Lot Essay
When Joaquín Torres-García returned to Montevideo, the city of his birth, in 1934 after living in Europe for forty-three years, his classic abstract style was already established. In Paris in the late 1920s, he had synthesized elements of Cubism and Neo-Plasticism with his own concerns for content expressed through compartmentalized, pictographic symbols to create "Construcive Universalism," intended to be both modernist and accessible. Back in South America, Torres-García renewed and strengthened his interest in Pre-Columbian, especially Andean, cultures as he attempted with an intensity of activity to forge a distinctly American modernism, rooted in indigenous form and archetype. In 1935 he began a series of entirely abstract canvases whose rectangular divisions are shaded to look like low relief, strongly recalling the ashlar masonry at Inca sites such as Cuzco or Machu Pichu. The rectilinear or tubular abstract forms of this relieflike style were succeeded within the next few years by angular, curved, and spiral configurations, and by representational imagery executed in the same technique, such as that in Man and Dog, 1937 (Private Collection)
The composition of Ritmos curvos y oblicuos en blanco y negro occupies the enigmatic territory between abstraction, representation, and symbolic structures. The irregular forms stacked up in horizontal registers evoke not only Inca stone walls but also Pre-Columbian pottery profiles, biomorphic fragments, and even machined volumes. This latter resemblance-with its echoes of Léger circa 1912-1914 or Malevich's figurative style of about the same time-serves to reassociate Torres-García's painting with its European antecedents, while, at the same time, marked dissimilarities reiterate the uniqueness and success of Torres-García's achievement in fashioning an American modernism, even in a wholly abstract, non-pictographic format.
The monochrome grisaille of Ritmos curvos y oblicuos en blanco y negro was long a favorite with the artist, but its use in the middle and late 1930s emphasizes his paintings' connections to relief and stonework, including his own. It was at this time that Torres-García designed a number of public sculptures, which influenced, and were in turn influenced by, his paintings. These designs culminated in the Monumento cósmico in the Parque Rodo in Montevideo, a large granite wall with incised pictographs, completed in 1938, the same year this painting was signed.
The yin-yang symbol in the lower right of the painting appears rarely in Torres-García's art. His interest in Asian cultures was not pronounced, but the sign would have appealed to him as a graphic symbol of the reconciliation of cosmic dualities. The sign does appear in a drawing dated 1930 and entitled Sens caché, which enumerates a host of emblems -sun, moon, stars, planets, compasses, crosses, Egyptian ankh, musical notations, vase, fish, etc.- as if compiling a pictographic alphabet [Reproduced in Joaquín Torres-García, 1874-1949: Chronology and Catalogue of the Family Collection. (Austin: The University of Texas at Austin Art Museum, Archer M. Huntington Galleries, 1974), p. 93] The yin-yang symbol also appears in the upper right of the Monumento cósmico, carved on the same block as the symbol for the earth.
Joseph R. Wolin
Associate Curator, Americas Society
New York, Oct. 1997
This painting will be listed under N. P1938.21 in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist being prepared by Cecilia de Torres
The composition of Ritmos curvos y oblicuos en blanco y negro occupies the enigmatic territory between abstraction, representation, and symbolic structures. The irregular forms stacked up in horizontal registers evoke not only Inca stone walls but also Pre-Columbian pottery profiles, biomorphic fragments, and even machined volumes. This latter resemblance-with its echoes of Léger circa 1912-1914 or Malevich's figurative style of about the same time-serves to reassociate Torres-García's painting with its European antecedents, while, at the same time, marked dissimilarities reiterate the uniqueness and success of Torres-García's achievement in fashioning an American modernism, even in a wholly abstract, non-pictographic format.
The monochrome grisaille of Ritmos curvos y oblicuos en blanco y negro was long a favorite with the artist, but its use in the middle and late 1930s emphasizes his paintings' connections to relief and stonework, including his own. It was at this time that Torres-García designed a number of public sculptures, which influenced, and were in turn influenced by, his paintings. These designs culminated in the Monumento cósmico in the Parque Rodo in Montevideo, a large granite wall with incised pictographs, completed in 1938, the same year this painting was signed.
The yin-yang symbol in the lower right of the painting appears rarely in Torres-García's art. His interest in Asian cultures was not pronounced, but the sign would have appealed to him as a graphic symbol of the reconciliation of cosmic dualities. The sign does appear in a drawing dated 1930 and entitled Sens caché, which enumerates a host of emblems -sun, moon, stars, planets, compasses, crosses, Egyptian ankh, musical notations, vase, fish, etc.- as if compiling a pictographic alphabet [Reproduced in Joaquín Torres-García, 1874-1949: Chronology and Catalogue of the Family Collection. (Austin: The University of Texas at Austin Art Museum, Archer M. Huntington Galleries, 1974), p. 93] The yin-yang symbol also appears in the upper right of the Monumento cósmico, carved on the same block as the symbol for the earth.
Joseph R. Wolin
Associate Curator, Americas Society
New York, Oct. 1997
This painting will be listed under N. P1938.21 in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist being prepared by Cecilia de Torres