JOAQUÍN TORRES-GARCÍA | Abstraction

Estate of the artist, Montevideo
Acquired from the above 

Caracas, Galería Siete Siete, Joaquín Torres-García, época de Paris, 1926-1932, 1980, n.n. 

This small work has not been recently restored. Isolated spots of retouching can be seen under ultraviolet light, particularly in the three white sections. There are quite a number of retouches addressing some pentimenti in the upper center and the upper right of the red rectangle in the center. Small retouches can be seen here and there within the remainder of the picture, particularly in the ochre color in the upper left. At present, the canvas is very heavily lined with wax onto a mechanical stretcher, and the retouches are not particularly good or well applied. If the lining were changed, it does not seem that it would need to be re-lined, and the retouches and varnish could be more thoughtfully applied. However, the work could be hung as-is. (This condition report has been provided courtesy of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.)
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.

The works by Joaquín Torres-García are not only regarded as “transformational paths for the advancement of Modern art on both sides of the Atlantic,” they also stand as some of the most significant contributions to twentieth-century art (Cecilia Buzio de Torres, “The Asociación de Arte Constructivo, 1934-1942” in El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and Its Legacy, Austin, 1992, p. 9). Involved in several of the early avant-garde movements that were burgeoning in both the United States and Europe, including Cubism and Neo-Plasticism, it was not until his experimentation with Constructivism during the latter half of the 1920s while living in Paris, and a serendipitous albeit short-lived friendship with Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl artists, that Torres-García was able to establish an unexpectedly new visual language that came to full fruition by the early 1930s: Universal Constructivism. 

After spending the first two decades of the 1900s in Barcelona teaching at the experimental art school Colegio Mont d’Or Tarrasa—which provided him a platform to fervently promote new generations of innovative artistic currents—Torres-García eventually moved to Paris in 1926. The French capital served as a critical arena of introductions and encounters for the artist: not only would he meet Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Michel Seuphor and Georges Vantongerloo, among others, he would also become acquainted with and deeply study Amerindian and pre-Columbian artifacts upon his visit to the popular 1928 exhibition Arts anciens de l’Amérique (Estrella de Diego, “Return to the Native Land: The Invention of an Origin” in Joaquín Torres-García, The Arcadian Modern (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015, p. 98). It should also not be overlooked that the cultural environment in Paris had reached a decisive and polarizing height during this time, with André Breton’s Surrealist brand of figuration at odds with van Doesburg’s purist expression of abstraction. Although Torres-García would briefly align himself with Seuphor to form the group Cercle et Carré and also collaborate with van Doesburg, he would eventually refuse to prescribe and solely devote himself to these campaigns of absolute abstraction and non-figuration proclaiming “I can’t stick strictly to a completely abstract, pure art” (Luis Pérez-Oramas, “The Anonymous Rule: Joaquín Torres-García, the Schematic Impulse, and Arcadian Modernity” in ibid., p. 2) As a result, the body of work from Torres-García’s Parisian residency, and specifically the crucial year of 1929, proved to be ground zero for his artistic production and would outline a period of imaginative and autonomous invention.In his book, Estructura, Torres-García dedicates a key passage to Mondrian, where he “talks of reconciling Cubism, Surrealism, and Neo-Plasticism.” He writes, “each of these three movements, taken separately, is quite incomplete. For this reason, around 1929, I attempted to unite them…since I understood that was the only way it would be possible to attain a complete art” (Estrella de Diego, “Return to the Native Land: The Invention of an Origin” in ibid., p. 103). Torres-García’s motivation to find his own voice and an “aesthetic” reconciliation to the dominant artistic principles in Europe of the time proved pivotal: in seeking to combine the reason of geometric-abstract construction with the organic and, what he considered, the spiritual intuition of pre-Hispanic aesthetic sensibilities (universalism), Torres created the fundamental principles for his oeuvre from this point onward.

The present painting, Abstraction, executed in 1929, serves as a key example of Torres-Garcia’s completely new plastic approach. He presents to us here a distinctive, reduced grid of forms and eccentric and rhythmic planes of color whose structural arrangements seem both deliberately measured while also limitless in their possibility of order—interspersed planes of black, red, yellow, blue and white, a nod and solution to the Neo-Plastic philosophies of Mondrian and van Doesburg. Moreover this formal, structural arrangement alludes to the most essential quality of Torres-García’s aesthetic philosophy of Universal Constructivism: the fusion of the esoteric, the ancient and the human. Recalling an architectural façade—defined by the artist as a “cathedral”—Abstraction is a clear, foundational expression of the artist’s incorporation of the human and the mystical into his visual lexicon: “fed by the archaic and the ancient… the Neo-Plastic structure itself becomes a figure [and] and a symbol” (Luis Pérez-Oramas, “The Anonymous Rule: Joaquín Torres-García, the Schematic Impulse, and Arcadian Modernity” in ibid., pp. 29-31).



This work is included in the Joaquín Torres García Online Catalogue Raisonné (www.torresgarcia.com) as no. 1929.48.