Only time has the capacity to endorse a truly genetic approach to art; the attitude one adopts to art is something more than a mere attitude; it is more than a gratuitous gesture, since it harbors within its physiological structure the genes of continuity guaranteeing the future. The artist either creates or continues. Any isolated gesture, which has no bonds with the past, or which fails to sow for the future, remains a mere pirouette by definition; however ingenious it may be, it can be called art.

Now a pirouette or a gratuitous gesture performed by the artist may well deceive us by the overwhelming evidence of its proximity. For although we can always detect a lack of precedent, we find it much more difficult to guess whether it will bear fruit in the future or not.

Undoubtedly avant-garde gestures and attitudes were observed among some modern Spanish painters, long before Antoni Tapies; but this early rebellion was not yet a real revolution, even though it may well have been a sign of the need for one and actually served as its herald.

The avant-garde movement, which made its presence, felt around 1956.

The "first" movement -that of Picasso, Juan Gris, Miro, and Julio Gonzalez and others- that is more of a worldwide avant-garde movement than an exclusively Spanish one is prior to "The Second Spanish Avant-Garde Movement of the Twentieth Century".

Through employing a customary manner of interpreting reality, classical painting was continuing a tradition. Avant-Grade painting was already committed at birth to a pre-existing world of reality and for this reason it continues; but it considers itself free in so far as customary methods of interpretation establish are concerned. Classical painting achieves its continuity by focusing upon a methodological system of interpreting reality. The new form of painting does away with this interpretative methodology, tackles reality directly and interprets it in accordance with its own means or powers of intuition. What happens very frequently is that in spite of this indifference to an already established method of interpretation, the new forms launched by the avant-garde movement -although unusual- reveal obvious signs, unmistakable family traits, which relate them to the old way of interpreting reality, which they were striving to discard.

This is because, whatever happens, any change of reality into art, the testimonial establishment of reality through the medium of art, is subject to its own laws, laws laid down not by the artist, but by the very nature of the reality, which artist is trying to fix or interpret; so the hereditary features common to the painting of Antonio Saura and the most violent of Goya's works are not the result of any conscious genealogical relationship between the two. They simply illustrate the survival of a reality, which remained the same in both Saura and Goya, a reality that impressed upon both painters the same law of violent interpretation, when it was expressed through art.