Antoni Tàpies valuation
Catalan painter who made pictures out of marble dust, sand and varnish, then scratched them.
Antoni Tàpies was born in Barcelona in 1923 into a Catalan family with strong political and cultural commitments, and turned to painting during a long convalescence from tuberculosis.
What a work by Antoni Tàpies is worth
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Bio
Antoni Tàpies was born in Barcelona in 1923 into a Catalan family with strong political and cultural commitments, and turned to painting during a long convalescence from tuberculosis. After a surrealist period he arrived in the early 1950s at the matter paintings that define him: thick grounds of marble dust, sand, latex and varnish built up on canvas or board, scored, scratched, torn and marked with crosses, letters and the four bars of the Catalan flag. Under Franco the work carried a political charge that could not be stated openly. He was made a marquess by the Spanish crown and died in 2012.
The surfaces are the whole point and they are physically vulnerable: heavy mixed grounds crack, shed and separate from the support, and losses cannot be made good without inventing material. Original scratches, tears and incisions are the work and are routinely reported as damage. Assemblages incorporating found objects — furniture, cloth, straw — raise the same question. The Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona and the Comissió Tàpies are the references for authentication, and there is a very large editioned graphic output that trades separately and frequently.
At a glance
- Born
- 13 December 1923, Barcelona
- Died
- 6 February 2012, Barcelona
- Movement
- Informalism
More on Wikipedia.
The Fundació, Venice and the catalogue
Tàpies set up the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, which opened in 1990 in a modernista building by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, and he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1993. He lived mainly in Barcelona and died there in February 2012.
His work is catalogued in the catalogue raisonné compiled by Anna Agustí, published in several volumes, and the Fundació's archive is the reference for a work's history. Prints, of which he made a great many, should be identified by their catalogue number and edition.
D'ací i d'allà, Dau al Set and the essays
Tàpies's father was a lawyer and Catalan nationalist who served briefly with the Republican government. At secondary school in 1934 he saw the Christmas issue of the magazine D'ací i d'allà, with reproductions of Duchamp, Braque, Kandinsky and Picasso, and during the Civil War he taught himself to draw and paint. In 1948 he was a founder of Dau al Set, the first post-war movement in Spain, led by the poet Joan Brossa and close to Surrealism, and his early pictures look to Paul Klee and Joan Miró. A French government scholarship took him to Paris in the early 1950s, and the critic Michel Tapié promoted his work.
He turned to abstraction in 1953. In 1958 he represented Spain at the Venice Biennale with Eduardo Chillida, winning the UNESCO and David E. Bright prizes, and took first prize for painting at the Pittsburgh International. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Pop art led him to bring larger objects, such as pieces of furniture, into the work. He made prints from 1947 and books with writers including Octavio Paz, José Saramago, Rafael Alberti and Joan Brossa, and his essays were collected in La pràctica de l'art in 1970 and later volumes. He received the Rubens Prize of Siegen in 1972 and the Velázquez Prize in 2003.
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