VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

172
immediate reference: the land. The canvases produced in these years look, indeed, like the planimetries
of some geographic space, painted à la Franz Kline (a painter that Manrique cited on occasion, not as
a model but in reference to the parallels between their respective universes) 14 , which is an example
of the obvious penetration of American art in Spanish art at around that time. Manrique’s work has a
clear resemblance to the work of other members of his generation in Madrid, Farreras, Labra,
Mampaso, Sempere, Planasdurá, Rueda, etc., all of whom tended to rule the surface of their canvases
into squares or fields of colour, as if trying to reflect the aerial vision of an expanse of ground, either
cultivated or simply differentiated by colour or material components, a compositional forms¡ that they
all borrowed from American abstract expressionism.
Compared to his previous oeuvre, Manrique’s work in this new period presented a striking
novelty, albeit in reductive terms: the disappearance of colour or, rather than the literal disappearance
of colour (which obviously never occurs), the eclipse of the vividness of tone of the preceding period.
He limited his palette to a few shades of grey and ochre (likewise reminiscent of Kline’s paintings).
The greens, reds and yellows that had prevailed in his more figurative paintings were dimmed, swept
over by a tide of tar. The time had come for drama, dressed in the strict black of mourning; it was time
to express the exasperation, brutality, darkness and repression usually associated with Spanish
painting. The El Paso group - whose members were all translators of that standardised image of
Spanish art, although paradoxically influenced by American expressionism - had made its appearance;
and their success imposed a new image of Spanish art 15 . Moreover, this image was deeply entrenched
in Spanish reality of the time - squalid and grey, needy and repressive; it was more in keeping with
what the country was thought to be like in Europe and America; hence the success of the artists who
portrayed an image closer to the preconceived ideas shared by foreign audiences.
Surprisingly, in the harshest moments of his biography, when he led a very precarious existence
in Madrid with barely enough to live on, sharing his hardship with the poverty he encountered daily
on the street, in the underground, in the bakeries where he bought his bread, at the chestnut stand
on the corner or at the news stand where he leafed through - but did not buy - the newspaper,
Manrique painted works of exalted colour that celebrated the beauty of the world and the hopeful
joy of living in it. By contrast, when he was a successful painter, who sold whatever painted, and at a
good price; when his activity as a decorator - a hazard that continuously threatened his pictorial
14. “I feel drawn [to nature] and I wish to express
my feelings with images of my own, the way Kline
expressed his relationship with the cityscape”.
Arte y literatura. New York, April, 1966.
15. I don’t know to what extent this “success”
of Spanish art abroad, along with the esteem of domestic
critics, influenced the change in Manrique’s work.
The fact is that he associated the terms “abstraction”
and “success”. On one occasion he said “Everything
I am today I owe to abstract painting. I received no
praise from Madrilenian critics until I adopted
this pictorial approach. (...) Of all my paintings,
the non-figurative works have always commanded
the highest price”. Falange. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria,
13 July 1957.