The Two Torres Garcias

If you know the Uruguayan Joaquin Torres Garcia’s best-known paintings—there’s a specimen one above—the exhibition of his sketches at the Museum of Visual Arts will come as surprise. His paintings are mythic, moody, sometimes playful, greatly influenced by the pre-Columbian art of Latin American, and often better than the knock-offs done of them in the 1940s by the American artists—Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and, yes, Jackson Pollock—who just a bit later launched the New York School of Abstract Expressionism.

But those paintings were just one side of Torres Garcia—the emotional side, which was in touch, he felt, with the universal unconsciousness that the psychologist Carl Jung said we all carry at the bottom of our being. (The title of the 1943 painting above is “Arte universal”—“Universal Art.”) When painting, Torres Garcia tried not to think but rather to respond to the moment, to what he was painting, and to whatever bubbled up into his awareness.

In total contrast is the Torres Garcia of this exhibit. He is all mind: a philosopher of art and aesthetics. (The same person being a first-rate painter and philosopher explains why Uruguayans consider Torres Garcia a Renaissance man.) He believes he has found the norms and proportions that underlie all visual beauty. The exhibit shows the sketches he did for his 1011-plus page book, Universalismo Constructivo (“constructive universalism,” 1944), that explains his philosophy. Apart from the philosophy, the sketches mean nothing and have little interest, unless you are at least as old as I am (65) and nostalgic for the didactic graphics of the 1920s and 1930s (think Bauhaus, Corbusier, and Nazi, British, and WPA signage).

The exhibit shows us, under glass, several open copies of Universalismo Constructivo, and we see how nicely the sketches work on the page. We also see the book’s touching last sketch, which is used as the exhibit’s logo. This sketch—stick cartoon, really—shows Torres Garcia at his Montevideo worktable beneath an overhead lamp at the moment he finishes the book, April 8, 1943 at 1:20 a.m. In a work of what I take to be relentless abstraction, the sudden eruption of individual pride in accomplishment is almost enough to bring tears to one’s eyes.

For much of his life Torres Garcia (1874-1949) was short on cash. For several years he had small factories making wooden toys in the U.S. and Italy, and a few of his hand-painted toys are on view. It’s hard for us to get excited about crude wooden toys today when plastic has made every plaything our children touch so smooth. But Torres Garcia—again, his emotional side—said something beautiful during this episode in his life: “I’m going to do all my painting on toys; what children do interests me more than anything; I’m going to play with them.”


From The Santiago Times, April 24, 2006