"I have named it "Escuela del Sur" because our final destination is the South.
No destination is feasible to us, but the opposition established North-South"

The denomination "Escuela del Sur", which the teacher materialized in his 1941 book Universalismo constructivo has embraced the whole artistic legacy left by Torres-García; i.e. his own constructivist work as well as the extensive production of his disciples: those who received his direct teaching and those who followed his precepts without having known him personally

This denomination, with a graphical representation of the inverted South America map - a true symbol - has been used as formal terminology in the academic world and abroad, his pupils and those linked to the Constructivist School always preferred to call it "Torres Workshop", a more informal expression still currently used in Uruguay.

Ever since he returned to Uruguay on 30 April 1943 after 43 years, it was evident that the old master was determined to widespread a doctrine with the strength given by the conviction of an absolute truth attained after a lifetime of unremitting search. That was how after returning to a promised land he hardly knew, he started a campaign to fulfill an aim he felt as a superior obligation. He gave his first conference a few days after he settled, in June he organized his first exhibition and in November he started his professional journalistic activity for the Buenos Aires daily La Nación. With no delay he started his autobiography using the third person singular and other essays about Art to be published years later.

The next step was procuring some kind of "institutional" support, a minimum infrastructure to centralize and organize the diffusion of Constructive Universalism. As a result, in January 1935 the AAC (Association of Constructive Art) was formed, joined by local personalities and painters with a solid background.

After a warm welcome and auspicious activities, both his intransigent beliefs, specially in terms of modern art, and his culture above average among Uruguayan artists and intellectuals, had the opposite effect and Torres lost support. He realized his ideas necessarily had to be aimed at a younger group, who had to be formed from the very start.

That was, in summary, the reason why in 1942 the teacher decided to start another "institutional" phase and he created the TTG (Torres-García Workshop). From then on, the only commitment of the AAC would be to give foundations to the existence of a teaching workshop of constructivist painting. The first pupils were friends of his own children, and even neighbors invited to come and learn painting, the average age of the group was around twenty.

Torres himself, in his book La recuperación del objeto defined in an essentialist way that first workshop, which later in history would achieve a place of its own: "...the Workshop is painting and nothing more. The Workshop is construction, the Workshop is abstract painting, three dimensional, naturalist but not imitative painting, and the Workshop is mural painting, on a plane, based upon the five pure colors, and the Workshop is pure painting, elementary [...] and it is graphism in the universalism [...], all this and nothing more".

Torres-García Workshop matured steadily and its incidence in the Uruguayan culture turned more solid with the passage of time. The strong reactions against this trend are also an unequivocal sign of its advancement. Exhibitions multiplied; in the winter 1944 the constructivist group performed its more transcendental collective work: the series of murals on the Saint-Bois Hospital, located in the outskirts of Montevideo. In 1945 the Workshop started publishing its own magazine -Removedor- which, as well as the Workshop, continued after the death of their master in 1949.

Despite controversy with respect to precise dates, 1962 would be the most probable year to establish the definitive closure of the Torres-García Workshop, which had continued under the direction of some of its most eminent pupils. The last official publication of the workshop was in January 1961: it was the third number of the magazine Escuela del Sur (this had replaced Removedor, whose final number 28 was published in July-August 1953.

By that time, several of the most distinguished pupils of Torres had left Uruguay, either to Europe or the United States, the Escuela del Sur was heading North.... where the most important retrospective exhibitions have taken place recently, like the one held at the Queen Sofia Museum in Madrid in 1992, just to give an emblematic example.

Finally, among the numerous artists of the Torres Workshop, we should mention those direct pupils with the best reviews by experts and whose work has achieved the highest prices in the world market of art. They are: Francisco Matto (1911-1996), Augusto Torres (1913-1992), Manuel Pailós (1918), Julio Alpuy (1919), Gonzalo Fonseca (1922-2000), Horacio Torres (1924-1974) and José Gurvich (1927-1974). But surely the future might give us a surprise.

EDUARDO ROLAND