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Tamayo y Baus, Manuel
(1829-1898)
Spanish playwright
The son of actors, Tamayo y Baus turned his
talents to playwriting at an early age, con-
centrating at first on adaptations of nondra-
matic works. He subsequently developed a
facility in translating and restructuring the
plays as well as novels of foreign-language
writers. He eventually began creating his
own original plays, ranging over history,
moral dilemmas, and romantic comedies.
La locura de amor
(The madness of love,
1855) was inspired by the story of Queen
J
OANNA
, daughter of F
ERDINAND
V and I
SA
-
BELLA
I, and reflected a number of his con-
sistent themes, including a vein of Christian
belief that was perhaps becoming some-
what out of fashion among Spanish writers
and critics. Despite such reservations many
critics have called his
Un drama nuevo
(
A
New Drama,
1867) one of the greatest of
Spanish plays and certainly the best of its
time. Its subject matter is a love affair within
an acting troupe whose leader is known for
the role of Yorik, the jester mentioned but
never seen in William Shakespeare's
Ham-
let.
The plot, which works itself out in a play
within a play (both of which end tragically),
would inspire Ruggiero Leoncavallo's opera
Pagliacci.
Tamayo y Baus wrote virtually
nothing for the stage in his later years, con-
cluding that the melodramatic approach of
J
OSÉ
E
CHEGARAY
had won the entire atten-
tion of Spanish audiences.
Tàpies, Antoni
(1923- )
Spanish painter
A Catalan strongly influenced by the vio-
lent experiences of the S
PANISH
CIVIL
WAR
era in his native B
ARCELONA
, Tàpies aban-
doned his earlier studies in law to become a
(largely self-taught) painter. In 1946 he
became a founder member of the Catalan
avant-garde group of artists known as the
Dau al Set (seven-sided die). He drew inspi-
ration from surrealism to produce collages
of commonplace debris (string, rags, and
torn canvas) smeared with paint. By the
early 1950s he was holding one-man exhi-
bitions and winning recognition abroad. By
1957 he had moved on to “informalism” as
a founder of El Paso group. Although he
was no admirer of the Franco regime, the
nature of Tàpies's materials and subjects did
not bring him into direct confrontation with
the censors. Adding a Spanish presence to
the general postwar movement of abstract
expressionism, he provided the kind of
“prestige export” that the government wel-
comed. One of his best-known works of the
period is
Ochre
(1963). Integrating a stark
surface of sand and asphalt with daubs of
black and white paint, the artist produced
382
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