Composición Constructiva

1932

Joaquín Torres-García

(Uruguayan, 1874–1949)

Culture

Uruguay

Medium

oil on canvas

Measurements

77.9 x 58.1 cm (30 11/16 x 22 7/8 in.)

Credit Line

Purchased with funds from the Severance and Greta Millikin Trust and Sundry Art – Miscellaneous Fund 2025.2

This artwork is known to be under copyright.

Location

223 20th Century Avant-Garde

Did You Know?

Joaquín Torres-García repurposed a canvas to make this work of art, painting over one of his previous compositions.

Description

This painting is emblematic of Joaquín Torres-García’s theory of “Universal Constructivism” in which the artist combined European geometric abstraction, as espoused by his friend Piet Mondrian, with ancient and Indigenous South American symbols and iconography that evoked the artist’s native Uruguay. The style that Torres-García borrowed from Mondrian involved building a composition around geometric shapes arranged harmoniously with straight horizontal and vertical lines. The symbols here—the anchor (representing the artist’s transatlantic journeys as well as hope), the snail and fish (references to nature), and clocks (an allusion to the concept of time and its presence in human experience)—frequently appear in the artist’s paintings of the late1920s and early1930s.