Joaquín Torres-García: Paintings in Houston Collections

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showcases a selection of key paintings by Joaquín Torres-García, one of the most influential Latin American artists and theorists of the first half of the 20th century.

Organized by Mari Carmen Ramírez, the Wortham Foundation curator of Latin American art at the MFAH, Joaquín Torres-García: Paintings in Houston Collections features a dozen paintings all culled from major Houston collections. The exhibition complements Joaquín Torres-García: Constructing Abstraction with Wood, an exhibition of over 80 wooden constructions also curated by Ramírez, which will open on September 25 at the Menil Collection and is an MFAH/Menil collaboration. These two exhibitions will be the first to present Torres-García’s work in the United States in over forty years. As such, they provide a unique opportunity to acquaint Houston audiences with the work of this major exponent of the international avant-garde. To celebrate this special moment there will be a series of joint events and programs organized around both exhibitions.

The paintings for the Houston show include half-a-dozen loans from Houston collectors, such as Mr. and Mrs. Meredith J. Long, Mary and Roy Cullen, Mr. Fayez Sarofim, Dr. Luis and Cecilia Campos, and a couple of private lenders. Additionally, the exhibition will feature five paintings from the Brillembourg Capriles Collection of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a major long-term loan addition to the museum’s Latin American holdings. This is the first time that all these works will be shown together. The paintings in the MFAH show vividly exemplify the diversity and multiplicity of solutions to which the Uruguayan artist arrived in his attempt to expand upon key issues posed by the early constructivist and abstract movements in Europe. That is, within a short span of time the artist not only produced works in different media but he also employed a variety of stylistic vocabularies, freely moving back and forth between them. Each painting on view at the MFAH show represents a different period of Torres-García’s production, ranging from an early landscape painted in France in 1928 to an oil on paper and canvas work made in 1945, giving viewers a rough overview of his career.

Torres-García’s paintings often balance nature and reason through a combination of Constructive elements and signs. To convey this balance he elaborated his own particular language based on the neo-Plasticist grid (reason) and pictographic symbols (nature). He called this language Constructive Universalism. Convinced that the impulse towards abstract modes of abstraction lie at the core of all civilizations, the system of Constructive Universalism incorporated symbols from ancient cultures such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and the ancient cultures of the Americas. One outstanding work on view is an untitled oil painting from 1932, depicting the outline of a fish. Inside of the fish are painted a number of other objects, which are all familiar symbols from Torres-García’s Constructive Universal repertory: precise references to the cosmos (the sun), the ideal pentameter (the number five), human emotions (the heart and the anchor, representing hope), nature (the fish), and references to North American Indian art (the teepee framed by a crescent moon and the sun, such as is found on painted hides). These symbols can also be found in other paintings on view.

Two additional and quite rare (only four of these exist and two are in Houston) tempera works, Forma anímica entrecruzada (Intersected Animist Form), 1933, (Fayez Sarofim Collection) and Formas cortadas por estructura (Forms Intersected by Structure), 1934, (Private Collection)—painted in Madrid, shortly before returning to Montevideo—were directly inspired in the designs of Nazca pottery from the collection of the Archaeological Museum in Madrid.

About the Artist
Torres-García is revered not only as a Modernist painter, but also as a teacher and author. Born in 1874 and raised in Montevideo, Uruguay, Torres-García moved with his family to Barcelona, Spain, at age 17. A self-taught artist, he soon began to explore styles from modern Classicism to the potential of creating a Catalan Classicism. He also moved frequently throughout his adult life, dividing his time between Spain, Italy, France, and New York, and exhibiting with the renowned artists of his time, including Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp. It was not until he was in his 40s that the artist began to work in the Modernist and Constructive style for which he is so renowned, going on to found Constructive Universalism. At age 60, Torres-García returned to his birthplace with the intention of introducing Modernist and Constructive art to Uruguayan artists. He gave hundreds of lectures, organized over 20 exhibitions, and founded the Sociedad de los Artes del Uruguay and the Asociación de Arte Constructivo, followed by the Taller Torres-García, fulfilling his dream to influence the next generation of artists. Torres-García died in 1949.