Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949)

Chicago, Chicago Artist's Exhibition/Pan-American Exhibition, June 14-July 29, 1958, n.n.

Torres-García executed this important painting in Paris, while he was enjoying great critical success.  He was exhibiting his work in the best of the avant-garde art galleries along with the most respected artists of his time.  In 1930 Torres-García and the Belgian poet and artist Michel Seuphor founded Cercle et Carré, an association of artists that promoted abstract art as an alternative to the increasing popularity of Surrealism.  They published a periodical and organized a major exhibition that included the participation of non-figurative artists working in Paris as well as abroad and which today is considered a landmark in the history of modern art.

This painting may have been exhibited at Galerie Jeanne Bucher in March of 1932 along with works by Jean Arp, Lurçat, and Max Ernst, or at Galerie Pierre’s exhibition also on view that month.  (Galerie Pierre was owned by Pierre Loeb, the dealer who launched Wifredo Lam).  1932 was the last year Torres-García lived in Paris which, he later wrote, had been the happiest time of his life.  It was the worldwide economic depression that caused him to leave, moving with his family, first to Madrid and then in 1934, after an absence of 43 years, to Montevideo.

Upon his return to South America, Torres-García immersed himself in his writing and began lecturing widely.  His theories, and his teaching workshop, the Taller Torres-García, were highly influential in shaping the future of modern art in Latin America.  Torres-García’s concepts represent the first systematic and coherent attempt to create an autonomous artistic tradition for Latin America.  He proposed that the art of the Americas’ great native cultures, and in particular, the shared principles of abstraction in Western and non-Western art, be the foundation for a new style that would represent the New World’s complex identity.

In 1949, a few months before Torres-García’s death, the art dealer Sidney Janis invited him to show in his new gallery in New York.  If not a financial success, the exhibition was very popular with the Abstract Expressionists. Torres-García’s pictographs, as stated by several art critics, had an impact on Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, and Louise Nevelson.  According to Sidney Janis, “Barney Newman (the American Abstract Expressionist painter), was a constant visitor to the gallery. He always had very interesting things to say about the works on the wall. I remember his visit to our Torres-García show. Barney would come every day and read the paintings to us. He would go into [the] mythology, history, and everything else.”[1]

In the late 1950s and 1960s prominent American collectors acquired Torres-García’s works.  Among them was Chicago businessman Morton G. Neumann who bought several canvases in Paris, including this outstanding example of Torres-García’s trademark style, his Constructive Universalism.  What is remarkable about this painting is the unusual atonal palette: pink, acid green, rich red, bright orange, metallic grey, and lilac.  In spite of the underlying grisaille that unifies such unlikely color combinations, this painting is all about color.  Very rarely did Torres-García indulge in using such sensual colors; a similar but less vivid work, Composición also of 1932, is in the collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

© Cecilia de Torres, 2007       

[1] Les Levine. “A Portrait of Sidney Janis on the Occasion of his 25th anniversary as an Art Dealer.” Arts Magazine, November 1973.

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