Key artist for regional modern art

150 years after the birth of Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949).
The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes presents a broad overview of the work and thought of the Uruguayan master, which includes paintings, drawings, illustrations, toys, engravings and books.
The exhibition Joaquín Torres García. Essay and conviction covers the experiments that led the artist's creative process until it was affirmed in its constructive and universal conception. This direction, which he imprinted on his mature work, was central to Latin American modern art, although readings in a purely constructive key tend to blur the audacity and vocation to try out new approaches that Torres García maintained even when everyone called him "the Old Man." Precisely, Manuel Aguiar, one of his disciples, observed that "his creative dynamic was often nourished by the internal battle between his contradictions: his aspiration or desire for timeless order, and his expressiveness that at times burst forth without consulting him, in a healthy and generous immediacy."

The curatorial script focuses its attention on a set of drawings, illustrations, engravings, murals, toys and paintings from different periods, organized into three cores that testify to his tendency to try out new plastic solutions and, immediately, to justify the motivations of these experiences. Therefore, in the dialectic of essay and conviction, the texts that support this conception are an essential part of his painting. In this sense, the presentation of the works is completed with the publications (books, magazines, articles, pamphlets and manifestos) through which he theorized, exchanged and disseminated his ideas.

Reserved for his works on paper, the first core allows us to appreciate the subtleties of early drawings made with charcoal, graphite or ink, in small-format works or sketches, as well as the experiences applied to illustration, engraving and his calligraphic and drawing books, which are true artist's books. The other two sections are devoted to paintings: one covers the treatment of the human figure - which also includes toys - and the urban landscape in the American and European period, leading to the works on the constructive structure, and the other presents the concept of constructed painting and constructive art, which he taught his disciples in the Montevideo period and which he captured not only in easel painting, but also in the murals made in the Martirené Pavilion of the Saint Bois Hospital in the Uruguayan capital.
On the other hand, this exhibition brings together works existing in Argentine public and private collections, especially in the collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts, and highlights the theoretical and plastic production of artists, thinkers and editors who, from this side of the River Plate, highlighted the importance of Torres García for Latin American art. For this reason, while going through the works, the exhibition traces the impact of his thought on Argentine culture.

The work of some critics reflects this aspect, including the monographs by Roberto J. Payró and Guillermo de Torre, the reviews by Romualdo Brughetti, Jorge Romero Brest and Julio E. Payró, the latter's curatorship of the exhibition held in 1942 at the Müller gallery in Buenos Aires, the cataloging of his engravings undertaken by Emilio Ellena and the studies by Mario Gradowczyk. The influence of his ideas on modern Argentine art impacted aesthetic debates, the emergence of the avant-garde of concrete art, and, in particular, some artists, such as Carmelo Arden Quin, Juan Grela, Leónidas Gambartes, Adolfo Nigro, Alberto Delmonte, Alejandro Puente or César Paternosto, among many others, who collected the legacy of his ideas.

The research that guides the curatorship of Joaquín Torres García. Essay and conviction is complemented by two specific studies. In "The Wisdom Books of Joaquín Torres García," Gonzalo Aguilar examines - in the context of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century - the artist's calligraphic books, handcrafted works in which he combined his handwritten writing with graphic signs.

In the text "Torres García, 1944: Constructive Universalism and the editorial networks of exiles in Buenos Aires," Silvia Dolinko analyzes the links between the Uruguayan artist and the Spanish exiles in Argentina who published magazines in which his works and ideas circulated, such as Correo Literario, Saber Vivir or Cabalgata.
To pay tribute to the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Uruguayan master, Joaquín Torres García. Essay and conviction highlights the human dimension of someone who, at every crossroads, achieved the temperance and resilience necessary to face challenges without fear of change. Likewise, the exhibition celebrates the artist who, with the gesture of inverting the map, symbolized the repositioning of all of Latin America with respect to the centers of power and opened the way to project our own utopias.

* Curator of the exhibition. Introductory text from the catalogue book specially edited by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The exhibition Joaquín Torres Garcia. Essay and conviction, continues at the MNBA, Libertador 1425, until March 16, 2025; Tuesday to Friday, from 11:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
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