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I'AI~
TISAN REVIEW
The show dealt not with the Paris period, however, but with the last
fifteen years of Torres-Garcia's life - 1934 to 1
()'t9 -
when he returned to
Uruguay, aged sixty, after forty-three years spent mostly in Europe, to
bring the message of modernism to Latin America. "El Taller Torres–
Garcia" was the workshop-school he founded in his effort to foster a new
modernist art of the Americas, a synthesis of geometric abstraction, con–
structivist principles, and the Pre-Columbian legacy, which would en–
compass everything fi'om monumental architecture to mural decoration to
domestic furniture and utilitarian objects. "The School of the South"
loosely describes the artists associated with hill! in this undertaking. Both
are all too unfamiliar. This exhibition and its excellent, comprehensive
catalogue, in fact, are the first efforts to reconstruct the history and philos–
ophy of the Taller Torres-Garcia, its influential founder, and the artists it
trained and encouraged.
Paintings, sculptures, constructions, pottery, marvelous painted furni–
ture, and more, formed equally out of high-minded abstraction and a taste
for the handmade, charted the expansiveness and pervasiveness of Torres–
Garcia's ideas. The show demonstrated, too, the course of instruction at
the Taller and its long-term influence on Latin American art. It was ab–
sorbing, and much of the work was on a high level, but the show, in
some ways, was tantalizing. Many of the group's early efforts have been
lost, and more important, their most ambitious projects, monumental mu–
rals and decorative schemes for architecture, were represented, of neces–
sity, only by catalogue photos. Still, a portrait emerged of an immensely
serious collective effort: a circle of talented, passionate idealists who
banded together to create a new universal language, unique to the
American experience, wholly modern but independent of technology - a
kind of modernist arts and crafts movement. It was a brave experiment
that produced some remarkable work. Together, the exhibition and its
catalogue formed a splendid, appetite-whetting introduction to this ob–
scure but fascinating chapter in the history of modernism.
The provocative January-February exhibition at Kraushaar Gallery,
Sigllificallt Others: Artist Wives
c:f
Artisrs,
examined the art of women who
have been defined largely in relation to their spouses, rather than as prac–
titioners in their own right. It was sobering to sec how many were all but
unknown, after more than twenty years of assiduous feminist research.
Some, such as Helen Torr (Arthur Dove's wife) were familiar to special–
ists. Only a handful had substantial reputations of their own, such as
Dorothy Dehner, who is increasingly recognized as an original sculptor
and draughtsman, albeit one closely linked to David Smith, her husband
for almost twenty-five years. They shared
J
grounding in Cubist and
Surrealist ideas, and there's even evidence that Dehner's influence on
