(Uruguayan 1874-1949)

A pioneer of modernism, Torres-Garcia was born in Montevideo in 1874 of a Catalan father and Uruguayan mother. His family moved to Spain in 1891 and settled in Barcelona. Torres-Garcia studied at the Escuela Oficial de Bellas Artes de Barcelona (the "Llotja") and at the Academia Baixas. By the end of the decade he had become, along with Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez, part of the bohemian milieu of the cafe Els Quatre Gats. In 1903 Torres-Garcia assisted Antoni Gaudi with stained-glass windows for the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca and later with the windows for the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. During this time the artist also executed various mural commissions and developed a style of pastoral and monumental classicism derived from that of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

 

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Joaquin Torres Garcia
(Continued)

He moved to New York in 1920 to manufacture wood toys he had designed and the following year exhibited at the Whitney Studio Club. During this time he produced paintings of cityscapes in a flat geometric style. Torres-Garcia moved to Paris in 1926 where he met Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian and later founded the group Cercle et Carre with Michel Seuphor. He developed at this time the style of Constructive Universalism for which he is best known. While in Paris, he also became interested in pre-Columbian objects. (His son Augusto worked making drawings of Nazca pottery for the inventory files of the Musee du Trocadero). Returning to Montevideo in 1934, he founded the Asociacion de Arte Constructivo. Four years later his Cosmic Monument was erected in the Parque Rodo in Montevideo.

In 1943 he founded the Taller Torres-Garcia and that same year his landmark theoretical book Universalismo Constructivo was published. Torres-Garcia's one-person shows include those at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Madrid, 1933; the Instituto de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, 1951; the Musee d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1955; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the OAS, Washington DC, 1961; and the Commission Nacional de Bellas Artes, Montevideo, 1962. Exhibitions were also presented at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, and the Hayward Gallery, London. The exhibition EI Taller Torres-Garcia: The School of the South and its Legacy was presented between 1991 and 1993 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, The University of Texas, Austin; the Museo de Monterrey, Mexico; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; and the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City. In 1996 a selection from that exhibit was shown at the Art Museum of the Americas, OAS.

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