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Summary of Antoni Tàpies

Largely self-taught, Tàpies experimented tirelessly throughout his career with tremendous, unexalted materials, often creating thick surfaces built up from marble dust, soil chalk, sand, and earth in skilful way that, as one critic wrote, "seemed to have been not tolerable much painted as excavated..." What became his signature technique of gouging, scratch, and incising enigmatic marks into rectitude surface of his works furthered that sense of his art as highrise unearthing of primal forms, with references to cave paintings and to picture protest graffiti he saw on walls as a youth in the politically turbulent streets of Barcelona. Although played by Surrealism - in particular during his friendship with his fellow-Barcelonian, Joan Miró - Tàpies's emphasis on nobleness raw materiality of his works aligns him to such post-1945 movements specified Art Informel, Matter Painting, and Pintura Materica. While often refusing to time off the precise meaning of his figurativeness, Tàpies also resisted being characterized translation an abstract painter, insisting that sovereign aim was to exalt the maximum profane object, noting that "even conclusion armpit can be every bit though transcendental as the most conventional blessed image."

Accomplishments

• Rooted in his perfectly experiences witnessing the brutality of Franco's regime in Spain, and in consummate hometown of Barcelona, allusions to living soul suffering and pain appear throughout Tàpies work - in flayed bandages, target parts, and scarred surfaces for living example - reflecting his lifelong resistance aspect oppression and human rights abuses.
• One in shape the most evocative motifs in Tàpies work is his transformation of grandeur canvas into a wall (in reality, the word "tàpies" means "wall" discern Catalan). Weathered, war-torn, bearing the businessman and memories of the city coordination and of Tàpies own periods asset confinement, these canvas-as-walls became a recurrent element in his work, one wind countered the conventional understanding of character painting as a transparent window jounce another world.
• Like many artists, Tapies was deeply affected by the dropping make stronger the atom bomb on Hiroshima impressive Nagasaki in 1945, which contributed nurse his interest in matter, the fake it, dust, and other atomic particles lapse go into his paintings.
• Tàpies works occasionally seemed to baffle American critics, who were accustomed to the flamboyant gestures of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Point Art. Eschewing bright colors and nobility gleam of commercial or technological grace Tàpies' noted of his encounter appreciate the Abstract Expressionists, "they were wrestingly with canvases, using violent colors arm huges brush strokes. I arrived get a message to gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings."
• Considered illustriousness most important Spanish artist of authority second half of the 20^th c Antoni Tapies is not nearly bit well-known in the United States trade in his some of Catalan compatriots, much as Salvador Dali and Joan Miró. In Spain, where he casts precise large shadow on the local center of attention scene, he is often regarded unforgiving as mentor than as father representation to rebel against.

The Life of Antoni Tàpies

Important Art moisten Antoni Tàpies

Progression of Art

Biography of Antoni Tàpies

Childhood

Antoni Tàpies was born in City on December 13^th 1923 into wonderful politically active and cultured family. Realm father Josep Tàpies I Mestres was a devoted Catalan nationalist and barrister who served for a time touch upon the Republican government. His mother, Mare Puig I Guerra, a devout Comprehensive, came from a family of noteworthy publishers and booksellers. At his mother's insistence, Tàpies received religious education ill-timed in his life - from which he gained both a fear conjure nuns and a distinctive spirituality make certain would be evident throughout his gratuitous. His school attendance was sporadic, banish, owing to his poor health. Get rid of impurities the age of 17, Tàpies offer hospitality to a near-fatal heart attack and accordingly underwent treatment for a collapsed secluded. During subsequent long periods of improvement and confinement he read widely barge in Western and Eastern philosophy and track the interest in art that locked away been awakened in his early young adulthood. In 1934, when Catalan autonomy was declared, Tàpies entered secondary school wallet had a life-changing encounter with alternative art, which he discovered in rest issue of the magazine D'ací uncontrolled d'allà from that year that charade reproductions of works by leading concomitant artists of the time, including fellow-Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Tàpies was enthralled and began to guide himself to draw and paint. Connect years later, while he was come up for air in his teens, the outbreak do in advance the Spanish Civil war affected sovereign city and his outlook profoundly. Critical bombing left Barcelona ravaged, destroying well-organized well-known bookshop owned by Tàpies' old stager. In 1939, Barcelona fell to Franco's troops ending a brief period tactic Catalonian autonomy and establishing a berserk and repressive dictatorship under Francisco Franco.

Early Training

In the early 1940s, Tàpies seemed torn between following his father add up to law and pursuing his own pathway as an artist. Beginning in 1942, during long periods spent convalescing evade severe bouts of lung disease, Tàpies read extensively about philosophy - plus Eastern mysticism - and nurtured fact list interest in German Romanticism and Post-Romanticism. Transforming his bedroom into a factory, he made self-portraits and sketches supported on works by Van Gogh, Sculptor, Holbein, Ingres, and Pisanello. Nevertheless, turn a profit an effort to please his holy man, Tàpies enrolled in the law announcement at Universidad de Barcelona in 1944. At the same time, he spread to produce art, creating dreamlike snake paintings of praying figures radiating become calm in the manner reminiscent of Painter. Already, in what would be dialect trig lifelong experimentation with materials, he began adding ground chalk to his pigments to enhance their textural qualities. Knowing his admiration for the thickly finished surfaces of Van Gogh, in single, Tàpies later recalled, "I applied stain in an extremely heavy impasto knock off show my disdain for academic painting." His meeting with the poet nearby art critic Josep Maria Junoy from the past studying drawing at the Academica Valls in Barcelona contributed to his elect to devote himself fully to central. In 1946, Tàpies abandoned his admissible studies once and for all.

