It is almost a little-known epic: the art critic José María Moreno Galván (La Puebla de Cazalla, Seville, 1923 – Madrid 1981), whose birth is now one hundred years old, and the painter Manolo Millares (The Gran Canarian palms, 1926 – Madrid, 1972) share the same tomb in the Civil Cemetery of Madrid. The space had achieved it, after arduous efforts, in record time, Manuel Padorno (Holy Cross of Tenerife1933 – Madrid, 2002), the other great close friend of Millares, one of the most constant, who, like Moreno Galván, accompanied him many times to collect sacks and waste materials for his canvases.
These have been the only two occasions on which, recalls Elvireta Escobio, she has visited the Madrid Civil Cemetery: on August 15, 1972, to bury her husband, when a brain tumor took his life, at the age of 46, and on March 24, 1981, when, at the request of his widow, Carola Torres, the Andalusian critic, who died at 57, was buried in his friend’s grave. The episode should be rescued as a milestone of intra-historical memory in the vortex of anti-Francoism: the artist, one of the top promoters of the El Paso Group, and the critic, one of the main mentors of that sudden oasis of mid-century informalism. , and Millares himself, covered by the same burlap, lie together on the far side of a secular field almost exclusively for foreigners, if not for outlawed Spaniards. The place is rarely visited even today, as Fernando Zóbel, promoter and first director of the Museum of Abstract Art of Cuenca, described it after attending Millares’s funeral, “the civil cemetery is a strange place. Quite small, and with a sweet scent from the foliage that adorns the most ancient, mainly English and German. A romantic atmosphere, something nostalgic and calm.
They were staunch agnostics, in times when it was risky to show this calling card; and both were self-taught
The critic and the artist were two bastions of informalism, without concessions, which, in a doubled struggle, demonstrated that social and ethical demands are not at odds with aesthetic subjectivity. On the contrary. As Manuel Padorno of the namesake art and his colleague has emphasized –in words that Moreno Galván would willingly subscribe to for his own scheme–, «Millares believed unequivocally in the spiritual adventure of Art; he paid no attention to any dogma, rejecting, above all, socialist realism, and painting with rage ».
Both were staunch agnostics, back in the days when it was risky to show that calling card; and both were self-taught, as well as excellent avant-garde writers, and (between informalism and abysses) made of their brief lives an accumulation of tumbling, outside their places of origin, to preach in the desert of the Dictatorship.
«I don’t know what I paint, but I do know very well what I do», pointed out the author of Memoria de una excavación urbana, in a sentence that, changing it, barely, for writing, would also serve for the journey of the author of Autocrítica del art. They were the interchangeable theory and praxis of the same body in perpetual advance; to the point that, even with their initials, MO-reno and MA-nolo, they could have configured a sort of New York MoMA itinerant in the aesthetic wasteland of mid-century Spain…
Indeed, theoretician and artist would subscribe to the denunciation of «retardary Spain» applied by Juan-Eduardo Cirlot to the situation of art, when, at the end of the fifties, «a post-war atmosphere was still breathed». In his Introducción a la pintura española actual, published in 1960, Moreno Galván states that “the structure of our modernity remains to be reassembled”, while he says that he continues to auscultate “the survival in our century of certain values from the 19th century”.
Faced with this desolate, inert and empty landscape -which Antonio Saura would define crowded “with thistle and ash”-, both friends would trace their lines of flight towards the margins. They share the same passion for archaeology, and applying it to their own present time, they choose to continue together the job that José-Augusto França awarded to Manolo Millares: “An archaeologist of the civilization of waste.” And, moreover, literally. Such is, for example, the peculiar still life of the landfill that the painter traces in a text from 1965, on the occasion of a ZAJ evening in a Lisbon gallery: «And in this indifferent garbage, a can of sardines -already empty of filth and fine of week-; a black shoe, without soles or laces, rented among the dumps outside the walls; a rag without erotic alchemy, they shout their closeness to the last folds of the earth […] someone is waiting for the miracle of a flower explosion born precisely on that same earth-shoe-can-rag-garbage that make up the tacit heap of our illustrious history». And in an article in Triunfo magazine, entitled Millares, neither with the beautiful nor with the sublime, Moreno Galván offers this testimony: «In my expeditions with Millares, I have tracked with him the possible reunion of lost archaeological traces -his great passion-, but I have also seen him look through the dunghills in search of an old espadrille, a moldy and rotten spoon or a decrepit hat, to test the possibility of bringing them back to life by including them, as witnesses of life, in art. There, in that search, there is no contradiction. What he seeks is always the similar».
And, immediately afterwards, he establishes their shared positions in this way: «Of all the objects, the ones I love the most are the used ones. The copper vessels with dents and crushed edges, the knives and forks whose wooden handles have been grasped by many hands. Impregnated with the use of many, often transformed, they have perfected their forms and have become precious.
A decade before “living together” forever, the last days of the painter were spent in the Sierra de la Demanda, Burgos
In the same headline, barely a fortnight before the death of the artist friend, the critic will round off: «I have seen Manolo Millares, not here or now, in a setting quite different from these: in a pile of decrepit rags and rubbish from the surroundings of a small town […] And I have seen Millares discover, like a treasure, an old shoe, molded and worn by use, a certain old shoe, with a certain shape.
It all started twenty years ago, when, in 1953 -the first time Millares de las Islas was out, at the age of 27- they both participated in the Santander Abstract Art Congress. Later, in the same way that the painter from the Canary Islands did not settle for painting alone, the Sevillian critic transcended mere theory. In Santiago de Chile, Moreno Galván was one of the greatest creators and promoters of the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum, although he did not get to see it in life. And, before, from Paris, where the magazine Cuadernos de Ruedo Ibérico was published, the articles by Juan Triguero, as he signed, managed to “enrage” the minister of the branch, Fraga Iribarne. The two friends participated in the tribute to Antonio Machado in Collioure, organized by the same publisher.
Curiously, a decade before they began to live in the same tomb, they also shared the last days of Millares. Moreno Galván himself gives an account of this, in the aforementioned Triunfo article, who, to relieve him of the Madrid summer calufa, takes him to the Sierra de la Demanda, in Burgos, where he usually spends the summer.
«Here I have with me now, in this place in the Sierra de la Demanda, where I spend my summer, Manolo Millares and his family. For once, he did not leave the Peninsula to spend these two or three months at his Canary archipelago. It’s just that he’s still convalescing from the two delicate operations he’s had recently. I managed to convince them to leave Madrid during the summer heat for a few days and come with me to this land covered in forests, close to the source of the Duero, but on the banks of the Arlanza River». He adds that in the area there are archaeological excavations with which to entertain the painter: «[Millares] he prowled through the ditches that the archeology workers dug just as the animal looks for the prey by instinctive premonition.
In terms similar to those dedicated to him by critic María Luisa Borrás – “the overflowing, hallucinating passion of a man who suffers in his flesh the suffering of others” -, Moreno Galván says of the creator of the Homunculi and Anthropofauns: “I his is, above all, an attempt to communicate with the man who left, with the man who leaves, with the man who is unknown, but who is known to be a similar one…». A sort of coetaneity of all times and all places, the critic seems to project onto the figure of his friend. And, also, a certain aura of Christic paganism and redemption (which he knows is impossible), including premature death, although he himself was not far behind. Both continue to share a grave in the Civil Cemetery of Madrid, unperturbed in their legacy that, to the touch of the burlap, the signs are at the same time “cells”; colors are «values», and that, ultimately, the only authentic thing around art and life, their joint root, is «the creative act».