‘School’ Tells Epic Tale of Torres-Garcia

The informative, inspiring story told by the Iturralde Gallery exhibition “The School of the South: El Taller Torres-Garcia” is an abbreviation of an ongoing epic tale of assimilation, nativism and universalism. It’s the story of Joaquin Torres-Garcia, who left his native Montevideo, Uruguay, as a young man in 1891 and returned in 1934 as a seasoned, ideologically impassioned artist of 60 to establish a teaching workshop.

In the intervening years, he lived in Barcelona, Paris, New York and several other cities, developing a style of geometric abstraction using pictographic symbols within a grid structure.

The Iturralde show, curated by Cecilia Buzio de Torres, surveys the variants of this style of “Constructive Universalism” through works by Torres-Garcia and a dozen of his disciples including Jose Gurvich, Julio Alpuy, Gonzalo Fonseca and Amalia Nieto.

Though high points abound throughout the gallery, the work of Torres-Garcia himself sets the standard. His 1938 wall-mounted “Tapestry” is breathtaking in its immediacy. All of the fundamental elements of story are present here--place, character, time, motion--through a boldly delineated archive of symbols, such as a clock, sun, man, cart, bottle, house and bird.

This frontality and directness, and its appeal to the timeless core of human experience, carry through into the work of the other artists on view, mostly painters, who oscillate between images of a spirited urbanism and those of a more totemic Surrealism. There is much that is derivative here, not only of Torres-Garcia but through him of Mondrian and Klee, but the range is broad, and the livelier works carry the rest.

Torres-Garcia championed a major realignment of perspective toward South American art, at one point drawing an inverted map of South America to skew the hierarchical status of north and south and to encourage his fellow artists to look within their own ancient cultures for imagery and meaning and not to blindly follow European trends. Torres-Garcia himself fused pre-Incan iconography with European Modernist abstraction to yield, in the end, the type of universalism he espoused.

His workshop remained active from its establishment in 1944 until 1962, 13 years after his death, and his influence resonates still in the contemporary art world, saturated as it is with the identity politics of race and culture. Every artist, Torres-Garcia rightly said half a century ago, has “to fight continuously within himself the great battle between the universal man and the individual.”

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* Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-4267, through June 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.