The Worlds of Joaquín Torres-García
Exhibition Coverage by Scott Verchin
APRIL 12 – JUNE 29, 2018
Joaquín Torres-García. Acquavella Galleries
He worked with Gaudi. Taught Miró. Picasso was his friend. Yet, despite the company he kept, most people are relatively unfamiliar with the life and works of Joaquín Torres-García. Arguably, the most famous artist to come out of Uruguay, Torres-García had quite the career.
Born in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo in 1874, Joaquín Torres-García’s career spanned over five decades on three separate continents. For those who are familiar with his career, many would agree that he was a jack and master of all trades.
A novelist, writer, teacher, scholar and theorist. Not to mention a painter, sculptor and muralist, who immersed himself in multiple art movements while, simultaneously, connected the classical and modern. It is safe to say that Joaquín Torres-García was anything but a one-trick pony.
Joaquín Torres-García, Arte constructivo universal (Universal Constructive Art) 1942, Tempera on wood, 153.8×153.7 cm. Photography by Scott Verchin ©
As an artist, Torres-García was difficult to categorize. Most people knew him for his quasi-abstract and constructivist paintings, however, he was also an accomplished portraiture, cubist and craftsman.
At the age of seventeen, Torres-García moved to Spain where he assisted the famous Catalan architect, Antoni Gaudí, with the iconic Sagrada Família and was also a muralist for the local Catalan government. It was during this two-decade period in Barcelona where Torres-García began to stress abstractionism within his work. After a brief visit to Paris (which he would later call home), Torres-García would arrive in New York in 1920. It was in New York where notable collectors and art patrons such as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Katherine Sophie Dreier began to purchase his works. Despite the success Torres-García had in New York, his stay there lasted only a couple of years. He ultimately opted to return to Paris in 1926 where he founded the avant-garde group, Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) in 1929 with Belgian painter, Michel Seuphor (Fernand Berckelaers). Amongst this group of Paris-based abstract artists included Piet Mondrian and Kurt Schwitters whose styles closely aligned with the Uruguayan artist.
“The Worlds of Joaquín Torres-García”, an exhibition at New York’s Acquavella Galleries, puts all of this on display while giving us a taste of his artist life in Barcelona, New York, Paris, Madrid and Montevideo.
This exhibition comes just two years after a major retrospective of Torres-García’s art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Furthermore, this exhibition represents the largest and most comprehensive survey in an American gallery since Joaquín Torres-García curated his own exhibition in 1950. Many of the seventy paintings and sculptures have been loaned to major museums in Europe and South America and will serve as the first time that these works have been presented as a whole.
Joaquín Torres-García, Arte constructivo universal. Padre Inti. 1944 Representacion Solar. Oil on Nails on Wood. 113.4×31.5cm. Photography by Scott Verchin ©
Upon entering this elegant five-story French neo-classical townhouse, you encounter the first floor front room consisting of a collection of wood reliefs along with ink and pencil drawings. The wood reliefs are inspired by the cultures and indigenous civilizations of ancient Greece, Egypt, Africa, Oceania as well as the Americas.
Padre Inti (1944) pays tribute to Inti, the Quechua name of the sun, which is considered the most significant deity in Inca mythology. This work is one of the many examples of Constructivism, which refers to a European tradition of abstract art based on geometric elements – lines, squares, planes – and characterized by simplicity and precision. Torres-García sought to combine the “reason” of geometry with the spiritual “intuition” of man and nature. Constructive Universalism, a philosophy of art developed by Torres-García in the 1930s, evoked the “universal” to describe organic sources of abstract art found in ancient (American) civilizations. In its integration of the constructivist grid and universal pictographs, Constructive Universalism aimed to restore balance and “The Worlds of Joaquín Torres-García” is on exhibit at Acquavella Galleries, 18 East 79th Street, New York NY USA, through 29 June, 2018.
Within this same room is a wall of 19 drawings – mostly ink on paper – which offers a complete picture of Joaquín Torres-García’s artistic universe. The variety of drawings clearly illustrates the artist’s different styles he used and the stages he went through. Many of these works are from his stays in New York. New York had a profound impact on the artist. In a letter to Katherine Sophie Dreier in 1921, Torres-García said, “I have been considering the wonderful possibilities the city of New York offers to the particular kind of art of which I am an exponent. There is no place so rich in material for the realization of something absolutely in art as this great city.”
Moving to the opposite gallery on the first floor, we see Torres-García’s signature style unveiled. These ten paintings employ the constructivist grid filled with pictographs that mixed geometry and abstraction with figurative or spiritual subject matter. Arte Universal (1937) is one of the many examples from the artist, which showcases a style concerned with combined formal elements of Cubism and Futurism with urban imagery. Works made in this style had compositions based upon loose grids and, subsequently, filled with linear symbols. These would become some of Torres-García’s best-known and most influential pieces. He sought to identify a universal structural unity through abstraction, which would lead to Torres-García eventually finding “Taller Torres-García”, an avant-garde school – similar to that of the European Bauhaus – that sought to blur hierarchical distinctions between arts and crafts.
On view in the second-floor of the rear gallery is a rare study of frescos as well as prime examples of the portraiture he pursued through his career including Hombre con nariz puntiaguda/Man with Pointed Nose (1939), where we see similarities to his contemporary and friend, Pablo Picasso. Torres-García was widely admired by his fellow artists as a global modernist. Long after his death, Joan Miró acknowledged his teacher’s influence, sending Torres-García’s widow a photograph of his paintings from a museum exhibition inscribed, “Do you see the forms and shapes of the master? They are still with me today.”
“The Worlds of Joaquín Torres-García” is on exhibit at Acquavella Galleries, 18 East 79th Street, New York NY USA, through 29 June, 2018.
http://www.acquavellagalleries.com/exhibitions/the-worlds-of-joaquin-torres-garcia
ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, INC.
18 East 79th Street
(Between Madison and Fifth Avenues)
New York, NY 10075
212-734-6300 PHONE
Hombre con nariz puntiaguda/Man with Pointed Nose .1939. Photography by Scott Verchin ©
Composition Universelle. 1937 Joaquin Torres-Garcia. Photography by Scott Verchin ©
Exhibition View. Acquavella Galleries. The Worlds of Joaquín Torres-García APRIL 12 – JUNE 29, 2018. Photography by Scott Verchin ©
1 comment
Hello friends. I used to come to invite them to galleries, to museums, to any place that supports and promotes art. I invite you to meets artist like Gabino Amaya Cacho, who work with modern pointillism, or like Da Vinci. Let’s go to know the art!
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