From Noucentisme to the avant-garde: Torres-García returns to the Sala Parés

Barcelona,

Last July marked 150 years since the birth of Joaquín Torres-García in Uruguay; He spent his childhood and adolescence there until he moved to Spain with his family in 1891. After a brief stay in Mataró, they settled in Barcelona, ​​where Joaquín enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academia Baixas, initially training in traditional way, studying neoclassical art. It is possible that these conventions were the reason why he renounced his academic path and decided to undertake a more self-taught experience: it would be in 1893 when he embarked on his own artistic search, encouraged by his conversations with Hernández Pijuan or Eduardo Marquina at the Cercle de Sant Lluc and, since 1897, with the regulars of Els Quatre Gats.

The Toulouse-Lautrec engraver became one of his references since the exhibition that the Sala Parés in Barcelona gave him in 1896 and, around that time, he would begin to collaborate as an illustrator in various books and periodicals, such as Popular Magazine and Barcelona Comic, and in the work of Jacinto Benavente The literary life. After some exhibitions in Barcelona, ​​in 1901 he brought a series of romantic landscapes, which he had made for the magazine Pel i Plomato the Paris Salon; Torres-García was already a recognized painter and muralist.

The vibrant artistic environment that Barcelona experienced at that stage, and modernism, motivated the Uruguayan author to join Gaudí in the execution of the stained glass windows of the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca and the Sagrada Familia (1903-1904); Already in 1910, while working on two mural panels for the Exposition Universelle in Brussels, he was able to admire the monumental classicism of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, another of his sources of influence. At the sixth Exposició d’Art in Barcelona, ​​critics would define him as one of the greatest representatives of Noucentisme and in 1912 Enric Prat de la Riba commissioned him to create the controversial frescoes for the decoration of the Salon de San Jordi of the Palau de la Generalitat; After completing them, Torres-García retired to Terrassa, where he created the Escola de Decoració and dedicated himself to teaching and publishing Notes on art in 1913 and Dialogues in 1915.

From a more personal language, he henceforth carried out compositions that, due to their accentuated geometry, anticipate his later and mature constructivist style. Since his exhibitions were increasing, both in Spain and abroad, in 1920 the artist and his family decided to move to New York, where for a while Joaquín created toys – recently Guillermo de Osma exhibited them. Again in Europe, in 1928 he met Mondrian in Paris and founded the group Cercle et Carré, to which he remained attached for a few years. In 1934 he decided to return to Uruguay, where he lived until his death, focused on the task of introducing the European avant-garde into the Latin American creative panorama and launching his notion of universal constructivism through the founding of the Association of Constructive Art and the Torres-García Workshop. At that same time, he executed his cosmic monument in Montevideo (1938) and published Constructive Universalism (1944), his main theoretical contribution.

Joaquín Torres-García. Mermaid, circa 1898-1900
Joaquín Torres-García. Landscape with nude, 1915

The first space in Barcelona where Torres-García’s work could be seen, the Sala Parés (it was in 1897, together with creators from the Cercle de Sant Lluc), houses in its three exhibition spaces the exhibition “Between Noucentisme and the Avant-garde (1891-1934) )”, a review of his production during his European and American period through 120 works, including oil paintings, works on paper and toys, many of them for sale and from collections in Paris, New York, Montevideo, Madrid and Barcelona. Also noteworthy are the preparatory drawings for the aforementioned frescoes of the Generalitat, provided by that institution, which has collaborated in the organization of this project together with the Torres García Museum in Montevideo.

The anniversary that this exhibition commemorates in the gallery is twofold: in addition to that century and a half of the author’s birth, the Parés began an exhibition program in 2017, called Memoryto celebrate its 140th anniversary, providing extensive presentations to the artists with whom this center has been linked and also research work: in the case of Torres-García, the assembly is completed with a catalog with an introduction by Jimena Perera, vice president from the Torres García Foundation of Montevideo and great-granddaughter of Joaquín, and a study by Michela Rosso, a specialist in his work and professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Barcelona, ​​in addition to the complete cataloging of the works in the exhibition, which can later be seen, in a reduced version, at the Leandro Navarro Gallery in Madrid.

Joaquín Torres-García. Two figures, 1927

Planned chronologically, the route highlights Torres’ links with Catalonia: it was here that his pictorial vocation was established and he participated in the Noucentista movement not only through his work, but also through his writings; Through them, and as a teacher, he became immersed in the cultural and intellectual debates of that time. We can say that his Catalan phase was characterized by his eclecticism: he combined academic notes with modernist essays.

The drawings for the Salon de San Jordi of the Generalitat that have arrived here, imbued with the features of Noucentisme, are Eternal Catalonia, La bòbila and Industrial Catalonia; They are aesthetically related to those he developed for the murals at Casa Badiella (1917) or somewhat earlier in Mon Repòs, in Terrassa (1914); also with Tent, Barcelona Street either Season (1917). The twenties, and his time in the United States, France and Madrid, in contact with new artists, brought greater dynamism to his work and changes in his palette; These experiments would culminate in his constructivist immersion. Of his Parisian stay we can contemplate in Parès Paris Cafe, Still Life either Portrait of Blasco Ibáñezdated at the end of the twenties; also a selection of toys, the earliest made in the carpentry of the Detachable Toy Society in 1917-1918.

Joaquín Torres-García. Tent, 1917
Joaquín Torres-García. Donkeys and horse, circa 1917-1919

“TORRES-GARCÍA. Between Noucentisme and the avant-garde (1891-1934)”

PARÉS ROOM

C/ Petritxol, 5

Barcelona

From November 30, 2024 to February 1, 2025

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