The Art of Joaquín Torres-García

Constructive Universalism and the Inversion of Abstraction

Aarnoud Rommens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315527550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

Intertwining art history, aesthetic theory, and Latin American studies, Aarnoud Rommens challenges contemporary Eurocentric revisions of the history of abstraction through this study of the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García. After studying and painting (for decades) in Europe, Torres-García returned in 1934 to his native home, Montevideo, with the dream of reawakening and revitalizing what he considered the true indigenous essence of Latin American art: "Abstract Spirit." Rommens rigorously analyses the paradoxes of the painter's aesthetic-philosophical doctrine of Constructive Universalism as it sought to adapt European geometric abstraction to the Americas. Whereas previous scholarship has dismissed Torres-García's theories as self-contradictory, Rommens seeks to recover their creative potential as well as their role in tracing the transatlantic routes of the avant-garde. Through the highly original method of reading Torres-García's artworks as a critique on the artist's own writings, Rommens reveals how Torres-García appropriates the colonial language of primitivism to construct the artificial image of "pure" pre-Columbian abstraction. Torres-García thereby inverts the history of art: this book teases out the important lessons of this gesture and the implications for our understanding of abstraction today.

1 Introduction The routes to roots of Joaquín Torres-García's South American abstraction¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315527574-1

In The Age of the Avant-Garde, Hilton Kramer offers this assessment of the work of Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949): What Kramer wants most of all is the ‘deep’ and ‘unfamiliar’ mystery of South American art, but Torres-García frustrates this desire for foreignness: in the end, his art as well as his life is all too familiar. This Northern, ‘touristic’ demand for authenticity – or rather, the refusal of Torres-García’s work to live up to the fantasy of authenticity – is countered by what is perceived as but an ‘exilic’ variation on European modernity. As Torres-García’s work fails to pay homage to the traveler’s fantasy of indecipherability as token of a hidden, almost mystical essence, Kramer cannot see beyond its “profound debt to the European avant-garde,” a debt that is “only too obvious” (ibid.). This is enough for Kramer to subsume the Uruguayan painter within European art history, since, as the text goes on to explain, Torres-García was not as daring as Pablo Picasso and certainly not as principled as Piet Mondrian. His art is supposedly an art of hesitant vacillation between the major trends of the European historical avant-garde: Torres-García dabbled in so many avant-garde styles that he became master – let alone author – of none. What makes this misrecognition doubly ironic is that Torres-García himself – contrary to Kramer’s judgment – believed he was unearthing a deep lost knowledge specific to South America. In his writing he held on to the illusion that he was restituting a long forgotten origin, a lost aesthetic that had been destroyed through colonization. Torres-García would baptize this recovered ‘mystery of South American art’ ‘Constructive Universalism’ and claim authorship.

In singling out Torres-García for attention … we should not be under any illusion that we are thereby penetrating the mysteries of South American art history. Torres-García was born in Montevideo in 1874, and he died there in 1949; yet his life as an artist traces the most familiar of modern scenarios – the scenario of exile.

(Kramer 1973, 256)

In counterpoint – and by using the art of Torres-García rather than his discourse as a heuristic – this book develops the view that the real illusion is the illusion of hidden depths, the fantasy that there is a mystery – a deep, originary structure – in need of deciphering. What is important in Torres-García’s visual work is that it shows that every restitution is an act of construction: the work of art enacts the artifice of origin, an artifice which is retrospectively disavowed in the artist’s philosophical writings. That is to say, in order to uphold the unity of his neoclassical edifice, Torres-García’s discourse obscures the fact that restitution is not the restoration of a long-lost origin but the assemblage of an imaginary present out of the contingent ruins of the past projected onto a utopian future. Moreover, what I will hope to make clear is that this artifice is possible only through the ‘scenario’ of exile and return, through the artist’s nomadic experience, with the latter amounting to a form of ‘border gnosis’ (cf. Mignolo 2000). Torres-García’s dream of a ‘School of the South’ arose out of a range of practices borrowed from the Schools of Paris and Barcelona, only to be reimported to South America under the label ‘Constructive Universalism.’ In that sense, the ‘familiar scenario’ displays an unscripted plot twist – namely, the artist’s unforeseen return, after a long detour, to his native Montevideo, which he then proclaimed to be the birthplace of an authentic yet repressed Pan-American abstract art expressive of a primordial ‘Abstract Spirit.’

It is this story of the artifice of ancestral abstraction within Constructive Universalism that needs to be told. To do so, we must first outline the Uruguayan painter’s ‘scenario of exile.’ Torres-García’s many arrivals and departures – a scenario of interruptions and unforeseen drifts – led to a heterodox aesthetic philosophy, which treated the avant-garde on the same plane as the atavistic, and where the ‘radical idea’ ² of abstraction was but the recurrence of an eternal principle.