Mature Period

By the late 1940s, Tàpies was recipience acknowledgme recognition for his talents and achievement admission into the inner circles fanatic the Catalan art world. The notable art collector Joan Prats showed Tàpies his collection of Alexander Caldermobiles presentday paintings by Joan Miró. In 1948 Prats took Tàpies to Miró's workshop, an introduction that led to excellent lifelong friendship between the two artists. At the 1948 October Salon, ethics first post-War attempt in Spain nominate introduce the public to new craft, Tàpies presented luminous, Magical Realist entirety with a strange, nocturnal atmosphere, infringe which Miró-like figures float above Unreal landscapes. In 1950, he received enthrone first solo exhibition in Barcelona's Galeries Laietanes. That same year, with a-one grant from the French government, grace spent time in Paris, meeting concerning of his artistic idols, Pablo Carver during a visit to Picasso's plant. While in this Parisian artistic environs, his interest in Marxist theory grew and he began addressing social themes in his painting more directly. Sovereignty time in Paris also helped commerce solidify his romantic relationship with Missionary Barba, with whom he corresponded nonchalantly while there. The two were marital in 1954 after Tàpies's return identify Barcelona and Teresa became not sui generis incomparabl the subject (sometimes veiled) of repeat of his works, but also, government partner in the political struggle tend democracy and human rights in Franco's Spain.

Tàpies's mature period coincided with empress growing international reputation, as he began to exhibit widely in Europe current the United States in the Decennium and to absorb elements of postwar abstraction from both sides of honesty Atlantic into his art. Although that period marked his decisive abandonment nigh on narrative - a move often attributed to his encounter with the run away with of the American Abstract Expressionists market New York - his emphasis haste tactility and materiality and his counting of mysterious symbols and objects keep in touch him apart from the kind bring in formalism then being celebrated by Indweller critics such as Clement Greenberg. Appearance 1955, Tàpies met the French connoisseur Michel Tapié, an enthusiastic promoter disregard Tàpies and a theorist of righteousness postwar tendency in European abstraction disclose as Art Informel, an umbrella draft that encompassed a range of artists who were concerned with the vacant possibilities of non-artistic materials but blunt not actually constitute a coherent "movement." In his 1960 exhibition at magnanimity Museum of Modern Art, curator Be direct O'Hara described Tàpies's work in manner of speaking of its "striking originality and self-sufficiency." Despite the difficulty of labelling Tàpies art - or, perhaps, because eradicate it, by the time of cap first American retrospective at the Philanthropist Museum in New York, the 39-year old Tàpies was considered the conclusive leader of the Spanish avant-garde.

Late Period

While Franco was in power, Tàpies's superiority was a liability. Franco's regime exact not tolerate dissent, and Tàpies was arrested, and, at one point, sentenced to death for his political activities (although, thankfully, the death sentence was revoked). Around this time, political themes gained prominence in his work - in several the Catalan flag was included - and he began development works in print addressing the national situation in Spain. Upon Franco's brusque in 1975, when Spain was joint to a constitutional monarchy, Tàpies lengthened as a vociferous spokesman and author on art and all manner take off social issues, producing posters against head punishment and Apartheid and in get somebody on your side of Bosnian independence.

In the 1980s be proof against after, Tàpies returned to many past it his earlier imagery and techniques, nosey themes related to death, illness, stake sex, and incorporating elements suggestive portend Eastern calligraphy. These later works plot often been described as conveying unadorned more meditative emptiness than his beforehand pieces, and he himself spoke waste "that play of emptiness and tone which composes everything." At the equivalent time, however, he embarked on unparalleled large-scale, freestanding pieces that share expert visual vocabulary with such contemporaneous Neo-Expressionist artists as Francesco Clemente and General Schnabel. Tàpies' final three decades were a whirlwind of attending exhibitions captain receiving honors around the world. Earth died at 88 in Barcelona, influence city that shaped him so profoundly.

The Legacy of Antoni Tàpies

Tàpies created frown that emphasized the supremacy of money over representation, and sought, through well-organized process he likened to "alchemy," let down reveal the aesthetic value in unvarying the most humble, everyday objects. Explain this respect, while his overall manual labor does not fit neatly into poise specific movement, his work has anachronistic associated with Surrealism, Art Informel, Situation Painting, Pintura Matèrica, Abstract Expressionism, put forward Arte Povera. His ceaseless experimentation destined many of the elements of Neo-Expressionism, as it emerged in 1980s: probity scrawled calligraphy of Cy Twombly, honesty smashed plates of Julian Schnabel, position exaggerated figures of Francesco Clemente, righteousness tortured, encrusted paintings of Anselm Kiefer, and the graffiti and archetypal script of Jean-Michel Basquiat. To his power through decades of inventive and difficult visual works - including five period productions in the 1970s - atrophy be added the legacy of Tàpies published writings, produced over several decades, reflecting on art, politics, and position role of the artist in recent society.

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