20TH CENTURY PAINTING IN FRANCE, BELGIUM, SPAIN AND ITALY
TORRES-GARCÍA, Joaquín (Montevideo, 1874 – Montevideo, 1949)
Architectural Composition with Figures
1925-1926
Construction, 50 x 52 x 5 cm
Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza
This work reproduces the lower order of the fresco Les Arts, painted in 1916, the third of those executed by Joaquín Torres-García in the Saló Sant Jordi of the county council offices in Barcelona. The figures have been replicated with great accuracy, but the architectural composition is completely different.
For the fresco Les Arts—as for the rest of the frescoes in the Saló Sant Jordi—there is a complete study (lower order, main order, and lunette on a single sheet of paper of 133 x 63 cm) executed by the artist around 1916, and very often exhibited and published, previously belonging to the artist’s heirs and at present in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. Unlike the work we are analysing, the architecture represented in that study is actually that of the Saló Sant Jordi. A pencil drawing (33.5 x 24 cm) representing a study for the figure on the right has also been published.
This work’s bibliography presents some uncertainties regarding its dating. Without explicitly mentioning it, Ràfols (1926) would include it among those executed in Villefranche-sur-Mer in 1925 or at the beginning of 1926. According to Sureda (1993) it dates from 1916, whereas the authors of the catalogue of the exhibition El Noucentisme, Perán, Suàrez y Vidal (Barcelona 1994–1995) consider it to date from around 1925. Guillermo de Osma (Madrid 1996), entitling it Project for the Palau Sant Jordi, fixes the date around 1925, although he points out “the possibility that it may have been executed at a later date”.
In 1912 Joaquín Torres-García received a commission from Prat de la Riba, President of the Catalan Mancomunitat (association of municipalities) for the decoration, with a series of fresco murals, of the Saló Sant Jordi in the county council offices in Barcelona. Due to their symbolic importance, both the commission and the work itself are usually considered as a key moment in the development of Noucentisme. For the artist, who was then thirty-eight, this meant the official recognition by the political and cultural forces then associated with the emerging Catalan nationalism. Obviously, during the next four years Torres-García devoted all his efforts to the design and execution of that project. He painted the first fresco, La Catalunya eterna, between 28 July and 10 August 1913. The work became a subject of controversy among the critics. The artist did not execute the second fresco until September 1915. The third one, the one dealt with here, was begun on 18 August 1916 and finished on 28 of the same month. The forth, bearing the inscription Lo temporal no és més que sìmbol (Temporal is just a symbol), was painted between 18 and 23 September of that same year. Prat de la Riba died in June 1917 and Torres-García, who had already made the study for the fifth fresco, began to suspect he would never paint it. In fact, in February 1918 Puig i Cadafalch, the new president of the Mancomunitat, cancelled the commission.
The frescoes of the Saló Sant Jordi do not show a uniform style. The first, second and third are clearly classical, particularly the first and the third; the fourth explores a new register—it is difficult to say whether medievalist or baroque—whereas the study for the fifth announces an industrial and contemporary iconography in contrast with the allegorical and timeless style of the previous compositions.
As I have said before, the figures of the work we are analysing correspond exactly both to those in the Les Arts fresco and those in the above mentioned watercolour study. Evidently, they are very close, from a stylistic point of view, to other 1916 works, such as the female figure in the frontispiece of Un ensayo de clasicismo, a book published by the artist in 1916, which came out precisely at the end of August, just after finishing his third fresco. Those reasons support the dating of around 1916, although we should dismiss the label of “project” attributed to it, which would be incompatible with the existence of the sketch in which he draws in great detail the real architecture of the Saló Sant Jordi and which coincides, in terms of its technique, with the sketches for the other frescoes.
