Antoni Tapies: Red and Black with Tears

In 1940 aged seventeen Antoni Tápies suffered a heart attack connected with his tuberculosis, and during a two year long period of convalescence he experienced the first of a series of mystical visions.

Outside of his room in the sanatorium, Franco had been brutally repressing Spanish society and culture, Tápies' family were facing economic ruin and social ostracism, and the Second World War had started. At a time of frustration and longing for health and a creative outlet, the teenager devoured some of the great works of literature. He was trying to understand a world that seemed to be slipping through his fingers. He wrote, but it didn’t satisfy him. In his memoirs he states:

“When at the peak of my romantic adolescence I tried to write a poem, that memory hounded and tormented me. I didn't break free from it until I began to paint, realizing that by means of the canvas I could say things without speaking.”

This is an extract from the full feature in After Nyne 10. To get your copy, visit our Store

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