Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.

The Still Life 1996 Spring



The Still Life

Pourquoi peignez-vous des natures mortes?
"Un mort,ça ne bouge pas."
Why do you paint still lifes?
"A dead thing doesn't move."
Paul Cézanne

A selection of STILL LIFES, from 1912 to the present; works by:
Julio Alpuy, Elsa Andrada, Pierre Bonnard, Lidya Buzio, Sergio de Castro, Caio Fonseca, Gonzalo Fonseca, José Gurvich, Francisco Matto, Jonio Montiel, Paul Resika, Edgardo Ribeiro, Gustavo Serra, Steven Skollar, Augusto Torres, Horacio Torres and Joaquín Torres-García.



Joaquín Torres-García

Joaquín Torres-García 1874 - 1949

On April 30, 1934, when he arrived in Montevideo after forty-three years of absence, Torres-García told the press that he had returned to Uruguay in order to "develop a wide range of activities, to lecture, to teach courses, to achieve... on walls what I have already achieved on canvas,... to create in Montevideo a movement that will surpass the art of Paris."

"... the moral zeal and joy in art making that Torres-García inculcated in his students, gives evidence of what a vibrant creation Latin American modernism was. It was technically at least as accomplished as its counterpart in the pre-Abstract Expressionist New York of the 30's and 40's, but improved upon it in one crucial respect: it transformed a borrowed European style into one deeply expressive of a New World culture. By Torres-García's standards, the work produced by El Taller was the genuine utopian article, and for anyone interested in modernism today, it is certainly an art to be reckoned with."
Holland Cotter, The New York Times, December 4, 1992

Since he had emigrated to Spain before his seventeenth birthday, he had no family ties in his native country. Nevertheless, Torres' declarations revealed a clear and ambitious plan. This was no passing visit; there was something definitive in his words that indicated that his return had been a deliberate act.

After a long development, during which his painting evolved from the Mediterranean classicism of his Barcelona frescoes of 1913 and passed through periods of Vibrationism, Cubism, and Fauvism, it culminated in 1929 in what was to become his characteristic incorporation of symbols into a geometric grid based on the golden section.

For Torres-García, the symbol was a way of synthesizing idea and form while bypassing narrative, which would interfere with the unity of the work. He called this conjunction of idea and form the nexus between the vital (or living) and the abstract. By inserting a symbol representing humanistic values into the antithetical rational structure of neoplasticism (which was devoid of human references), Torres succeeded in creating a style that constituted a major contribution to modern art. He called it Constructive Universalism.

What Torres-García envisioned as the new art for the Americas would encompass all expressions from architecture to the most humble utilitarian object. This was not an American version of the Russian constructivist movement or the Bauhaus; his aim was to create a modern art for the new continent equal in scope to the art of the greatest civilizations of antiquity. The uniqueness of Torres' proposal consisted of his incorporation of essential elements of indigenous American art into the basic principles of European constructivism and geometric abstraction.

His conception of art had a metaphysical and spiritual dimension - a faith in the spiritual value of art as a creative act bound to a universal law - and - in the independent existence of a work of art, apart from its naturalistic contents.

[Excerpted from the essay by Cecilia de Torres in El Taller Torres-García, The School of the South and Its Legacy, University of Texas Press, 1992.]


Please click for Chronology and CV


Lidya Buzio

Sculptor of painted surfaces, for over thirty years Buzio has created abstract volumes and cityscapes.  Working conceptually she creates the sculptural form that best address the tonal coloring or landscape that she will paint.  Buzio’s ceramic sculptures twist and juxtapose the structure and light of New York.

Buzio’s work is in the Painting & Sculpture Collections of the Brooklyn Museum & the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; in the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Fine Arts Museums; Nelson-Atkins; Everson; Victoria & Albert, London; Taiwan National Museum; and many other museums and private collections, internationally.

A catalogue of her work with an essay by Garth Clark and an extensive chronology is in preparation.


Please click for Chronology and CV


Julio Alpuy

American, born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, 1919.  Lived in New York City from 1961 until his death in 2009.

Introduced to Joaquín Torres-García in 1940, Alpuy joined his atelier and in 1943, began teaching at the TTG under Torres-García’s direction.  In 1944, Alpuy painted two Constructivist Murals for the Saint Bois Hospital, one now at the College of Architecture.  In 1949, he executed several mural commissions in mosaic for the architects Leborgne and De Leone and for Torres-García’s home.  In 1950s, interspersed by trips to Europe, the Middle East and Chile, and two years in Bogotá and Caracas, Alpuy continued to teach at the El Taller and work professionally.  He executed a series of large mural paintings for the architect Payssé Reyes, the Larrañaga Lyceum and for the YMCA headquarters in Montevideo. 

