VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

7. Calvo Serraller, Francisco (ed.): España. Medio Siglo de
Arte de Vanguardia. 1939-1985. Madrid, Fundación Santillana-
Ministerio de Cultura, 1985, vol. I, p. 293.
8. Aróstegui, Antonio: El arte abstracto. Granada, Ediciones
Cam, 1954.
Cuixart, and in recovering, to some extent, the impetus lost with ADLAN and the Republic. It is no
coincidence that Sebastià Gasch, one of the founders of ADLAN, authored the introduction to the
catalogue for the 1948 exhibition.
The Brief Academy disappeared in 1954 and the Salones de Octubre in 1957, a sign that new
circumstances had begun to reign by then in the artistic world, in which their endeavour in favour of
revival was no longer required. Indeed, in the early fifties, important changes took place in the
philosophy underlying the policy for cultural promotion, in response not only to a different official
strategy, as so often has been sustained, but also to an artistic reality that had evolved and which
required a new approach. From the end of the sombre forties and early fifties symptoms of this
evolution began to appear in different parts of Spain. Groups of artists began to form, often with their
own publications and journals, who opposed both purely academic aesthetics and the aseptic
figuration, which was neither modern nor traditional, of the painters of the so-called Second Vallecas
School or the Madrid School. In the forties the latter generally engaged in figuration - often
landscapes - with a certain expressionist gloss, compatible with a strong constructivist rigour
reminiscent of classicism. These new groups began to appear all across the country, committing their
endeavour to something different, much more clearly reformist and cosmopolitan, which drew from
the works of the great masters and movements of international modernity. Some of the more
prominent of such groups were Pórtico, in Zaragoza (1947); Dau al Set, in Barcelona (1948) or
L.A.D.A.C., Los Arqueros del Arte Contemporáneo (The archers of contemporary art), in Las Palmas
de Gran Canaria (1950). Among the founders of this last group, “the most rigorously abstract and
avant-garde group of all those that had appeared up to that time in Spain” 7 , were the publishers of the
journal Planas, the Millares brothers, with whom César Manrique had long been on very friendly
terms. Each of these groups proposed different visions of modernity, but they all participated in the
debate on the issue that was the focus of critics’ articles and studio conversations for most of the
fifties: the abstraction-figuration dialectic or, more precisely, the theoretical fundamentals of
abstraction 8 . While the members of Pórtico occasionally engaged in figuration influenced by Picasso,
Klee and Miró, at other times their works were thoroughly abstract. The distinguishing feature of the
Dau al Set group was a certain surrealist legacy, translated into what came to be called magistic
nocturnal visions, midway between the caustic and the transcendental. With the exception of Joan
Ponç, this magicism soon evolved into research into material and gestural abstraction. In the case of
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