The new Spanish painting: Dau al Set and El Paso
After the Spanish Civil War, and amidst the upheaval of World War II, a period of expectant inactivity ensued in the visual arts of Spain. Spanish artists seemed to ignore the wealth of experiences emerging in postwar European painting, particularly within the School of Paris and the American school. The first sign of a revival appeared in Barcelona in 1948 with the founding of a group comprised of several young painters and a few writers.
Dau al Set
This group was called Dau al Set – Die to Seven – a name inspired by a phrase by André Breton: "The seventh face of the die." The group consisted of Modest Cuixart , Joan Ponç, Antoni Tàpies, and Joan Tharrats , later joined by the critic and poet Juan Edmundo Cirlot. They published an art and literary magazine with a very limited circulation, thanks to Tharrats's printing business, and the magazine continued to be published long after the group disbanded. Dau al Set was surrealist in tendency and influenced by Miró, a painter familiar to its members as a fellow countryman, and by Klee. Tàpies was the first to abandon his surrealist imagery, in 1952. He was followed by Cuixart in 1954 and Tharrats in 1955.
From then on, Cuixart's work became more informal, incorporating collages of rags, string, or paper into his paintings. He gradually refined his technique, seeking, against a smooth, immaterial background, the effect of a vast space upon which magical graphic elements, symbols, or unknown emblems were inscribed with a material relief. Cuixart thus gravitated towards metallic qualities, achieving silver or dark gold surfaces that reinforced the sense of magical or secret objects.
Tharrats also embraced Informalism in 1955, but within a category called Tachisme. Tachisme was a reaction against Cubism and was characterized by spontaneous brushstrokes, drips and splatters of paint straight from the tube, and sometimes scribbles reminiscent of calligraphy. His paintings consist of patches or broad strokes invaded by black and dark cracks, as if there were a struggle between color and non-color, creating a seductive and decorative quality neutralized by the floating movement of the colored elements.
The Step
Despite their brief existence, these groups constituted the two centers of influence of the Spanish avant-garde, and their members form the basis of what is known internationally as the Spanish School. Undoubtedly, other individual talents have emerged, but the former members of both groups remain firmly at the forefront of the Spanish art movement.
