VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

1. “César Manrique”, Diario de Avisos, Santa Cruz de
Tenerife, 2 December 1979.
2. Dore Ashton, “À Rebours: La rebelión informalista”, cat.
À Rebours: La rebelión informalista, Atlantic Centre of Modern
Art, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Queen Sofia National
Art Centre Museum, Madrid, 1999.
César Manrique
Mariano Navarro
«[...] I had a sense of belonging,
of being absolutely one with Nature.
That sensation marked me for the rest of my life.» 1
Historians have long acknowledged the deep wounds that the two world wars inflicted on the
world’s cultural flesh, particularly after the horrors of World War II in the West and Japan and the
ethical devastation that came in the wake of the holocaust and the use, on two consecutive occasions,
of the atomic bomb against the latter country.
These - according to Dore Ashton - were the painful roots of two distinguishing characteristics of
post-war art: the rebellion against established systems and the use of one and the same abstract language
by artists hailing from very distant latitudes. “Their emphatic responses” - he adds - “soon received a series
of labels: art informel, tachism, abstract expressionism, lyrical abstraction, action painting, new figuration ...
[...] painters the world over found a pictorial language that adapted to their circumstances. Nonetheless,
the existence of an international lingua franca did not entail the disappearance of the vernacular language,
so deeply rooted in any traveller’s heart. Local circumstances inevitably yielded local dialects and accents” 2 .
Several of the American abstract expressionists confessed, sooner or later, that all the kind of
painting they had practised in the forties induced in them was desolation, despair and emptiness,
which may be what drove them, in Adolph Gottlieb’s words, to “try anything”.
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