Joaquín Torres-García

The Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García was a central figure in early twentieth-century transatlantic modernism. He is widely known today as a pioneer of geometric abstraction and as the inventor of Universal Constructivism a style that integrates geometric shapes and figurative pictograms legible across the visual cultures of different civilizations. But he was also a prolific art theorist and pedagogue who bridged avant-garde circles in Europe and the Americas, establishing the Southern Cone— a geographic area comprising Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay—as a hotbed of abstract art on a global scale.

Born in Montevideo, Torres-García emigrated with his family to Catalonia, Spain, in 1891. He completed his artistic training in Barcelona, frequenting the Els Quatre Gatscafé alongside artists like Pablo Picasso and Julio González, and embarking on monumental decorative projects for religious institutions, such as Antoni Gaudís Church of the Sagrada Familia. Between 1907 and 1914 he worked as an art teacher at the progressive Mont d’Or elementary school, studying modern pedagogical theories and applying the Montessori method in his classes. This experience later inspired him to design modular wooden toys that he believed would encourage spontaneous acts of creativity from an early age. These whimsical objects reflected his ambition to develop a fresh artistic vocabulary out of a repertoire of simple forms—one that he thought would benefit the work of Latin American artists who emulated artistic trends imported from Europe, such as Impressionism and Art Nouveau. The only issue of the magazine Vida Americana, which he co-edited with the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and his Uruguayan compatriot Rafaél Barradas, exhorted artists from the region to invent new visual idioms and embrace distinctively local subjects.

In 1920, hoping to distribute his toys on a mass scale, Torres-García moved to New York with his wife Manolita and their children. Therehe witnessed for the first time pre-Hispanic artifacts, on display at the Museum of Natural History—an event that triggered his life-long fascination with Indigenous artistic traditions. He also found his way into the city’s modern art scene. Through the painter and critic Walter Pach, he became acquainted with the Society of Independent Artists, meeting Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Stella as well as painter and art patron Katherine Dreier. In March 1921 he attended the Society’s yearly costume ball in a pair of overalls painted with local landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth Building, which earned him a special mention in The New York Times. Although his New York supporters included collectors such as Gertrud Vanderbilt Whitney and the founding director of the Whitney Museum, Juliana Force, his commercial aspirations did not come to fruition. After two years in the United States, the Torres-Garcías returned to Europe, moving between various central Italian cities and the village of Villefranche-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, before settling in Paris in 1926.

In the City of Lights, the artist deepened his understanding of non-Western art through visits to the city’s ethnographic collections. At the same time, he became a leading voice in artistic debates about the definition and function of abstract art, aligning himself with peers who valued the clarity and order of geometric forms. Among these were the artists Jean Hélion, with whom Torres-García briefly shared a studio; Jean (Hans) Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, whose home he occasionally frequented; Otto and Adja van Rees, who hosted Torres-García and his family in Switzerland; and Theo van Doesburg, with whom he established an enthusiastic correspondence. The Belgian painter Michel Seuphor, too, became an essential collaborator for Torres-García, especially as they embarked on a project that cemented their standing in the international avant-garde community. In 1929, they cofounded Cercle et Carré, an artist group and eponymous publication that promoted carefully balanced abstract compositions as alternatives to the figurative scenes and spontaneous impulses then largely associated with Surrealism. This mission coalesced the following year in an exhibition at Galerie 23, in Paris, of works by an international array of over eighty artists. Although Cercle et Carré soon came to an end dueto internal disagreements, its driving principles lived on in Torres-García’s subsequent propagation of geometric abstraction in Latin America.

Financial pressures prompted Torres-García and his family to leave Paris and relocate to the artist’s native Montevideo, which they reached in 1934 after a sojourn in Madrid. Intellectuals such as the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro celebrated his return and heralded him as a spokesperson for the latest developments in avant-garde art, prompting him to deliver hundreds of lectures at local institutions and publish articles on modern art and architecture that quickly circulated to neighboring metropolitan centers such as Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo. As he disseminated the artistic theories he had developed in Europe and the United States, Torres-García found numerous acolytes among a generation of younger Latin American artists and critics. In 1935, he explicitly extended the legacy of Cercle et Carré to the vibrant artistic community of Montevideo by founding the Asociación de Arte Constructivo and the accompanying periodical Círculo y Cuadrado.

He also maintained, however, his early aspiration to create an artistic movement that would foreground visual forms indigenous to Latin America. To this end, in 1943 he established the Taller Torres-García (also known as La Escuela del Sur), a workshop that trained painters, sculptors, and designers to make works that asserted the cultural autonomy of South America, independent from European and North American influences. The artist illustrated this idea in the contemporaneous drawing América Invertida (Inverted America; 1943; Fundación Torres García, Montevideo), areversed map of the region with south at its top that stresses the leading role he envisioned for local artists on the global modern art scene. By the time Torres-García passed away in 1949, his students had achieved this goal: Julio Alpuy, Julio Fonseca, and Francisco Matto—as well as admirers including Carmelo Arden Quinn, Gyula Kosice, Tomás Maldonado, Lidy Prati, and Rod Rothfuss—not only expanded his ideas on geometric abstraction in new directions but also cemented the Southern Cone as a laboratory for avant-garde innovation that propelled the rise of abstract art around the world.