Joaquín Torres García

JOAQUÍN TORRES GARCÍA (Uruguay, 1874 - 1949).
Untitled, 1942. Copy 2/2.
Etching on copper.
Signed and dated (JTG 42) on the metal.
Measurements: 19,5 x 13,6 cm.
Joaquín Torres García, Uruguayan of birth, emigrated with his family to Mataró, where he began his artistic formation in academies after a first self-taught stage. When they all moved to Barcelona, he was able to enter the School of Fine Arts of the city, where he coincided with painters such as Mir, Sunyer, etc. In these years he exhibited works, published drawings in "La Vanguardia" and began to paint in fresco in 1901, working later in decoration with Adrià Gual and then with Gaudí in the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca and in the Sagrada Familia. From 1905 onwards his work approached classicism, seeking an approach to Greek art, the cradle of civilization. In 1907 he began teaching at the Mont d'Or school. Around this time he replaced those Greek formal elements with Catalan ones, imbued with the vindictive spirit of the time (he participated in the Catalan Noucentisme). In 1920, he left with his family for New York, then moved to Italy and, from there, to Paris, where his work changed radically, becoming part of the constructivism headed by Mondrian, but without abandoning his peculiar symbolic universe. He elaborated his aesthetic-philosophical system, called Constructive Universalism, an art based on proportion, unity and structure. In 1934 he returned to Montevideo, where he showed his avant-garde artistic theories to promote an unprecedented art in America. In this city he created the Society of the Arts of Uruguay and published books and articles. Since 1938, the influence of pre-Columbian and indigenous art began to show in his work. He tried to implant Constructivist art in Uruguay, especially with the creation of the Torres García Workshop in 1942, where he made his disciples follow the path of art and not the mere imitation of external forms (workshop that forged the School of the South, one of the most consistent artistic movements of the twentieth century). A museum has been dedicated to his figure in Montevideo and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, the National Museum of Art of Catalonia, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Sao Paulo, the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington DC, etc., all have works by this artist.