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Lot Essay
Torres-García left Montevideo with his family in 1891, eventually settling in Barcelona and entering the orbit of the Noucentist movement, which called for a revival of Catalan cultural nationalism and a return to a classicizing, Mediterranean order. The Arcadian orientation of his early work led to a major public commission of six frescoes for the Saló de Sant Jordi, the chapel in Barcelona’s Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya, in 1912; the contract was canceled five years later, however, amid controversy over the four completed murals. Torres-García’s disillusionment with Noucentisme’s political and pastoral ideals and subsequent marginalization within the Catalan community coincided with his emerging interests in modernity, telegraphed in a lecture that he presented at Galeries Dalmau (Barcelona) in February 2017 and stimulated by his meeting six months later with fellow Uruguayan Rafael Barradas, who had moved to Barcelona in 1916. “Forget the past, including your own,” Torres-García enjoined in a book of fictional correspondence, El descubrimiento de sí mismo [Self-Discovery], published in 1917. “Look upon it as a dead thing that must have nothing to do with the present so that none of that past will overcome you, and, thus, the originality that shall sprout from you at all times, as from a fountain, shall have the freshness of living things.”[1]
Torres-García had already begun to turn away from Noucentisme before the termination of his mural commission, and his first paintings of modern, urban life emerged in the months before his decisive encounter with Barradas in August 2017. The two artists became close friends over the year and a half that they spent together in Barcelona as they developed the principles of Vibrationism, a new “ism” coined by Barradas that drew upon Cubism, Futurism, and Simultaneism to express the vitality of the modern city. “Vibrationism is, therefore, certain MOVEMENT that is determined by the passage of a sensation of color to a corresponding one,” Torres-García wrote, “each one of these chords, diverse notes of distinct harmony, fused to each other by more muted chords, each gradation more opaque.”[2] The simultaneity and dynamism of the movement appealed to him, and yet his paintings retained a structural order both suggestively timeless and anticipatory of the Neo-Plastic grid of Constructive Universalism, which he developed over the following decade. “I was drawn to something static, like architecture, to the idea of the thing, to proportion as a foundation, to what is constant, to the law, to what is general,” he reflected of his Vibrationist work, “and not so much to the modern aspect, but rather to this centuries-old human tradition.[3]
By 1918-19, Torres-García had begun to plan his departure from Spain, selling his house, Mon Repòs, in Terrassa and devoting himself to the production of toys. “I am excited to be working again, after such a long period of not painting anything,” he wrote to Barradas in December 1918. “The toys are leading me to this. Because the one is the same as the other. In the end, I think I will have found something that, despite making money—if it actually does—will make me happy to do it. It’s all toys and painting!”[4] This excitement around these toys, no less their commercial prospects, inspirited Torres-García through his last years in Barcelona and eventually prompted his departure in 1920 for New York, where he planned to manufacture and market them. He stopped in Bilbao in March 1920 to give a talk related to an exhibition and then traveled to Paris before setting sail from Le Havre; he landed in Brooklyn on June 16.
The schematic geometry of his transatlantic paintings continued the Vibrationist direction of his work with Barradas, reinforced by his production of transformable, constructivist toys and the dynamic urban environments that he observed. In a letter to Barradas from Bilbao, Torres-García exclaimed over “boats, things, railways, trams, cars, cranes, factories, etc.” integrated together “like in our paintings.”[5] The present work describes a bustling port scene in Bilbao just as he described. As in paintings such as Puerto Constructivo (1920) and Puerto de Nueva York (1923), the scene teems with the helter-skelter scramble of commerce that vibrates from the framework of building facades to the ship to the frenzied activity in the foreground, its graphic elements brightly colored and compressed. Torres-García later pronounced his work from this time “expressionistic and geometric, dynamic, sometimes depicting reality, and in others a synthesis of it, but already the vertical and horizontal dominate, which will be the basis of other paintings.”[6]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Joaquín Torres-García, El descubrimiento de sí mismo: cartas a Julio, que tratan de cosas muy importantes para los artistas (Girona, 1917): 25, quoted and trans. in M. Lluïsa Faxedas Brujats, “Barradas’ Vibrationism and its Catalan Context,” RIHA Journal 0135 (July 15, 2016), https://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:101:1-2016110712596.
2 Torres-García, quoted in Angel Kalenberg, “Rafael Barradas: el tránsito,” in Barradas, Torres-García (Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1995), 24.
3 Torres-García, Universalismo constructivo (1944), vol. 2 (Madrid: Alianza, 1984): 475, quoted and trans. in Faxedas Brujats, “Barradas’ Vibrationism and its Catalan Context.”
4 Torres-García to Rafael Barradas, December 13, 1918, in Pilar García-Sedas, ed., Joaquín Torres-García y Rafael Barradas: un diálogo escrito, 1918-1928 (Barcelona: Parsifal, 2001): 148, quoted in Luis Pérez Oramas, “The Anonymous Rule: Joaquín Torres-García, the Schematic Impulse, and Arcadian Modernity,” in Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 20.
