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Biografy

Joaquín Torres- García
(Montevideo, 1874-1949)

Writing an autobiography means transferring an experience,based on the hypothesis that the experience has been valuable and could therefore be exemplary for future generations.His return to his native country, Uruguay, at sixty years of age marked the end of a stage for Joaquín Torres García,who considered that he had accumulated a “piece of history” that deserved to be told.Surely he considered some of these questions when he decided to tell his life story, which he signed in Montevideo in October of 1934. The meticulously descriptive and sometimes intimate nature of the text acquires some distance through the use of the third person, a curious choice for a book of this genre, which is usually governed by the first person. “I’ll write about myself as if I were any other character, so as to have a less biased view of myself,” he commented at the book launch. By concealing the “I” he sought a certain objectivity and, with it, the purpose of achieving greater effectiveness and credibility. Apart from those considerations, he was fulfilling the dual desire for transcendence and control over the transmission of his personal history to the future. His founding of the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (Constructive art association, 1934) and a school, the Taller de Torres García (Torres García workshop, 1943), were other resources that would guarantee the continuation of his creative project.

He had returned after 43 years’ absence from his city, Montevideo, prepared to found modern art again from there.His experience in several European metropolises and in New York had shaped and challenged him at different times.It was time, then, to draw up a balance, to review those experiences and to start out on another path in the certainty that he was meant for this task of initiation.

Born in that Uruguayan city on the 28th of July, 1874, to a Catalonian father and a Uruguayan mother, he spent part of his childhood assessing images that would be activated many years later as part of his artistic development. His childhood memories are brimful of flat façades, clocks, docks, in short, city scenes of the capital on the River Plate that was built in homage to the river-seacoast. He left Montevideo in 1891 on board the steamer Cittá di Napoli bound for Europe, and specifically for Barcelona via Genoa. Finally the Torres-García family settled in Mataró, a town near Barcelona where they had family ties.

The first decade of the new century was the time of his professional training at the state-run art college Escuela Oficial de Bellas Artes de la Llotja and at the Academia Baixas, both in Barcelona.He was active in the Cercle Artistic Sant Lluc (St. Luke’s fine arts association),and became part of Catalonian bohemian society at the Els Quatre Gats café. Those years also saw his association with Gaudí and his participation in the making of the stained glass windows for the Palma de Majorca cathedral. He also worked intensely not only on his own art but as a teacher. One of his students during that period would eventually become one of the first critics to evaluate his work in Río de la Plata: Julio E. Payró, son of Argentine writer Roberto J. Payró, with whom he made friends. Toward 1910 this friendship became productive in a new sense. Payró had settled in Brussels, where his assessment of Torres’ work for the Uruguayan embassy helped win Torres the commission to paint the mural that would decorate the Republic’s pavilion at the Brussels International Exposition. That experience enabled him not only toconsolidate his art and his public presence, but also to make contact—albeit somewhat superficially—with the contemporary artistic movement, both during his passage through Paris on the way to Brussels and in the Belgian capital.

1912-1918 were years of hard work for the Barcelona city council painting the frescos in thePalau de la Generalitat (regional government building). The esthetics of this work are in line with the principles of Catalonian Noucentisme proclaimed by Eugenio d’Ors in his writings. This process was to be interrupted by a change of course that began to make itself evident around 1917, at the time Rafael Barradas arrived in Barcelona. Their two-man exhibition at the Galería Dalmau was the first public staging of Torres’ new evolucionista (evolutionist) or plasticista (plasticist) style.

This experience, like all the previous and subsequent ones in the course of his long career, was manifested in a convergent movement of images and texts. His work in the plastic arts consisted of experimentation with his esthetic intuitions followed by analysis and critical articulation, which he accomplished in his writings.

It seemed that each new decade in his career unfurled under a different sign. The 1920s were a period of international nomadism in search of greater public recognition and a favorable territory that would stimulate him in the continued pursuit of his creative development. From 1920 to 1922 he tried settling in New York, where he contrasted his perception of a “moth-eaten” Europe with the dual impact that this powerfully modern city represented in his mind: a metropolis where “everything is mechanical, orderly and clean” and, at the same time, materialistic, a place where values were altered, where there was no hierarchy or tradition.“New York attracts and repels...so leaving there was a liberation.” Those years, nonetheless, were of seminal importance for Torres’ deepening researches in a painting dominated by geometry, by synthesis and the creation of an orthogonal rhythm in the plane.

From New York he went to Italy at a time when everything was colored by the advance of fascism, a circumstance that made this new territory an inhospitable one for Torres. His stay there lasted a little longer than two years, after which he launched a new experience that was to be a defining one: Paris. Between 1926 and 1932 he lived in the metropolis of modern art. While in each stage of his autobiography he devoted long paragraphs to each of the personages who passed through his life, the relationships that he forged with them and the benefits—or absence of benefits—that they brought him, it is in the Parisian period—as in the Barcelona years—where his story gains greater density. It was in Paris that he entered into intense contact with the avant-garde, where he analytically explored everything from primitive cultures to cubism, passing through neoplasticism, constructivism and finally debating with surrealism. His work was shown in the Salon des Indépendants, and he participated in the organization of an alternative event to the Autumn Salon of 1928, in cooperation with other painters whose work, like his, had been rejected by the Salon jury.He met Michel Seuphor, Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, and Georges Vantongerloo.From the friendship with Vantongerloo came the Cercle et carré initiative, as well as his affiliation with spaces such as Art concrèt. He also made contact with other Latin American artists who were in Paris during the same period; together they set up the exhibition of Latin American art at Galerie Zak.

All these experiences converged in the formulation of Torres’ esthetic project:universalismo constructivo (universal constructivism), which he would condense in 1944 in the form of a book published by Poseidón in Buenos Aires, a publishing house that arose from the initiative of Spanish republicans exiled in Argentina after the Civil War. Before distilling his work in that extensive book, he had published many articles, lectures and books (see a selected list in the bibliography) that surrounded his painting and gave him a defined position in the history of modern art in Latin America. D. W.