The Atchugarry Art Museum celebrates the immense Uruguayan master

Joaquín Torres-García, in Punta del Este. The modernist returns to his shore

A century and a half after his birth, the Atchugarry Art Museum celebrates the immense Uruguayan master.
It is the most appreciated and global, with an exhibition that reinterprets it.

Uruguayans say that the art scene in Punta del Este can be divided into AM and PM: before MACA and post MACA. The Atchugarry Museum of Contemporary Art, opened two years ago by the Uruguayan sculptor on land where he has his own workshop, became an instant classic. The imposing building, which faces the sunset and bears the signature of another famous Uruguayan, Carlos Ott, has housed quality samples since its inauguration. This year it doubles the bet and dedicates its main room to the most relevant painter loved by Uruguayans: Joaquín Torres-García.

Joaquin Torres García in Punta del Este. The artist with his geometric “toys”. Joaquin Torres García in Punta del Este. The artist with his geometric “toys.”
The inauguration was a two-step social event, which began with a fundraising gala. This year the cover cost $1,500. Fiona White, in charge of the event, says that the food “exploded”: 460 people enjoyed a sophisticated menu by Argentine chef Mauro Colagreco.

And January 5 arrived, when it was officially inaugurated and no one was missing: there was the vice president of Uruguay, its minister of Education and Culture, the director of the Torres-García Museum (a private museum that houses the artist's archive), the director from the National Museum of Visual Arts, various collectors and gallery owners who lent work, various figures from the world of culture and, of course, Pablo Atchugarry and the two curators, the Argentine Cecilia Rabossi and Aimé Iglesias Lukin.
Joaquín Torres-García: The discovery of himself is the name of the exhibition and that of a book he authored. This is the first act of a series of tributes, on the 150th anniversary of his birth. What we see is the result of laborious research work in his archive, which is resolved in a personal odyssey: through documents, paintings, watercolors, collages, objects and toys, we travel with him and his way of inhabiting the various cities in which he lives. who lived, and we immerse ourselves in the mental processes that led to a pictorial system that he called “constructive universalism.”

Joaquín Torres-García (Montevideo, 1874-1949) was the son of a Catalan importer and wholesaler married to a Uruguayan woman. In 1891 the family moved to the coastal city of Mataró, where he began his academic training. A year later he moved to Barcelona and participated in the gatherings attended by artists of the stature of the architect Antoni Gaudí and Joan Miró, who would be fundamental for his training.

Thus began a path that led him to live in Barcelona until 1919, in New York until 22, in Paris between 26 and 32, and in Madrid for a year, to return to Montevideo permanently in 1934, where he died in 1949.

This course can be followed in detail thanks to the extensive documentation exhibited. “In this exhibition there are no showcases. It is a way of linking inks, watercolors and documents to paintings,” says Cecilia Rabossi. And she succeeds in spades. Sketchbooks or artist notebooks are especially interesting. There are freehand drawings resolved with ink and watercolor (the Moulin Rouge, the Mediterranean coast, the extraordinary views of New York), sketches that, hung next to the paintings, reveal a plot of landscapes resolved according to convention and that gradually They lose perspective. From there, first the color planes emerge and then the grids that will define his work.

Torres-García draws cities. Cities that he inhabits and that inhabit him; To understand the character, it is essential to look carefully at the photograph of the costume that the artist designed and wore at the Society of Independent Artists party in 1921, a suit painted with the spaces and the name of New York. The artist dresses in the city; it is the city.
The first decades of the 20th century are running and cities are modernizing; The bustle of the metropolis does not hide the difficulties that many of its inhabitants go through, and the personal and social challenges that besiege them. There is in Torres-García a sensitivity to these problems and a generosity that is evident in his pedagogical concerns.
In another of the montage's successes, the script gives us his words about the way children play and their relationship with toys; Many of the transformable toys that he created and intended to produce at scale are exhibited there. Also the theoretical texts and conferences that denote an enormous need to communicate and share with other artists.

The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful catalog whose texts shed light on his creative process: the way in which the orthogonal grid appears as early as 1916, as the cover of a book; the moment when that grid becomes a dialectical system of orthogonal plots and archetypal figurative signs; and how “that symbolic world became a constitutive part of the national identity,” in the words of Leonardo Noguez, artistic director of MACA.
Like Odysseus, Torres-García returns to his humble Ithaca, Montevideo, after having seen it all. There he inverts the map of the continent. “His political proposal not only suggests thinking that our north – our guide – is the South, but… an idea of the South constructed as a group and structurally organized by its own symbols,” say the curators. To which Aimé Iglesias Lukin adds: “Torres-García makes the local the universal.” He paints your village and you will paint the world.