Joaquín Torres García returned to Montevideo in April 1934, more than forty years after embarking on a transatlantic journey that stretched from Barcelona to Paris, Madrid, and New York. Celebrated as a teacher, he worked tirelessly to catalyze the development of modern art throughout the Southern Cone, advancing a hemispheric approach to the arts grounded in the recuperation of an indigenous American legacy for abstraction. In 1935 Torres García founded the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (AAC), dedicated to the promulgation of universal and indigenous Constructivism. The AAC’s local investigations of pre-Columbian art were complemented by programmatic instruction in European avant-garde movements—Cubism, Neo-plasticism, Constructivism—through lectures, radio broadcasts, and publications. During this period of intense activity, Torres García began to advance his theory and practice of Constructive Universalism and to advocate for an autonomous tradition of Latin American art: the “School of the South.”Constructive Composition epitomizes Torres García’s philosophy of Constructive Universalism in its assimilation of the ancient and universal iconography of the Americas within the metaphysical cosmos of the constructivist grid. Archetypal signs—boat, anchor, ladder, clock, star, heart—calibrate timeless values of order and unity, voyage and discovery, stability and love, time and measurement. The appearance of Universal Man, described by a configuration of rectangles and triangles in the upper-left-hand corner, reinforces the underlying humanism of Torres García’s Indo- American vision. The painting’s gridded structure references Inca masonry as well as the Neo-plasticism of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, acknowledged in the overlay of primary colors—rectangles of red, ocher, and blue—across the painting’s grisaille surface. A centerpiece of the permanent collection, Constructive Composition entered AMA’s collection in 1963 as a gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller.
Joaquín Torres García was born in Montevideo and left Uruguay with his family in 1891, returning to his father’s native Spain. He studied drawing and painting under Josep Vinardell and, the following year in Barcelona, attended the Escola Oficial de Belles Artes, La Llotja. He presented his first solo exhibition in 1897 (Barcelona, Saló de la Vanguardia) and came into contact with Julio González and Pablo Picasso, among others, at the café Els Quatre Gats. In 1898 Torres García traveled to Madrid and encountered the work of French symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, an important early influence. He worked with Antoni Gaudí on the Sagrada Familia Catedral in 1903 and accepted a number of local mural commissions, notably four frescoes at the Saló de Sant Jordi (Palau de la Generalitat, Barcelona), completed in 1916. During this time, Torres García was linked to Noucentisme, coined by Eugenio d’Ors to denote a Catalan art movement based on Arcadian and Mediterranean ideals. In 1917 Torres García met the Uruguayan painter Rafael Barradas, with whom he developed Vibracionismo, a style adapted from Cubism and Futurism to capture the vitality of the modern city through the use of simultaneous color. Torres García moved to New York in 1920, his work continuing to describe urban images within a schematic and proto-constructivist geometry. He entered into the orbit of the Society of Independent Artists, with whom he exhibited, and pursued the production of wood toys, which he had begun to design in 1917 and continued to develop during his time in Italy from 1922 to 1924. Following a year in Villefranche-sur-Mer, Torres García arrived in Paris in 1926. Stimulated by his meeting with the De Stijl painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian in 1928-1929, he joined the group Cercle et Carré and began to articulate his system of Constructive Universalism, in which he combined the Neo-Plastic grid with pictographic symbols. He moved to Madrid in 1932 due to financial hardship and two years later returned to Montevideo, where he wrote and lectured widely as he championed Constructive Universalism in painting, sculpture—notably, Monumento cósmico (1937)—and murals. He founded the Asociación de Arte Constructivo in 1935, a predecessor to the Taller Torres García, established in 1943, and published his memoir, Historia de mi vida, in 1939.
