Antoni Tà pies i Puig, 1st Marquess of Tà pies (Catalan: [ənˈtɔni ˈtapi.əs]; 13 December 1923 – 6 February 2012) was aSpanish painter, sculptor and art theorist, who became one of the most famous European artists of his generation.
The son of Josep Tà pies i Mestre and Maria Puig i Guerra, Antoni Tà pies Puig was born in Barcelona on 13 December 1923. His father was a lawyer and Catalan nationalist who served briefly with the Republican government. Due to this, Tà pies grew up in an environment where he was very much exposed to a cultural and social experiences of leaders in the Catalan public life and its republicanism. His maternal grandmother also exposed him to this world with her great involvement in civil and political activities. Tà pies was first introduced to contemporary art as he entered secondary school in 1934. He saw a famous Christmas issue of the magazine, D’acà i d’allà , which contained reproductions of works by artists such as Duchamp, Braque, Kandinsky, and Picasso. At 17, Tà pies 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.
TÃ pies studied at the German School of Barcelona. After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting. In 1945 TÃ pies began experimenting with more rinse materials. He would mix oil paint with whiting. At this time he also became increasingly interested in philosophy, especially that of Sartre as well as Eastern thought. He became known as one of Spain's most renowned artists in the second half of the 20th century. His abstract and avant-garde works were displayed in many major museums all over the world. In 1954 TÃ pies married Teresa Barba Fabregas. Together they had three children Antoni, Miguel and Clara. He lived mainly in Barcelona and was represented by the Galerie Lelong in Paris and the Pace Gallery in New York. TÃ pies died on 6 February 2012. His health had been suffering since 2007.
Tà pies was perhaps the best-known Catalan artist to emerge in the period since the Second World War. He first came into contact with contemporary art as a teenager through the magazine D’Acà i D’Allà , published in Barcelona, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), while he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint. On a French government scholarship in the early 1950s he lived in Paris, to which he often returned. Both in Europe and beyond, the highly influential French critic and curator Michel Tapié enthusiastically promoted the work of Antoni Tà pies.In 1948, Tà pies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set which was connected to theSurrealist and Dadaist Movements. The main leader and founder of Dau al Set was the poet Joan Brossa. The movement also had a publication of the same name, Dau al Set. Tà pies started as a surrealist painter, his early works were influenced by Paul Klee and Joan Miró; but soon become an informal artist, working in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into the paintings. In 1953 he began working in mixed media; this is considered his most original contribution to art. One of the first to create serious art in this way, he added clay and marble dust to his paint and used waste paper, string, and rags (Grey and Green Painting, Tate Gallery, London, 1957). Canvas Burned to Matter from c. 1960, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of the artist's mixed media assemblages that combine the principles of Dada and Surrealism.
Tà pies' international reputation was well established by the end of the 1950s. From the late 1950s to early 1960s, Tà pies worked with Enrique Tábara, Antonio Saura, Manolo Millares and many other Spanish Informalist artists. In 1966 he was arrested at a clandestine assembly at the University of Barcelona; his work of the early 1970s is marked by symbols of Catalan identity (which was anathema to Franco). In 1974 he made a series of lithographs called Assassins and displayed them in theGalerie Maeght in Paris, in honour of regime critic Salvador Puig Antich's memory. From about 1970 (influenced by Pop art) he began incorporating more substantial objects into his paintings, such as parts of furniture. Tà pies's ideas have had worldwide influence on art, especially in the realms of painting, sculpture, etchings and lithography. Examples of his work are found in numerous major international collections. His work is associated with both Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism.
The paintings produced by TÃ pies, later in the 1970s and in the 1980s, reveal his application of this aesthetic of meditative emptiness, for example in spray-painted canvases with linear elements suggestive of Oriental calligraphy, in mixed-media paintings that extended the vocabulary of Art informel, and in his oblique allusions to imagery within a fundamentally abstract idiom, as in Imprint of a Basket on Cloth(1980). Among the artists' work linked in style to that of TÃ pies is that of the American painter Julian Schnabel as both have been connected to the art term "Matter".