Antoni Tàpies i Puig, 1st Marquess of Tàpies (
Catalan: [ənˈtɔni ˈtapi.əs]; 13 December 1923 – 6 February 2012) was a
Spanish painter, sculptor and art theorist, who became one of the most famous European artists of his generation.
Life
The son of Josep Tàpies i Mestre and Maria Puig i Guerra, Antoni
Tàpies Puig was born in Barcelona on December 13, 1923. His father was a
lawyer and
Catalan nationalist who served briefly with the Republican government. At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal
heart attack
caused by tuberculosis. He spent two years as a convalescent in the
mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art that had
already expressed itself when he was in his early teens.
[1]
Tàpies studied at the
German School of Barcelona.
After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards
only to his painting. He lived mainly in Barcelona and was represented
by the Galerie Lelong in Paris and the
Pace Gallery in New York. Tàpies died in early February 2012.
[2] He was 88.
[3]
Work
Tàpies was perhaps the best-known Catalan artist to emerge in the period since the
Second World War. He first came into contact with contemporary art as a teenager through the magazine
D’Ací i D’Allà,
published in Barcelona, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9),
while he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint.
[4]
On a French government scholarship in the early 1950s he lived in
Paris, to which he often returned. Both in Europe and beyond, the highly
influential French critic and curator
Michel Tapié enthusiastically promoted the work of Antoni Tàpies.
In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as
Dau al Set which was connected to the
Surrealist and
Dadaist Movements. The main leader and founder of
Dau al Set was the poet
Joan Brossa. The movement also had a publication of the same name,
Dau al Set. Tàpies started as a surrealist painter, his early works were influenced by
Paul Klee and
Joan Miró; but soon become an
informal artist, working in a style known as
pintura matèrica,
in which non artistic materials are incorporated into the paintings. In
1953 he began working in mixed media; this is considered his most
original contribution to art. One of the first to create serious art in
this way, he added clay and marble dust to his paint and used waste
paper, string, and rags (Grey and Green Painting, Tate Gallery, London,
1957).
Tàpies' international reputation was well established by the end of
the 1950s. From the late 1950s to early 1960s, Tàpies worked with
Enrique Tábara,
Antonio Saura,
Manolo Millares and many other Spanish Informalist artists. In 1966 he was arrested at a clandestine assembly at the
University of Barcelona; his work of the early 1970s is marked by symbols of Catalan identity (which was anathema to
Franco).
[5] In 1974 he made a series of lithographs called
Assassins and displayed them in the
Galerie Maeght in Paris, in honour of regime critic
Salvador Puig Antich's memory. From about 1970 (influenced by
Pop art)
he began incorporating more substantial objects into his paintings,
such as parts of furniture. Tàpies's ideas have had worldwide influence
on art, especially in the realms of painting, sculpture, etchings and
lithography. Examples of his work are found in numerous major
international collections. His work is associated with both
Tachisme and
Abstract Expressionism.
The paintings produced by Tàpies, later in the 1970s and in the
1980s, reveal his application of this aesthetic of meditative emptiness,
for example in spray-painted canvases with linear elements suggestive
of Oriental calligraphy, in mixed-media paintings that extended the
vocabulary of Art informel, and in his oblique allusions to imagery
within a fundamentally abstract idiom, as in
Imprint of a Basket on Cloth (1980).
[6] Among the artists' work linked in style to that of Tàpies is that of the American painter
Julian Schnabel as both have been connected to the art term "Matter".
[7]
Graphic work
Alongside his production of pictures and objects, from 1947 onward
Tàpies was active in the field of graphic work. He produced a large
number of collector’s books and dossiers in close association with poets
and writers such as Alberti, Bonnefoy, Du Bouchet, Brodsky, Brossa,
Daive, Dupin, Foix, Frémon, Gimferrer, Guillén, Jabès, Mestres Quadreny,
Mitscherlich, Paz, Saramago, Takiguchi, Ullán, Valente and Zambrano.
Essays
Tàpies has written essays which have been collected in a series of publications, some translated into different languages:
La pràctica de l’art (1970),
L’art contra l’estètica, (1974),
Memòria personal (1978),
La realitat com a art (1982),
Per un art modern i progressista (1985),
Valor de l’art (1993) and
L’art i els seus llocs (1999).
[8]
Exhibitions
In 1950, Tàpies' first solo show was held at the Galeries Laietanes, Barcelona, and he was included in the
Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
[9]
In 1953 he had his first shows in the United States, at the Marshall
Field Art Gallery in Chicago and the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York.
[10] His first retrospective exhibitions were presented at the
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, in 1973 and at the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, in 1977.
[11] Later he was the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the
Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1994,
kestnergesellschaft in Hannover in 1998, and at the
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2000.
Legacy
In 1984, Tàpies created the Tàpies Foundation, dedicated to the study
of modern art. In 1990 it opened a museum and library in the premises
of a former publishing house in Barcelona. Its holdings include nearly
2,000 examples of his work.
[12]
Recognition
Tàpies was awarded in 1958 the First Prize for painting at the
Pittsburgh International, and the UNESCO and David E. Bright Prizes at
the
Venice Biennale.
[13] He received the Rubens Prize of Siegen, Germany, in 1972.
[14] On 9 April 2010, he was raised into the
Spanish nobility by
King Juan Carlos I with the hereditary title of
Marqués de Tàpies[15] (English: Marquess of Tàpies). In the Academic Sphere, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the
Rovira i Virgili University
in 1994. Furthermore, he designed Rovira i Virgili University’s logo,
which is characterized by the letter “a”, symbol of universal’s
knowledge principle.
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Voss graduated from Minnechaug Regional High School in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, in 1972.[5] She
