Tàpies: Art and activism

In París, engagé

During the 1960s and 1970s, Antoni Tàpies’ combative art against the Franco regime enjoyed a privileged platform in Paris, as part of his exhibitions at the Maeght Gallery. In the 1967, 1972 and 1974 shows, he produced several large protest posters that were displayed in the city, featuring dissident messages that were impossible to display in Franco’s Spain, such as the four bars [of the Catalan flag] or the term “assassins”. Symbols and proclamations that he displayed in the exhibitions through pictorial, object or graphic works, as well as in specific publications of the gallery, such as Derrière le Miroir. The Catalan flag as a symbol of protest occupied a special place in homage to Joan Miró at the Moulin de la Galette, on the occasion of his exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1974, which brought together a representative group of Catalan artists and intellectuals.

París, 1950s

Antoni Tàpies was well acquainted with Paris, having spent six months there between 1950 and 1951 on a scholarship from the French Institute in Barcelona. He first moved into the College of Spain in the university city and then to Saint-Cloud (Paris), where he came into contact with his Catalan colleagues, his cousin Modest Cuixart and Enric Tormo. In Paris, he also visited the poet and diplomat João Cabral de Melo, collaborator of Dau al Set, who introduced him to the philo-communist readings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Roger Garaudy, Henri Lefebvre and Jean Kanapa. His Parisian work explicitly expressed his concern about the oppression and alienation of man within the context of capitalism and dictatorship – Personatge i reixes (Figure and Bars) (1950), Ells acusen (They Accuse) (1951) and Sèrie Història Natural (Natural History Series) (1950) – as well as his interest in committed poets such as Federico García Lorca or Rafael Alberti. Concerns that he shared in letters with his friend the poet Joan Brossa, who remained in Barcelona.

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