“I really want to see you, Tàpies. Yes, I really want to see you. Now we both have the initial force focused on the same idea, we both carry the same spectacle in our souls, we are part of the same movements, we have the same attitude of existing, we ride the same horse. "It's formidable, isn't it?" Joan Brossa writes with admiration in a letter dated 1951 addressed to the painter, who at that time was in Paris receiving a scholarship from the French Institute. They had met five years before and the relationship between them had gone from mere friendship to a passionate creative complicity that would last for more than four decades and give rise to a multitude of joint projects. "It is difficult to find, throughout the 20th century, a relationship as intense, deep, fertile and extensive, between two creators, as the one between Brossa and Tàpies," says critic and essayist Manuel Guerrero, author of With the Heart of fire (Galaxia Gutemberg), a volume that for the first time brings together the correspondence between both artists, while exploring the links that cemented their creative relationship and the never-well-explained reasons for their final estrangement.
Joan Brossa (Barcelona, 1919-1998) and Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923-2012) met in 1946 at the opening of an exhibition at Els Blaus de Sarrià that brought together, under the auspices of J.V. Foix, works by the painters Joan Ponç, August Puig, Pere Tort and the sculptor Francesc Boadella. In his autobiography, Tàpies would remember long after that what struck him most about that night was the meeting with Brossa. "Perhaps because he was a few years older than me, I believed him from the first moment to be a more confident man, who knew more clearly what he wanted and who went directly to it," he wrote in Personal Memories. Brossa, despite the differences that separated them, was also impressed by that elegant man "with a hat, tie, double-breasted jacket and thick-soled shoes, which I called 'liter shoes'", although initially he did not like his work too much. : "I was more interested in him than in what he painted." Soon, the distance had disappeared. "'It seems to me that I am very influenced by your poetry.' And he answered me: 'Man, Tàpies, I also think that your painting influences me.'"
Con el corazón de fuego, which also has a Catalan edition (Amb el cor de foc), includes 32 letters, most written during Tàpies' stay in Paris, which draw attention for their "intensity," says Guerrero. “Dear friend: I don't want to leave more days without writing to you. Don't think that Paris, despite the dazzle it produces the first few days, is enough to make me forget friends like you. Quite the opposite. It is precisely now that I have realized the importance that your friendship has for me, and I plan to do everything possible to preserve it, even if, for whatever reason, we had to go years without seeing each other. After the overwhelming feeling of the first moments, I have felt a great longing for everything at home. I have even been tempted to take the train and return,” Tàpies writes shortly after his arrival. Months later, Brossa insists on the ties that unite them: “You don't know how much I want to see you and for you to tell me things, to show me paintings and drawings that correspond to your (our) current intentions. Because we must help and complete each other. Comprehensive of all things, we must give the greatest possible clarity to the alliance, our passion must bring it together – brings it together – everything, and together.”
But beyond the personal and the manifestations of mutual admiration, the epistolary is also a testimony of the suffocating atmosphere of Franco's regime. "Around here everything remains the same, and the atmosphere gives the impression of a threat. I, however, continue to believe that we must take a path on the left. On the right a nervous laugh escapes everyone's lips," he told him. says Brossa from Barcelona. In another letter, the painter tries to comfort him: "You tell me that you are screwed and screwed up (it won't be that much). To console you I will tell you that here you would also have to walk through the catacombs (...) What I do regret, and in that Yes, I agree with you, judging by what happened to me when I was in Spain, it is the impossibility of reacting that young people have, due to the complete lack of preparation. Keep in mind that not everyone has your powerful intuition, friend Brossa. (You have become an immense island, due to your intelligence, but you have also taken on responsibilities.) I feel great pity for my homeland!”
In the letters from that period, the Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo also plays a great role, "who was fundamental for the evolution of both of their works at a time of change and maturity," says Guerrero. He introduced them to Marxism and social and political criticism, "which made them abandon the neosurrealism of Dau al Set and look for a new critical realism that would lead to the essential poetry of Brossa and the material informalism of Tàpies." In the case of the poet, it is thanks to Cabral that he changes his attitude and understands that the recipient of his work is the entire society and not just the bourgeois minority public. He tells it to his friend like this: “Everything is the same around here. I have done two readings - at the Barraquer Institute and at Club 49 - which have been the scene of my true birth among the public. In them I have banished the usual limits and have invited everyone. This is proof that my reality conditions have changed. Now my work has a recipient."
Tàpies congratulates him profusely after reading his volume of Em va fer Joan Brossa and in their exchange of letters encourages him to go to Paris. (…) “You must come to France, Brossa. Here everything is alive and you can still speak clearly. For a poet that is essential (….) And if you can't come, you must get published in magazines here by all means. Not only because you deserve it but because it is necessary. It is important to know how a great poet (a spokesperson for the oppressed people) thinks on the other side of the border. That is more important than the regrets (and I say this with all due respect) of those who left. "It would not be the first time in the history of the world that a testimony like this produces a disorder."
Brossa wrote numerous texts about Tàpies and titled some of his works, making him the protagonist of films and plays such as Nocturns Encounters (he played the role of Harlequin); The painter made the sets for Or i sal, which premiered at the Palau de la Música and portrayed him in 1950 leaning to one side and staring at an unknown place. "When he had it ready, I told him frankly that I missed the painting. He did not understand the comment and then I added: 'You have made a portrait of me, but what about the painting?'" the poet told Lluís Permanyer. Twenty years later he added a sponge as a collage and some violent white stripes. Their joint collaboration, which went beyond the simple juxtaposition of texts and images, was reflected in artist books, such as Cop de poma, El pa a la barca, Novel la, Fregoli, Nocturn matinal, U no es nú o el last, Carrer de Wagner, in 1988.
What ended up dynamiting a friendship that seemed indestructible? Guerrero, who admits that in his study and editing of the correspondence there is surely an attempt to search for answers, gives some clues. Surely the first disagreement occurred in 1974 when Brossa wrote a text for Tàpies's first exhibition at the Maeght Gallery in Barcelona in which he criticized the art system and the dependence on French galleries and lamented how "it hurts to see elevated works like those of Tàpies - or those of Miró - mired in the game of money, lost at the bottom of safes, or on the shelves of a store, snatched from their people and opening a direct path only to the snooping of gold. They did not publish it, "but it is not difficult to understand that Tàpies must have felt uncomfortable with the text and Brossa, betrayed by his friend," Guerrero writes. Already before, in the Hegelian Triptych to Antoni Tàpies, he identifies himself as a poet who works outside the market, while the painter would be an instrument at the service of capital.
But it is from 1982, when Brossa stops being just a poet, he also becomes an artist and begins to play in the same field as his friend, to compete, with a first exhibition at the Joan Prats gallery, which is followed others at the Reina Sofía, the Fundació Miró, the Venice Biennale, the IVAM, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, the Fridericianum in Kassel... when the relationship falls apart. The last document is a telegram that the painter and his wife Teresa sent her in 1991, on the occasion of the inauguration at the Reina Sofía: "WE REGRET NOT BEING ABLE TO ATTEND BUT WE ALWAYS THINK OF YOU WE WISH GREAT SUCCESS STOP CORDIAL AFFECTION TERESA ANTONI TÀPIES" .
Another thing that distanced them, adds Guerrero, was that neither Brossa nor any of his friends were invited to be part of the board of the Fundació Tàpies (they referred to it as "the mausoleum"), unlike what they had done. I look.
