Torres García: the world is the limit

Exhibitions and events in Uruguay celebrate the 150th anniversary of the life and work of Joaquín Torres García, an artist vital to Latin American culture, both scholarly and popular.
150 years after the birth of Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949), an artist who renewed and globalized Latin American art, tributes were not long in coming. In his birthplace, Uruguay, the initiation ceremony took place at the beginning of the year at the Atchugarry Museum of Contemporary Art (MACA) with El descubrimiento de sí mismo (The discovery of oneself), an exhibition that bears the same title as one of the author's first books (1917). The Argentine curators Aimé Iglesias Lukin and Cecilia Rabossi conducted archival research to gather traces of the master. Through documents, paintings, watercolors, collages, objects and wooden toys they revealed the mental processes that led to the pictorial system known as “constructive universalism,” an artistic and philosophical concept developed by Torres-García, in which she based an important part of her legacy, based on the extraordinary originality of her attitude and her painting.

In April, at the Blanes Museum in Montevideo and curated by María Eugenia Méndez and Cristina Bausero, the exhibition Ellas. Mujeres de la Escuela del Sur was held, which sought to give visibility and highlight the pictorial contribution of 42 female artists (of the 115 participants who are estimated to have passed through the Escuela del Sur, founded in 1935), such as Raquel Orzuj, María Esther Mendy, Amalia Nieto and María Cantú.

A few weeks before the opening of the exhibition Clásico. Moderno. Universal at the Torres-García Museum (where the new edition of the book Universalismo constructivo (1944) was presented), the National Museum of Visual Arts in Montevideo celebrated the anniversary with the exhibition El universo como reto (The Universe as a Challenge), which includes not only his intense plastic work, but also his teaching facet, since all the works that make up the Torres-García art gallery at the MNAV are displayed there, plus a selection of pieces by the students of his Workshop. The exhibition “exudes deep philosophical concerns with neoplatonic and Pythagorean components. We mean rules and sensitive material that introduces the random: the poster, the city, the movement. In short, a universalist conception of the human being,” according to the curatorial text by its managers Enrique Aguerre, María Eugenia Grau and Fernando Loustaunau.
Finally, this journey of celebrations is joined by the premiere of the documentary feature film Pax in Lucem, by the filmmaker Emiliano Mazza de Luca (1970) and the director from the Torres-García Museum in Uruguay, the great-grandson of the artist, Alejandro Díaz Lageard (1969). The plot of the film is this: the discovery of three large fragments of the mural Pax in Lucem, an iconic work by the artist being honoured, which was believed to be lost in the fire at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (1978) together with 73 pieces that made up the core of the painter's work, gathered there for a retrospective, triggers a journey into the behind-the-scenes of his life and family, and has as its backdrop the restoration of the fragments burned by the fire. Synthesis that endures

Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994), before publishing his first novel, El pozo, before becoming the writer that most Spanish-speaking readers recognize today, had expressed his admiration for the figure of Torres-García: the story “Avenida de Mayo-Diagonal-Avenida de Mayo” (1933) shows only a patina of that influence. Onetti intercepted the painter to interview him a few years after his return to Uruguay, in 1934. As a result of that conversation, in 1939 an unmissable report was published in the pages of the Semanario Marcha, which seems to have laid the foundations of a friendship: Conversando de pintura con Joaquín Torres-García. The darts that Onetti threw at Torres, displaying his “habitual pessimism,” show signs of a respectful and amusing complicity. And far from avoiding them, between anecdotes and critical positions regarding the state of affairs in the provincial artistic environment of the River Plate region and, in particular, regarding his presence in Uruguay, the painter made clear a crucial idea that helped us a lot to interpret him: “The values that form constructive art are not the common, current values that evolve with the customs and ways of life of the people. They are the eternal values, those inseparable from the man of all times. It has nothing to do with immediate things, those that make people run here and in the antipodes […] if we are individuals, we are also and above all men in a universal, cosmic sense. And this is the best, the most authentic and profound thing that there is in us.”

Read more