VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

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A review of the proposals and conclusions set out by the participants at the Santander event
reveals that critics, historians and commentators stressed the distance between Spanish painting of
the time and the problems and fundamental intentions that prevailed in the New York School on the
one hand and, although different in its formulations, in European art informel or lyrical abstraction on
the other, especially with respect to what Michel Tapié called Art Autre.
Seen from today’s perspective, the factor most likely to attract the contemporary reader’s
attention is the fundamental importance attached to the religious question and the transcendental
potential of abstract or non-objective art.
Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño reproached abstraction for the absence of any social, political,
philosophical or religious content (without specifying direction or intention) and sustained the
inexorable need for such expression: “Only non-objective painting, with its precedents and recent
sires, has been removed from any religious, political, social or philosophical belief. It is, moreover,
viewed by all such beliefs with distrust and hostility, because they all seek their own specific ends and
are only willing to accept plastic language insofar as it serves as propaganda. It would not appear to
be easy to maintain this isolated arrogance. Abstract art, and specifically painting, cannot escape from
this historic law and to survive will have to bow to one of these systems, or otherwise suffer total
confinement and desertion” 9 .
But paraphrasing Eugenio d’Ors, Gaya later contradicts himself by asserting that “Today, years
after the mid-twentieth century, the only religious painting is abstract painting” 10 .
Such devotion, I would hasten to add, was always, or at least always appeared to be, far from
Manrique’s intention, but its redundant appearance in the comments of the time must not have been
indifferent to him. In any event, in 1953 he participated in the exhibition Religious art today, held at the
Hostal de Los Reyes Católicos in Santiago de Compostela, and as late as 1958, a year which we shall
later see was substantial to his artistic evolution, he participated in the collective shows Continuity in
sacred art, at the Ateneo in Madrid, and the Exhibition of sacred art, held in the Bishop’s See at
Zaragoza 11 . Nor does it seem to me to be irrelevant to recall, for instance, that in 1950, Jorge Oteiza
was commissioned to do the sculptures for the Aránzazu Basilica - the year prior he had won a
9. Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño, “La pintura abstracta”, in
El arte abstracto y sus problemas, Ediciones de Cultura
Hispánica, Madrid, 1956.
10. Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño, op. cit.
11. Lázaro Santana reports that he exhibited
Símbolos de la Pasión (Symbols of passion), a design
for a mural, and Cabeza de Jesús (Head of Jesus),
the latter in the See only. Lázaro Santana, Manrique,
Edirca S.L., Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1991.