ABSTRACT
In the history of modern art in South America the name that sounds with the greatest resonance—at least to European and North American ears—is that of Joaquin Torres-Garcia. Torres-Garcia was born in Montevideo in 1874, and he died there in 1949; yet his life as an artist traces the most familiar of modern scenarios—the scenario of exile. Torres-Garcia's life as an artist actually began in Spain, where his family went to live in 1891. It is, in any case, the "Constructivist" paintings, begun at the age of fifty-five, to which Torres-Garcia owes his international reputation, and it is these, of course, that dominate the exhibition. In 1929, the year he met Mondrian, he produced his first so-called "Constructivist" paintings—and the term had better be left in quotation marks to avoid confusion with the kind of Constructivist art that is firmly based on nonrepresentational form.
