Joaquín Torres-García

Private Collection, Belgium (a gift from the artist)
Thence by descent (and sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 18, 1995, lot 160)
Private Collection, Europe (acquired at the above sale) 
Acquired from the above 

Valencia, Institut Valencià d'Art Modern Centre Julio González & Barcelona, La Caixa, Aladdin Toys, Los juguetes de Torres-García, 1997-98, no. 112, illustrated in color in the catalogue 
Strasbourg, Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain & Madrid, Museo Colecciones ICO, Joaquín Torres-García: Un mundo construido, 2002-03, illustrated in color in the catalogue 
Biarritz, Espace Bellevue, Passion et raison d'un esprit constructif: Une conquete de l'art d'Amérique Latine: oeuvres de la Fundación Daniela Chappard, 2006, no. 22, illustrated in color in the catalogue 
Málaga, Museo Picasso, Toys of the Avant-Garde, 2010-11, illustrated in color in the catalogue 
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000, 2012, no. 43, illustrated in color in the catalogue 
New York, The Museum of Modern Art; Madrid, Fundación Telefónica & Málaga, Museo Picasso, Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern, 2015-16, illustrated in color in the catalogue

"The Art of Play" in Patek Philippe: The International Magazine, vol. III, no. 6, 2012, illustrated in color p. 10 

These three works are in very good condition overall, taking their age into account. All of the individual elements are accounted for. Each of the elements is lightly soiled, lightly worn, and presents minor pinpoint spots of media loss, which is consistent with their age; however, the media layer is stable throughout. Three rust-colored surface accretions measuring less than ½ inch each in length are present on the back of the torso of the orange-clad figure. Two faint grey partial fingerprints measuring less than ½ inch each in diameter are present on the upper left and right corners of the head of the blue-clad figure.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Please note that this work is accompanied by its original box, stamped Jouets transformables Aladin déposé, faits en France par J. Torres-García, artiste-peintre. Joaquín Torres-García’s wooden toys, which he created throughout his lifetime, form an integral part of his oeuvre and represent a crystallization of his plastic theory of Universal Constructivism. Although less well-known than his paintings, these diminutive works are revolutionary in their construction, embodying Torres-García’s aesthetic synthesis of his own humanist aesthetic ideology with innovative theories in early childhood education that emerged in the early twentieth century.

Torres-García’s toys are a lifelong continuation of his earliest creative experiences; he began making them as a child in his family carpentry in Montevideo. However it was in 1907, when he began working as a drawing teacher in the experimental Collegi Mont d’Or in Barcelona that he began to create them in earnest. Dedicated to an innovative educational approach, in particular the methods of groundbreaking German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel, the Collegi Mont d’Or fostered an aesthetic- based education that encouraged children to learn through play and tailored its curriculum to the needs and interests of each child. One innovation of Fröbel’s in particular that resonated with Torres-García, who was by then a father to his own young children: his Spielgabe (Fröbel gifts), a set of toys composed of fundamental geometric shapes (cubes, spheres, and pyramids) which a child would be encouraged to rebuild over and over again. Fröbel stated: “The active and creative, living and life producing being of each person, reveals itself in the creative instinct of the child” (quoted in "Froebel’s Kindergarten, with Suggestions of Principles and Methods of Child Culture in Different Countries" in American Journal of Education, Hartford, 1984, p. 83). Nurturing this creative instinct through spontaneous and open-ended play, he believed, was critical to a child’s social and intellectual development. Torres-García’s toys, composed of multi-part figures, towns, trains, and animals put this theory into play, encouraging children to build and re-build tiny universes in endless combinations while offering them concrete representations of their own world to engage with. Observing his own children at play, Torres-García said: “If a child breaks his toys, it is at first to investigate, and then to modify: knowledge, and creation. Give him, then, the toys already in pieces, so he may do as he likes. This way, we adapt to his own psychology” (quoted in Aladdin Toys: Los juguetes de Torres-García (exhibition catalogue), Valencia, 1997, p. 13). This spirit of creative destruction and reinvention is characteristic not only of Torres’ toys, but of his aesthetic approach overall, as he constantly sought to improve and refine his plastic ideology.

The two present works, Personnages and Pueblo (Le Village), (see lots XX and XX) were executed in Villefranche-sur-Mer and Paris in 1925 and 1928-29, a critical moment in Torres-García’s career in which he was formulating the aesthetic language of Universal Constructivism—merging the seemingly “irreconcilable tendencies of rigorous structure and flexible improvisation (unlike other artists of the period, creating a language in which Cubism, Neoplasticism and, in a certain way, Surrealism, coexisted)” (Carlos Pérez, “Los juguetes de Torres-García” in Aladdin Toys: Los juguetes de Torres-García (exhibition catalogue), Valencia, 1997, p. 10). Luis Pérez-Oramas, curator of Torres-García’s 2015 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, contextualizes the toys in this moment, arguing that they embody the synthesis of the supposed opposites of figuration and abstraction: “The[se] anthropomorphic objects, [these] small, mutable modern totems—whose parts seem related to the quadrants in the grids of Torres’ paintings, as if liberated from the plane to become the limbs of an infinitely rearrangeable body—erase any effort to oppose figuration to abstraction, for these are anthropomorphic abstractions, abstract figures (Luis Pérez-Oramas, “The Anonymous Rule” in Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015, p. 30). Deceptively simple yet brimming with infinite possibility, these transformable characters and their endlessly changeable environment are building blocks in the language of Universal Constructivism.   



This work is included in the Joaquín Torres García Online Catalogue Raisonné (www.torresgarcia.com) as no. T4.413.