VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

2. See Lázaro Santana: César Manrique, un arte para la vida.
Editorial Prensa Ibérica. Barcelona, 1993
expressed it with naive drawings that he traded for other objects with his playmates 2 . This was how
he began to learn about nature, with which he retained close ties for as long as he lived, through his
work and his outlook on life, feeling himself an intimate part of the natural world. Another of his
plastic exercises as a teenager was to copy the stills for the films shown in Arrecife: César drew and
re-drew the faces of actresses such as Mae West, Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich,
attempting to capture the exotic mystery and air of femme fatale that they radiated; he was
particularly fascinated (and would continue to be intrigued throughout his life) by Great Garbo’s cold
and distant beauty.
Not a single example of these early exercises has survived. But we must assume that he drew them
ably enough to achieve a reasonable likeness with his models. In later years César did many portraits of
family and friends, in which he attained a precise resemblance to the true image: these are faces painted
along academically acceptable lines, many of them done before the author trained in San Fernando.
The earliest of Manrique’s works that have been conserved date from the first half of the forties:
they formed a part of his first solo exhibition, held in Arrecife in 1942. As would be the case in most
of his exhibitions, at least until 1957, two types of works were included in the showing, which differed
in intent and technique: there were, on the one hand, what we might call the genre paintings, done in
a very orthodox manner bearing in mind Lanzarote’s geography and humanity; and on the other,
certain invented scenes, with stylised figures, staged against exotic backdrops. The former have an
undeniably local flavour and the content is defined by the titles themselves: Puente de las Bolas (Las
Bolas Bridge), Vecinos de Famara (Famara townsfolk), Tocando en Tahíche (Playing at Tahíche), Mociando,
etc. In them, the landscape - urban or rural - is portrayed objectively and its most distinctive elements
are identifiable - stone or white-washed walls, volcanoes, etc.; the people wear typical island dress,
constituting perfect folkloric vignettes. The invented scenes, by contrast, represent places that
Manrique had never been (here also the titles of the paintings clearly explain their content: Oriente
(The East) or Venecia (Venice)), in which the artist painted elongated figures in rather contorted
postures; most are female nudes, some sharing the canvas with giant cacti. The decorative aesthetic of
these scenes was very close to the art deco that Manrique had very likely seen in certain films and
also to the work of by a rather nondescript Canary Island modernist painter, Néstor, who was
nonetheless much admired by Manrique.
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