Joaquín Torres García was a Spanish Uruguayan artist painter, sculptor, muralist, novelist, writer, teacher and theorist, active in Spain, United States, Italy, France and Uruguay.
Torres Garcia was an avant gardist whose influence encompasses European, American and South American modern art. He dealt the eternal dilemma between the old and the modern, the classical and the avant-garde, reason and feeling, figuration and abstraction with a simple and brilliant metaphor: there is no contradiction or incompatibility. The same brush strokes serve for a primitive composition or for a mural of Renaissance inspiration. Like Goethe, he seeks the integration between classicism and modernity.
He is known for his collaboration with Gaudi in 1903 on the stained glass windows for the Palma Cathedral and the Sagrada Família. He decorated with monumental frescoes the medieval Palau de la Generalitat seat of the Catalan government. His art is associated with archaic universal cultures; Mediterranean cultural traditions, Noucentisme, and Modern Classicism. From 1920 he developed a unique style, encompassing Cubism, Dada, Neo plasticism, Primitivisme, Surrealism, Abstraction and coined the term Universal Constructivism.
As a theoretician he published more than one hundred and fifty books, essays and articles written in Catalan, Spanish, French, English; "admirable treaties on aesthetics and avant-garde literature." In his lifetime he gave more than 500 lectures. An indefatigable teacher who founded several art schools one in Spain and another in Montevideo and numerous art groups including the first European abstract art group and magazine Cercle et Carré (Circle and square) in Paris in 1929. Among the many artists that have called him "Maestro" (teacher) are Joan Miró, Helion, Pere Daura, Engel Rozier.
Retrospectives in Paris in 1955 and Amsterdam in 1961 are the earliest to document historically the place of Torres-García in the currents of abstract art. In the United States he had important exhibitions in the 1920s, in the 1930s at Gallatin's Gallery of Living Art as a master of the European Modern Art with Arp, Braque, Gris, Picasso.
Sidney Janis Gallery and Rose Fried Gallery sponsored important shows from the 1950s.
Joaquín Torres-García was born in Montevideo, Uruguay on 28 July 1874. The first child of Joaquim Torras Fradera (son of Joan Torras and Rosa Fradera), an emigrant from Mataró, Spain, and María García Pérez (daughter of José María García, from the Canary Islands, and Misia Rufina Pérez, Uruguayan). He grew up in his father's general store called the Almacen de Joaquín Torres. As a child, Torres "examined the picturesque store situated in the old Square of the Wagons, the arrival point of the raw material of the country for export to Europe. The colonial Montevideo had a port, trains, and a vibrant population dotted with countless gauchos wrapped in capes with whip ready in hand." "Much of his early education in that predominantly agricultural society came from his observation of the things around him ... He received his first formal art training when his family returned to Spain"
In 1891, Torres-García's father returned to Mataró, Spain, with his wife and three children who became naturalized citizens of Spain ("l'artista uruguaianocatalà Joaquim Torres Garcia") . He studied with a local painter. He soon showed a strong vocation. The family moved to Barcelona. Torres-García enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona (Escuela de Bellas Artes de Barcelona), the Baixas Academy (Academia Baixas) and the Saint Lluc Artists Circle. "Torres-García and Picasso were contemporaries. Both began their artistic lives in modern Barcelona... whose privileged epicenter was the cafe Els Quatre Gats...The language came from Paris; the favorite models were Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen." His classmates and friends included Ricard Canals, Manolo Hugue, Joaquim Mir, Isidre Nonell, Pablo Picasso, and Julio Gonzalez. Torres assiduously contributed drawings in all the principal newspapers and magazines of the time: La Vanguardia, Iris, Barcelona Cómica and La Saeta.
In 1900, Torres Garcia's father died.
Miguel Utrillo wrote an article titled "Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Decorator" in Pel i Pluma, published with a portrait by Ramon Casas, photographs of several paintings by Torres — one on the cover of the magazine — and his first article, called "Impressions".
Antoni Gaudí commissioned Torres in 1903 to create stained-glass windows for Palma Cathedral. "One of the key events in his career was his intervention (between 1902 and 1905) in the High Altar of the Cathedral of Palma de Majorca, a masterpiece of Spanish Gothic, for which he made the lateral stained glass windows and the small rose window in the apse. His interpretation, of the Marian symbols ... from the Song of Songs — in the words of Baltasar Coll Tomas — is one of the many dialogues proposed by Torres ... these symbols ... will be reinterpreted in every stage of Torres's long career: the sun, the moon, the star, the well, the garden, the tower, the temple. ." Commissioned murals for Church of San Agustin, Church of the Divina Pastora, and the house Torre del Campanar.

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