Torres Garcia, Joaquim

"Joaquín Torres Garcia (Montevideo 1874 - 1949)

He was a Uruguayan-Catalan painter and sculptor, muralist, novelist, writer, professor and theorist who spent most of his adult life in Spain and France.

Uruguayan-Catalan artist, not only because he was the son of a native of Mataró, but also because he lived in Catalonia from the age of seventeen until he was forty-six, he acquired from his father's land his strong artistic training and dedicated an important part of his work to it. He was one of the most notable personalities of the artistic movement of the first half of the century.

He began painting at the end of the 19th century in modernist Barcelona, and soon became one of the most representative painters of noucentisme, the ambitious civic and cultural project that aspired to transform and modernize Catalonia in the first decades of the 20th century and turn it into the mouthpiece of the Mediterranean cultural tradition.[3] He was married to Manolita Piña de Rubies, a Catalan woodcutter and painter.

He is known for his collaboration with Gaudí[4] in 1903 in the stained glass windows of the Cathedral of Palma and the Sagrada Familia.

In 1913 he painted the famous monumental frescoes in the medieval headquarters of the Generalitat Palace of the Catalan government.

As a theoretician, he wrote more than 100 articles, books and essays in Catalan, French and Spanish, and gave more than 500 lectures. A tireless teacher, he founded two art schools, one in Barcelona and the other in Montevideo, and numerous art groups, including the first European abstract art group and the magazine Cercle et Carré ("circle and square") in Paris in 1929. Many artists have called him a master, among them Joan Miró, Jean Hélion, Pedro Dora or Engel Rozier.

More information on Wikipedia."