Uruguayan Art in the Twentieth Century

Ángel Kalenberg

Uruguayan art of the twentieth century is a young art, like almost all that of postcolonial Latin America: perhaps more so because Uruguay developed without the factors that imposed, in other countries, the weight of pre-Columbian, Colonial-Baroque or African traditions.

This young Uruguayan art was permeable to influences from abroad. For this reason it can be considered to be art of assimilation, the clear product of a society of immigration that had proved capable of specifying its own art in a particular way. Such particularism imposed a limit on the universal, but at the same time, opened the particular to universal culture.

Uruguayan artists did something more than copy the foreign schools (which incidentally they also influenced): they reworked them until they obtained their own, genuine production. In the twenties, with the state and an expanding middle class as benefactors, modernity invaded with "planismo" (planeism). This was a local post-impressionism; the planeists painted flat colours, forming a theory of chromatic relations, of luminosity, transparency and the colour of the national landscape.

Towards 1934, with the return of Torres-García from Europe, formalist movements invaded Uruguay along with this artist's conviction that "(Latin) America would have to produce a hitherto unknown art". In addition to artistic production, Torres-García founded the Taller Torres-García (Torres-García Workshop). From here he disseminated his theory of Universalismo Constructivo (Constructive Universalism), a reconciliation between the abstract world and the feeling of nature that the artists of this region of the world still have. Torres-García felt that, returning to Uruguay, he had to rediscover his own city (as opposed to Mondrian and Kandinsky who, having lived through the war, withdrew into themselves).

In the mid fifties, in both continuity and a rupture with Torres-Garcian syncretism, a structuralist line (línea estructuralista) appeared. It was both anti-iconic and dynamic and its most notable names were: Rhod Rothfuss, José P. Costigliolo and María Freire.

Uruguyan art is an art of individualities; as a consequence it is a discontinuous art: Figari, Barradas, Balnes Viale, Cuneo, De Simone are artists with few connections between them (despite having been contemporaries) and they are also artists without followers. Joaquín Torres-García remains an exception as founder of a school. Two points characterise the work of artists that emerged from 1985 onwards, simultaneous to the restoration of democracy. Firstly, recourse to new languages, and secondly, the return to the human figure and a mannerist language. In style, this language flees any pre-established harmony or rhythm; in attitude, it interprets the moments of restlessness of societies that have passed through situations of conflict. It formulates a new reading of the reality of Latin American and Uruguayan history and contemporaneity, and supposes a victory over the institutional crisis and nihilism of previous generations.