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.
Born in the final quarter of the 19th century, Joaquin Torres-García soon ventured beyond the confines of academia to become one of the founding figures of modern art. His paintings of universal symbols emphasized 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. A modern master who bridged European avant-garde movements with Latin American identity.
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1874, Torres-García moved to his father’s native Spain in 1891. As a young artist in Barcelona, he achieved notorious success painting murals for the Catalan Government and working with Antoni Gaudí. He introduced classical principles revitalized for the modern era He began his career as a theorist and teacher, shaping young artists including 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—future 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, founded the School of the South, which was instrumental in bringing European and North American 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.
New York City: Bird's Eye View 1920 Yale University Art Gallery.
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 White Figure (Constructif avec homme blanc) 1931
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.
Initiation of the Drama (Iniciación del drama) 1947.
Constructive Art in Five Tones (Arte constructivo a cinco tonos) 1948.
Construction in White and Black 1938 MoMa The Museum of Modern Art.
The Phantom Ship (Le bateau fantôme) 1940
Composition 1938 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Constructive Work with Color Planes and Graphic Elements (Constructivo con planos de color y grafismo) 1943 Art Museum of the Americas.
Infinity No. 1 (Infinito No 1) 1943
Constructive City with Universal Man 1942 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
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
Although executed in oil, many of Torres-García's important Constructivist paintings—recall the pictorial qualities of the frescoes. They have a matte finish that comes from the fact of having been painted with a very sparse material on a mordant preparation, and its chromatic scheme is reduced to a palette of earth tones, vermilion, and black. As with fresco painting, the artist relies on the white of the prepared canvas as a base for the dark tones, which are more or less transparent; this gives the pictorial space the animationof a relief.
Tomas Llorens
exploring the sculpture
Forms on White (Formas sobre fondo blanco) 1924 MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
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.
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
Constructive drawing (Dibujo constructivo) 1935 Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
