The Art of Joaquín Torres-García
The Art of Joaquín Torres-García

Author: Aarnoud Rommens

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-08-05

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1315527561

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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.

Arcadian Modern
Arcadian Modern

Author: Luis Pérez Oramas

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780870709753

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Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguayan, 1874-1949) is one of the most complex and emblematic modern masters from the first half of the 20th century, whose work determined transformational paths for modern art on both sides of the Atlantic. Manifesting a profound impulse toward the avant-garde as much as the primitive, and stressing a schematic impulsion alongside a permanent fascination with the notion of utopia, he participated in some of the most crucial intellectual and artistic discussions of the past century. His personal involvement with a significant number of early Modern and avant-garde movements, from Catalan Noucentismo to Cubism, Ultraism- Vibrationism, and Neo-Plasticism, make him an unparalleled figure in the history of modernism in the Americas. Published in conjunction with the first major, all-inclusive retrospective of the artist's work in the US since the 1970s, this richly illustrated publication presents Torres-García's long and wide-ranging career, from the late 19th century to the 1940s, and includes drawings, paintings, objects and sculptures. Combining a chronological presentation with a thematic approach, the book is organized into five separate essays with interspersed plates, following an illustrated chronology and an extensive bibliography.

Inverted Utopias
Inverted Utopias

Author: Héctor Olea Galaviz

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 618

ISBN-13: 0300102690

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In the twentieth century, avant-garde artists from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean created extraordinary and highly innovative paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mixed-media works, and installations. This innovative book presents more than 250 works by some seventy of these artists (including Gego, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Xul Solar, and Jose Clemente Orozco) and artists' groups, along with interpretive essays by leading authorities and newly translated manifestoes and other theoretical documents written by the artists. Together the images and texts showcase the astonishing artistic achievements of the Latin American avant-garde. The book focuses on two decisive periods: the return from Europe in the 1920s of Latin American avant-garde pioneers; and the expansion of avant-garde activities throughout Latin America after World War II as artists expressed their independence from developments in Europe and the United States. As the authors explain, during these periods Latin American art was fueled by the belief that artistic creations could present a form of utopia - an inversion of the original premise that drove the European avant-garde - and serve as a model for

The Art of Joaquín Torres-García
The Art of Joaquín Torres-García

Author: Aarnoud Rommens

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-08-05

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1315527553

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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.

Joaquín Torres-García
Joaquín Torres-García

Author: Joaquín Torres-García

Publisher: Menil Foundation

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300154016

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Joaqu�n Torres-Garc�a (1874-1949) is one of the most influential artists to have emerged from Latin America in the early 20th century. His unique innovations in the medium of wood--constructed three-dimensional grids and planes known as maderas--foreshadow later artistic developments in Europe and the Americas (such as the work of Louise Nevelson). Torres-Garc�a was also much celebrated for his work as a modernist painter, teacher, and author. This handsome catalogue focuses on Torres-Garc�a’s wood constructions and accompanies the first exhibition held in North America of these works and the first solo exhibition of the artist in the United States in over forty years. It includes essays by prominent scholars that discuss the creation of the maderas and their place in the debates surrounding abstract art in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s and in Montevideo, his hometown in Uruguay, in the late 1930s and 40s. It also includes newly translated writings by the artist.

The Stone and the Thread
The Stone and the Thread

Author: César Paternosto

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780292765658

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"Shows that precolumbian tectonic forms (especially as found in sculpture and weaving) appear to be an overlooked source, or anticipation, of much of the art of the 20th century. Second part of book deals with artifacts as American art and addresses reception of ancient tectonics in the 20th century. Emphasizes intense relationship that some members of the New York School (particularly Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb) had during 1940s with the aboriginal arts of the North American part of the hemisphere and thus the affinities between their work and the work of the older Torres Garcâia in Montevideo, at the other end of the continent"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

The Adventures of China Iron
The Adventures of China Iron

Author: Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Publisher: Charco Press

Published: 2019-11-14

Total Pages: 125

ISBN-13: 1999368428

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Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020 1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland. While Liz provides China with a sentimental education and schools her in the nefarious ways of the British Empire, their eyes are opened to the wonders of Argentina’s richly diverse flora and fauna, cultures and languages, as well as to the ruthless violence involved in nation-building. This subversive retelling of Argentina’s foundational gaucho epic Martín Fierro is a celebration of the colour and movement of the living world, the open road, love and sex, and the dream of lasting freedom. With humour and sophistication, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara has created a joyful, hallucinatory novel that is also an incisive critique of national myths.

Transatlantic Encounters
Transatlantic Encounters

Author: Michele Greet

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2018-01-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0300228422

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Paris was the artistic capital of the world in the 1920s and '30s, providing a home and community for the French and international avant-garde. Latin American artists contributed to and reinterpreted nearly every major modernist movement that took place in the creative center of Paris between World War I and World War II, including Cubism (Diego Rivera), Surrealism (Antonio Berni and Roberto Matta), and Constructivism (Joaquin Torres-Garcia). Yet their participation in the Paris art scene has remained largely overlooked until now. This book examines their collective role, surveying the work of both household names and an extraordinary array of lesser-known artists. Michele Greet illuminates the significant ways in which Latin American expatriates helped establish modernism and, conversely, how a Parisian environment influenced the development of Latin American artistic identity.

Constructive Spirit
Constructive Spirit

Author: Mary Kate O'Hare

Publisher: Pomegranate Communications

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780764952746

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The first survey of Pan-American geometric abstraction between the 1920s and 1950s, Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s provides a fresh and innovative look at this dynamic and cosmopolitan period of Modernism in the Americas. In the first half of the twentieth century, South American and US artists infused the hard-edge lines and geometric shapes of abstract art with new perspectives. This richly illustrated book examines the connections, both conceptual and personal, among abstract artists from Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela, suggesting parallels that cut across time, national borders, and a range of media. It begins with the arrival of Torres-García in New York City in 1920, and culminates in the 1950s, as North and South American abstract artists converged in the international arena in such exhibition venues as the Bienal de São Paulo. Released in conjunction with the traveling exhibition organized by the Newark Museum, Constructive Spirit presents more than ninety rarely seen paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings, and films, from private and public collections across both continents. The sixty-eight featured artists include the renowned-Alexander Calder, Joaquín Torres-García, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Arshile Gorky, for example-as well as those who deserve much wider recognition, such as Charmion von Wiegand, Geraldo de Barros, Alfredo Hlito, and many others. Essayists Karen A. Bearor, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, Aliza Edelman, Adele Nelson, Mary Kate O'Hare, and Cecilia de Torres offer new insights as they investigate the ideas and influences that informed South and North American artists' transformation of abstraction into a language of their own.