Joaquin Torres-Garcia
Painter, sculptor, writer, critic, and educator, Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949) nurtured modern art across Europe, North America, and South America. Within what is known as Western culture, Torres-García represents a unique synthesis of its three paradigmatic continents.
Joaquin Torres-García’s paintings of universal symbols emphasize the contrast and synthesis between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ beauty—merging timeless order with a bold, contemporary visual language. Torres-García’s protean reach as an artist, pushed not only the boundaries of abstraction but brought innovation to landscape, cityscape, and portraiture.
Born in 1874, Torres-García left his native Uruguay in 1891 to move to his father’s homeland, Spain. He studied in Barcelona but soon ventured beyond the confines of academia to become one of the founding figures of modern art. As a young artist he achieved notorious success painting murals for the Catalan Government and working with Antoni Gaudí. He introduced classical principles revitalized for the modern era. As a theorist and teacher, he inspired young artists like Joan Miró who said ‘Do you see the forms and shapes of the master? They are still with me today.’
While living in New York, Torres-García exhibited with Stuart Davis, Joseph Stella, and Walter Pach, and formed friendships with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney— founder of the Whitney Museum—and Katherine Dreier, of the Société Anonyme.
In 1926, he moved to Paris and, together with Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, co-founded the abstract art group Cercle et Carré, which included artists such as Kandinsky, Léger, and Le Corbusier. Returning to Montevideo in 1934, Torres-García resumed his teaching and established the School of the South—instrumental in bringing European modernism to South America.
painting highlights
Untitled Composition 1929 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C
The Family (La familia) 1917 Museu de Montserrat.
Today (Hoy) 1920 IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern
Synthesis of New York (Synthèse de New York) 1929 Fundación Malba, Buenos Aires.
Portrait (Retrato) 1921 Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo.
Still Life with Fork (Bodegón con tenedor) 1924
Structure with Street (Structure avec rue) 1929 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Café Riche, Paris 1928 Dallas Museum of Art
Street of Paris (Calle de París) 1930 Fundación Malba, Buenos Aires.
Black Mask (Mascara Negra) 1928 IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern.
Head 1930 Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Constructive Painting (Pintura Constructiva) 1931 The Met Fifth Avenue.
Mujer recogiendo frutos 1926 , Museo Torres-Garcia, Montevideo.
Constructive with Compass (Constructif avec boussole)1932 The Centre Pompidou.
Abstract Form with Triangles 1936 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Interlaced Forms on a Red Background (Formas entrelazadas en fondo rojo) 1938 Newark Museum of Art.
Composition 1931 MoMa The Museum of Modern Art.
Constructive Structure (Estructura constructiva) 1943 The Centre Pompidou.
Construction in White and Black 1938 MoMa The Museum of Modern Art.
Constructive Work with Color Planes and Graphic Elements (Constructivo con planos de color y grafismo) 1943 Art Museum of the Americas.
Composition 1938 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Initiation of the Drama (Iniciación del drama) 1947.
Constructive City with Universal Man 1942 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
New York City: Bird's Eye View 1920 Yale University Art Gallery.
excerpts from critical essays
“Torres-García created a quotidian classicism. His search for an exactly shaped naïveté paralleled the work of Gertrude Stein, Satie, and Miró. The use of previously non-art craft techniques for high-art ends--collage, welded metal, or, in Torres-García’s case, carpentry--puts us on notice that art is literally beginning again. The drama is in the exquisiteness of the sensibility that attends to this rough-hewn stuff--as fine, if not finer, than that of a master jeweler concocting Fabergé eggs. What keeps Torres-García’s work from preciosity, from a facile charm, is the pressure that he imposes on blunt fact.”
Jed Perl
“The figurative forms that appear in Torres-García's Constructivist pictures … he himself uses the term “sign” to refer to them. But there is another more convincing argument: in contrast to the schematic forms that in a Cubist painting refer to a palette or an absinthe glass, the schematic forms of Torres-García do not represent things, but rather the “ideas of things,” to use the expression chosen by the author himself. That is why what we see in Torres-García’s paintings are always complete forms and not fragmentary, such as those found in Cubist art. For in mental representation, objects always appear complete because they are presented as types; from an empirical viewpoint, we recognize them as objects regardless of their fragmented representation.
Torres-García emphasizes this condition of an ideal type attributed to represented objects by writing them with uppercase initials. For him, the schematic drawing does not represent a ship (this or that ship), a house (this or that one), but the Ship, (thus, with a capital S), and the House (“as drawn by children”). In this sense, the painted schema is a sign. This pictorial language, built by Torres-García following these schemas, is a deliberately constructed language of signs
Tomas Llorens
exploring the sculpture
Construction with Curved Forms 1931 MoMa The Museum of Modern Art.
Guitar 1924 MoMa The Museum of Modern Art.
Two-Button Character (Personnage à deux boutons) 1927 The Centre Pompidou
Shelf with Cup (Repisa con taza) 1928 Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Plastic Object (Constructive Composition) 1931 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Untitled 1929 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Forms on White (Formas sobre fondo blanco) 1924 MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
words of Joaquin Torres-Garcia
“Never stop. Never walk the same path twice. Routine is useless. Habit, worthless. Never let anyone classify you or slap a label on you. Let’s be unclassifiable — indefinable.”
“ Our lives are, in a way, an accumulation of units — not just years, but hours. I’m in approximately my 367,204th hour, and the 367,205th is approaching with a new fragment of life, unlike all those before it, never to return. We have to live with that sense of extension: hour by hour, adding life. ”
(nuestra vida es algo a manera de unidades que se van sumando. no solo suman años sino tambien horas. yo estoy aproximadamente en la hora 367204. y la que viene ya la 367205, es un nuevo fragmento de vida que nada tiene que ver con el resto que ya jamas volvera a ser. hay que vivir en ese sentido de extension: sumando horas.)
featured drawings
