Zack Hatfield on Joaquín Torres-García
Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949) was a roving messiah concurrently forward of and behind the curve—a didactic, spinoff pioneer who sought nothing lower than to beget a standard language that might transcend time and tradition. He was additionally nice with children. Combining these qualities, the Uruguayan-born artist established a toy-making enterprise throughout the interwar years, a pursuit explored earlier this 12 months in an impressive survey at Ortuzar Tasks. Spurs to youngsters’s imaginations on each side of the Atlantic, his fanciful playthings have been, the present argued, key to Torres-García’s quixotic program of Common Constructivism, a mode that mingled pre-Columbian iconography with strains of the European avant-garde right into a novel modernism that aspired to show “America” on its head (as demonstrated in his iconic 1943 drawing América invertida [Inverted America]). The motion was his second wind, and within the Thirties and ’40s it swept many Latin American artists up in a gust of decolonial fervor.
Working as a schoolteacher and frescoist in Barcelona, Torres-García had by 1917 damaged with the reactionary classicism of Catalonian Noucentisme and had lastly yielded to the spirit of the brand new. “All the things is toys and portray!” the forty-three-year-old artist exclaimed in a letter to his good friend, artist Rafael Barradas. Beneath the spell of Friedrich Fröbel’s and Maria Montessori’s progressive pedagogy, he designed his toys to be disassembled and, with interchangeable elements, put again collectively once more. (As metaphors for a war-torn world primed for transformation, his reconfigurable constructions sit someplace between the ill-starred idealism of the Bauhaus and the gleeful nihilism of Dada.) He handmade all his objects from wooden, a cloth steeped in recollections of his household’s carpentry workshop in Montevideo: The previous would all the time belong to Torres-García’s future. Ever the dreamer, he known as his start-up Aladdin Toys.
In 1920, the Torres-García household moved to Manhattan, the place they lived for 2 cash-strapped years earlier than returning to Europe. Regardless of its hardships, New York proved its personal playscape: a teetering grid of verticals and horizontals and mechanized pace. The artist sketched every thing (storefronts, bridges, individuals) and met everybody (Stuart Davis, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney). He drew the town on white overalls and wore them to a gala. He furthered such spatial experiments via his toys, fusing the collage-like geometrization of Cubism with the cartoon. These objects commanded a big white stage on the gallery—a miniature carnival of zoo animals, tropical birds, vehicles, and caricatured metropolitans. Amongst these greater than sixty feats of charisma and pictorial economic system have been a duck with three swappable heads, a delight of jagged lions and leopards, a wishbone-shaped giraffe, a gray-suited man whose blocky silhouette seems lifted from the Manhattan skyline, and a harlequin worthy of the Cirque Calder (which Torres-García attended together with his son in 1928, when the household lived in Paris). Their modular, frontal aesthetic proliferated throughout close by drawings and work, akin to Formas trabadas con figura humana (Interlocked Types with Human Determine), 1933, whose relatively Lego-like configuration apotheosizes a protean New Man.
“Activity of childhood: to deliver the brand new world into symbolic house,” wrote critic and toy collector Walter Benjamin, to “acknowledge the brand new as soon as once more.” Like many modernists impressed by the best of the kid, Torres-García delighted within the categorical contradictions embodied by toys, issues animated by creativity and consensus, progress and ritual: common but deeply private cultural ciphers that handle to sidestep distinctions between summary and figurative artwork, to not point out artwork and nonart (transitional objects, certainly). Accordingly, the transformables Torres-García produced for kids might be understood as totems akin to the masks, anchors, fish, suns, and different “primitive” pictographs that fill the irregular Mondrianesque grids of his signature canvases à la Common Constructivism, whose South American adherents yearned to revive a “pure” Amerindian custom that had been disrupted by colonization. Shadowed by this nostalgic motion in addition to by the present conflict unleashed by Russia in opposition to Ukraine—eighty-eight years after Torres-García’s fateful homecoming to Montevideo in 1934, as fascism crept throughout Europe—this present’s whimsical creatures walked a curious line between naïveté and disenchantment, the wide-eyed prodigies of a utopia that by no means stood an opportunity.
— Zack Hatfield
