Universal Composition

Date

1933

Creator

Joaquín Torres García is known today not only as one of the foremost modernist European artists of the 1930s and ’40s but also as a tireless educator who brought modernist art and design to his home country by establishing an art school, a journal, and regular exhibitions in Montevideo. Working primarily in Spain and France, by 1930 he had developed his own distinctive style: a gridlike arrangement of squares and rectangles, each containing naively drawn signs and symbols recalling ancient pictographs and petroglyphs. Torres García’s abstractions were influenced by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s severely geometric compositions of squares and rectangles. In his writing and teaching, Torres García explained his belief that the picture writing of ancient peoples could be used by artists of the twentieth century as a vocabulary for "universal constructivism," the name he gave to his style. The creation of this mode was his way of providing people with a glimpse into a shared unconscious world, developed as an alternative to the exploration of dreams and imaginings presented by artists of the Surrealist movement such as Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. from Snite Museum of Art, Selected Works: Snite Museum of Art (Notre Dame, 2005)