VERSIÓN INGLESA ENGLISH VERSION - Fundación César Manrique

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Tàpies, the member of the group who first abandoned their experiments, material research would
follow other courses that exceeded the limits of painting to include the object, a new spirituality and
other sorts of content, often political. The works of the L.A.D.A.C. group, in turn, in addition to
drawing from the surrealist legacy of the Gaceta de Arte, contained a reflection on indigenous Canary
Island art.
Actually, this latter reflection can be associated with a view of primitivism as a source of
inspiration for a new plastic expression that was to reach beyond the bounds of island culture. It was
not coincidental that two of the members of L.A.D.A.C. who had enjoyed great relevance in the prewar
artistic world, the sculptor Ángel Ferrant and the editor-in-chief of Gaceta de Arte, Eduardo
Westerdahl, took part in another of the most significant post-war experiences in Spain: the Altamira
School (1948), whose scope and importance have yet to be studied in detail. From what we know, the
origin of this school was the aesthetic discovery of the Altamira caves by the German painter Mathias
Goeritz, who soon contacted intellectuals and artists such as Pablo Beltrán de Heredia, Ricardo
Gullón and Ángel Ferrant. This encounter spurred international conversations on artistic modernity,
abstraction and primitivism, as well as a journal titled Bisonte and a collection of artistic monographs.
School membership included Sebastià Gasch, Rafael Santos Torroella, Eugenio d’Ors, Llorens Artigas,
Joan Miró, Modest Cuixart, Pancho Cossío - a painter much admired by Manrique -, the Italian
architect Sartoris and the English artists Tony Stubbing, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. It will
be noted that concurrence can be readily found in the names behind many of the reformist activities
of the forties and fifties. This concurrence partially overlapped into other initiatives as well, such as
Club 49 and Cobalt 49 in Barcelona.
Looking outward in the fifties
Thus, when the political and social change taking place in the early fifties in Spain provided a
suitable backdrop for a new strategy in artistic promotion, the artistic environment was very different
from the atmosphere prevailing in the early post-war years. The situation in which César Manrique
had begun his life as a painter on the Canary Islands in the early forties or which he found on his
arrival in Madrid in 1945, had evolved into something else. Politically speaking, 1950 can be said to