght, Paris, he showed the series Assasins , lithographs that were motivated by the political situation in Spain and in particular by the execution of the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich , and in 1975 he contributed a lithograph and a poster to a campaign more civil legal persons campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty in Spain. He also took part in various actions organized by the opposition of the Franco regime in favor of an amnesty for political prisoners and in actions for the final return of democratic peace.

Homenatge a Picasso , 1983, Monument in the Parc de la Ciutadella in Barcelona
Montaner i Simon, the building of the Tàpies Foundation with his work Núvol i cadira on the roof

In 1976 Tàpies traveled to Saint-Paul-de-Vence , where he took part in the opening of his retrospective at the Maeght Foundation , which was subsequently shown at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. During 1977, Tàpies produced several posters for various cultural and urban events and, together with Rafael Alberti, participated in the collector's book Retornos de lo vivo lejano . The following year he traveled to New York City, where there was an exhibition of his work at the Martha Jackson Gallery, and visited Robert Motherwell at his home in Greenwich , Connecticut . The Argentine writer Julio Cortázar wrote the text 'Grafitti' for the catalog of this year's exhibition at the Maeght Gallery. Together with Alexander Mitscherlich, Tàpies worked on his book Reflecting on Dirt and produced eight engravings for Petrificado petrificante , a collector's book with poems by Octavio Paz .

In 1981 Tàpies in Saint-Paul de Vence designed his first ceramic sculptures with the support of the German ceramist Hans Spinner and, on behalf of the city of Barcelona, ​​made the first sketches for a monumental sculpture in honor of Pablo Picasso. He also participated in various collector's books , such as Anular , together with José-Miguel Ullán; Tàpies répliquer , together with Jean Daive and La pierre touant le sense mais, plus tard, le ciel au fond de l'entaille , together with the French poet Yves Bonnefoy .

Foundation of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies

In 1984, on the initiative of Antoni Tàpies, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies was founded in Barcelona, ​​which was opened to the public in 1990 with the unveiling of the monumental sculpture Núvol i cadira on the roof of the former Montaner i Simón publishing house - the current headquarters of the Fundació.

Reception and criticism

Although Tàpies was recognized as one of the great artists of the last century and as a great genius of abstraction, he always saw himself as a simple amateur and, contrary to the opinion of many art critics, not as an abstract artist, but as a realist who sees his work as an attempt to understand reality and present it to the viewer. Tapies only viewed his surrealist and dadaist phase as self-critical, which robbed him of his spontaneity.

The artist created around 8000 signed works in the course of his career. Many of them achieved prices between 40,000 and 300,000 euros at auctions. Such numbers were never important for Tàpies. He felt drawn to Zen Buddhism and the mystics and deplored the chaos of modern society in which only money is discussed and in which the spiritual message that the artist wants to convey is drowned out.

The early inclusion of Tàpies' work, especially in Germany, is thanks to the commitment of Alfred Schmela , who showed the first solo exhibition in 1957, and that of Werner Schmalenbach five years later . The enthusiasm for this art with its rugged, earthy and rough surfaces, in which the material became the medium of expression, has remained unbroken to this day. It breaks all traditional values ​​and "sensitizes our eyes to an aesthetic of decay".

But Tàpies also politicized his art and used it for agitation. The recurring motif of the four red stripes of the Catalan flag was his statement. This went so far that he demonstrated against Franco's show trials and went to prison for a short time. But his political ideas gradually lost their radicalism.

Awards and honors (selection)

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

Web links

Commons : Antoni Tàpies  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Youssef Ishaghpour: Antoni Tàpies. Works, writings, interviews . Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2006, p. 151.
  2. ↑ a b c Diether Rudloff : Unfinished Creation. Artist in the twentieth century . Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1982, p. 134.
  3. ↑ Francisco Calvo Seraller: (inlet): Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection . Guggenheim Bilbao 2009, ISBN 978-84-95216-61-8 , p. 527.
  4. ↑ a b Youssef Ishaghpour: Antoni Tàpies. Works, writings, interviews . Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2006, p. 152.
  5. ↑ Youssef Ishaghpour: Antoni Tàpies. Works, writings, interviews . Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2006, p. 152 f.
  6. ↑ a b c d Youssef Ishaghpour: Antoni Tàpies. Works, writings, interviews . Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2006, p. 153.
  7. ↑ a b c Youssef Ishaghpour: Antoni Tàpies. Works, writings, interviews : Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2006, p. 154.
  8. ↑ Youssef Ishaghpour: Antoni Tàpies. Works, writings, interviews . Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2006, p. 155.
  9. ↑ star v. February 8, 2012
  10. ↑ Handelsblatt v. February 7, 2012
  11. ↑ FAZ v. February 9, 2012
  12. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung v. February 8, 2012
  13. ↑ Real Decreto 433/2010 (PDF; 150 kB) - website BOE
  14. ^ Antoni Tapies exhibition Villa Wessel 1995/1996 in Iserlohn
  15. ^ Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen
  16. ↑ Musée d'art moderne de Céret
personal data
SURNAME Tàpies, Antoni
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tàpies i Puig, Antoni; Tàpies, Antonio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish painter
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Barcelona , Spain
DATE OF DEATH February 6, 2012
Place of death Barcelona , Spain