Horacio Torres: Eight Nudes, 1971-1975 2023 Winter
Horacio Torres: Eight Nudes, 1971-1975
On the 46th anniversary of Horacio Torres’ death in February 1976, Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. exhibits eight nudes he painted in New York between 1971 and 1975, when a return to figuration emerged in reaction to the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Color Field, and Pop Art. Today, we again witness an ushering in of representational painting after years of Conceptual Art. The works on view at the gallery demonstrate Torres’ contemporary approach to the human body, while at the same time continuing the tradition of great easel painting.
Horacio Torres was born in Italy in 1924; two years later, his father, Joaquín Torres-García, relocated his family to Paris. Horacio was too young to recall the modernists who frequented their home: Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Jean Hélion, and Jacques Lipchitz, among others. He did remember however, accompanying his father to visit Alexander Calder perform his Circus and wondering why a grown man was playing like a child. In Montevideo, Torres learned the craft of painting at the Taller Torres-García (TTG), the workshop his father created in the 1940s.
Upon arriving in New York in 1969, and encouraged by Clement Greenberg, Torres began to paint the figure. He abandoned the constructivism and geometric abstraction practiced at the TTG and began painting in the style of the Venetian Renaissance fearful that this tradition, which he held dear, could be lost forever. In 1974, Kenworth Moffett, then Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, organized an exhibition of Torres’ new paintings, which brought him to the public’s attention. Critics pondered over how he was confronting the dilemma of representing the nude figure at a time when abstraction was dominant.
To achieve a sense of the modern and avoid falling into a renaissance pastiche, Torres divested his paintings of the narrative and the anecdotal. To avoid having the figure become the center of attention he often cropped the body, a device that strengthened the overall abstract effect. Every inch of Torres’ lush canvases is a creative act of painting, “it is not a matter of loose painterly handling or empty bravura,” wrote Michael Brenson in his review for The New York Times of a 1990 exhibition of the artist in New York, “but rather an expressive phrasing that is continually invented.”
Horacio Torres
b. 1924 Livorno, Italy - d. 1976 New York City
Horacio Torres was born in 1924 when his father, the painter Joaquín Torres-García was living in Livorno, Italy. The family moved to Paris in 1926 where Horacio grew up, and was introduced to Alexander Calder's Circus. In 1934 the family left Europe to settle in Montevideo. Horacio was a member of the Association of Constructivist Art and The Taller Torres-García. In 1942 he traveled to Perú and Bolivia with his brother Augusto to study pre-Columbian Art. He painted two large constructivist murals in the walls of a hospital in Montevideo, a collective project launched by his father with the Taller Torres-García artists. In 1947, Horacio won a competition to paint a large mural for the offices of A.N.C.A.P. the state owned "National Administration of Fuels, Alcohols and Portland." After his father's death in 1949, he traveled to Europe, lived at the Maison du Mexique in the Cité Universitaire, and travelled throughout Europe visiting the great museums. Having returned to Uruguay, Horacio began collaborating with the architects Antonio Bonet, in Buenos Aires, and in Montevideo, with Mario Paysee Reyes, who commissioned large wall reliefs in cut brick for the church of the Archdiocese Seminary.
In 1969 he settled in New York where he began painting large representational canvases of nude figures. Curator Kenneth Moffet wrote “that this change to the figurative involved perceiving that his veneration for tradition and his desire to be modern were problematic and related impulses. His modernity had to be won, his traditionalism justified, and the friction that their conjunction generated proved fruitful." The figurative canvases were first shown at the Noah Goldowsky Gallery in 1972, and two years later, in an individual exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Horacio died in New York in 1976.
His work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brandeis University Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts; Hastings College, Nebraska; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Edmonton Museum, Alberta, Canada; the Biblioteca Nacional, Montevideo; and the Museo Blanes, Montevideo, Uruguay.
Please click for Chronology and CV
Horacio Torres: Early Works
2016 Autumn
Under the Influence
2016 Summer
The South was Their North: Artists of the Torres-García Workshop
2015-2016 Autumn-Winter
Art Basel Miami Beach 2014
December 4-7, 2014
Line - Plane - Volume / Sculpture: 1944-2006
2006 Winter
Modernism: Montevideo & Buenos Aires 1930-1960
2001 - 2002 Winter