商品簡介
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 JoaquA-n Torres-GarcA-a. After studying and painting [for decades] in Europe, Torres-GarcA-a returned in 1934 to his native home Montevido with the dream of reawakening and revitalizing what he considered the true indigenous essence of Latin American art: a€?Abstract Spirit.a€? Rommens rigorously analyses the paradoxes of the paintera€?s aesthetic-philosophical doctrine of Constructive Universalism as it sought to adapt European geometric abstraction to the Americas. Whereas previous scholarship has dismissed Torres-GarcA-aa€?s 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-GarcA-aa€?s artworks as a critique on the artista€?s own writings, Rommens reveals how Torres-Garcia appropriates the colonial language of Primitivism to construct the artificial image of a€?purea€? pre-Columbian abstraction. Torres-GarcA-a thereby inverts the history of art: The Art of JoaquA-n Torres-GarcA-a - Constructive Universalism and the Inversion of Abstraction teases out the important lessons of this gesture and the implications for our understanding of abstraction today.
作者簡介
Aarnoud Rommens is BeIPD-COFUND/Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow, FacultAc de Philosophie et Lettres, University of LiA‥ge, Belgium.
