A New View on the Cliff

For much of this century, Spanish artists have felt that they, rather than their paintings, were up against a wall. The government discouraged modernity, and its practitioners were honored any place but at home. As a freer spirit began to emerge in many phases of Spanish life, modern art enjoyed a resurgence. Now it has its own museum 90 miles from Madrid. Significantly, the founders are the artists themselves.

Overlooking the plains to the south, where Don Quixote tilted at windmills, the first Museum of Spanish Abstract Art (see opposite page) opened this month in the citadel city of Cuenca. Three years of restoration went into the 20-room museum housed in 15th century buildings which crane over a gorge that drops some 600 feet. The prime mover is a wealthy Philippine-born painter named Fernando Zobel, 42, who has taken from his collection 120 paintings, 200 drawings and twelve sculptures by fellow Spanish moderns to hang in the quaint quarters at Cuenca. After retiring from business in 1959, Zobel looked about Spain for a place to lodge his collection, which included, aside from his works by Goya, Velasquez and El Greco, post-Picasso Spanish painters of promise. An abstractionist named Gustavo Torner, now co-director of the museum, persuaded him to try Cuenca, where a grateful mayor was happy to find someone ready to rent the hanging houses already undergoing exterior repairs.

Painterly Walls. The art inside is abstract, brutal and sober. Spanish artists prefer to call their work "informalist." Zobel inveighs against the impression that Spanish painting is "exaggeratedly tragic, a lot of King Kong beating on the chest." Says he: "There is Spanish restraint, absolute control of material, unsentimental romanticism, if you like, but none of this Germanic flopping around the deck with tears streaming."

Certainly Eduardo Chillida restrains the knotty nature of his wooden sculpture (see over page), and Antonio Saura's Brigitte Bardot is unsentimental. Says Saura, 36: "When I throw a blob of paint on my canvas, I am committing a rape. When I work I become a kind of monster." There is violence, a seething impasto in whorls of dark color, the suggestion of hot, bubbling blood. Like the peeling, crumbling walls of the Cuenca museum itself, Spain's informalists, such as Luis Feito, present a modern vision of ancient agonies bred in the scorching sun. They convey a sense of decaying grandeur, human endurance and often bizarre imagination. Only 324 years before, below this newly established refuge of Iberian abstraction, Philip IV's noblemen staged a bullfight in the nearby Jucar River, charging the wading beasts from gondolas built in the shape of dolphins and sea monsters.

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