When Joaquín Torres-García returned to his native Uruguay in 1934, he was 60 years old and had lived abroad for more than 40 years. During the first years of his American relocation, before he became the referential Master at Taller Torres-García, he founded and directed the Asociación de Arte Constructivo, the achronym for which—AAC—appears signed on most of his paintings from 1935 to 1938. During these years Torres-García created a series of black-and-white abstract paintings that constitute one of the most striking repertoires of synthetic abstraction ever produced in the Americas. On view in MoMA’s sixth-floor galleries as part of the retrospective Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern is a group of 10 paintings from this series, anchored by the monumental Estructura abstracta tubular (Abstract tubular structure) (1937) on loan from Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, Venezuela.
This work, arguably the largest abstract painting ever made by Torres-García, has the dimensions and visual texture characteristic of a mural painting. Closer examination, however, reveals that the large canvas’ sandy surface is not due to the technique of fresco painting, (which Torres-García mastered since his early years as oficial painter of Catalonia’s Commonwealth) but rather to the use of mixed pictorial media that includes pigments, binder, and giesso. In collaboration with Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, and Fundación Museos Nacionales in Venezuela, MoMA’s painting conservator Anny Aviram organized a workshop focusing on the condition and restoration of this work. What they discovered made curators and collection specialists reconsider what was first deemed a fragile condition.
When Torres-García painted this work in 1937, he prepared his materials by mixing in the pigment and binder with giesso. The sandy texture of the latter wasn’t thoroughly mixed in before it was applied to the surface of the canvas. Instead, lumps in the material settled on the canvas as it was painted over. Shortly thereafter, as the painting dried, the air in these lumps popped and produced fractures on the pictorial surface. Conservation specialists refer to these incisions as “drying-cracks,” meaning that the rupture is not a consequence of possible degeneration in the condition of the painting, but rather a mark that is present since the work’s early stages. Understanding these drying-cracks as built-in, constitutional marks sheds significant insight on the artist’s intention. An experimented painter, Torres-García was well aware of the consequences of mixing in giesso and applying lumpy media onto a canvas. In doing so, expecting cracks to emerge, he was intentionally giving the painting an aged appearance. An absolutely modern work in its abstract form and grid-based construction, Estructura abstracta tubular is at the same time a matured ruin, subjected to the patina of time. Oblivious to the modern messianic fascination with progress typical of early 20th-century artists, Torres-García’s modernizing visions were instead heavily rooted in antiquity and the ancestral. This fascination with an unreachable past found expression, not only in his subject matter—telluric deities, pre-Columbian America—but also in his preference for rough finishes and precarious constructions. This dichotomic interest in both the modern and the ancient, the time of the avant-garde and the erosion of temporality, is a central narrative of the current exhibition. The idea of Torres-García as an arcadian-modern master finds scientific grounds in the close study and analysis of works such as Estructura abstracta tubular. Interdisciplinary efforts such as this are the backbone of healthy collecting and exhibiting institutions. The close collaboration and reciprocal influences between curatorial and conservation agents—between the the artwork’s exegesis and its scientific observations—underlies an exhibition’s motivations and enables new scholarship. The ability to exhibit this work at MoMA, alongside related works from the same period, owes much to this interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration.