Joaquín Torres-García

Joaquín Torres-García was a Uruguayan-Spanish artist who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. Torres-García emigrated to Catalunya, Spain as an adolescent, where he began his career as an artist in 1891. For the next three decades, Torres-García embraced the Catalan identity and led the cultural scene in Barcelona and Europe. As a painter, sculptor, muralist, novelist, writer, teacher, and theorist, Torres-García was considered a "renaissance" or "universal man." He used a simple metaphor to deal with eternal struggles he faced between the old and the new, between classical and avant-garde, between reason and feeling, and between figuration and abstraction: there is no contradiction or incompatibility. Like Goethe, Torres-García sought to integrate classicism and modernity. Although he lived and worked primarily in Spain, Torres-García was also active in the United States, Italy, France, and Uruguay; he influenced European and North American and South American modern art.
Torres-García is known for his 1903 collaboration with Antoni Gaudí on the stained-glass windows for the Palma Cathedral and the Sagrada Família.