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Lot Essay
“I come to achieve something concrete, something that ought to come about…something that is already fermenting,” Torres-García declared upon his return to Uruguay in 1934, more than forty years after he embarked on a transatlantic journey that led him to Barcelona, Paris, and New York. “Given our tradition, our…public, our latent virtues, the miracle would not lie in our producing something great, but in our failing to do so” (quoted in C. Buzio de Torres, “The School of the South: The Asociación de Arte Constructivo, 1934-1942,” in El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and its Legacy, exh. cat., The Archer M. Huntington Gallery, Austin, 1992, p. 7). A celebrated teacher, Torres-García catalyzed the development of modern art throughout Latin America, lecturing widely and forming the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (1935-39) and, in 1943, El Taller Torres-García. Proclaiming that “our North” is the South, he advocated a hemispheric approach to modern American art grounded in the shared, indigenous legacy of abstraction. The paintings from this final, Montevidean period—Constructivo en cinco colores signal among them—mark the culmination of Torres-García’s career and exemplify his theory and practice of Constructive Universalism, which combined the “reason” of geometry with the spiritual “intuition” of man and nature.
The principles of Constructive Universalism, Torres-García’s syncretic theory of abstraction, took root during a critical interval spent in Paris between 1926 and 1932. Working alongside an international avant-garde, including Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, he defined his mature practice around the ideal schema of the Neo-Plastic grid, whose geometric austerity (primary colors and straight lines) epitomized the totality of the universe and its highest, utopian order. His assimilation of schematic (“universal”) symbols within the grid, beginning in 1929, marked a watershed moment: recovered from pre-Columbian art, the pictographs became archetypal signs, transformed by geometry into a new paradigm for (Latin) American abstraction. By the time of his arrival in Montevideo, Torres-García aimed “to situate Constructive Art where it belongs, in the history of the Art of the Americas,” and the AAC sought to articulate the “close theoretical kinship” between Constructivist and pre-Columbian art. “We base ourselves on the universal golden rule that governs both our philosophy and our art; and since this is also found in the ancient cultures of the Americas, it is, one might say, the link that unites us across the centuries” (“Subscription Letter of the Asociación de Arte Constructivo,” in El Taller Torres-García, op. cit., p. 52).
Torres-García convened the first meeting of the Taller in 1943, a particularly prolific and generative year, and began to consolidate his teaching and practice around an expansive understanding of abstraction. “We say that painting is abstract and concrete at the same time, and without that having anything to do with representation,” he asserted. “We say that it is abstract, because instead of imitating reality, it proceeds with absolute plastic elements” (in C. Buzio de Torres, “The School of the South: El Taller Torres-García, 1943-1962,” in El Taller Torres-García, op. cit., p. 115). Constructivo en cinco colores evinces these reciprocal interests in abstraction and plastic order, integrating Torres-García’s own transatlantic narrative within a compacted, modular space. Like Constructivo en cinco colores and Composición con sol, both from the same year, the present work reconciles many of Torres-García’s most recurrent forms within the ideal schema of the Constructivist grid. Partitions of primary colors, rendered with visible brushstrokes, contain universal symbols—home, train, boat, mask, clock—as well as the Uruguayan flag. A microcosm of an integral American vision, the painting embodies Torres-García’s overarching cosmic sensibility and the precepts of Constructive Universalism.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
The principles of Constructive Universalism, Torres-García’s syncretic theory of abstraction, took root during a critical interval spent in Paris between 1926 and 1932. Working alongside an international avant-garde, including Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, he defined his mature practice around the ideal schema of the Neo-Plastic grid, whose geometric austerity (primary colors and straight lines) epitomized the totality of the universe and its highest, utopian order. His assimilation of schematic (“universal”) symbols within the grid, beginning in 1929, marked a watershed moment: recovered from pre-Columbian art, the pictographs became archetypal signs, transformed by geometry into a new paradigm for (Latin) American abstraction. By the time of his arrival in Montevideo, Torres-García aimed “to situate Constructive Art where it belongs, in the history of the Art of the Americas,” and the AAC sought to articulate the “close theoretical kinship” between Constructivist and pre-Columbian art. “We base ourselves on the universal golden rule that governs both our philosophy and our art; and since this is also found in the ancient cultures of the Americas, it is, one might say, the link that unites us across the centuries” (“Subscription Letter of the Asociación de Arte Constructivo,” in El Taller Torres-García, op. cit., p. 52).
Torres-García convened the first meeting of the Taller in 1943, a particularly prolific and generative year, and began to consolidate his teaching and practice around an expansive understanding of abstraction. “We say that painting is abstract and concrete at the same time, and without that having anything to do with representation,” he asserted. “We say that it is abstract, because instead of imitating reality, it proceeds with absolute plastic elements” (in C. Buzio de Torres, “The School of the South: El Taller Torres-García, 1943-1962,” in El Taller Torres-García, op. cit., p. 115). Constructivo en cinco colores evinces these reciprocal interests in abstraction and plastic order, integrating Torres-García’s own transatlantic narrative within a compacted, modular space. Like Constructivo en cinco colores and Composición con sol, both from the same year, the present work reconciles many of Torres-García’s most recurrent forms within the ideal schema of the Constructivist grid. Partitions of primary colors, rendered with visible brushstrokes, contain universal symbols—home, train, boat, mask, clock—as well as the Uruguayan flag. A microcosm of an integral American vision, the painting embodies Torres-García’s overarching cosmic sensibility and the precepts of Constructive Universalism.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park