Colecciones de arte

Nature morte avec fruits et pitcher, 1917

FICHA TÉCNICA
Physique, 1929
Oil on cloth, 60 x 73 cm

Refusés

5 Par le Jury du Salon d' Automne Peintres.

Exposent leurs toiles «condamnées» et quelques autres.

Au moment où se manifeste un violent mouvement rétrograde, il est intéressant - peut-être prudent- de connaître quelles tendances le contredisent.

Voici parmi tant d'autres 5 peintres parisiens désignés par le refus flatteur du jury:

Un uruguayen

Un polonais

Un belge

Un catalan

Un français

Du 3 Novembre au 15 Novembre

Galerie Marck .

Rejected. In 1928 a group of five artists, including the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres García, decided to exhibit in a commercial gallery in parallel with the Autumn Salon. The leaflet that promoted the show clearly took the tone of a denunciation of what the refusés labeled “retrograde” esthetic positions, and invited the public to get acquainted with other alternatives that questioned those positions. The alternative nature of their works was the reason they were rejected by that official salon. In the case of the Uruguayan artist, the repudiated painting would be recognized shortly thereafter as the first of his works in which he tried out “the architectural, constructive sense of his painting.”

With unequivocal gestures and practices that virtually turned the world of art into a battlefield,Torres García—one of a number of artists of different origins who were grouping together in Paris to participate actively in the development of modern art—took his esthetic proposals to the point of direct confrontation, thus achieving a high degree of visibility. The strategy of the anti-salon worked, attracting the public and critics as well as other artists. It gave Torres García the occasion for meeting Theo Van Doesburg, founder of the De Stijl review, a champion of neoplasticism.Through this relationship he connected with en entire area of plastic art production linked with abstraction:with Seuphor and Piet Mondrian, and later with Georges Vantongerloo, with whom he would develop the collective Cercle et Carré project.

1928 saw Torres opening other fronts. He exhibited his work in the free salon—Sur indépendants—which was also linked to innovative trends. It was at that salon in 1908 that Georges Braque had shown his “inventions,” which had placed cubism on the public stage. This movement would become the first of a long series of more or less radical breaks with the paradigm of Western figurative representation that had been canonized since the Renaissance.

Cubism, whose proposals remained in effect beyond the limits of their historic emergence, and whose practitioners were still active in the debates of the 1920s, had produced an alteration in the concept of representation of the real, advancing firmly over a different reality, the reality of painting itself. The plastic elements—lines, colors, forms—were presented not has they had been shown before, and necessarily remitted the reading of art to pure painting, beyond all literary references. Thus, the languages used in making art were placed at the center of attention of esthetic reflections, to be questioned and revised again and again by many artists who took cubism as a referent, argued with it and tried out other options. Among these was Torres, for example, who approached this matter by saying “forms express what they are and nothing more” to throw himself headlong into pure painting. In Hechos (Acts), an unpublished text written in 1919, he defines this position more precisely in the following clear terms: “Painting is not representing nor the manner of representing. It is that ABSOLUTE thing by means of which things take shape in representation.... The artist ignores the object. He wants no part of the fiction of perspective.He wantswhat it IS:not the apparent.” Painting “is” in itself, through the creation of a self-sufficient world. Thus Torres advanced along the conceptual path of the autonomy of language and of art, approaching the terms of the avant-garde formulations.

While this was his latest line of thinking with regard to painting on the level of these theoretical texts, toward 1917 the dynamism of the modern city began to seem like an interference in the noucentiste principle that he had been developing, and which would subsequently give way to the elaboration of a radical position with respect to the classical tradition. In that same year he published Descubrimiento de sí mismo (Self-discovery), a book in which he revealed various aspects of this change. “There is nothing more beautiful than to forget the past and go on an adventure,” he said.Centered on the problem of defining his new approach, his encounter with Rafael Barradas in Barcelona and the proposal to exhibit together at the Dalmau gallery were especially productive.