In order to understand the reasons for dating this work in 1925 we should say something else about the artist’s life. After the commission for the Saló Sant Jordi was cancelled, Torres-García’s work developed rapidly and he joined the young artists (Barradas, Miró, Ricart, etc.) constituting the emerging new Catalan avant-garde. Then he tried to combine his painting activity with the setting up of a firm that made educational wooden toys. The difficulties he came across in both pursuits persuaded him to move to Italy in 1922, in the hope that working conditions there would be more favourable. When he realised that that was not the case, he moved back to Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice, that same year. There, during 1925, he intensified his dedication to painting and, due to a series of reasons—theoretical, sentimental, and practical—he returned to classicism, which he had abandoned in 1917. In June 1926 he exhibited in Paris, in the Galerie A. G. Fabre, thirty-four works in which, next to the “vibrationist” paintings executed in New York, he showed the classicist works painted in Villefranche-sur-Mer. Most of them belonged to the second group. Undoubtedly one of the reasons for his return to classicism lies in the artist’s reaction when he learnt that the new president of the Barcelona County Council (appointed by the government of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, hostile to Catalan nationalism) had ordered that Torres-García’s frescoes be replaced by another set of paintings, different from the former both in their subject and in their style. In spite of a campaign to preserve them, organised by eminent artists and art critics, in 1925 the frescoes had finally been covered up (Torres-García thought they had been destroyed), a fact that is explicitly mentioned in the catalogue of the Galerie Fabre exhibition.
According to Perán, Suàrez, and Vidal (Barcelona 1994–1995) such would be the context in which this work was created. In favour of the 1925 dating, they refer to the aforementioned book by Ràfols, published in 1926, and a photograph of Torres-García in his studio in Villefranche-sur-Mer, in which the wooden construction we are analysing can be seen, hanging from the wall in the background, next to other works.
Although neither Ràfols’ text nor the photograph are conclusive proof that this work dates from 1925 or the beginning of 1926—since the artist might well have unpacked and hung in his Villefranche studio a work executed in 1916—the verisimilitude of this argument is reinforced by circumstances concerning the artist’s life around that date. In an interesting series of four letters addressed to Barradas between 7 March and 24 October 1926, Torres-García reflects upon his return to painting and his stand with respect to classicism and the avant-garde.
“My Barcelona paintings—the last ones you had seen—are somewhat outdated. This past year of 1925 was a year in which I worked very hard and in which everything I had accumulated in New York came out. You would love to see how new it is, how personal, though almost within Cubism (a Cubism that feels alive), and how everything has become clear and lives freely. I myself have made the frames for those works, and they are like an extension of the painting—you should see the frames!—[…] I have done my usual things, what I used to do in the beginning, but completely transformed [...]. This return to classical principles is the result of a great struggle and much thinking throughout many years—and my New York book is the fruit of that struggle—and it ends with the triumph of that idea of art. Taking a look at what is produced in the rest of the world (but for some exceptions unknown to me, which probably exist) I can see that painting in general, although very sensitive, very refined and very profound, if you like, lacks poetry, grandeur and a humane aspect. And I consider Cubism to be as classical, in terms of its essence, as an antique statue or a piece of architecture. And this is the great step taken by painting, which has freed itself from realism in order to attain pure form. Therefore Cubism is all right, but in this field one should do more than a fragment, one should do something complete, human, great, architectural, poetic, complete! Therefore, I have freed myself from the old school and from the new, because all that lives in me as a natural thing [...]”.
The work analysed here (and for which a new title is suggested) seems to respond to the intentions expressed in the lines above, not only in terms of the technical details of its execution (the frame and the invented architecture, made of strips of wood, the deliberate poverty of the materials used for the work, which seems to fulfil the requirement of giving priority to the structural frame, the form, over the perceptive qualities of the piece, etc.) but mainly in what concerns its spirit. Once he had decided to return with great determination to painting after ten years of travels and (to a greater or lesser extent commercial) adventures, Torres-García tried to start anew, grafting in the trunk of his achievements of the Saló Sant Jordi frescoes of ten years before, the shoots of what in the meantime he had learnt about modernity. In Paris, where he settled in October 1926, he developed—from that new starting point and precisely in a series of wooden constructions, most of them painted and some completely abstract, which sum up, at least during the first years, what is most essential in his production—his more fruitful and personal creative period.
Tomàs Llorens
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