Joaquín Torres-García
Uruguaian, 1879-1949 (active Spain andFrance)

Composition, 1932
oil on canvas
32 1/4 x 25 3/4 in.

SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by the 20th c. Art Acquisition and Endowment Funds, the Grace Jones Richardson Trust, Jon B. and Lillian Lovelace, and Les and Zora Charles
1997.69



Undated photo of Torres-García

“A painter of great scope, he inscribes his pictorial visions on a material substance...
Above all it is the plane that dominates, supported by line that, through juxtaposition, sets up rhythmic inscription on the plane surface...one is allowed to translate or understand everything solely through the composition and purely pictorial means…
Torres-Garcia sings in a minor key…”
- Theo van Doesburg on Joaquim Torres-Garcia, Paris, May 13, 1929


RESEARCH PAPER

Introduction
The music of Torres Garcia’s art is subtle, but his ambition was enormous. In The School of the South, his first Latin American manifesto, published in February of 1935, he proclaimed, "Our North is the South" and opened with an inverted map of South America, with the tip of Patagonia pointing south, at the top of the page. By inverting the map Torres-Garcia was announcing the beginning of a new era in Latin American art, and calling on his fellow Uruguayans to be conscious of their own culture, rather than the culture of Europe. He believed passionately that it was possible to create a utopian art movement for the Americas, – "a metaphysical, anonymous, monumental, popular art" - that would include everything: architecture, sculpture, and painting, even the most simple, utilitarian objects. He hoped to create a modern art for the American continent that was equal in scope to the art of the greatest civilizations of antiquity, founded on the principles of constructive universalism, his fusion of constructivist principals, geometric abstraction, abstract surrealism, and the essential elements of indigenous American art.

Today, the legacy of this movement is, for the most part conceptual, rather than aesthetic, but from the 1940s on, Latin American artists, turned to Torres-Garcia and his School of the South for guidance and legitimacy in theoretical, aesthetic and ideological concerns. His art fused the pre-Hispanic past with the modernist tradition, and allowed future Latin American artists to define their cultural legacy within the parameters of universal art. His ideas were particularly appealing to artists working in countries with strong indigenous and pre-Columbian traditions. In the United States his work and theories influenced the early Abstract Expressionists including Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, and the work of American sculptor Louise Nevelson. Torres-García’s combination of abstraction and symbol anticipated pop art’s desire to construct and capture the idea of an object, rather than the object itself.

Portrait of Torres-Garcia
A photographic portrait of Torres-Garcia taken after his return to Montevideo shows him sitting at a desk, with a sphere, cube and pyramid on the tabletop in front of him. In his hands he holds a stick, marked off center and behind him are photographs of what appear to be pre-Columbian artifacts as well as sketches of stick figures. His face is stern, solemn and half in shadow. This portrait captures the essence of the man, his "aura of an apostle", the intensity of his commitment to the principles upon which he built his art, and the ideas of constructive universalism.

The sphere, cube and pyramid are references to geometry. The stick he balances in his hands demonstrates the golden section, a system of proportion thought to express the secret of visual harmony. Torres-Garcia is displaying the golden section in its simplest form: a line divided into two parts so that the smaller is to the larger as the larger is to the whole. (The ration 1:1.6180339… is irrational, or inexpressible in whole numbers. It is roughly equivalent to 8:13). His canvases were often structured based on the golden section. For Torres-Garcia geometry was part of "that science of numbers, which is the ordering of the spirit, which does not lie in knowing the physical, but the essential of everything.” He considered the geometry of the pyramids, Gothic cathedrals, Byzantine, Egyptian, and Inca art "spiritual geometry".

The figures displayed in the background are references to the symbols that appear in his work, and to pre-Columbian traditions. Torres-Garcia developed a formal vocabulary, a combination of modern and prehistoric symbols that he incorporated into his abstract compositions. He was not interested in appropriating imagery; his desire was to link modern art to the spiritual or metaphysical sense that inspired the primitive work. Unlike the surrealists who used primitive imagery as a personal metaphor for the unconscious state, Torres-Garcia saw primitivism as part of the universal vision of human history. While living in Uruguay in the late 1930s and 1940s, he theorized that pre-Columbian art was a perfect balance of abstraction, geometry and references to natural forms and images with powerful magical connotations, and he described a strong affinity between avant-garde constructivism and pre-Columbian traditions.

Constructivism Defined
Constructivism is a term that was first used by Russian sculptor Naum Gabo to describe art that acknowledges structure as the backbone of any work of art in any medium, and since the 1920s it has been applied to a number of different art movements. The aesthetic system developed by Torres-Garcia, which translates in English, as "constructive universalism" was not a derivative version of European constructivist movements. In the original Spanish, Torres-Garcia referred to constructivism in adjectival form, and emphasized the term "universalism".
Torres-Garcia clarified what he meant by constructive as follows: "Structure means recognition that unity is at the foundation of everything. Outside this concept all is fragmentary, without a base…a constructed work (built according to certain rules) differs absolutely from any work not so constructed. Such a work has an invisible center which unifies all elements, retains them in a relationship that is precise, numerical and controllable."

