Despite these exhibitions, his circle of prosperous friends, and his significant connections to artists and art patrons, Torres-García sold little of the work he produced in the United States. The appeal of New York and the glamour of American modernism eventually wore off; his once beloved adopted country and city became overwhelming, a place where a foreigner, facing the pressure to conform to American socioeconomic standards, could not maintain his individuality. “Here all foreigners need to adapt: —which is to earn money no matter what,” Torres-García wrote in his manuscript on New York. “—America is a death trap—there is entry, but no exit. . . . This is New York—the city of 7 million people—which crushes the artist.”¹ The fast-paced city caught up to him, as did the cold climate, illness, seclusion, the language barrier, and the lack of a steady income.

Nor was Torres-García successful in his production of wooden toys, the idea that he told Barradas had brought him to New York in the first place. In 1921, in association with an existing firm called Dover Farms Industries, he established a company, Artist Toy Makers, and then in 1924, now back in Europe, a second one, Aladdin Toy Company, which maintained a New York warehouse financed by Force.² He also looked for carpentry and manufacturing resources in Italy—his first stop on leaving the United States—and began to market toys on a substantial scale to toy companies in Amsterdam, London, and Barcelona.³ Just when it seemed that the concern was about to take off, however, the warehouse burned down, along with its entire inventory. In 1924, Torres-García gave up the business for good.

Torres-García’s New York manuscript shows that he went back and forth between loving and despising North America. On the one hand he admired America’s cultural diversity, its modern, functional, and utilitarian designs, its gender equality, and the opportunities it offered for success. On the other hand he saw it as a country in which the individual’s ultimate goals were consumerism, commercialism, and industrialism—a place where if one didn’t adapt to capitalism and become its slave, one ceased to exist.⁴ In 1922, with his toy business floundering, Torres-García blamed himself for being tempted by “that hateful commercial thing” and for his inability to support his family by selling his art.⁵ Deciding to leave New York and return to painting, he left the city with his family on July 17. Living first in Italy, then in France and Spain, he eventually returned to Uruguay in 1934, where he would remain until his death in 1949.

Back in Europe, Torres-García continued to think of New York, and to maintain connections with it, despite the transatlantic distance. In 1926 he exhibited his sketchbook New York (1920) in his first solo exhibition at Galerie A. G. Fabré, Paris; in 1929 he welcomed Dreier to his studio; and in 1932 he made a sale of works to the New York collector Albert Eugene Gallatin. In 1927, Gallatin had founded the Gallery of Living Art, a museum-type space—in 1936, in fact, he renamed it the Museum of Living Art—intended to give an American audience access to the most recent developments of twentieth-century art, and in particular to the work of the School of Paris.⁶ Like Whitney, Dreier, and Arensberg, Gallatin was an American patron passionate about building a significant collection of modern art in the United States. He conceived his museum as an educational and experimental laboratory in which the public could view—free, and on a daily basis—major works by such artists as Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Klee, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and many others.⁷ In 1942, after losing his display space at New York University, Gallatin donated most of his collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum received the collection on a loan basis in 1943 and then definitively in 1952, contributing considerably to its importance as an institution conveying the history of modern art to audiences in the United States.

Gallatin was known for building his collection without professional advisors, instead talking to artists and critics and relying on his own intuition. By the early 1930s he was amassing a large group of Constructivist and Neo-Plasticist works. He liked to acquire art while traveling in Europe, often advised by the French artist Jean Hélion—a friend of Torres-García’s—and in 1932 he made a visit to Torres-García’s Paris studio. Shortly after his visit Gallatin purchased Composition (1929), Street (1930), Head (1930), and Construction (1931). All but Street were included in the 1937 and 1940 exhibitions of Gallatin’s collection at the Gallery of Living Art. A year later, writing about Gallatin’s collection, Hélion described Torres-García as an artist who created “an alphabet of natural forms” (fishes, boats, doors, etc.) and masterfully incorporated those “hieroglyphics” into his “checkerboard” paintings.⁸

Torres-García and Gallatin corresponded from 1932 until at least 1936, when the artist was living in Montevideo.⁹ In a letter of October 1, 1934, he called life in Montevideo “une belle vie,” and mentioned that he was laboring strenuously to develop not only his own work but also a large school of art with a new orientation.¹⁰ Upon arriving in Montevideo, Torres-García had thrust himself into mentoring a younger generation of Uruguayan artists through the formation, first, of the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (1935–39), which delved into pre-Columbian art and aimed to incorporate it into a geometric abstract language, and later the Taller Torres-García (1943–62), which encouraged experimental exercises in all media that would contribute to the creation of a new universal language based on art from past civilizations. The Taller Torres-García fostered many significant artists in Uruguay, among them Torres-García’s two sons, Horacio Torres and Augusto Torres, as well as Julio Alpuy, Gonzalo Fonseca, José Gurvich, and Francisco Matto.¹¹

While Torres-García was living in Montevideo in the 1940s, his work appeared in significant New York venues, and would continue to do so increasingly after his death. In 1942, The Museum of Modern Art acquired two Torres-García works, Composition (1932) and The Port (1942), both of which it included in the 1943 exhibition Latin American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, arranging 200 works to fill all of its second-floor galleries. The exhibition press release asserted that the Museum’s collection of Latin American art was the “most important of its kind in the world.”¹² It also listed Lincoln Kirstein, MoMA’s Consultant on Latin American Art, as the exhibition’s advisor. Kirstein’s catalogue essay was the first text in English to attempt a history of the art of South America.¹³

The acquisition of these two works by Torres-García was part of an early-1940s initiative to expand MoMA’s collection of modern and contemporary art by South American artists. Kirstein and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the Museum’s founding director, actively purchased works for the museum’s collection through the newly established Inter-American Fund, which was financially supported by Nelson Rockefeller.¹⁴ In an extensive report written in 1943, “Latin American Painting: A Comparative Sketch,” Kirstein identified South American countries he had visited—Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay—and provided biographies of artists and a bibliography of his sources.¹⁵ He also identified four painters he had visited in Uruguay the previous year: Juan Manuel Blanes, Pedro Blanes Viale, Pedro Figari, and Torres-García. Of the latter, he wrote:

“While it fell upon Pedro Figari to make his Uruguay known to the rest of the world of modern art, it had been the task of another Montevideano to explain the rest of the world of modern art to the land of his birth. The figure of Joaquín Torres-García is one of the most sympathetic in all Latin America. He is a man whose entire existence has been devoted to painting, who has sought all over the world, the most advanced experimentation, who has taught ceaselessly both by lectures and writing, and who is responsible for some beautiful and original pictures. . . . Yet he is a man of paradox, an Uruguayan who has spent most of his life in Catalonia, an international painter preoccupied with Pre-Columbian forms.”¹⁶

Although reductive, Kirstein’s take is notable in pointing out that Torres-García helped to introduce European art to Montevideo. Indeed, the artist’s Asociación de Arte Constructivo produced an extensive series of lectures, seminars, courses, and a magazine, Círculo y Cuadrado (the Uruguayan counterpart of the short-lived French journal Cercle et Carré, established in Paris in 1929 by Torres-García and Michel Seuphor), all aimed at disseminating the tools of constructivist art and at linking constructivism to pre-Columbian art—a revolutionary approach at the time.

In 1945, René D’Harnoncourt, then the Vice President of Foreign Activities at MoMA, visited Torres-García’s studio in Montevideo during a tour of South America. The visit was described by D’Harnoncourt’s guide, Giselda Zani, in an article in Removedor, a magazine published by the Taller Torres-García.¹⁷ The artist himself unfortunately missed D’Harnoncourt’s visit owing to fragile health, but his two sons, Horacio and Augusto, were present. According to Zani, D’Harnoncourt had a “profound and extreme reaction” to Torres-García’s work.¹⁸ He left with the gift of the artist’s book Universalismo constructivo (Constructive universalism, 1944), a collection of the 150 lectures Torres-García gave in Uruguay between 1934 and 1943—at over 1,000 pages, an encyclopedic testimony to his fundamental artistic principles.¹⁹ The following year, Torres-García wrote to thank D’Harnoncourt for the visit and to inform him of the newly published book Nueva escuela del arte de Uruguay (New school of art in Uruguay, 1946), which shows some of the works he had seen at the studio, as well as some by students at the Taller Torres-García.²⁰ He was donating a copy of the book to the Museum’s library as part of an ongoing book exchange—indeed he thanked the Museum for sending him two publications, Indian Art of the United States (1941) and Arts of the South Seas (1946).²¹ The contents of these books were surely relevant to his own desire to create a new type of visual language incorporating a universal, symbolic, and spiritual philosophy.

When Torres-García died, on August 8, 1949, he was preparing for two exhibitions in the United States the following year: Torres-García and His Workshop, at the Pan-American Union (now the Organization of American States) in Washington, D.C., and a solo exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. The Pan-American Union exhibition, with nearly forty works, was the first North American show for Torres-García and his Taller students.²² Its organizer, the Cuban art critic José Gómez-Sicre, had been part of the Pan-American Union’s Visual Arts Unit since 1946 and was among those working to give South American artists exposure to audiences in the United States through lectures, publications, and exhibitions.²³He had served as an advisor to Barr for the Modern Cuban Painters exhibition at MoMA in 1944, traveled extensively to secure acquisitions for North American museums, and had the freedom to organize exhibitions and promote rising artists. In 1961 he would organize a solo show of Torres-García at the Pan-American Union, Joaquín Torres-García of Uruguay.

Torres-García himself chose the works for the Janis Gallery show, which later traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ranging from 1931 to 1943, most of those he selected were in his constructivist style and resembled “mosaics made up of little compartments in which are found various astrological, commercial, architectural, anatomical and religious symbols . . . juxtaposed to demonstrate an idea or scene.”²⁴ The structural format of the grid, a matrix Torres-García conceived while in New York almost thirty years earlier, frames his symbols in vertical and horizontal lines within an architectural format to create a unified composition of line, structure, color, geometry, signs, texture, and an intrinsic sense of universality derived from his in-depth study of past civilizations. Sidney Janis later said that the Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman, a constant visitor to the gallery, had shown an interest in Torres-García’s work: “Barney would come almost every day and read the paintings to us. He would go into mythology, history, and everything else—they were pictographs.”²⁵ A similar impulse has driven the art historians Werner Haftmann and Irving Sandler to link artists such as Klee and Adolph Gottlieb to Torres-García; those artists’ works too combined mythic signs, abstraction, and grid compositions.²⁶

Torres-García’s art, spanning from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, encompasses an impressive trajectory. His temporary stay in New York in 1920–22 gave him a firsthand experience of American modernism and a chance to meet key members of the American avant-garde. Although his stay in the city had its difficulties, he was able to produce a significant amount of work there and to generate ideas that he would carry over to the latter part of his career. Out of the many cities that he visited during his travels, his time in “the grand metropolis of the United States” would remain for him a time when, along with his fellow Americans, he lived to the rhythm of the city.²⁷

This is the second section of the essay. Read Part 1 here. Excerpted from Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães’ essay “Spirit of America: Joaquín Torres-García in New York, 1920-1922” in the exhibition catalog Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern available at the MoMA Design Store.

The post Part 2: Spirit of America: Joaquín Torres-García in New York, 1920-1922 appeared first on post.

Each era has its own art. All of the classics have been contemporary in their era—have reflected the life of their era—have been men of their era. We too must be men—like them—of the present—of our era.

—Joaquín Torres-García, New York. Impresiones de un artista, 1921¹

On June 16, 1920, Joaquín Torres-García arrived in New York with his wife, Manolita, and their three young children, Olimpia, Augusto, and Ifigenia, ages five through nine (his fourth and last child, Horacio, would be born two years later in Italy). Since 1892, Torres-García had been living in Barcelona, but had grown disillusioned with local politics after government officials forced him to abandon a prestigious commission of large frescoes that he had been working on since 1913 at the Saló Sant Jordi, in the city’s Palau de la Generalitat.² So he left for New York, telling one of his closest friends, the Uruguayan painter Rafael Barradas, that he intended to work there on manufacturing wooden toys.³ But toy-making gave way to grander ambitions: in New York, Torres-García sharpened his skills as an abstract painter, even while he continued to use the cityscape as his main subject matter, a theme he had begun to explore in Barcelona in 1918. During the two years he lived in the city, he dedicated works to it, met leaders of the American avant-garde, showed in significant galleries, sold work to important collectors, and wrote about his experience in a manuscript he titled New York.⁴ His stay in the city began with enthusiastic optimism and a sense of purpose, motivating him to paint everything he saw.

In a letter to Barradas written in early 1920, before he left for the United States, Torres-García imagined New York as a giant, vibrant, dynamic city and proclaimed North America his country.⁵ A little later, writing from Bilbao, he told Barradas that he felt similarly in this city where everything he saw, “boats, things, railways, trams, cars, cranes, factories, etc.,” fused together to depict a new pictorial vocabulary “like in our paintings.”⁶ Barradas, like Torres-García a Uruguayan living in Europe, was influenced by the Cubists and the Futurists and developed a style he called vibracionismo (vibrationism), producing colorful, energetic, and fragmented compositions with an intense rhythm and sense of movement. Torres-García’s paintings of modern Spanish cities showed some of Barradas’s vibracionismo style and had an indirect Cubist inclination.⁷

City life, industrialism, and commerce dominate Torres-García’s first New York paintings of 1920. He described these works to Barradas as “synthetic impressions of a distorted New York,”⁸ and later, in his autobiography, Historia de mi vida, of 1939 (in which he wrote of himself in the third person), he wrote that they “correspond to a very personal vision, absolutely his, expressionistic and geometric at the same time, and very dynamic.”⁹ New York City: Bird’s Eye View (1920), for example, depicts a chaotic city through multiple perspectives, overlapping planes, vibrant colors, and imagery of a young, modern America: skyscrapers, bridges, steamships. Before the end of 1920, Torres-García had produced two sketchbooks of nearly 200 watercolors, numbering them consecutively and stenciling each page with the label “New York” or “N.Y.”¹⁰ These sketchbooks, which have yet to be studied in depth, provide an intimate look at his reaction to the city, in this respect resembling the sketches and studies of American counterparts such as Stuart Davis, John Marin, and Joseph Stella.

Torres-García was not the only immigrant artist to embrace the jolt of energy in American life; in the 1910s, and particularly after the outbreak of World War I had led to a wave of departures from Europe, the “vibrant electricity” and “vital force” of New York mesmerized many French expatriates, including Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Francis Picabia.¹¹ One of the city’s reporters called this migration a “French invasion . . . of the young and rebellious in the art of Europe.”¹² Duchamp urged his compatriots to let go of the “Old World” and accept America as “the country of the art of the future.”¹³ Gleizes spoke of America as a “calm and ordered” place where the “individual counts” and “art is possible”; he was inspired by the movement and stimulation he experienced in the streets.¹⁴ Picabia had felt the same kind of sensation when he came to America in 1913, declaring New York a “cubist, futurist city” because it expressed life, spirit, and modern thought through its architecture, skyscrapers, and subways.¹⁵

Torres-García’s expressive metropolitan imagery evidently appealed to Katherine Dreier, an active collector and impresario of modern art under the name of the Société Anonyme, which she had cofounded with Duchamp and Man Ray. In his autobiography Torres-García writes of a visit from Dreier to his studio at 4 West 29th Street, leading to her purchase of three works for the Société: New York Docks (1920), New York City: Bird’s Eye View, and New York Street Scene (1920).¹⁶ (She made another purchase in 1929, when Torres-García was living in Paris and invited her to visit his studio there;¹⁷ the visit led to her acquisition of a 1929 work called Docks, and the artist also gave her a suite of six watercolors, Artists’ Ball, that he had made in New York in 1921.) New York Street Scene, in oil and collage on board, depicts a frenzied city street densely packed with motor vehicles. Advertising signage scattered across the composition evokes the commercial market’s permeation of public space. Above and to the right, before a facade of tenementlike buildings, Torres-García paints the word “America” in capital letters, the letter “e” wedged below the letters “m” and “r.” Right below it is a collage element, a fragment of a letter dated August 6, 1920, from the publishing house Harcourt, Brace and Howe, Inc., rejecting the artist for a job. Emboldened by this refusal, Torres-García pastes the letter on the composition’s surface, paints a patriotic star over it, and partly frames it with a deconstructed American flag. The superimposition of the letter over images of America’s booming industrial and commercial economy points to the incongruity between the country’s promises and the reality of his own situation.¹⁸

Torres-García’s brief connection to the Société Anonyme and the artists involved with it had a significant impact on his artistic maturity. Founded at 19 East 47th Street, New York, in 1920, the same year he arrived in the city, the Société established itself as an educational organization designed “for the promotion of the study in America of the Progressive in Art, based on Fundamental Principles, and to render aid in conserving the vigor and vitality of new expressions of beauty in the Art of today.”¹⁹ The Société organized exhibitions, publications, and educational programming to promote modern artists such as Duchamp, Stella, Man Ray, Marsden Hartley, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, and John Storrs. Between 1920 and its closure in 1950, it produced eighty exhibitions, eighty-five educational public programs, and nearly thirty publications, and it amassed a collection of over 1,000 works, now at the Yale University Art Gallery.²⁰

Although Torres-García’s contact with Dreier was limited, and the works of his that she purchased were never exhibited during his lifetime (New York Docks was shown in 1952, New York City: Bird’s Eye View and New York Street Scene not until 1971), she recognized his contribution to the evolving language of modern painting.²¹ In 1949, in one of many drafts she wrote for a catalogue of the Société’s collection, she called him one of “those artists who have a passion for Art. . . . For him it took many forms. . . . He was a deeply rooted individualist, creating his personal statements, which gave him a strong independent position in the art world.” She went on to describe his works in the collection as “very individual in expression. . . . only those who have a keen eye for the construction and division of space . . . can realize his achievement.”²² Torres-García’s New York experience helped him to establish the structural matrix of his constructivist compositions of the 1930s, mainly by revealing the grid structuring the city’s monumental frontality and balancing its vertical and horizontal elements, creating the “division of space” that Dreier mentioned. In New York (1921), for example, he uses the geometric configuration of a building facade and an adjoining elevated rail- or roadway to establish a compartmentalized overall composition. This kind of complex construction of forms reappears in Composition (1931), where the composition is divided into geometric shapes and rectangular substructures housing Torres-García’s recurring symbols for man, space, time, and other concepts indexed in his works by figures, clocks, rulers, stars, and cardinal points, for example.

In addition to Dreier, Torres-García made a number of connections in New York that fostered friendships and established him in the city’s art scene. Through the Catalan architect and urban planner Cebriá de Montoliu, for example, who had emigrated to New York in early 1920, he met Walter Pach, an artist, critic, and advisor who had worked closely with artists Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn in the organization of what has come to be called the Armory Show—the International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory in 1913.²³ Pach offered Torres-García room and board in a building at 13 East 14th Street for a couple of months before the artist and his family relocated to 4 West 29th Street. Pach also introduced Torres-García to possible sources of employment and to artists such as John Xceron, who in turn introduced him to Stella and Max Weber. It was at Stella’s studio that Torres-García met “the Whitney ladies”—Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who would found the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931, and her assistant Juliana R. Force, the museum’s first director.²⁴

In 1918, at 147 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village, Whitney had created an exhibition space called the Whitney Studio Club where she promoted the works of avant-garde and American artists. Here, in the spring of 1921, she offered Torres-García an exhibition, to be shared with Davis and Stanislaw Szukalski.²⁵ (Torres-García would also exhibit in the Club’s Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture in April of the following year.) The exhibition was warmly reviewed in the New York Times as “perhaps one of the most interesting, certainly the most unusual, exhibitions that has been in the gallery this year.”²⁶ (Exhibitions earlier in the year had included etchings and drawings by Charles Frederick William Mielatz and James Donald Corley and decorative textiles and figurative sculptures by Salvatore Bilotti, Harold Perry Erskine, and Gerome Brush.)²⁷ Although the show was shared with Davis and Szukalski, it was Torres-García who received the most attention from the press. Critic Hamilton Easter Field described him as “closer to the reality of things, closer to life, closer to himself [than the other two]. His talent is more vital. His paintings of life in our modern cities are admirable in their compactness.”²⁸

Torres-García had come to New York with a great deal of his earlier work in his luggage (he wrote about doing the same thing when traveling from Barcelona to Madrid in 1919), allowing him to include works from previous years in the Whitney Studio Club exhibition and others.²⁹ Among the earliest works shown at the Studio Club, from c. 1908, was El ensanche de Barcelona (Suburbio de Barcelona) (The expansion of Barcelona [Suburb of Barcelona]), an image of Barcelona as a city on the brink of expansion into a modern metropolis. He exhibited this painting with later works such as Calle de Nueva York (New York street, 1920), which depicts the city as a single urban conglomerate of buildings, transportation, and signage. In incorporating his new pictorial language, works like these illustrate the evolution of Torres-García’s style.

At the same time that Torres-García was showing at the Whitney Studio Club he was participating in Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings Showing Later Tendencies in Art, a group exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, from April 16 through May 15.³⁰ In the course of one year, then, Torres-García had participated in two prominent exhibitions in the United States. The Philadelphia show featured artists Arthur Dove, Marius de Zayas, Hartley, Man Ray, Stella, Weber, and others, and was applauded as a great success—“in every way the best show of modern American art ever held,” according to Field, who again noted Torres-García among those artists he saw as “exceptional.”³¹ The show included Torres-García’s painting Fourteenth Street (Business Town) (1920), which shows the lively intersection of 14th Street and Fifth Avenue, a few doors away from where he and his family had spent the summer of their arrival.

Torres-García was also connected to the Society of Independent Artists, a New York–based group of Americans and Europeans who supported annual exhibitions of contemporary art. Founded in 1916 by Dreier, Duchamp, Gleizes, Marin, Pach, Man Ray, Stella, Walter Arensberg, and John Sloan, the society followed the model of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris, established in 1884, and like its French counterpart it staged “equal-opportunity” annual exhibitions in which artists of all schools could exhibit together independent of jury decisions and prizes.³² Like Dreier and Whitney, Arensberg and his wife, Louise, were important American collectors and patrons of modern art. In 1950 they would donate their remarkable collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Their home, at 33 West 67th Street, was a hub for artists and intellectuals; among their frequent guests were Duchamp, Picabia, Crotti, Gleizes, Sheeler, Stella, the poet William Carlos Williams, and the artist and art dealer de Zayas.³³

Torres-García participated in the society’s fifth annual exhibition, which was installed at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel from February 26 through March 24, 1921, and was, according to one critic at the time, “quite the best the Independents had given.”³⁴ He also attended a costume ball that the society staged at the hotel during the show’s run. For this event Torres-García wore a garment of his own design: canvas overalls painted to depict New York City. On the front of the two pant legs he drew the words “New” and “York.” The upper half of the costume contained the words “Uptown,” “Times Square,” and “World Trade Center” amid a pulsating check pattern (he also wore a checkered long-sleeved shirt); the lower half represented the East Side and the West Side of Manhattan, with Broadway and Fifth Avenue as the city’s main arteries, and each leg was emblazoned with a skyscraper, the Woolworth and Banker’s Trust buildings. On the back of the costume were written “Central Park” and “Bronx Zoo,” and below them “Bowery” and “Wall Street”; at the very bottom was a depiction of the Brooklyn Bridge and a ferry.³⁵ The costume further elaborated Torres-García’s appropriation of the urban motif. Rather than simply depicting New York, he was New York, embedding the city’s fundamental structures in his clothing and body: uptown, downtown, east, west, his limbs dividing the architectural space that would come into play in his later work.

A New York Times reporter called the ball “pretty,” given the “prismatic colors” of most of the costumes and the predominance of the color yellow in both costumes and décor.³⁶ Specifically mentioning Torres-García, Xceron, and Stella, the article praised the men as more adventurous than the women: “The New York Times Building found itself unexpectedly dancing with the Independents on the costume of J. Torres Garcia [sic], the Spanish artist, who had New York City outlined on his costume. . . . John Xeron [sic], Greek futurist artist, was in a futuristically painted costume with a tall futuristic hat; Joseph Stella, who painted Brooklyn Bridge—in a picture—not the bridge itself—in a Spanish mantle as an Emperor ‘with a kingdom’ he insisted.”³⁷ Torres-García did not lose the opportunity to sketch at the ball, producing fast mini-portraits of Xceron, Stella, and others. In spirit these sketches echo his Artists’ Ball watercolors of the same year, which he would make a gift of to Dreier in Paris in 1929. Whether those watercolors refer to the Society of Independent Artists ball at the Waldorf or to other social gatherings that he attended in New York, they supply anecdotal observations of his convivial, active social life in the city.

This is the first section of the essay. Read Part 2 here. Excerpted from Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães’ essay “Spirit of America: Joaquín Torres-García in New York, 1920-1922” in the exhibition catalog Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern available at the MoMA Design Store.

The post Part 1: Spirit of America: Joaquín Torres-García in New York, 1920-1922 appeared first on post.