.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
We are grateful to Mrs. Cecilia de Torres for her assistance cataloguing the present work.
This work is sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by Alejandra Torres and dated 31 July 2013.
"As the painter Torres-García says, we must live within the universal," Theo van Doesburg wrote in 1929 of his friend, with whom he shared a commitment to the Neo-Plastic vision of a timeless and universal art. "Quite simply, we met within the universal," he explained of their intellectual synergies. "That is the palette which Torres-García uses" (quoted in Torres-García, exh. cat., Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1985, p. 101). Following stints in New York, Italy, and southern France, Torres-García moved to Paris in September 1926 and quickly gravitated toward a group of artists exploring paths within geometric abstraction--among them, Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, and van Doesburg. He drew closest to van Doesburg, whose progressions within abstraction and humanist universalism suggested a natural, philosophical kinship. Torres-García's first constructivist paintings of 1929, to which the present work belongs, evolved out of his engagement with this international avant-garde, which culminated in his co-founding, with Michel Seuphor, of the group Cercle et Carré in 1929.
"Creating with no intermediary but the means specific to painting gives us the only freedom worthy of the universal spirit," van Doesburg declared of Torres-García's early constructivist practice. "At this stage of plastic expression, we go beyond the world of things that can be weighed and measured. Structure and structure alone sustains the painting." (quoted in ibid., p. 102). Both van Doesburg and Torres-García used the Golden Section to structure their work from this period, and the present Composition may well have been organized according to this ratio. A mathematical proportion known to have existed in the classical world, the Golden Section postulates that the subdivision of space into certain ratios connotes structural parallels with the universal cosmos. Torres-García's affinity for the Golden Section, prevalent in his works beginning in 1929, underscores the importance that he ascribed from the beginning to the metaphysics of abstraction and to the constructivist grid.
Working characteristically here with the primary colors, along with white and black, Torres-García shows his fluency in the formal syntax of Neo-Plasticism. As in contemporary works by Mondrian and van Doesburg, the cardboard rectangle is broken down into vertical and horizontal modules that describe a balanced and unified visual field. "There is no time, no space, no matter," Torres-García remarked around this time, as he considered the eternal and universal dimensions of his art. "There is no relationship between things, no separation. Far away from any fatherland, there lies the universal, the place where art, science, religion are one and the same." (quoted in ibid., p. 101.) Although the gridded blocks of color do not yet contain pictographic symbols, which appeared in the next stage of his practice, the surface of Composition is noticeably mottled with visible brushstrokes and indentations--subtle, but intentional traces of the artist's hand and a marked contrast to the smooth, almost lacquer-like finish seen in the work of many of his contemporaries. This surface handling anticipates Torres-García's rejection the following year of Neo-Plasticism's purist aesthetics as he broke with the Cercle et Carré group and began to build his theory and practice of Constructive Universalism.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park.
Joaquín Torres-García in his Paris studio, circa 1930. BARCODE: 29668472
This work is sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by Alejandra Torres and dated 31 July 2013.
"As the painter Torres-García says, we must live within the universal," Theo van Doesburg wrote in 1929 of his friend, with whom he shared a commitment to the Neo-Plastic vision of a timeless and universal art. "Quite simply, we met within the universal," he explained of their intellectual synergies. "That is the palette which Torres-García uses" (quoted in Torres-García, exh. cat., Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1985, p. 101). Following stints in New York, Italy, and southern France, Torres-García moved to Paris in September 1926 and quickly gravitated toward a group of artists exploring paths within geometric abstraction--among them, Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, and van Doesburg. He drew closest to van Doesburg, whose progressions within abstraction and humanist universalism suggested a natural, philosophical kinship. Torres-García's first constructivist paintings of 1929, to which the present work belongs, evolved out of his engagement with this international avant-garde, which culminated in his co-founding, with Michel Seuphor, of the group Cercle et Carré in 1929.
"Creating with no intermediary but the means specific to painting gives us the only freedom worthy of the universal spirit," van Doesburg declared of Torres-García's early constructivist practice. "At this stage of plastic expression, we go beyond the world of things that can be weighed and measured. Structure and structure alone sustains the painting." (quoted in ibid., p. 102). Both van Doesburg and Torres-García used the Golden Section to structure their work from this period, and the present Composition may well have been organized according to this ratio. A mathematical proportion known to have existed in the classical world, the Golden Section postulates that the subdivision of space into certain ratios connotes structural parallels with the universal cosmos. Torres-García's affinity for the Golden Section, prevalent in his works beginning in 1929, underscores the importance that he ascribed from the beginning to the metaphysics of abstraction and to the constructivist grid.
Working characteristically here with the primary colors, along with white and black, Torres-García shows his fluency in the formal syntax of Neo-Plasticism. As in contemporary works by Mondrian and van Doesburg, the cardboard rectangle is broken down into vertical and horizontal modules that describe a balanced and unified visual field. "There is no time, no space, no matter," Torres-García remarked around this time, as he considered the eternal and universal dimensions of his art. "There is no relationship between things, no separation. Far away from any fatherland, there lies the universal, the place where art, science, religion are one and the same." (quoted in ibid., p. 101.) Although the gridded blocks of color do not yet contain pictographic symbols, which appeared in the next stage of his practice, the surface of Composition is noticeably mottled with visible brushstrokes and indentations--subtle, but intentional traces of the artist's hand and a marked contrast to the smooth, almost lacquer-like finish seen in the work of many of his contemporaries. This surface handling anticipates Torres-García's rejection the following year of Neo-Plasticism's purist aesthetics as he broke with the Cercle et Carré group and began to build his theory and practice of Constructive Universalism.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park.
Joaquín Torres-García in his Paris studio, circa 1930. BARCODE: 29668472