In 1961, Alpuy immigrated to New York City, where he died in 2009. He received a 1961 Fellowship from The New School for Social Research.  Alpuy was awarded a mural commission for the new Uruguayan Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1980, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1983), the New York Council for the Arts (1986), and the Gottlieb Foundation (1990).  Alpuy has had numerous one-person exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows for nearly sixty years.  In 1999, the Municipal government in Montevideo honored Alpuy with a retrospective exhibition that then traveled to Buenos Aires.  Alpuy’s work is in major public and private collections internationally.


Please click for Chronology and CV


Gonzalo Fonseca

Born in Montevideo in 1922, Fonseca traveled frequently to Europe with his family visiting museums and archeological sites that made a great impression on him.  At 15, he learned to sculpt in stone.  In 1939, Fonseca enrolled in the College of Architecture of Montevideo, but by 1942, he abandoned his architectural studies and joined the Taller Torres-García.  Along with Jonio Montiel, Sergio de Castro and Julio Alpuy in 1945, he traveled through Argentina, Peru and Bolivia to study pre-Columbian art.  In 1950, Fonseca moved to Paris, then Rome in 1951.  He traveled through North Africa and the Middle East where he joined in excavations directed by Petrie Flinters.  Living in Madrid in 1953, Fonseca studied ceramics at Rosedal - La Moncloa and met the Spanish sculptor Jorge de Oteiza.  In 1956, he returned to Montevideo and in 1958, moved to New York.  In 1970, Fonseca began working in Italy, near Carrara, on large marble pieces.  Fonseca lived and worked in New York and Seravezza, Italy.  He died in Italy, June 11, 1997.


Please click for CV


José Gurvich

Born in Lithuania, 1927; died in New York, 1974.

A violin student along with Horacio, the younger son of Torres-García, Gurvich studied with Torres-García and was a part of the Taller Torres-García until 1962. He spent several years on an Israeli kibbutz and traveled in France and Italy before settling in New York in 1970. Gurvich achieved a unique style as well as technical mastery. His work is populated with figures and images that combine the iconography of his Jewish upbringing, the formative years with Torres-García, his great admiration for Breughel and Bosch and a life spent in Montevideo, Israel and New York.


Please click for Chronology and CV


Francisco Matto

Born 1911 and died 1995 in Montevideo, Uruguay

Privately tutored and a child painter, Matto at age 21, traveled to Tierra del Fuego and acquired the first Pre-Columbian pieces of what was to become a major collection and an important influence on his art. Matto met Torres-García in 1939, joining his atelier and exhibiting with the artists of the Taller Torres-García until the 1960s. An elegant, aristocratic man, Matto worked with humble materials, preferring cardboard to canvas and found pieces of wood for his sculptures. His work has been exhibited at the Sálon des Surindépendants, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; in Spain, Italy, Germany, Moscow, Tokyo, New York and throughout Latin America. Matto's monumental concrete sculptures are landmarks in Punta del Este, Uruguay.


Please click for Chronology and CV


Augusto Torres

Born in Tarrasa, Cataluña, 1913; died in Barcelona, 1992. 

The first son of Torres-García, Augusto grew up primarily in Italy and France. In 1927, the family shared a house with the painter Jean Hélion, who inspired Augusto in his passion for collecting North African and American Indian art. Hired by the Musée de l’Homme to document their Pre-Columbian pottery, he studied tribal and primitive art. In the early 1930s, Augusto was an apprentice to the sculptor Julio González and studied drawing in Amedée Ozenfant’s academy. After Torres-García brought his family to Uruguay in 1934, Augusto participated in all the activities of his father’s teaching atelier, the Taller Torres-García. Throughout his life, Augusto traveled widely; including two years living in New York City, a recipient of a New School grant. From 1973 on, he divided his time between Barcelona and Montevideo. An inspirational teacher, he instructed several of today’s fine young artists.


Please click for Chronology and CV


Horacio Torres

Of the many painters who studied with his father, the great Constructivist artist Joaquín Torres-García, Horacio Torres made the quantum leap into the Contemporary art world of abstract and expressionistic painters in New York's 1970s. That he did so with figurative canvases was a singular achievement. Taken under the wing of the critic Clement Greenberg, who understood that Horacio's work was really about painting and was thoroughly modern, Horacio explored the thunderous territory of Titian, Velasquez and late Goya with a unique background of skill and aesthetic education in a contemporary way. Thus the series of headless nudes and of figures with faces obscured, make clear his painterly intentions and concerns. His monumental canvases are wondrous exercises of painted imagination formed with the structure of the depicted figure, but they are not about nudes, they are about painting.


Please click for Chronology and CV