VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

12. Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño, op. cit.
13. Informaciones, Madrid, 5 February 1955. Quoted in
Lázaro Santana, op. cit. (2)
competition for a monument to Philip IV - that would be prohibited in 1954, or that the following
year the Basque sculptor would, together with architects Sáenz de Oiza and Romaní, be awarded the
National Prize in Architecture for a design for a chapel on the Road to Santiago.
It is nonetheless obvious that Manrique replaced this dry and at the same time imposed fundamentalist
spirituality with a pantheism bordering on paganism and the orgiastic rapture of the senses.
These conferences also emphasised the absence of “literature” that should preside abstraction.
Oddly, this literary aspect would become the monster to be most forcibly slain in the immediate future.
As far as technique is concerned,. there was “A very nineteenth century concern to use the right
technique for each and every piece was also very much a part of abstract painting, which was
performed with formal perfection, striving for durability in a way that was absent in previous
schools” 12 . César Manrique would comment on that shared penchant on various occasions: “The
mechanics of painting is [...] of primary importance for me. Without a command of craftsmanship noone
can do anything worthwhile, whether with a canvas or a jack plane” 13 . There is also nearly
unanimous recognition of a Spanish palette, a legacy of the Golden Age tradition, emanating from
obscurity and linking chromatics to spiritual loftiness.
Hence, in an unusual article intended for circulation abroad, La pintura informalista [española] a
través de los críticos ([Spanish] Art informel painting seen by its critics), published in three languages by
the Directorate General of Cultural Relations, a department under the aegis of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, Carlos Areán explains how “The two non-objective schools presently existing in Spain,
the Madrid school, headed by Saura, Canogar, Suárez and Vela, and the Barcelona school, whose most
prominent member is Tapies (sic, hereafter, correctly spelled Tàpies), update the Spanish chromatic
tradition (which Areán defines in terms of the limitation of range and interpenetration of colour),
enriching it with slight modifications and nuance. In Madrid, Saura’s gold-hued sepias, Canogar’s flashes
of red in a chain of sandy greys, Suárez’ blood-stained and pasty white and Vela’s sandy and lightstreaked
ochres, greens and blues, honour tradition, while restricting the range and multiplying the
tones of each of the few colours used. In Barcelona, the most innovative contribution is the discovery
of luminescent colour, which may be gold or fire in Cuixart, multiple in Puig or Vallés, silvery or golden
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