The fascinating "criminal" and "degenerate" Tàpies

BarcelonaThe NO-DO, the weekly Francoist news programme that was shown in cinemas, was on the right track. In November 1949, it showed a report on art following the II Salón de Octubre organised by the Galerías Layetanas in Barcelona. There were works by Antoni Tàpies, Modesto Cuixart and Àngel Ferrant, among other artists from the Dau al Set group. The position of the news programme was unequivocal: it associated this avant-garde art with "a fairground spectacle, with social danger and criminality, according to an exercise in psychopathologisation that recovers the [Nazi] theories of degenerate art", as explained by Pablo Allepuz, curator of the exhibition. Antoni Tàpies. The Imagination of the World together with Imma Prieto, the director of the Museu Tàpies.

What was Antoni Tàpies like, the dangerous, criminal and degenerate fair-goer of the late 40s? An artist in transformation who barely left behind the academic portrait, who made dark copies of Joan Miró and who consciously and unconsciously echoed surrealism, dadaism and dirty art, and a sociocultural context where the traces of Wagner, Tolrà's trading cards, Tarot cards, the popular energy of Patum, the tricks of Méliès's cinema, the novels of thieves and night watchmen, film magazines, walks with Joan Brossa and meetings with Club 49 to listen to recordings of the film overlapped. bluesman Big Bill Broozy or the opera Wozzeck by Alban Berg. "Tàpies breaks down the walls between high culture and low culture," says Allepuz, who used the artist's reflections in books such as Art and its sites (1999).

"He was always interested in the world and in creation, in a broad and profound sense," adds Prieto, who highlights the impact of one of the "foundational readings for the awakening of Tàpies' sensitivity" in a text by Joan Prats published in the magazine From here and there in 1934 that "invites us to transgress boundaries both in time and space." "Tàpies remembers how that reading unhinged him, and literally mentions the fact that the issue of the magazine closed with an article by MA Cassanyes on magic and surrealism," says Prieto. Magic and surrealism are spread throughout the exhibition that can be visited until January 25, 2026, the first after "the swarm" of the commemoration of the artist's centenary, as the museum director has referred to it.

It is a fascinating Tàpies, a militant of thecombinatorial arts of Ramon Llull, an artist in the making at a time of tension after the avant-garde, himself fascinated by children's creativity, by prehistoric creativity and by that of the mentally ill. It is a Tàpies who makes works like Transformed landscape (1947), a painting that establishes almost magical connections with later artists; depending on one's background, some will see the influence of this Tàpies in Basquiat, others will connect it with underground comics, or even with a Tarot disturbance more typical of David Lynch. One of the attractions of this exhibition that can be seen on the first floor of the museum is precisely its capacity to surprise. "There are drawings and paintings that will leave visitors perplexed," says Prieto. Some because of their academic sobriety, others because of their surrealist imagination, like Tree-woman (1944), a drawing of disturbing innocence. Many because in this founding Tàpies is the omen of the milestones that he would achieve from the second half of the fifties.

A very powerful collective imagination

The imagination of the world The exhibition includes some 140 pieces, including paintings and drawings by the artist and all kinds of material related to the popular culture that Tàpies experienced in Barcelona in the 1940s. "There is a very deep dialogue with a very powerful collective imagination," says Prieto about "an essayistic, humble, austere, medium-scale exhibition." The tour is organized into five areas that are not isolated spaces either thematically or chronologically. The first corresponds to academic realism, "almost hyperrealistic," according to Allepuz, but also includes a portrait of Joan Brossa materially altered in 1970, because, as the curator recalls, Tàpies "was constantly revising himself." The second area brings together sympathy for marginal art, primitivism, children's creativity and raw art. Here the exhibition includes drawings made by children during the Civil War and drawings by Tàpies with changed characters. Transformed landscape presides over the third stage of the exhibition, dedicated to the relationship between body and landscape. The fourth section allows us to delve into post-war Barcelona, including unexplained crimes, and brings together such interesting works as Parafaragamus (1949). Finally, the exhibition closes with a mural with some of the invitations to the activities of Club 49, "a cultural cartography of what was happening in Barcelona in those years," says Allepuz.