VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

1. Much has been written about the positive influence
wielded by Daniel Vázquez Díaz during the post-civil war
period. I believe, however, that this painter’s work has been
overestimated; his work has not withstood the passage of
time and one wonders whether the tardy adoption of
abstraction by young Spanish painters (the only avant-garde,
at the time, that could pull national art out of its
mediocrity) was largely due to the opinion that Vázquez
Díaz expressed of if from the prestige of his chair
Cesar Manrique’s painting up to 1958
Lázaro Santana
Around 1958 or 1959 César Manrique adopted the lexis that would constitute the most
recognisable inventory of his pictorial language for thirty years: material art informel whose apparent
model is the convulsive orography of the island of Lanzarote but whose plastic essence lies in the
adoption of material in its own genuine essence, with no external allusions other than the anecdotal
references in some of the titles. He would pursue this line of work in his maturity and his prime, which
extended at least into the early eighties.
Since Manrique was born in 1919, he can hardly be said that he defined his plastic personality
precociously; on the contrary, it seemed to elude him as he coupled his work to that of his Spanish
contemporaries, imbuing it with only relative originality, which, in any event, differed substantially from
his subsequent achievements.
In Spain, the fifties were years of aesthetic dispersion, in which the isolation from artistic currents
in Europe and America, the absence of masters whose work could serve as a guide and
encouragement for young artists 1 , and the presence of certain painters very highly acclaimed in official
quarters whose plastic language was embedded in the most mediocre realism, contributed - all these
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