Antoni Tàpies, one of the great artists of the Spanish avant-garde, a fundamental representative of Spanish Informalism, which emerged in the 50s, and who goes down in history as one of the icons of the international painting of our time, has passed away. His work is included in some of the most important collections in the world, such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Moca in Los Angeles, the Pompidou in Paris or the Reina Sofia Museum. His work has been exhibited internationally since the beginning of his degree program.

The collection donated by María Josefa Huarte to the University of Navarra, with which the project of the University of Navarra Museum is launched, has this artist as one of its main artistic axes, together with Pablo Palazuelo and Jorge Oteiza, all three now deceased, with whom María Josefa was friends and whom she accompanied as a collector and patron of the arts.

There are five works by Tàpies that form part of the University of Navarra Museum Collection, all of them of exceptional quality and which establish a unique journey through the eyes of a collector like María Josefa, a witness like few others of Tàpies' artistic work, through his production in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

Isaiah Berlin used an allegory to distinguish between two types of intellectuals: the hedgehog and the fox. The concept of the hedgehog defined by Berlin alludes to the thinker attracted by a unifying vision; as opposed to the thinker he calls the fox, a term he uses to describe the thinker who is characterized by pursuing many ends, usually unrelated and even contradictory.

Tàpies was one of those hedgehog intellectuals. He investigated throughout his pictorial degree program through different visual or artistic ideas, he was a subtle artist, he worked in a genuine way the subject and produced in an extraordinary way until the end of his life. But even with all this productive immensity, the central core of his proposal is characterized by unity.

The unitary character that binds the whole narrative speech of Tàpies' pictorial work is composed by a concept of art that establishes the artist as a creator of myths. He was looking for a symbol that would recover the roots of an art consecrated to permanence, a pursuit of permanence of original meaning, recalling that sentence by Kierkegard "true repetition is eternity".

Of Tàpies, María Josefa Huarte has always recognized the reaction of uncontainable emotion that being in front of his works generates in her. Thus, when contemplating the piece L'Espirit Catalá, 1971 in a basement of the Maeght Gallery in Paris, she remembers how she jumped out of her chair like a spring and decided to acquire the work. This work portrays his love for Catalonia through the prodigious use of the subject in the painting, being painting but at the same time sculpture, formal art, but informalist, action painting but establishing a myth and a rereading of the flag with incisions written as a wall.

L'Espirit Catalá, 1971 is made with marble dust on board as is Incendi, 1991, two of the most important pieces in the Collection of the Museo Universidad de Navarra and two of Tàpies' greatest works.

This feeling of emotion and shock before the work of Tàpies has remained something permanent in María Josefa Huarte. I still remember her description of him at her home in Madrid, admiring the lines written by him in L'Espirit Catalá, 1971, the blood lines in red on the albero colored wall.

The Collection of the future University Museum of Navarra has three other pieces among which is one for which María Josefa Huarte feels special admiration: the sculpture Composició amb Cistella, 1996. It is a bronze casting with a golden patina coating that simulates a large cardboard box with a wicker basket, alluding to the found object, again resorting to sensuality over the beauty of the material. And in this painting, the constant cross of that Tàpies who wrote his works stands out, an artist in whom, as Antonio Lucas has pointed out, the plastic and the alphabet collide. In Tàpies we see the importance of gesture, of the gravity of the painter's action guide , a painter as a dowser, as Calvo Serraller described Cy Twombly: the artist who lets his hands flow along a real path.