5 Torres-García to Barradas, March 2, 1920, in García-Sedas, ed., Joaquín Torres-García y Rafael Barradas, 205, quoted in Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, “Spirit of America: Joaquín Torres-García in New York, 1920-1922,” in Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern, 39.
6 Torres-García, Historia de mi vida (Montevideo: Asociación Arte Constructivo, 1939), 214, quoted in Cecilia de Torres, “Torres-García’s New York: The City as Icon of Modern Art,” in Deborah Cullen, ed., Nexus New York: Latin American Artists in the Modern Metropolis (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 2009), 110.
Torres-García had already begun to turn away from Noucentisme before the termination of his mural commission, and his first paintings of modern, urban life emerged in the months before his decisive encounter with Barradas in August 2017. The two artists became close friends over the year and a half that they spent together in Barcelona as they developed the principles of Vibrationism, a new “ism” coined by Barradas that drew upon Cubism, Futurism, and Simultaneism to express the vitality of the modern city. “Vibrationism is, therefore, certain MOVEMENT that is determined by the passage of a sensation of color to a corresponding one,” Torres-García wrote, “each one of these chords, diverse notes of distinct harmony, fused to each other by more muted chords, each gradation more opaque.”[2] The simultaneity and dynamism of the movement appealed to him, and yet his paintings retained a structural order both suggestively timeless and anticipatory of the Neo-Plastic grid of Constructive Universalism, which he developed over the following decade. “I was drawn to something static, like architecture, to the idea of the thing, to proportion as a foundation, to what is constant, to the law, to what is general,” he reflected of his Vibrationist work, “and not so much to the modern aspect, but rather to this centuries-old human tradition.[3]
By 1918-19, Torres-García had begun to plan his departure from Spain, selling his house, Mon Repòs, in Terrassa and devoting himself to the production of toys. “I am excited to be working again, after such a long period of not painting anything,” he wrote to Barradas in December 1918. “The toys are leading me to this. Because the one is the same as the other. In the end, I think I will have found something that, despite making money—if it actually does—will make me happy to do it. It’s all toys and painting!”[4] This excitement around these toys, no less their commercial prospects, inspirited Torres-García through his last years in Barcelona and eventually prompted his departure in 1920 for New York, where he planned to manufacture and market them. He stopped in Bilbao in March 1920 to give a talk related to an exhibition and then traveled to Paris before setting sail from Le Havre; he landed in Brooklyn on June 16.
The schematic geometry of his transatlantic paintings continued the Vibrationist direction of his work with Barradas, reinforced by his production of transformable, constructivist toys and the dynamic urban environments that he observed. In a letter to Barradas from Bilbao, Torres-García exclaimed over “boats, things, railways, trams, cars, cranes, factories, etc.” integrated together “like in our paintings.”[5] The present work describes a bustling port scene in Bilbao just as he described. As in paintings such as Puerto Constructivo (1920) and Puerto de Nueva York (1923), the scene teems with the helter-skelter scramble of commerce that vibrates from the framework of building facades to the ship to the frenzied activity in the foreground, its graphic elements brightly colored and compressed. Torres-García later pronounced his work from this time “expressionistic and geometric, dynamic, sometimes depicting reality, and in others a synthesis of it, but already the vertical and horizontal dominate, which will be the basis of other paintings.”[6]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Joaquín Torres-García, El descubrimiento de sí mismo: cartas a Julio, que tratan de cosas muy importantes para los artistas (Girona, 1917): 25, quoted and trans. in M. Lluïsa Faxedas Brujats, “Barradas’ Vibrationism and its Catalan Context,” RIHA Journal 0135 (July 15, 2016), https://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:101:1-2016110712596.
2 Torres-García, quoted in Angel Kalenberg, “Rafael Barradas: el tránsito,” in Barradas, Torres-García (Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1995), 24.
3 Torres-García, Universalismo constructivo (1944), vol. 2 (Madrid: Alianza, 1984): 475, quoted and trans. in Faxedas Brujats, “Barradas’ Vibrationism and its Catalan Context.”
4 Torres-García to Rafael Barradas, December 13, 1918, in Pilar García-Sedas, ed., Joaquín Torres-García y Rafael Barradas: un diálogo escrito, 1918-1928 (Barcelona: Parsifal, 2001): 148, quoted in Luis Pérez Oramas, “The Anonymous Rule: Joaquín Torres-García, the Schematic Impulse, and Arcadian Modernity,” in Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 20.
5 Torres-García to Barradas, March 2, 1920, in García-Sedas, ed., Joaquín Torres-García y Rafael Barradas, 205, quoted in Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, “Spirit of America: Joaquín Torres-García in New York, 1920-1922,” in Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern, 39.
6 Torres-García, Historia de mi vida (Montevideo: Asociación Arte Constructivo, 1939), 214, quoted in Cecilia de Torres, “Torres-García’s New York: The City as Icon of Modern Art,” in Deborah Cullen, ed., Nexus New York: Latin American Artists in the Modern Metropolis (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 2009), 110.