Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012)

Antoni Tàpies’s Homenatge a Miguel Hernández is not only a powerful composition full of surreal icons, signs and symbols, but an important political and revolutionary cry. Miguel Hernández is one of the greatest and best-loved Spanish poets associated with the literary movements Generation of '27 and the Generation of '36. He was arrested due to his active participation on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and died of tuberculosis while imprisoned in 1942. Tàpies was a great admirer of the poet, writing: ‘I became aware of the tragic life and poetry of Miguel Hernández for whom I felt a great esteem and to whom I rendered homage in a painting, as I had done for García Lorca’ (A. Tàpies, A Personal Memoir. Fragments for an Autobiography, Barcelona, 2009, p. 240). The present work is based on the 23rd sonnet included in Hernández’s book of poetry El rayo que no cesa (The Unending Lightning), purchased by Tàpies in Paris in 1950. The artist has represented the analogy that Hernández made between the bull and a man in love: he noted the animal is born to be wounded and then killed by a sword during a bullfight, and compares it to the man and how love can hurt in the same deadly way.