Wikipedia entry
Joaquín Torres-García (28 July 1874 – 8 August 1949) was an Uruguayan-Spanish artist ("l'artista uruguaianocatalà Joaquín Torres-García") born in Montevideo, Uruguay. As an adolescent, Torres-García emigrated to Catalunya, Spain, where he began his career as an artist in 1891. For the next three decades, Torres-García embraced the Catalan identity and led the cultural scene in Barcelona and Europe. As a painter, sculptor, muralist, novelist, writer, teacher and theorist, Torres-García was considered to be a "renaissance" or "universal man." He used a simple metaphor to deal with the eternal struggles he faced between the old and the modern, between the classical and the avant-garde, between reason and feeling, and between figuration and abstraction: there is no contradiction or incompatibility. Like Goethe, Torres-García sought integration between classicism and modernity. Although he lived and worked primarily in Spain, Torres-García was also active in the United States, Italy, France and Uruguay, where his influence encompassed a personal presence in European, North American and South American modern art. Torres-García is known for his collaboration with Antoni Gaudi in 1903 on the stained glass windows for both the Palma Cathedral and the Sagrada Família. He also decorated the medieval Palau de la Generalitat seat of the Catalan government with monumental frescoes. His art is associated with archaic universal cultures, including Mediterranean cultural traditions, Noucentisme, and Modern Classicism. Torres-García developed a unique style (first described as "Art Constructif") in the 1930s while living in Paris. Arte Constructivo (Constructive Art), a school he opened in Madrid, was continued as Universalismo Constructivo (Universal Constructivism), a treatise he published in South America while teaching through his workshop schools, “Asociación de Arte Constructivo” (Constructive Art Association) and El Taller Torres-García. Torres-García's art combines classic/archaic traditions with twentieth-century "-isms": Cubism, Dada, Neo-plasticism, Primitivism, Surrealism, Abstraction. As a theoretician, Torres-García published more than 150 books, essays and articles written in Catalan, Spanish, French, and English. During his lifetime, he gave more than 500 lectures. An indefatigable teacher, Torres-García founded several art schools in Spain and Uraguay (Montevideo) and numerous art groups, including the first European abstract art group. He also founded the magazine Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) in Paris, in 1929. Retrospectives in Paris (1955) and Amsterdam (1961) are the earliest shows to historically document the position of Torres-García in the world of abstract art. In the United States, he exhibited in New York in the 1920s just as the Whitney Studio Club, the Society of Independent Artists and the Societe Anonyme were emerging. In the 1930s, Albert Eugene Gallatin exhibited Torres-García's work in the Museum of Living Art alongside such Modern masters as Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger. The Museum of Modern Art opened its Latin American collection exhibition in the 1940s with the acquisition of Torres-García's work, and the Sidney Janis and Rose Fried galleries sponsored important shows during the 1950s. In the 1970s, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened a retrospective exhibition, and more recent retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art (2015) and Acquavella Galleries (2018) exhibited Torres-García's art from a contemporary perspective.
Getty record
Uruguayan, Central American, South American, Spanish
Artist, Teacher, Fresco Painter, Muralist, Painter, Toymaker, Theorist




