If there are artists whose work is incapable of crossing the borders
of international taste, then the Spanish painter Antoni Tàpies is not
one of them. Based in Barcelona, Tàpies (b. 1923) has been cited
along with Picasso and Miró as one of his country’s premier
modernists. He has achieved a worldwide recognition that few living
artists can claim, and his work is not unknown in New York, where he
has exhibited regularly since his 1953 debut at the Martha Jackson
Gallery. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the art world will
find his work familiar and, perhaps, prescient. Tàpies’s paintings
of the Fifties and Sixties, for instance, can bring to mind the
Neo-Expressionism of the Eighties. A case can be made for Tàpies
being ahead of his time. Taking into account the nature of his
influence, however, one wonders just how much such an accolade is
worth.

For although there are fifty-six objects spanning almost fifty years
in “Tàpies,” the first full-scale presentation of his work seen in the
United States since 1977, it is not so much an exhibition of art as
a display of
ego.
There have always been painters and
sculptors who have thought highly of their own talents, of course, and
not a few were great artists—one shudders at the thought of
a civilization bereft of them. It is one thing, however, to be an
artist like, say, Picasso, whose sizable ego was occasioned—and,
more often than not, surpassed—
by similarly proportioned