VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

15. Ruiz Cabrero, Gabriel y Molins, Patricia: L’arquitectura i
l’art dels anys 50 a Madrid. Barcelona, Fundació la Caixa,
1996.
16. Nieto Alcaide, Víctor: “Sobre el arte que se hizo en los
cincuenta: entre la modernidad y la vanguardia”. In Del
Surrealismo al informalismo. Arte de los Cincuenta en Madrid.
Madrid, Department of Culture of the Region of Madrid,
1991, p. 42 et sequentes.
commissioning works from artists such as Canogar, Mompó, Valdivieso, Rivera or Pablo Serrano for
the decoration of the churches and town halls he designed for the National Colonisation Institute. He
was no exception in this regard 15 . Other architects shared his ideal of integrating art and architecture.
One particularly significant case was the Our Lady of Aránzazu Basilica, designed by Sáenz de Oiza
and Luis Laorga, in which artists such as Oteiza, Chillida or Lucio Muñoz participated. Other architects
were also on very special terms with the plastic arts in those years, such as Antonio Fernández Alba,
who participated in El Paso activities, or Ramón Vázquez Molezún, painter and architect who
participated in the Latin American Art Biennial of 1951, did a design for a contemporary art museum
that was awarded a prize in the National Architecture Competition of 1954 and won the Brussels
International Exhibition Prize for the so-called Hexagon pavilion, designed in conjunction with Juan
Antonio Corrales. By extension, construction companies associated with these and other architects,
such as Agromán, or art collectors such as Huarte - the company referred above as sponsor of
Museum of Contemporary Art activities - involved artists in their construction projects, a policy that
benefited César Manrique himself, who painted murals for buildings such as the Banco Guipuzcoano
at Tolosa, the Hotel Fénix in Madrid or the Barajas Airport terminal.
From art informel to pop art
In the Madrid of the late fifties, where César Manrique lived and worked, the main contemporary
artistic trend was the art informel in which he himself engaged. In the early years of the decade it was
difficult to define a common denominator for the art being produced in the city, which appeared to
be more a sum of a variety of individual and collective options. There was, nonetheless, a certain “aura
of age” that linked such scattered works and tendencies, due perhaps to a series of common but
diffuse influences: Picassian cubism, Matissian colourism, and the legacy of artists directly or indirectly
related to surrealism, such as Klee - in particular his geometric poetics - and Miró. All these influences
can actually be applied to the Manrique of those years, who participated fully in this rather vague
reformist discourse and identified with this “fifties style” 16 . This was ambiguous, eclectic modernity,
that can be associated with developments in the so-called Spanish School in Paris at the time. At the
end of the decade, however, art informel abstraction may be said to have reached a truly prevalent
position, albeit in co-existence with other avenues of artistic research, from the geometric, collective
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