(light jazz piano music)
- [Dr. Zucker] We're at The Museum of Modern Art,
looking at a painting by Joaquin Torres-Garcia
called "Composition."
It was made in 1931,
between the First and the Second World War.
He was born in Uruguay,
but as an adolescent,
he moves with this family to Catalonia
in northeastern Spain,
where his father was from.
And he travels a lot during this early period.
- [Dr. Kilroy-Eubank] He spends much of his life,
up until he's 60, traveling.
He's in Madrid, Barcelona, New York City.
He spends a great deal of time in Paris.
- [Dr. Zucker] And when he's in these cities,
he's in the center of the avant-garde.
In New York, he makes connections
with some of the most radical artists
and the most adventurous collectors.
When he's in Barcelona,
he's spending time with Picasso and Joan Miro,
and he's working with Gaudi.
- [Dr. Kilroy-Eubank] And in Paris, he's similarly engaging
with a lot of different artists.
He forms a group with some of them
called Circle and Square.
- [Dr. Zucker] We're looking at
almost a kind of writing painting,
a painting that is drawing on a set of ideas.
- [Dr. Kilroy-Eubank] Torres-Garcia
is trying to reconceptualize the grid.
- [Dr. Zucker] But this grid is so different from the grids
of fellow Circle and Square member Piet Mondrian,
whose use of yellows and reds and blues,
blacks and whites, are tremendously formal
and remove all representational form.
Here, Torres-Garcia is reconstructing the grid,
so that it becomes a mosaic of elemental form.
- [Dr. Kilroy-Eubank] The lines in Mondrian's painting
have been developed using some type of straightedge,
and Torres-Garcia wanted to draw even more attention
to the handmade nature of his art.
So he hand-paints the lines.
We can see very visible brushstrokes
in black, in gray, in white,
this roughness of texture.
It also gives the different individual grids
architectural, or three-dimensional, qualities.
- [Dr. Zucker] Its rectangle and square
contains a recognizable form,
and these are basic things.
A ship, an arrow, a house, a man,
an anchor, a fish, a key, a heart,
the face of a clock,
perhaps a ruler, a bottle, a ladder,
a vessel, and a man's face.
- [Dr. Kilroy-Eubank] And these are symbols,
or what technically we should refer to as pictograms,
that Torres-Garcia believes are universal symbols
that transcend time,
that transcend geography.
- [Dr. Zucker] Which he calls constructive universalism.
This idea that our experiences
are the experiences of people in the past
at an elemental level,
and that our experiences in the future
will also be tied and connected,
that time itself and human experience
are not fragmented as is so often represented
in the modern industrial world
with our precise calendars and clocks,
but instead is part of a great
and deeply human continuum.
- [Dr. Kilroy-Eubank] And so this is not
a recognizable ship.
This is not a clock that's telling us a specific time
about a specific event.
This is not a recognizable human figure.
What Torres-Garcia has done
is built up these forms
using this grid-like structure
to give us this sense of universalism.
- [Dr. Zucker] Striving for this ideal
of core and universal human values
and human experiences,
as opposed to the political fragmentation
that had done so much damage
during the First World War,
and that was again asserting itself
in the early 1930s.
- [Dr. Kilroy-Eubank] So Torres-Garcia's use
of these pictograms
is borrowing from a number of different traditions.
While he's in Paris, for instance,
he's at the Ethnographic Museum
and looking at African art,
art that dates to the Americas
prior to the invasion of Europeans.
- [Dr. Zucker] So the fact that the artist
who had been born in Uruguay
is rediscovering American culture in Paris
is such a perfect example of the colonial condition.
And for me, this work is an example
of the way that the artist is grappling
with these complex historical circumstances.
I think that when people see this painting,
there may be a degree of frustration.
What does each symbol mean?
Should this be read as if I'm reading text?
But I think it's more subtle and more complicated than that.
I think that the artist wants a degree of ambiguity here,
although art historians have referenced,
because of the artist's copious writings,
some symbolic equivalencies.
For example, the fish,
which is a well-known symbol in the Christian tradition
as a reference to Christ,
is transformed also to include perhaps
the relationship between man and nature.
And the house in the upper right
is the fundamental idea of shelter.
And then there's the clock.
He's thinking about time as a historical force.
- [Dr. Kilroy-Eubank] And this is why he's drawing
on these pictographic forms
from across cultures and time.
He's making this larger statement about temporality
to create something universal
that will be here beyond his timing.
- [Dr. Zucker] And in fact, his art
would have a profound impact
on the later South American avant-garde.
- [Dr. Kilroy-Eubank] He returns to Uruguay
at the age of 60,
and continues to be extraordinarily active.
He writes manifestos,
establishes a school,
he's training artists,
and he has this profound legacy
that influences the next generation of artists
in place like Brazil, in Argentina, in Uruguay.
- [Dr. Zucker] And his impact is also felt
outside of South America,
most obviously in the work of the US-based
abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb,
who creates a series of grids
that are clearly informed by Torres-Garcia.
- [Dr. Kilroy-Eubank] Despite being this artist
who is transnational,
he's traditionally been omitted from conversations
about geometric abstraction.
- [Dr. Zucker] So many people know
the names Picasso or Mondrian,
but it's past time that we also know the name Torres-Garcia.
(light jazz piano music)