Torres-García's ‘scenario of exile'

In 1934, at the age of sixty and after an absence of forty-three years, Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949) returned to his native Montevideo. The end of his prolonged European ‘aesthetic education’ – its final stage his apprenticeship in the avant-garde in Paris and his progressive turn to abstraction – is signaled by the inversion of the map (Figure 1.2) accompanying his essay “The School of the South.” Rerouting abstraction through the periphery precipitated the power of contestation inherent in Torres-García’s marginal doctrine of Constructive Universalism, marginal at least with respect to European abstraction and its subsequent canonization into the ‘historical avant-garde’ (cf. Bürger 1984). What his work shows is that abstraction was neither ‘invented’ nor ‘discovered’: it is created, and has been recreated in various guises spanning all continents for millennia. ³

Initially, Torres-García coined the term ‘Constructive Universalism’ in Paris in 1932 to differentiate his own praxis from the hegemony of cubism, geometric abstraction and neoplasticism. This eking out of a divergent position would intensify after his return and the reorienting gesture of the Inverted Map, and gain momentum by an increasing approximation of its principles to what he saw as the essence of pre-Columbian art. Torres-García effected the ‘becoming-minor’ ⁴ of abstraction – geometric abstraction in particular – through its relocation to the South. There it mutated, through the influx of the Inca tectonic paradigm, into a hybrid, mestizaje configuration of figuration and abstraction. What Peter Bürger (1984) dubbed the ‘historical avant-garde’ – the historicization of the European avant-garde during the first half of the twentieth century into a ‘major’ formation which has fossilized into a museal object of intense inquiry and nostalgia – is relayed to the periphery. Constructive Universalism inverts the genealogy of the avant-garde, giving birth to a counter-history and a divergent reading of the avant-garde and abstraction alike. This is what the Inverted Map signals to the world.

Before his arrival in Paris in 1926, Torres-García had had little or no intensive contact with the avant-garde. He received his formal artistic education at the Academia de Belles Artes and at the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc. He became a prominent member of Noucentisme, a The Catalan movement rejected the perceived excesses of modernism in favor of a neoclassical style that continued the legacy of Mediterranean, Latin culture. At that time Torres-García painted pastoral and allegorical murals in a neoclassical ‘fresco’ style in line with this regionalist, anti-modern ideology – as in this mural for the Catalan government entitled Eternal Catalonia of 1913, for example (Figure 1.1). Disenchanted

Figure 1.1Joaquín Torres-García, La Cataluña eterna, 361 × 723 cm (top), 579 × 723 cm (below), fresco, 1913. Sala Torres García, Salón de San Jorge, Palacio de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona. Image courtesy of the Patrimony of the Palau de la General de Catalunya, Barcelona

somewhat nationalistic movement [that] represented a reaction against various nineteenth century styles: academicism, romanticism, even French Impressionism. The Noucentiste painter aimed for classicism and objectivity, achieved through flat pastel colours, clean contours, sculpted volumes and idyllic Mediterranean pastoral or allegorical subjects.

(Rowell 1985, 10)

with certain political shifts and turning his eye to the modern, pulsating city, Torres-García broke with Noucentisme. “I am the enemy of all tradition, of whatever kind” (qtd. in Jardí 1973, 87), he would even write, repudiating his previous adherence to neoclassicism in this belated echo of the polemical stance of futurism. In 1917 he met fellow Uruguayan painter Rafael Barradas, who encouraged him to embrace vibrationist painting. This art accentuated the movement and dynamic of a contemporary Barcelona in the midst of modernization. His work became increasingly attuned to modern life and evinced a more dynamic, graphic style characterized by cubist schematization in counterpoint to his Arcadian neoclassicism. The latter works were deemed out of touch with the times, while his new art was seen as more in tune with a legibility that valued the distinctly modern phenomenon and interpretation of life. After financial misfortune, Torres-García and his family migrated to the United States in 1920, with the intention of setting up a toy business while the artist would further his experiments in painting the frantic rhythms of urban life, transposing vibrationism to the New World. However, his stay in New York was short-lived. Already alienated as he hardly spoke any English, disaster struck – the toy warehouse burned down – which hastened the family’s decision to move to Italy. They first settled in Genoa, only to relocate to Livorno a year later. Troubled by the rise of fascism in Italy, the family moved once more, this time to the French coastal town of Villefranche-sur-Mer. From there, the family temporarily ended their pilgrimage: in 1926 the Torres-García family arrived in Paris, and would remain there for eight years.

Constructive Universalism as ‘ethnographic abstraction’

This new uprooting synchronized his work with the dominant avant-garde iconographies. As Torres-García put it, “I learned much in Paris, and it was there that I was formed” (qtd. in Jardí 1973, 117). However, his approach to the avant-garde remained idiosyncratic; he was always somehow ‘out of step,’ his avant-garde was always somewhat ‘belated.’ Owing to this lag, he was unwilling to compromise on the contradictory tension of his own visual research – the friction between (classical) naturalism and (avant-garde) abstraction. In fact, it can be argued that Constructive Universalism never truly abandoned the basic tenets of his neoclassicism, in that he saw the preoccupation with pure plastic form in geometric abstraction as a logical extrapolation of his own interest in the planar dimension of painting already evident in his neoclassical work. ⁵ He did not condemn surrealism, since he saw its concern with the unconscious as similar to his formulation of ‘Abstract Man’ in terms of the salvaging of a primitive vitality, although in his writing Torres-García consistently equates vitalism and the unconscious with rationality and structure, thus inverting the surrealist valuations. ⁶ This accounts for his uneasy relation to neoplasticism; although he felt close to the work of, among others, Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo and Theo van Doesburg, he was never at ease with doctrinal geometric abstraction. As a way to foster a more inclusive forum, he founded, together with Michel Seuphor, the more eclectic group Cercle et Carré in 1930. This loose collective organized a wide-ranging exhibition and published a short-lived review under the same name. ⁷ What appears as a constant is that Torres-García’s embrace of the ‘new’ was always provisional; it was always counteracted by the pull of the ‘archaic,’ of painterly tradition. His avant-garde was muted, tentative, restless, belated, at odds with itself. His refusal to choose between figuration – which was identified with surrealism at the time – and abstraction – in the form of neoplasticism – is indicative of his exilic perspective.

It was also in Paris in 1932 that he found a name, a regime of legibility, for his idiosyncratic praxis: universalismo constructivo, Constructive Universalism. Generally speaking, Constructive Universalism is not so much an aesthetic as a metaphysical credo: it names the desire to return to living archaic forms that fuse avant-garde principles of abstraction in a harmony with the here and now. It is decidedly utopian: its hope is to constitute a new world with a new set of ritual practices as a way of reconstituting the – at least imagined, fantasized – ancient, pre-modern integration of life and art through the principles of geometry and proportionality. The aim is to make the ‘new’ reverberate with the ‘primitive,’ with the originary cosmic unity of man and nature in the hopes of constituting a continuum with the origin and the now; its objective is to re-enchant the world. Torres-García found the wellspring of this re-enchantment in the pre-Columbian, as the possible catalyst for a new idea of history, a history in which the implications of the abstract in the renewal of the life of spirit were to be resumed. Constructive Universalism can be seen as a form of ‘ethnographic abstraction,’ comparable to what James Clifford dubbed ‘ethnographic surrealism’ (Clifford 1988, 117–51). With ‘ethnographic surrealism,’ Clifford refers to the intertwining, in the 1920s and 1930s, of surrealism and the emerging science of ethnography and anthropology, producing “a more general cultural predisposition that cuts through modern anthropology and that this science shares with twentieth-century art and writing. The ethnographic label suggests a characteristic attitude of participant observation among the artifacts of a defamiliarized cultural reality” (ibid., 121). In the case of Constructive Universalism, the ethnographic gaze is driven by the abstract geometric paradigm, and Torres-García positions himself as the heir and practitioner of a primitivist Andean paradigm. His absorption of the pictorial language of the Inca and pre-Inca illustrates the extent to which he framed himself as a ‘participant observer’ of a ‘defamiliarized culture,’ a culture he was intent on making ancestral. It was his discovery of pre-Columbian art at the Trocadéro museum in Paris that prompted him to gradually equate geometric abstraction and the principles of neoplasticism with the matrix of an Inca and pre-Inca tectonic paradigm. ⁸ The latter allowed him to envision a new art that would assume an integral function in the social fabric through its quasi-religious status. In fact, Constructive Universalism’s ‘ethnographic abstraction’ is in line with Bürger’s characterization of the avant-garde’s ethos of the reconciliation of life and art: “The avant-garde intends the abolition of autonomous art by which it means that art is to be integrated into the praxis of life” (Bürger 1984, 54). For Torres-García, this reintegration was to be accomplished by charging the abstract geometric paradigm of the avant-garde with Inca primitivism_ it was to restore the ritual, cosmological embedding of art in life. However, Constructive Universalism did not have any followers in Paris – it simply had no time to take root. With Paris feeling the effects of the Great Depression, the specter of poverty forced the Torres-García family to relocate. In 1932 they packed their belongings and headed to Madrid, but their stay there did not last long. Hesitating between Mexico and Uruguay, Torres-García made a final roll of the dice: in 1934 he and his family returned to Montevideo.

Returning South: colonialism, impurity and abstraction

Aged sixty, and after an absence of forty-three years, Torres-García ended his prolonged European ‘aesthetic education.’ It was here, after his return to Latin America, that Torres-García’s project of renewal assumed concrete form and turned resolutely to the Southern hemisphere. That is to say, Constructive Universalism was progressively reframed through the parad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• 1 Introduction: the routes to roots of Joaquín Torres-García’s South American abstraction
• 2 Constructive Universalism’s ‘theoretical eye’: vitalism, arkhé-tectonics and grafismo
• 3 Tactics of a-semiosis
• 4 Writing/drawing the universal by hand: abstraction’s unruliness
• 5 Emblematics, “The School of the South” and the inversion of maps
• 6 Thick grids and the scrapbooking of the universal
• Conclusion: reverting South
• Bibliography
• Index