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"Nothing is Paltry.” Avantgarde, Tradition and the Discourses of Modernity in Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012)

Date
Thu November 14th 2024, 12:00 - 1:00pm
Event Sponsor
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Location
Building 260, Pigott Hall
450 Jane èצӰ Way, Building 260, èצӰ, CA 94305
Room 252

Speaker: Raül Garrigasait

Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923-2012), painter, sculptor, and essayist, is widely considered a major figure in the post-war informalist movement in Europe. However, the circumstances that shaped his style —Franco’s long dictatorship and the Catalan experience of national oppression— differ greatly from those of most other informalist painters of the time, as well as those of their American counterparts, the abstract expressionists. How was the avant-garde rupture to be understood and practiced when it was the established power, rather than the avant-garde, that took up Marinetti’s futurist call to destroy libraries and the cultural heritage? The lecture will first examine the cultural and political conditions surrounding Tàpies’s emergence as an artist and explore his reception on the international stage. It will then discuss his rich reflections on the aesthetic experience and the meanings of modernity, which are singular within the context of the Cold War cultural debates and resonate powerfully with today’s crises.