Joaquín Torres-García

(Montevideo, 1874 – 1949)

Author's artworks

19th-20th Century Uruguayan

Born in 1874 in Montevideo. In 1891, his father, a Catalan trader based in Uruguay, decided to go back to his country of birth, where he settled in the town of Mataró together with his wife and children. There, the young Joaquín attended evening classes in drawing at the School of Arts and Crafts given by Josep Vinardell (1851-1918). One year later the family moved to Barcelona, where the painter continued his training at the Academy of Fine Arts, coinciding there with notable members of
, the Catalan cultural movement, including Isidre Nonell (1872-1911) and Joaquim Mir (1873-1940). Torres-García was disappointed with the institution’s academicism, forcing him to weigh up alternative approaches to learning. As a result, he enrolled at Academia Baixas. This experience also disillusioned him, leading him to try at Círculo Artístico de Sant Lluc, which he entered in 1894. There he found access to French magazines which opened a window for him onto the European avant-gardes. To earn a living, he made illustrations for various journals and other publications, such as Barcelona Cómica and El Gato Negro.

His earlier symbolist pieces, created towards the end of the nineteenth century, evince his interest in the classical world and the mark left by his discovery of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), whose mural works he would eventually see in person on a trip to Paris in 1910.

In 1912 he began to become familiar with
, introduced to Barcelona by the gallerist Josep Dalmau. Surprised by the innovative language, he abandoned
and started to develop a cubist aesthetics mixed with futurist formulations. This was the moment when Torres-García abandoned tradition and claimed that art should be a reflection of the hustle and
of the contemporary metropolis.

In 1920 the artist took up temporary residence in New York, initially with the intention of sounding out the business potential for the wooden toys he was making. This circumstance would prove essential for his trajectory and opened a new chapter in his career. Torres-García began to render the bustling atmosphere of the big city and to apply a certain compartmentalisation to his paintings and drawings through the use of vertical and horizontal lines, a feature that would become one of his signature traits. In the Big Apple he also frequented other artists, exhibited in galleries, and met important collectors. However, his enthusiasm for New York only lasted until 1922 when, after growing disappointed with the consumerist culture and overwhelmed by his financial situation, he decided to return to Europe.

In the following years, he divided his time between Fiesole, Livorno and Villefranche-sur-Mer. In 1926 the artist travelled for the last time to Barcelona. After that visit he moved to Paris, where he promoted the foundation of
and started in a new phase in the consolidation of his style. Synthesising the teachings of
and
, Torres-García undertook the creation of oil paintings and sculptures that struck up a dialogue between abstraction and figuration, in which he fits a number of pictograms allusive to time, architecture, and the human being in a space constructed using vertical and horizontal lines.

During a short stay in Madrid, he founded
. Shortly after that, in 1934, he moved to Montevideo for good, where he promoted the creation of
. At that moment, he expanded his iconography and incorporated symbols from Pre-Columbian civilisations into his paintings. Little by little, his practice shifted towards figurative naturalism, reminiscent of his earliest paintings, but always rendered with utmost purity and simplification. Throughout his life, Torres-García was also active on a theoretical front, penning among other works an autobiography narrated in the third person called Historia de mi vida, which was published in 1939. Joaquín Torres-García died in 1949 in Montevideo.

His works have been seen in acclaimed retrospective exhibitions, like the show held in 1933 at Museo de Arte Moderno de Madrid, his participation at the 5th Sao Paulo Biennial in 1959, or most recently, the exhibition organised by Fundación Telefónica in 2016.