Painter Joaquín Torres García at the Whitney
One hundred years ago today … The work of painters Joaquín Torres García and Stuart Davis, and sculptor Stanislav Szukalski were on exhibit at the Whitney Studio Club, 147 West 4th Street. The gallery, opened in 1914 by sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was the precursor the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Catalog Cover. TorresGarcia.com
The two-week exhibition was reviewed, one hundred years ago today, by Royal Cortissoz, longtime art critic at the Herald.
From now until May 15 the Whitney Studio Club will house an exhibition of modern painting by Stuart Davis and J. Torres-Garcia, together with sculpture by Stanislaw Szukalski. It is all in the same key. Gaccia has come over from Spain with an ambition, like his illustrious countryman in myth, to conquer not merely a windmill but a whole city at a blow. He has made a picture of New York City on a yard of canvas, but descends from this detached point of view to paint some still life studies of fruit. His co-exhibitor is equally unconventional in his manner of painting. Mr. Davis's still life conceptions of various popular brands of cigarettes are novel. There is a certain feeling of symmetry in the sculpture of Szukalski, to which such titles as "Cho Yo Power" and "Tagore Power” have been given.
Cortissoz, “Random Impressions in Current Exhibitions.” New York Herald, 8 May 1921, p. 47.
The Torres García painting of New York City he likely alludes to is “New York Street Scene,” which the Uruguayan-Spanish artist made in either 1920 or 1921. (Different sources list different dates.)
“New York Street Scene.” Yale University Art Museum.
The painting is an example of vibracionismo (‘vibrationism”), “an artistic movement that fused the aesthetic experiments of cubism and futurism to capture the movement an energy of the modern city” as Michele Greet describes it (172).
“Marine Quarter, Barcelona,” also shown at the Whitney Exhibit, was reprinted in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 1 May, 1921, p. 39. Newspapers.com.
Torres García had moved to New York in 1920 and, energized by the city, had urged fellow artists based in the Catalonia region of Spain to do the same in a February 1921 open letter (Houston).
References/ Further reading
Greet, Michele. Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris Between the Wars. United Kingdom, Yale University Press, 2018.
Houston, Kerr. “A Sly Warning: Torres García’s Open Letter of 1921.” Source: Notes in the History of Art 2016, 35:4, 333-342.
– Jonathan Goldman, May 8, 2021
TAGS: modern art, painting, modernism, avant-garde, studio, Latinx artists