Joaquín Torres-García, considered the father of Latin American Constructivism, lived in Europe and the United States for almost 40 years before returning permanently to Uruguay. These travels exposed him to different modernist movements including Constructivism, Cubism and Neo-Plasticism, while he was living in Paris and New York. The period between 1926 and 1933 in Paris was Torres-García’s most mature, punctuated by his co-founding (with Michel Seuphor) of the renowned Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) movement, which presented the international art scene with an alternative to the Parisian Surrealists. This resulted in the seminal 1930 exhibition of Constructivist artists, including Joaquín Torres-García, at the legendary Galerie 23 in Paris.

The present lot, Untitled, 1930, introduces the structures of thick, black orthogonal lines creating a Neo-Plastic grid that organizes Torres-García’s compositions into geometric compartments, reminiscent of Piet Mondrian. Inside these windowed façades, Torres-García includes quotidian symbols—bottles, a pot, an abstract figure and a key—to depict a schematic urban scene from his own imagination. At the same time, the perfectly balanced geometrical plane and earth-toned palette are inspired by Pre-Columbian art, which he considered to be “the perfect synthesis of structure and figuration” (Luis Pérez-Oramas, Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern, New York, 2015, p. 108). The jarring and vibrant chromatic field of pink, gray, yellow and orange, reflects Torres-García’s first experiments with colors that he observed in Peruvian Nazca ceramics. Although seemingly simple, this composition is quite radical as it combines “the European modern-art-practices such as abstraction, to an indigenous artistic legacy, with the aim of creating a sense of timelessness and universality” (Luis Pérez-Oramas, Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern, New York, 2015, p. 108). Untitled, 1930 is thus an emblematic painting that delineates the principles behind Joaquín Torres-García’s Constructive Universalism vision, reminding us of the pivotal contributions that the artist made to modernism, most recently reflected in his 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern.