In 1933, while in Madrid, Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949) visited the author of this article, Guillermo de Torre (1900 -1971), and the husband of Norah Borges (1901–98). A friendship based on mutual respect and intellectual admiration intensified from that moment. On the same year that Joaquín Torres García (1949), a companion he met in his route to Paris in the early 1930, Michel Seuphor (1901–99) published L’art abstrait. Ses origines, ses premiers maîtres, in which the Uruguayan master is enormously ignored and overlooked as one of the figures that conformed the group of abstract artists of Cercle et Carrè. Nor was he even considered as a relevant abstract artist. The critic, who had been residing in Buenos Aires after the Spanish Civil War, in an article in the Uruguayan magazine Clima, then makes it known, when he reacts vigorously against what he considered a Parisian cultural ethnocentrism, rather yet, a chauvinism that builds an artistic historiography that is more than European-centric it is Parisian-centric.
The essayist points out the importance in Montevideo during the period of Joaquín Torres career as a teacher and as an artist, contrary to the “ignorance" that Michel Seuphor adopted over the period. Given the friendly relationship cultivated between the two, the Spanish writer is unable to evade the affectionate praise and moral characterization of Joaquín Torres García, whom he considered “incorruptible” and being endowed with “artistic radicalism”, an “apostolic ardor” and a “protean spirit.”
As another great paradox that is euro-centric in nature, it is worth noting the scarce importance Guillermo de Torre would give regarding to the interest by Joaquín Torres García of the Indo-American culture. He comes to clarify that “he quickly turned away from that” based on the idea of a timeless universalism. Contrary to that assertion, it should be noted that Joaquín Torres García never metaphysically stopped engaging with Indo-American art and with what he would call the great tradition of the abstract man. For this reason, his Indo-Americanist studies were never regionally accentuated nor were they detached from universalistic conceptions. Furthermore, throughout the course of text, the author discussed the cubist affiliation with abstract art, the relationships with the Torres García constructivism and surrealism, citing antagonistically the German art collector and art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiller (1884–1979) and the surrealist militant poet Benjamin Péret (1899–1959), for negating their postures on abstract art.
