Hail César! The artist who shaped Lanzarote

The visionary who turned devastation into beauty remains a force in this centenary year, says Linda Cookson

The pretty whitewashed village of Haría in northern Lanzarote is as cool and leafy as a North African oasis, tucked quietly in the heart of the island’s “Valley of 1,000 Palms”. According to tradition, a new tree is planted each time a baby is born in the region. With its honeycomb of cupboard-sized craft shops, and pavements criss-crossed by papery palm fronds and littered with windfall dates, Lanzarote’s artiest village has a timeless charm all of its own.

But what has drawn me here today is not so much the village itself as the allure of its most famous former resident. I’m following in the footsteps of Lanzarote’s most loved and extraordinary son, the visionary 20th-century artist, sculptor and architect César Manrique, whose centenary year is about to be marked. Among other tributes, the island’s airport (currently known as Arrecife, after Lanzarote’s capital) is due to be renamed César Manrique-Lanzarote Airport in his honour. “Palm Grove House” – here on the edge of Haría – is where Manrique lived and worked for the final four years of his life, until his death in a car accident at the age of 73.

Sophisticated and comfortable, the house is preserved exactly as he left it on the morning of Sept 25 1992, the day of the fatal crash. The floor of his studio is scattered with unfinished canvases. Tubes of paint rest in pigeonholes. Splattered blue overalls are draped over the back of a chair. The only intrusion into this time capsule is a video screen, where a grainy film is rolling. I hold my breath as a genial, handsome man dressed in those selfsame overalls raises his intelligent dark eyes to the camera and smiles at me. I feel I’m standing at the feet of a giant.

Manrique’s influence on his native island is almost impossible to overestimate. In his own way – as a power for good – he’s proved as far-reaching a force in shaping present-day Lanzarote as the volcanic eruptions that blasted the island in the 1730s. That catastrophe left more than a quarter of the land mass freakishly contorted and encrusted by lava.

So fractured a landscape might sound a wildly unpromising canvas for an artist. Timanfaya National Park, the blackened, tortured badlands covering the site of the eruptions, is as starkly surreal as an alien planet. (Apollo 17 astronauts were shown photographs of the carnage to prepare them for their moon landing.) But to Manrique, such desolation carried a haunting beauty of its own. He dedicated the last 25 years of his life to turning a natural disaster into an art form, conjuring vibrancy and glamour from the island’s ravaged surface like a master magician.

Manrique was born in Arrecife on April 24 1919. He moved to Madrid in 1945 to study art, and established himself as a successful metropolitan artist and sculptor. Yet his homeland’s primeval palette of colours remained unshakeably etched in his imagination. His abstract paintings from that period swirl with the raw charcoals and crimsons of Lanzarote’s wildernesses.

Engaging and charismatic, he was famously fond of a good party. But a brief, hedonistic period in the mid-Sixties as the toast of bohemian New York, collaborating with Andy Warhol and clinking cocktail glasses with the Lower East Side’s avantgarde, very quickly lost its charms. “Man was not created for this artificiality,” he wrote to a friend. “There is an imperative need to go back to the soil. Feel it, smell it.”

Declaring himself rootless without “the pureness of my people… the bareness of my landscape”, Manrique returned to his native island in 1966, determined to channel his future creativity into showcasing its surreal splendour for the world. “Lanzarote is like an unframed, unmounted work of art,” he said many years later. “And I hung it and held it up for all to see.”

Lanzarote’s gallery of uniquely forged treasures couldn’t have found a more zealous curator. And – as luck would have it – the then-president of the cabildo (island government) was one of Manrique’s oldest friends. Under their joint guidance, the island began mobilising sustainable tourism before the concept was even invented. Advertising hoardings were banned, telephone cables were laid underground, and mass tourism was confined to just three main coastal regions, with height restrictions imposed on hotels.

Manrique’s mantra was “ArteNaturaleza, Naturaleza-Arte” (ArtNature, Nature-Art): the belief that development should be environmentally friendly and integrate man-made forms with natural spaces. His overall design aesthetic for the island’s sugar-cube housing was based on the same principle. Doors and