VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

19. John Bernard Myers, “Un singular artista español y su
entorno: una opinión estadounidense”, versioned by
Antonio García Ysábal, cat. César Manrique. Hecho en el fuego
(Obras 1968-1990, una selección), Madrid, 1991.
There is no question in my mind that the first works of importance that Manrique did were the
successive murals that he painted in the mid fifties for the Hotel Fénix in Madrid, the Banco
Guipuzcoano in San Sebastián and, later, after finishing the latter, the purely abstract and, strangely, at
the same time very gestural, mural for the Barajas Airport terminal.
Although today they have all unfortunately since disappeared and our information is based on
photographs only, these enable us to at least elucidate one controversial aspect of his work: the
existence and possible consequences of the Kandinsky influence. John Bernard Myers, one of
Manrique’s most passionate and enlightened commentators and certainly the one who interpreted his
early maturity with the finest sense of humour, sustained in 1966 that it was after Manrique saw
Kandinsky’s oeuvre in Paris that he did his best contemporary work, dated from 1958 to 1966 19 . In
view of the available documents, there appears to be no doubt that Kandinsky’s compositional system
of closed, fractionally coloured forms in contrasting shades, included in the general subject with a
rhythm closely reminiscent of a musical tempo, is visibly present in the three panels painted by the
artist for the Banco Guipuzcoano. This method was used in combination with the more Picassian
universe to be found in the Hotel Fénix’ single body mural.
The most thought-provoking interpretation, in my view, for the astonishing diagnosis it
establishes, was put forward by Eduardo Westerdahl in a text written in 1960 when the style that
Manrique would definitively adopt was still developing, a text which, announcing that style and
identifying the causes of a profound change, sustained that “the mysterious door that Kandinsky had
opened in the human body just a half century before [...] reached its ultimate consequences in the
informal tendencies of abstraction” Whereas the Russian painter subdivided his research into
“improvisations”, “compositions” and “impressions” “in an evolutionary process running from chaos
to grammar”, in other words, from free forms to geometry and lines, the latter painters, among whom
he names Manrique and to whom he specifically refers, move towards their objective in the opposite
fashion: they start off from geometry to “leap to the reality of the earth, the soil. Kandinsky’s formula
is devitalised”, replaced by two elements brought into play by surrealism, the found object and
decalcomania. “The priority of aesthetic concerns such as tension, structure, composition, weight or
measure, declines. And with them, the grammatical meaning of a language. Man’s supremacy in predigesting
these values is lost. The found object was not a human creation and decalcomania was a
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