In his extensive introduction to this lecture, Joaquín Torres García (JTG) speaks of how his creative efforts have been met with misunderstanding and belligerence on the part of the Montevideo art scene, which he mocks and describes as stingy. After six years of intellectual combat at a number of institutions and in radio broadcasts of his “lectures,” the artist claims that he has arrived at a concept of “Constructive painting” that might be compatible with the conformist and eclectic local spirit. JTG’s statements—and his work as a whole starting in 1934—were made at a particular political juncture, specifically under the de facto government of dictator Gabriel Terra, in power from 1933 to 1938, and the buildup to World War II—both of which divided the waters along ideological lines in intellectual circles. As groups of leftist intellectuals were being formed, groups that attacked JTG for his “purist painting,” a conservative cluster allied with the government and supportive of its initiatives was also taking shape. Through the Comisión Nacional de Bellas Artes, that conservative group attempted to impose a nineteenth-century academic aesthetic dear to Terra’s circle of patrician and oligarchic families. JTG felt cornered, and forced to take a stand against that sector in this five hundredth lecture: he speaks of “ungrateful folks with faith in nothing except for profit […] whose vulgar spirit ushered in this rudimentary and poor notion of the academy.” While JTG was giving this lecture, the government was publicizing the great retrospective of Juan Manuel Blanes, the nineteenth-century “painter of the fatherland,” to be held in Montevideo in 1941. JTG attempts to re-establish an authentic and local concept of “the fatherland” in painting, a concept based not on themes, but on an approach to painting and to art in general. If the book Metafísica de la Prehistoria Indoamericana, published in 1939, was a first attempt to adjust his Constructive Art project to regional reality, the notion of Constructive painting put forth in this five hundredth lecture is a second and final attempt to adapt to the Uruguayan middle class. He entertains the idea of a (perhaps nonexistent) local tradition and the idea of landscape painting which, starting at the beginning of the century, was the theme preferred by those who aspired to interpret the national reality. To the question “how should [painting] come into play in this life you have returned to?” he replies, “Well, [through] the city where we find ourselves, Montevideo, with its current appearance...”—an attempt to combine universality with “Uruguayanity,” modernity with local tradition. In this lecture, he explains what he calls the “six bases for a Constructive painting,” “three [of which] look to reality and three [of which] look to art.” Indeed, those would be the premises for the landscape painting JTG made starting in 1941 in his own Taller Torres García (TTG). [For further reading, see the following texts by Joaquín Torres García in the ICAA digital archive: “Con respecto a una futura creación literaria” (doc. no. 730292); “Lección 132. El hombre americano y el arte de América” (doc. no. 832022); “Mi opinión sobre la exposición de artistas norteamericanos: contribución” (doc. no. 833512); “Nuestro problema de arte en América: lección VI del ciclo de conferencias dictado en la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de Montevideo” (doc. no. 731106); “Introducción [en] Universalismo Constructivo” (doc. no. 1242032); “Sentido de lo moderno [en Universalismo Constructivo]” (doc. no. 1242015); “Bases y fundamentos del arte constructivo” (doc. no. 1242058); and “Manifiesto 2, Constructivo 100%” (doc. no. 1250878)].