Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949) and Pedro Figari (1861–1938) met from time to time when they were in Paris, but never developed a personal friendship, even though Rafael Barradas (1890–1929) praised Figari lavishly in the letters he wrote to the maestro from Madrid. On June 25, 1930, when both artists were in Paris, Figari wrote to Torres-García, trying to encourage him to send some of his work to Uruguay for the Centenario competition. Earlier that year, in April, they had both shown their work at the Galerie Zak (Paris) with two other Uruguayan painters: Carlos Alberto Castellanos (1881–1945) and Gilberto Bellini (1908–35). They showed their work again at a larger group exhibition of Latin American artists at the Galería Castelucho Diana in December 1930. In spite of these fleeting encounters—and one occasion when Torres-García visited Figari’s home-studio in Paris—they both resisted talking to each other specifically about painting. Obviously, they both had very different views on the subject. There is no record of them getting together again when they were both in Montevideo, from 1934 to 1938. While they were not close, there were no explicit public disagreements between them. The same could not be said, however, for their various representatives: Carlos Herrera Mac Lean (1889–1971) on behalf of Figari, and the editorial board at Removedor magazine on behalf of Torres-García.
The fact that the grand retrospective exhibition of Figari’s work—held in 1945, a year when both Torres-García and his Taller were savaged by critics—was curated by Herrera Mac Lean prompted the article by Héctor Ragni (1897–1952) in Removedor. Though Ragni specifically focuses on the praise expressed at the event and in subsequent press coverage of Figari’s work, the pejorative tone of the word “literary” in his scathing review is no doubt intended as a slight on both the artist’s painting and Herrera Mac Lean’s curatorial standards, since the architect was determined to “show everything” and exhibited a total lack of selective criteria. The harshness of most of the articles that appeared in Removedor surely suggests a form of criticism that was “on the defensive”. In other words, a way to express, by comparison, the opposite point of view regarding all manner of local traditionalism or the anecdotal subjects shown in the paintings, both of which were repeated ad nauseum by the maestro.