Antoni Tàpies Spanish abstract painter, dies at 88

Antoni Tàpies, a Spanish abstract painter whose seductive tactile surfaces, often scratched with mysterious graffiti-like marks, made use of unconventional materials like marble dust, ground chalk, sand and earth, died on February 6 in Barcelona. He was 88.

Tàpies came to prominence in the late 1940s with richly symbolic paintings strongly influenced by Surrealist painters like Miró and Klee, a style he abandoned by the mid-1950s as he turned to what became his signature work: the heavily built-up surfaces that were often scratched, pitted and gouged and incised with letters, numbers and signs.

Using a wide variety of materials, on canvases and boards that often suggested walls, doors, windows or gates, he grounded his work in the brute reality of the Spanish street and in the turbulent political dramas of his youth in Catalonia, including the Spanish Civil War and the Catalan nationalist movement.

The rich, painterly textures and sober use of color in his “matter paintings” lent a moving solemnity the critic John Russell referred to their “seignorial dignity” to works that “seemed to have been not so much painted as excavated from an idiosyncratic compound of mud, sand, earth, dried blood and powdered minerals.”

Tàpies chafed at being characterised as an abstract painter. At the same time, he refused to explicate the tantalising scratches, letters and crosses that seemed to offer the viewer a text. His dreamlike symbols, fished from the soup of the unconscious, suggested an ancient language waiting to be deciphered, but Tàpies declined to assist.

Tàpies was born in Barcelona on December 13, 1923. His father was a lawyer and Catalan nationalist who served briefly with the Republican government.

At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis. He spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art that had already expressed itself when he was in his early teens.

To please his father, he enrolled in the University of Barcelona to study law, but he continued to produce art and for two months studied drawing at the Valls Academy. With the Catalan poet and playwright Joan Brossa, he founded Dau al Set (The Seven-Spotted Die), a progressive arts magazine, and, at an exhibition of his work in Barcelona, became friends with Miró, a decisive influence. In 1954 he married Teresa Barba Fàbregas. They had three children, Antoni, Miguel and Clara.