Antoni Tapies in Print

Spanish artist Antoni Tapies's lithographs and intaglio prints bristle with ambivalent allusions to sexuality, mysticism, dismemberment and death. He anthropomorphizes chairs, mixes everyday objects with spiritual symbols, and depicts words or single letters combined with his own calligraphic signs. Familiar objects like scissors and pitchers are invested with transcendent meaning; sexual images, cleverly hidden in some compositions, burst forth in others. In his prints, the eminent painter gives surrealist automatism a distinctly Spanish flavor, with a Romantic undercurrent that calls to mind freewheeling American abstract expressionism and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, which he witnessed as a teenager in Barcelona. This well-produced catalogue of a traveling exhibition weds 75 plates (25 in color) to a thoughtful essay in which Wye, a curator at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, illuminates Tapies's complex symbolism. (June)