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PARTISAN REVIEW
American modernists. He exhibited with Stuart Davis at the Whitney Studio
Club in the 1920s, whlle reproductions of his works in magazines and a mar–
velous painting in the Gallatin Collection seem to have resonated with both
Gottlieb and David Smith early in their mature careers.
What remains constant throughout Torres-Garda's work is its assertion
of an underlying geometric order and its lexicon of pared-down images,
ranging from the descriptive to the symbolic, distilled equally from percep–
tions of everyday urban life--boats, trains, buildings, cars-and from abstract
concepts such as time and love. What remains constant too is a mood of
restraint, of reduction to essentials, manifest in a subdued, earthy palette, a firm
but slightly scratchy line, and that omnipresent forthright grid.
In the exhibited works, Torres-Garda's mastery of a Cubist idiom was
evident in a loose, elegant 1917 collage deploying mattress ticking and a label
from Maggi bouillon
en cubitos.
His later preoccupations were plain in works
such as
Hoy,
1921, a wonderful picture composed of collaged Barcelona tram
tickets, painted semaphore flags, the flags of the U.S., Italy, and France, an
alphabet, calendar pages, and a clock face, not to mention part of an envelope
mailed from Puerto Rico in 1918 and an enigmatic scrap of paper stamped
"opened by ·censor."
Hoy
is like a chart of the artist's travels; its delicate, stac–
cato drawing reading as both pure line and a diagram of Atlantic crossings.
Tradicion del Hombre Abstract,
made in Uruguay in 1941, is both a handsome,
expressive picture and a manifesto of Torres-Garda's aesthetic: his unshake–
able belief that all art, whether ancient or modern, sophisticated or naive, was
rooted in harmonious, geometric,
abstract
relationships; his affection for hum–
ble materials; his love of signs, invented alphabets, and symbols. Drawn in
pencil and ink on wood, the picture is an aesthetic time line, a genealogy of
Torres-Garda's principal sources and influences, presented as one of his ele–
gantly proportioned, frontal, geometric scaffolds. Antiquity, the Middle Ages,
and the Renaissance are cited, along with Pythagoras, Christ, El Greco, Bach,
and Beethoven; beneath it all is a zone marked "Prehistory;" throughout,
Torres-Garda's personal symbols-fish, arrows, pentagran1s, invented alpha–
bets-are threaded into the grid. At once an evocative palimpsest and a
brilliant graphic design, this odd picture also reads as a weathered artifact of
urban life, a record of an ancient civilization that, startlingly, turns out to be
our own recent past.
Good as the show at Jan Krugier was, the selection, by its very nature, was
slightly erratic.
It
would be exciting to see a coherent study of this engaging
painter's work. There was a retrospective at the Guggenheim more than
twenty-five years ago. Isn't it time for another one?
It's not altogether far-fetched to describe
Lightwater: Sourdre,
Bertrand
Ivanoff's monumental installation in a derelict warehouse at Staten Island's
Bay Street Landing, as a post-modernist reincarnation of some of the spirit of
