Already in the late 1890s, he was frequenting the café Els Quatre Gats, where he would become acquainted with Catalan Noucentisme, a local movement that called for a return to classicism and saw in the Greek-Roman Mediterranean inheritance a means of national assertion in the aesthetic, intellectual and political realms. Between 1904 and 1905, he worked with Antoni Gaudí on the decoration of Palma Cathedral, in Majorca, and Sagrada Família, in Barcelona. In 1910, he visited Paris for the first time, where he saw the murals by Puvis de Chavannes, and from where he left to decorate the Uruguay Pavilion in the Brussels World’s Fair.

In 1913 his works began to change slightly, becoming closer to modernism. In the same year, he would go to Rome and Florence to study fresco painting after getting a commission to paint the Salan de San Jorge in the Palacio de la Generalitat de Cataluña. This work, which he started to paint in the Hellenic tradition, would progressively abandon rural themes and plunge into everyday life: themes that caused an exasperated reaction marked by political disputes. In 1917, this controversy resulted in the destruction of the frescos, which were covered by an academic historical painting. Still in 1913, he published his first book, Notes sobre Art [Notes about Art], and a year later he built his first wooden toys.

His work with wooden toys was fundamental to the change in the way in which he tackled his painting from the late 1910s onwards. Marked significantly by the publication of the book El Descubrimento de Si Mismo [The Discovery of Oneself], Torres-García questioned the idea of mimesis, deciding that painting must be sufficient unto itself. In this sense, as already mentioned, the experience with toys helped him develop compositions with complex structures based on elementary geometric forms used to organise the pictorial plane. He moved to New York in 1920, but came back to Europe in 1924, where he would live near Florence. The following year he settled in Villefranche sur Mer, leaving to go to Paris in 1926. In the French capital, Torres-García took part in the Constructivism International and, in 1929, was the co-founder of the group Cercle et Carré with Michel Seuphor, with whom he edited the three issues of a magazine with the same name in March and June of 1930. In the same year, they also organized the exhibition Cercle et Carré at Gallerie 23, with works by Piet Mondrian, Hans Arp, Luigi Russolo among others. Before moving to Montevideo in 1934, he got to know Vieira da Silva, with whom he would exchange letters.

In Uruguay, Torres-García founded the Asociación de Arte Construtivo [Association of Constructivist Art] in 1935, through which he attempted to influence the arts in Uruguay. Capitalising on his Parisian editorial experience, he published ten issues of the magazine Círculo y Cuadrado between 1936 and 1943, and founded in 1941 the Taller Torres-García. In 1944, emphasizing that “the artist works with shapes and not things, because what he does is pictorial ordering and not the reproduction of natural appearances,” he published the book Universalismo Constructivo, where he elaborates a synthesis between the legacy of Catalan Noucentismo and constructivism, and defends the idea that the assertion of the South American continent must happen through a symbiosis between modernity and local values, and not through a tendency towards isolation. He was thus defending a practice that looks back at classic European and South American periods, condensing them by using signs that resolve the pictorial transition from nature to abstraction, organized in an orthogonal structure that moulds the picture plane, where the golden rule dominates.

André Silveira

May 2013