For Torres-Garcia, constructivism and geometry were common denominators in the art of numerous cultures, from archaic to modern. Constructivism provided more than just a system for structuring a canvas; it held a philosophy that depended on its ritual application according to systems used in ancient cultures. He believed that while the conscious mind was occupied with measuring and harmonizing, the unconscious was freed to move into that space where true art is born.

Torres-Garcia began to articulate the principles of Constructive Universalism in the late 1920s while living and working in Paris. He defined this synthesis in 1929-1930 as a fusion of three avant-garde movements: cubism, neoplasticism, and surrealism.

Biographical Sketch
The journey that took Torres-Garcia from the Montevideo of his birth and childhood, to Paris in 1929 began in 1891, when his Spanish father moved his family home to Spain prior to his son’s seventeenth birthday. During his first years in Spain Torres-Garcia received his formal training in art at the Academy of Barcelona. Upon leaving the Academy at the beginning of the century, he embraced modernism, and began studying philosophy and the classics. He began collaborating with the architect Antoni Gaudi in 1903 and worked at stained glass, frescoes, paintings, teaching and writing. He married Manuela Piña de Rubies in 1909, and worked in Italy and Belgium (painting the Uruguayan Pavilion of Brussels International Exhibition, 1910). In 1907, determined to reject the Renaissance tradition of the sensuality of painting he began to flatten figures, mitigate color, and make angular, unornamented drawings. 1917 marked an important break in Torres-Garcia’s art and artistic practice: he began experimenting with Abstract Cubism, and tried to achieve as a part of his artistic practice a transcended state where he believed "true art was born." He became a defender of new artistic talent from the conservative attitudes of the Barcelona public and critics. Joan Miro began to visit him regularly and in 1918, the year of Miro’s first exhibition, Torres-Garcia wrote an article defending Miro’s work.

The next ten years were difficult financially for Torres-Garcia and his family, and they were years when Torres-Garcia stopped writing. The family traveled to New York in 1920 for an extended visit; Torres-Garcia exhibited at the Whitney Club and met Marcel Duchamp and Stuart Davis. In late 1921 the Torres-Garcias moved to Paris, where Torres-Garcia met Mondrian, Braque, Gris, Lipchitz, and Picasso. It was in Paris, in the late 1920s that his life’s work came together.

Development of Constructive Universalism
In 1929 Torres-Garcia began a collaboration with Theo Van Doesburg, and the Cercle et Carré group, which united artists interested in geometric abstract art or neo-plasticism (the theory of art developed by Mondrian, Van Doesburg and others to create a pure plastic art – comprised of the simplest elements, primary colors, primary values, and horizontals and verticals - that would convey mystical and spiritual ideas). Torres-Garcia shared with the neoplasticists the belief in a universal art not bound by nationalist traditions; in Van Doesburg’s words, painting was a means to, "approach the structure of the universe…We must see deeper, we must see abstractly, and first of all universally." His association with Mondrian and Van Doesburg brought him into contact with De Stilj ideas for integrating life and art as well as its use of geometry. Like Torres-Garcia, Van Doesburg felt that art and life were inseparable.

It’s difficult to say how much Torres-Garcia used the ideas of Van Doesburg and his group in his own painting. Prior to 1929 some of his work shows an orthogonal organization, but it was produced not by a grid of straight lines but by planes of color and by the distribution of figurative graphic signs. Torres-Garcia first began incorporating symbols into a grid in 1929, as a way to synthesize idea and form. He called this "the nexus between the vital (or living) and the abstract," and named the style, "Constructive Universalism." In 1930 in the first issue of Cercle et Carré Torres-Garcia published an article that defined constructive universal art, he said that his objective was not plastic purism, but a synthesis of cubism, surrealism and neo-plasticism that would integrate the unconscious into the constructive grid. The grid, symbols, and colors were an integral part of the process. In this article, he argued that artists who follow intuition and integrate figurative elements into a geometric structure can achieve the same synthesis created by primitive peoples: the incorporation of feelings of harmony with the universe that existed in the origins of primitive art and was expressed through it.

On April 30th, 1934, he returned, with his family, to his native Uruguay, after a forty-three year absence. To Torres-Garcia, Uruguay seemed like a blank canvas, at least where modern art was concerned, a place isolated and independent from the art centers of Europe, a country of relative peace, perhaps the ideal place to create a new art for the Americas. For the next fifteen years, until his death in 1949, he worked to promote his utopian art movement. He founded the Association of Constructive Art (Asociación de Arte Constructivo) or AAC and the Torres-Garcia Workshop (El Taller Torres-García) or TTG. He gave more than 1500 lectures, wrote more than 1 dozen books, numerous pamphlets and manifestos, staged exhibits, painted murals (often without pay), created a monument in stone (Monumento Cosmico), and painted hundreds of pictures.