Just as the repertoire of actions taken by the artists linked with the new art included forming groups or seeking allies (as Torres did by inviting Barradas to exhibit with him), the need to create a supportive viewing public also emerged, and demanded an effort to train those viewers, to notify them that they were going to see something different and tell them what that new and different art was about. Torres accepted that task. In a “Note to the Public” he explained the difficulty of expressing in words “the things that had found suitable expression in form and color.”

“This is pure BIOLOGICAL PLASTICISM” was the phrase he used to name what he and Barradas were exhibiting. Shortly thereafter, in Un Enemic del Poble (An enemy of the people), he published a text affirming his commitment to this philosophy:he wanted to make neither paintings nor art, but “plasticisms.” By coining this new term he was surely trying to slough off the weight that encumbered such notions as painting and—even more so—art, and sought at the same time to open the way to a new proposal with which to flee from conventions and from imitation, through purely plastic elements and their encounter with geometry.

Beyond these efforts to distinguish his art by means of a term that would give a name to this way of thinking about and making art, the critics could not avoid thinking of those works exhibited at the Dalmau gallery in relation with cubism. While Torres did not renounce this movement, he considered that cubism was a transitional stage in the evolution of art toward pictorial structuralism. It was precisely the incorporation of the concept of structure that would guide his researches and lead him to the formulation of an artistic project that he condensed at the end of the 1920s, in which he finally placed his practice in the tension existing between a debate that was unfolding inside the artistic realm and another discussion that was beginning to emerge and sought to be conducted in the social space.

The six works presented by Torres García to the Salon des Indépendants reflected his explorations around a new way of resolving the tensions between naturalism and abstraction, in which he was striving to redefine the representation of the real once again from the standpoint of art practice. Physique is an example of the paintings that can be classified within this line of work.

This canvas of 1929 shows Torres’ structuring of the compositional plane and his way of thinking about forms. In this plane he carefully placed a harmonious grid; some of the rectangles of this grid are subdivided, and then subdivided again, creating a continuous rhythm in which a palpable geometric regularity is reproduced. Other rectangles hold lines that intersect to cede to schematic silhouettes:two fish, a woman, a man, a house, a key, a wheel, and in the upper right-hand area, the word “PHYSIC,” prefiguring the title of the work. The warm palette, limited to a few desaturated colors, achieves a balanced set of tones by combining them to produce intermediate shades with gradual passages that avoid strong contrasts.This cedes the more prominent role to the line that describes Torres’ characteristic signs.The line, rigorous and modulated at the same time, is charged with structuring the major areas of color, setting the rhythms and constructing the forms that appear in each of these areas. The surface texture of the painting is reminiscent of a certain chiaroscuro-like treatment that, without violating the two-dimensionality of the plane, contributes to the buildup of a vibrant perception of this new universe adumbrated in the painting.

“Those drawings of things, those outlines...are the base, the starting point, of all universal art,” Torres would say years later. The linear elements that can be seen in Physique became leitmotivs in his works, to be identified as primary forms, almost as ideas constructed from certain minimal data taken from their real referents, organized in an orthogonal space that is solid and, at the same time, sensitive. All these elements, in their diverse combinations, were given the task of carrying on the “struggle between nature and abstraction” that Torres García sustained during these years, accompanied by a profusion of texts, lectures and a militant teaching effort. Among these, we can point especially to Estructura (1935) and Universalismo Constructivo (1944), two capital books in which the painter collected a major portion of his writings. D. W.

SIGNATURE

J. Torres-García 29" on the upper part of the work, almost on the edge, in black on a field of desaturated earth colors and greens. The location of the signature and its distance from the date, within its upper rectangle, plays with the same harmonic rhythm that unites the rest of the elements in the painting.

ORIGIN

Hersant-Anavi collection, Paris / Private Collection, Paris / Dan Pollock, New York / Cecilia Torres Gallery, New York.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Torres-García: Grid-Pattern-Sign. Paris-Montevideo1924-1944, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1985, Nº 21, p. 32 / Torres-García, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1991, Nº 69, p. 111 / North and South Connected: An Abstraction of the Americas, Cecilia de Torres Ltd., New York, 1998, rep. Nº 4 / The Amerindian Paradigm. Musée de Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels.