The Worlds of Joaquín Torres-García, an exhibition comprised of over sixty paintings, sculptures and works on paper from 1896 to 1949. Drawn from the private collection of the family of the artist, this group of works has never been exhibited as a whole. Best known for his semi-abstract paintings of universal symbols that emphasize the contrast and synthesis between "classical" and "modern" beauty, Torres-García defies easy categorization. This exhibition demonstrates his protean reach as an artist, pushing not only the boundaries of abstraction but also bringing modern vitality and innovation to landscape, cityscape, and portraiture, themes that preoccupied him throughout his working life in Barcelona, New York, Paris, Madrid, and Montevideo.

The worlds of Joaquín Torres-García converged across the Atlantic in the 1950s, retracing the peripatetic routes that he himself had earlier traveled—from Montevideo to Europe to New York and back again—amid a broad reassessment of the Constructivist legacy in American art. Memorial exhibitions at the Sidney Janis Gallery and the Pan-American Union, both in 1950, pondered his position in terms interchangeable with those lately applied to American Abstract Expressionism, then in its infancy. Barnett Newman, among the New York School’s most sharp-witted interlocutors and an admirer of “primitive” art, found a kindred, metaphysical spirit in Torres-García, over whose work he marveled at the Janis show. “Newman was able to understand the subtle use of symbolism better than any other artist,” Janis recalled. “He came to the gallery every day and explained to other artists his interpretation of them through knowledge of ancient graphic expression, mythology, philosophy, archaeology, Zen, etc.” 2 For Newman and the emergent New York School, Torres-García’s doctrine of Constructive Universalism— expressed through the assimilation of pictographic symbols within the ideal geometry of the grid—epitomized the identity, and plausible originality, of American abstraction.

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