Intertwining art history aesthetic theory and Latin American studies Aarnoud Rommens challenges contemporary Eurocentric revisions of the history of abstraction through this study of the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García. After studying and painting (for decades) in Europe Torres-García returned in 1934 to his native home Montevideo with the dream of reawakening and revitalizing what he considered the true indigenous essence of Latin American art: Abstract Spirit. Rommens rigorously analyses the paradoxes of the painter's aesthetic-philosophical doctrine of Constructive Universalism as it sought to adapt European geometric abstraction to the Americas. Whereas previous scholarship has dismissed Torres-García's theories as self-contradictory Rommens seeks to recover their creative potential as well as their role in tracing the transatlantic routes of the avant-garde. Through the highly original method of reading Torres-García's artworks as a critique on the artist's own writings Rommens reveals how Torres-García appropriates the colonial language of primitivism to construct the artificial image of pure pre-Columbian abstraction. Torres-García thereby inverts the history of art: this book teases out the important lessons of this gesture and the implications for our understanding of abstraction today. |The Art of Joaquín Torres-García Constructive Universalism and the Inversion of Abstraction | Visual Studies
