Intertwining art history; aesthetic theory; and Latin American studies; Aarnoud Rommens challenges contemporary Eurocentric revisions of the history of abstraction through this study of the Uruguayan artist Joaquiacute;n Torres-Garciacute;a. After studying and painting (for decades) in Europe; Torres-Garciacute;a returned in 1934 to his native home; Montevideo; with the dream of reawakening and revitalizing what he considered the true indigenous essence of Latin American art: "Abstract Spirit." Rommens rigorously analyses the paradoxes of the painters aesthetic-philosophical doctrine of Constructive Universalism as it sought to adapt European geometric abstraction to the Americas. Whereas previous scholarship has dismissed Torres-Garciacute;as theories as self-contradictory; Rommens seeks to recover their creative potential as well as their role in tracing the transatlantic routes of the avant-garde. Through the highly original method of reading Torres-Garciacute;as artworks as a critique on the artists own writings; Rommens reveals how Torres-Garciacute;a appropriates the colonial language of primitivism to construct the artificial image of "pure" pre-Columbian abstraction. Torres-Garciacute;a thereby inverts the history of art: this book teases out the important lessons of this gesture and the implications for our understanding of abstraction today.
#1996643 in eBooks 2016-08-25 2016-08-25File Name: B01JKGOAOQ
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