Art: The Joyless Spaniards

Had Generalissimo Franco followed the script that other modern dictators have written, he would have declared almost every living Spanish artist a degenerate and banned his works. But Spain's artistic roots go deep. Last week in two major exhibits in Manhattan—one at the Museum of Modern Art, the other at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—U.S. gallerygoers could see that the heirs of Goya and El Greco had plunged headlong into their own brand of abstract expressionism.

For many of them, mere paint and canvas are not enough: a novel end can apparently justify any means. Manolo Millares, 34, dips burlap into white paint, bunches and tears it, smears and daubs it with black. If he ends up with something vaguely resembling a figure, he calls it Homunculus, and some of his homunculi look rather like decayed and mangled ghosts. Antoni Tapies, 36, who abandoned the University of Barcelona law school to take up painting in 1946, heaps his canvases with paint, then gouges, cuts and scrapes. His Three Stains on Grey Space is exactly what it says—three blobs of thick paint placed at the bottom of a grey canvas.

Millares and Tàpies have both won a following outside their own country; the other artists in the two shows are almost all making their U.S. debuts. Luis Feito, 31, piles his paint to build up black and white compositions that resemble small cities seen from the air. Manuel Rivera, 33, works almost entirely with wire mesh to make spiderweb constructions, which he usually calls Metamorphosis. Manuel Viola, 41, gives a rare kind of pleasure with canvases that seem to have an inner glow of their own. And the imaginative iron sculpture of Eduardo Chillida almost seems to dance.

But seen as a group, the artists of Spain turn out to be not quite so wild as they at first seem. Even their rips and gougings are carefully planned, with the artist, rather than the painting, at the controls. Yet the stern discipline deprives the paintings of warmth, and in the end, they seem little more than exercises repeated over and over again. For so sunny and passionate a land, Spain has produced a paradox: a comparatively youthful generation of artists whose experiments add up to monotony. The obsessive colors they all use—black and white, dull greys, somber browns, putty greens—are the colors of joylessness.