The Painting
The SBMA’s painting, Composition, 1932 dates from near the end of Torres-Garcia’s time in Paris, and is an example of the Constructive Universal style. I’d like to begin our discussion of this work by quoting Torres-Garcia on the subject of his paintings:
"…The painting is abstract art, since it proceeds from the work of the spirit and concrete, because the plastic elements that form the work do not refer to anything else, as in the case of the imitative painting. Here the plastic elements: tones, colours and absolute forms, are being represented by themselves, without making references. The elements that we put on the canvas are absolute."

This painting shares with other works from this time in Torres-Garcia’s career (approximately 1930 to 1934), a painterly quality that makes his work from these years most popular with collectors and museums. By using small brush strokes to create connections and contrasts, Torres-Garcia incorporated the nuances of light and shadow into his abstract art. Throughout his career Torres-Garcia argued that it is possible to capture the visual relations of the natural world through a special tonality that the artist transposes in his work, and that this does not have anything to do with figuration. "Tone is not color. Tones or values are not tints or colors. Color is pure sensation: tone is form, weight and volume: architecture."

The painting’s grid-like structure is a modification the neoplasticists’ overall vertical/horizontal compositional system into a pinwheel arrangement of dynamic, staggered rectangles, derived from the golden section. The overall size of the grid, its individual components, as well as the selection of color and its placement within the grid is intended to create a harmonious whole. The structure is dynamic, made up of color, forms and contrasts, arriving at an active harmony that results from the myriad of transitions and contrasting tones. Composition, 1932 incorporates many of Torres-Garcia’s recurring symbols: the Greek temple, the classical vase, a human figure, a clock, a key, a star, a boat, an anchor and a fish. Whether the signs have individual significance is not clear; Torres-Garcia was of the opinion that real symbolism would not require interpretation or reading. "They tell me: this sign represents one thing or another; I want a sign that represents itself."

Despite Torres-García’s admonition to not dissect the signs, various interpretations for the symbols have been offered, and it is tempting to try deciphering them. In Composition, 1932 is the key, placed in the center of the canvas and painted white so that the viewer’s eye is almost immediately drawn to it, the key to everything? Does the inclusion of the lock make the canvas a door? Does it allude to a transition from one state to another? What is most important to understand is that taken together, the signs are intended to provide a symbolic link with the universal, in Torres-Garcia’s word, "everything," unrelated to an actual vision of nature, and that their interweaving into the structure of the artwork allows them to function in a purely visual way.

The artist sold Composition, 1932 to an important collector of European modernism, Bertie Urvater of Belgium, prior to his departure for Uruguay. The painting remained in that collection until the 1980s when it was sold to a United States collector interested in building a premier collection of modern Latin American art. CDS gallery obtained the painting when the collector divorced and it was purchased by the SBMA in 1997.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Laura DePaoli, October 18, 2000

Bibliography
Fonseca, Gonzalo. "Torres- García’s Symbols Within Squares." Art News 59, no. 1 (March 1960): 29-31.
Hunter, Sam and John Jacobus. Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture 3rd Ed. New York: Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1992.
Lucie-Smith, Edward. The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984.
Ramirez, Mari Carmen, ed. El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and Its Legacy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.
Stangos, Nikos ed. Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism to Postmodernism 3rd Ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994.


SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Joaquín Torres-García played an instrumental role in formulating and promoting a new geometric abstract art in Latin America. Synthesizing ancient and modern art, the artist developed a complex visual language based on what he believed were universal signs—forming the basis of his theory of Constructive Universalism. He perceived these symbols as the “materializations of the universal spirit,” and as a way of returning to our common human origins.

Torres-García returned to his native Montevideo in 1934, more than forty years after embarking on a trans-Atlantic journey that stretched from Barcelona to Paris and New York. Composición belongs to the artist’s late Paris period and features a five- pointed star, a fish, a Grecian temple, a clock, Inca masonry, and an anchor, among other simplified images. The reclamation and use of pre-Columbian symbols placed the cultural contributions of these civilizations on par with those of Europe’s classical antiquity, causing them to no longer be seen as regional,personal, or primitive, but universal.

- Ridley-Tree Gallery, 2016

Joaquín Torres-García played an instrumental role in formulating and promoting in Latin America a new geometric abstract art known as Constructivism. Reared in Montevideo and educated in Barcelona, Torres-García lived and worked in New York before moving to Paris in the late 1920s.

Composition belongs to the artist’s Paris period and is a definitive example of his theories and style. Synthesizing modern ideas of international Constructivism with antique concepts of Greek Classicism, the work plays with the notion of harmonious proportion, demonstrated by the structure of the grid as well as by the selection and placement of color. At the same time, the painting features the artist’s most important and recurring motifs derived from a wide range of sources, his primary inspiration being pre-Columbian art.

Synthesizing ancient and modern art, Torres-García developed a complex visual language based on what he believed were universal signs. Presented within a grid, objects are treated as bold, schematic symbols that correspond to autobiographical, mathematical, spiritual, or metaphysical concepts. Using iconic imagery, Torres-García aimed to create a new symbolism that could be understood by viewers through the world, accounting for his distinction as the progenitor of “Universal Constructivism”.

- SBMA Wall Text, 2000