VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

22. Ashton, Dore: “À rebours: la rebelion informalista”. In
À rebours. La rebelión informalista. (1939-1968). Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria, Atlantic Centre for Modern Art and Madrid,
Queen Sofía National Art Centre Museum, 1999, p. 18.
23. Sandler, Irving: The Triumph of American painting. A history
of Abstract Expresionism. New York, Icon, 1970. See also
Guilbaut, Serge: How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art,
The University of Chicago, 1983.
All of them, along with other art informel practitioners such as Lucio Muñoz, Tharrats, Farreras,
Feito or artists devoted to research in geometrical abstraction such as Sempere, were represented in
the new abstract art museum inaugurated in the “Casas Colgadas” in Cuenca in 1966. This museum,
founded by Gustavo Torner and Gerardo Rueda, houses a private collection acquired by the painter
Fernando Zóbel as a tribute to Spanish artists of the fifties. The following year, as if unintentionally
offering a new approach, an exhibition titled New generation was organised in Madrid by Juan Antonio
Aguirre. This showing included a new group of artists, most notably Luis Gordillo. Very soon thereafter,
Gordillo was to be conferred a nearly tutelary role by other painters of a subsequent generation
anxious, in an environment in which artistic modernity was identified with tendencies such as
minimalism and conceptualism, to recover the pleasure of painting.
1965-1968 in New York
While the Spain of the latter half of the sixties continued to develop art informel and its
alternatives, César Manrique moved his studio to New York. There he found a city full of life and
agitation, radically different from his native Spain, dazzling at first, but perhaps overwhelming in the
longer term, triggering nostalgia not for Madrid, from where he had come, but for Lanzarote, which
he had actually never left. He continued to work with the art informel poetics of gesture and material
that had been initiated in the forties by artists such as Fautrier and Dubuffet in France and abstract
expressionists such as Pollock or Kline in New York, and which had been echoed in the fifties not
only by the El Paso artists, but also, among others, the CoBrA group in Northern Europe. In the postwar
years, certainly, art informel had constituted a sort of “lingua franca that enabled painters to
communicate across national boundaries” compatible with “the vernacular language, so deeply
rooted in any traveller’s heart” 22 . But when Manrique arrived in New York, abstract expressionism,
the tendency that had made this city the new artistic Mecca, ousting even Paris from the its
primacy 23 , had long since ceased to prevail. The dramatic death in 1956 of Pollock, the hero par
excellence of American culture, had brought the expressionist adventure to a symbolic end. Many of
the chief players of the New York School, in which Pollock himself had been so prominent, such as
Rothko, Motherwell, Kline or de Kooning, were still painting. But they were no longer the brightest
stars in the firmament. The values that critics and merchants were now banking on included,
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