NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s will present a modern masterpiece by Joaquín Torres-García from the artist’s most sought after period in the fall Latin American Art Evening Sale in New York on November 20. Making its first appearance at auction, Composition Nord - Art Constructif (pictured above, estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000), has been in the same private European collection for the past 55 years. It has been exhibited occasionally in prominent exhibitions and biennials, including the Venice Biennale XXVII in 1956 and the Bienal de São Paulo in 1959, as well as at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 1970. The artist is currently the focus of a major retrospective exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, on view through mid-February 2016.
Created while the artist lived in Paris at the height of his career, Composition Nord (oil on board laid on Masonite, 31 ¼ x 23 5/8 in, signed and dated ’31) serves as a virtual blueprint for understanding Torres-García’s theory of “Universal Constructivism,” his idiosyncratic vision of art. Following stints in New York, Italy, and southern France, Torres-García moved to Paris in September 1926 and quickly gravitated toward a group of artists exploring paths within geometric abstraction—among them, Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, and Theo van Doesburg. Torres-García’s first Constructivist paintings of 1929 evolved out of his engagement with this international avant-garde.
Long considered the father of South American modernism, Torres-García defined his mature practice around the ideal schema of the Neo-Plastic grid, whose geometric austerity—primary colors, straight lines—epitomized the totality of the universe and its highest, utopian vision. In its linear and spatial relationships, structured to embody an invisible, metaphysical order, he posited the oppositional relationships of the cosmos: male and female, material and spiritual, active and passive. Amid the tremendous interest in primitive art in Paris during the 1920s, Torres-García began to assimilate pictographic (“universal”) symbols within the grid, in order to express the humanist values reconnecting modern art to its ancestral and universal past. Recovered from pre-Columbian art, his ideograms became archetypal signs, transformed by geometry into a new paradigm for (Latin-, or alternatively his own Indo) American abstraction.
Torres-García soon consolidated this integral aesthetic—Constructive Universalism—in his practice, and he produced many of his most outstanding paintings in 1931. His repertory of pictographs was well established by this time, with signs ranging across the physical and spiritual worlds and distilling the emotions of space, time, and direction (as here: heart, house, clock, fish, anchor, ladder). In Composition Nord, these ideograms are arranged within shallow, rectangular subdivisions, their forms shaded by short, painterly passages in muted tones of red, blue, ocher, and black. Torres-García placed his signature above the sailing vessel in the upper left-hand corner, suggestively anchoring the grid from above; at the corner diagonally opposite, the inscription “Nord” suggests the inverted axis of his School of the South and its New World order.
In addition, the sale features another important example of Torres-Garcia’s constructivist period, Constructif avec poisson ocre, from 1929, (estimate: $600,000 - 800,000). Among other works for sale in the November 20 evening sale and November 21 day sale are a broad representation of artists, such as Matta, Fernando Botero, Rufino Tamayo, Claudio Bravo and Wifredo Lam, including a large number of exceptional works by some of today’s leading Brazilian artists.
