Joaquín Torres García (28 July 1874 – 8 August 1949) was a Uruguayan artist, painter, sculptor, muralist, novelist, writer, teacher and theorist who spent most of his adult life in Spain and France. Torres-Garcia solved the eternal dilemma between the old and the modern, the classical and the avant-garde, reason and feeling, figuration and abstraction with a simple and brilliant metaphor: there is no contradiction or incompatibility. The same brush strokes serve for a primitive composition or for a mural of Renaissance inspiration. Like Goethe, he seeks the integration between classicism and modernity.
