Joaquín Torres-García (Montevideo, 1874-1949), through his work and teaching, became one of the most influential Uruguayan artists in the cultural history of his country. He left, and very few did, a non-ephemeral and forever permanent School, widely known abroad more than half a century after his passing away.

The "Constructive Universalism", the name of his aesthetics trend, was the result of an entire life of incessant research and reflection, where Art - "with capital letters", as he used to say- became an aim of metaphysical character for him, almost a "religious conviction", to which he dedicated all his energies.

Torres-García's itinerary in life is rather unusual: he was born in Uruguay and he died in Uruguay, but he spent most of his life abroad. At the age of 17 the young man emigrated with his family to Mataro (Catalonia), his father's birthplace. He returned to his native country in 1934, just before he turned 60. His long stay outside Uruguay can be divided in five chronological periods for better comprehension: 1. Catalonia (1891-1920), 2. New York (1929-1922), Italy and southern France (1922-1926), 4. Paris (1926-1932), 5. Madrid (1932-1934).

In all that time, ever since he became a student at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona one year after he arrived in Spain, till the moment he decided to return to Montevideo, Torres-Garcia, was a privileged protagonist of the fantastic art transformation that took place in the first decades of the 20th century. Those were years when the artist had contact with several of the most important World painters, developing at the same time his own and definitive stance about painting, and art in general terms, crystallized in Montevideo.

In 1903 he worked with the famous architect Antoni Gaudí in the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca; a few years later, the critic Eugenio D'Ors considered his painting as a paradigm of the Noucentisme. At that time Torres published many theoretical texts about this Pro-Catalonian, idealist and neo-classical trend, and he was consecrated as a muralist within this trend.

When in October 1918 the Catalonian government decided to cancel the great mural series that the painter had been developing for several years in the Edificio de la Diputación in Barcelona) a great disillusion affected Torres-García. Simultaneously he experienced an avant-garde influence from the poet Salvat-Papasseit and his admired countryman painter Rafael Barradas (1880-1929), with whom he first met in Barcelona and kept a relationship by letter when the painter had left the Catalonian capital. At that time an inflection was produced in the career of the Uruguayan-Catalonian painter who was already 44 years old. In fact he spent a silent decade, without giving a foundational theory to his plastic production - as he generally did-, and two years later he decided to depart from Europe, leaving Catalonia for good.

The two years he spent in New York left him with mixed feelings. He felt attracted to the cosmopolitan agitated surroundings of the big City, but he immediately recognized that such a materialist society with no traditions wasn't a good place to abode. He didn't make a large quantity of paintings: some oil paintings about the city and mainly the famous album of New York drawings, where, with a very characteristic trace, he captured the heartbeats of a city in constant motion. He met several painters, Marcel Duchamp among others, the father of the conceptual art that will dominate the plastic universe during the second half of the 20th century.

Back in Europe he settled in Italy, where his primary aim was making a living with the construction of wooden artistic toys to be sold by a New York commercial firm. He could sell his work irregularly, whereas he moved from place to place without a good salary as he wanted, and without making progress in his art. In fact, as his paintings show, in that period he got back to the Noucentisme of classical and Mediterranean inspiration. While he lived in Italy he couldn't exhibit his work. His stay at the Coast of France - six months - is a prolongation of the Italian voyage and a stopover for his arrival in Paris, where his art will suffer a very significant transformation.

The artistic Parisian environment of the mid 20's was a big cultural lab where the latest plastic, literary, musical, film theories were tested. It was a place where the most talented restless artists of that time could be found in typical cafés. During those effervescent years when his first constructive works were born, Torres-García lived in Paris, where after a decade, he returned to writing and actively participated in the theoretical discussions.

His friendship and work with artists like Theo van Doesburg, Luigi Russollo, Michel Seuphor y Piet Mondrian, and the will to create a group to resist to the surreal precepts were vital for achieving his definitive esthetical posture, the one he tried to teach in Montevideo after he settled there. The epicenter of this movement was called Cercle et Carré. A magazine of the group, with the same name, made collective exhibitions where the geometrical abstraction was the most evident common denominator. By then Torres met again with Pablo Picasso, just when the cubist influence was being substituted by the neoplasticism in Torres García's painting.

Despite how good he felt in his artistic research in Paris, he had to leave because he wasn't able to generate resources to support his own family. That's why, already separated from the group of Cercle et Carré, he moved to Madrid at the end of 1932. The year and a half he lived in the Spanish capital, as he expressed, was one of the most suffering periods of his life. Surely the contrast with the Parisian progressive environment and the fatigue of starting again at the age of 57, may have influenced Torres to name this period his Madrid epoch. A period he continued painting in a constructive code, using symbolic griddle and graph, those characters that the layman buying a painting these days shall associate with his name and his school anywhere all over the world.

His two possible choices to migrate were Mexico or Uruguay; finally he decided to get back to the country where he had been born. That's how in April 1934, he departed from Cadiz to his final destination: Montevideo, a virgin city in terms of modern art, a city where the artistic avant-garde was a name that made reference to a wide, unknown and distant reality.

In Montevideo, Joaquín Torres-García gave final shape to a discovery that had absorbed his whole life: the Constructive Universal Art, or Constructive Universalism, a vast vision certainly revolutionary for the local environment, whose seeds only germinated in the youngest artists, who considered Torres a God rather than a master.

As Juan Fló once have pointed out, there are three forces that converge to form his final Aesthetics: the Renaissance tradition in painting, the formalism of the European trends and the mystic character from primitive art. Then, "in the Constructive art, a synthesis of schools doesn't occur, but a union of the two large opposed groups in which Torres debated: on the one hand the painting of light, the instinctive sensorial spontaneity, the visual reality, and on the other hand geometry, structure, and reason, as Fló affirms with great clarity.

In his last 15 years of his life in Uruguay, Torres gave hundreds of conferences, wrote articles and books, taught, organized collective activities, created a workshop in the medieval and renaissance traditional way, running after the utopia of an impersonal art, able to reach a communion between the man and the cosmic order. Certainly, the results of his work were so important that the Escuela del Sur that followed his principles, represents a case only comparable to the Mexican muralist trend in Latin American art history.

EDUARDO ROLAND