Joaquin Torres-Garcia and the Indoamerican Cult of Balance

by Tia Merotto

Stepping into the Abstraction and Utopia exhibition in MoMA’s David Geffen Wing, one is immediately faced with two juxtaposing images. On the right, the iconic composition of Piet Mondrian's Tableau I: Lozenge with Four Lines (1926) is immediately identifiable by its pure, analytic approach. To the left hangs Joaquin Torres-Garcia’s lesser-known Composition (1931); despite Torres-Garcia’s influential career as the father of Latin American Constructivism and his role in introducing modernist theory to Latin America, the artist remains to this day an underrepresented and misunderstood presence in the world of modern art.

Part theoretician and part painter-sculptor, Torres-Garcia is difficult to classify in comparison to his European contemporaries. His works are not so abstract, strictly speaking, as those of Mondrian or Van Doesburg, with their gridlike structure and geometric principle merged with a pictographic language rooted in the notion of universal human culture. It is in this light that Torres’ works are generally curated, discussed and defined: as outliers to European movements of purist abstraction that are more familiar to the western palate. As such, his work is most commonly understood in relation to De Stijl art, which, while a significant influence in the evolution of Torres-Garcia’s Constructive Universalism, has been overemphasised by curators and critics alike. Far less studied and understood is the relevance of pre-Columbian theosophy to Torres-Garcia’s work. The MoMA’s Abstraction and Utopia exhibition is one of many exhibitions which has situated Torres-Garcia’s work within a European narrative in a manner which ultimately undermines and diminishes the uniquely Latin American aims driving his artistic practice. Upon closer consideration, the existing connection between Torres’ art and ancient American metaphysical belief positions Constructive Universalism not as a provincial offset of neoplasticism and other related European movements, but as a revival of the spirit of indigenous Latin American cultures.

Born in Montevideo in 1874, Torres emigrated from Uruguay to Catalonia, Spain at age of 16. After studying in Spain and spending most of his career abroad in Europe and the United States, he finally returned to his homeland on April 30 1934, aged 59, and was welcomed as an international cultural icon. Torres found Montevideo’s art scene lacking originality, as much of the work consisted of imported styles, and instead of looking locally, many artists had looked heavily to Europe for inspiration. Uruguay’s socio-economic stability in comparison to Europe, however, presented opportunity. Torres viewed Uruguay as a blank canvas for modernist innovation, ideal for the realisation of his own creative theory. Speaking to the press, the artist announced his intentions ‘to create in Montevideo a movement that will surpass the art of Paris.’

In order to remedy the lack of artistic consciousness in Uruguay, Torres proposed a complete revision of the value and criteria attached to art. He encouraged the development of a national language founded in the geometry and proportion of ancient American art instead of the folkloric tropes fashionable amongst nativist art movements elsewhere on the continent. The Asociación de Arte Constructivo (AAC) was established by Torres and his supporters in 1935 in order to change the local concept of art, and promote the value of tradition in developing a modern idiom for Latin American art.

The idea that ‘art should be the product of a particular land and period’ was central to Torres’ aesthetic theory. After his return to Latin America, this logic posited the art of ancient American high cultures- the Maya, Aztec and Inca- as the most appropriate body of inspiration in articulating modern Latin American identity through the arts. Delivered to the public in 1939 through a series of lectures, Torres’ ‘Metaphysics of Indoamerican Prehistory’ was a seminal work in his career which explored pre-Columbian cultural and religious tradition and its enduring relevance to American culture. The study placed particular emphasis on the relationship between natural symbolism, geometry and abstraction as found in these early manifestations of Latin American art.

Torres identified an overlap between pre-Columbian philosophy and the rationalising aims of modern European abstraction in the concept of balance. Ancient indigenous American cultures maintained that the universe existed as an infinite series of interdependent polarities (life vs. death, light vs. dark, and so on) within which sanctity amounted to the balance of opposing forces. Truth, value and beauty were thus conceived in these same terms; for something to be aesthetically valuable, it must contribute positively to the existing order of the cosmos by embodying balance and purity- in other words, by literally being balanced and pure.

Composition, oil on canvas, 1931.pictures taken by Tia Merotto — *Composition*, oil on canvas, 1931.
pictures taken by Tia Merotto

In developing an understanding of pre-Columbian metaphysical belief systems, and particularly by recognising the ways in which the relative or the particular reflected an underlying universal essence, Torres and the artists of the AAC sought to isolate the spirit of Indoamerican culture. Their goal was to inaugurate a symbolic-geometric style which incorporated the achievements of pre-Columbian art and architecture alongside those of European abstraction. Torres’ Composition, like many of his other works from this formative period, reflects these aims in its attention to balance, purity and structural unity. Its web of pictograms- both local and universal in their origins- is ordered around the geometry of the golden section. For Torres, these symbols were a way of combining concept and form while bypassing narrative, which he believed would interrupt the unity of his images. The image is literally balanced in composition, but conceptually balanced in the dialectical oppositions between figuration and abstraction it relates. Moreover, Composition straddles a duality more directly relevant to Torres’ own life: the dichotomy between internal (indigenous American) and external (US-European) cultural influences.

In his own complex passage into modernity, Joaquin Torres-Garcia’s legacy to the world of modern art can be summarised through two leading contributions. On the one hand, his arrival in Montevideo served as a bridge between continents, establishing channels of intellectual and creative exchange between Latin American and European artists. Equally fundamental to the aims of the AAC, however, was the reintroduction and revival of ancestral ideas to the Latin American continent. It is clear which of these is given more coverage amongst western institutions, and which dimensions of his art are all too often overlooked. To situate Torres’ work within a European context, for the sake of convenience or otherwise, is to misconstrue and undervalue his contributions to the global art scene. If Torres’ work and theory is still widely misunderstood almost a century after its inception, it is time for the MoMA and other major art institutions to reevaluate the angle from which the artist is observed, or at least to broaden the lens.

Bibliography

Boone, Elizabeth P. (1994). The Aztec World. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.

Burkhart, Louise (1989). The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Leon-Portilla, Miguel (1963). Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, trans by J. Davis. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Carmen-Ramirez, Maria (1992). El Taller Torres Garcia: The School of the South and Its Legacy. Austin: University of Texas Press.