Concrete Invention

Concrete Invention, a group of artists based in Buenos Aires in the 1940s known for its works of geometric abstraction.

In 1944 the artists Carmelo Arden Quin, Gyula Kosice, Rhod Rothfuss, Tomás Maldonado, and others collectively produced the first and only issue of the illustrated magazine Arturo, with texts and reproductions of work by many artists, including Joaquín Torres García, Lidy Prati, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. The appearance of Arturo, which expressed its contributors’ opposition to representational and symbolic art, marked the beginning of a dynamic period in Argentine art. Two distinct groups emerged from the publication: Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (“Concrete-Invention Art Association”), led by Maldonado, and Arte Madí, led by Arden Quin, Kosice, and Rothfuss.

Although these rival groups both promoted “concrete art”—their name for geometric abstraction devoid of representational content—they differed in their artistic philosophies. Arte Madí’s participants worked in multiple arenas; they distributed leaflets in the streets of Buenos Aires, published the magazine Arte Madí Universal (1947–54), and organized exhibitions that blended visual art, music, poetry, and performance. Their art emphasized the concrete reality of the materials, often eschewing the conventional picture frame for irregularly shaped canvases. Rothfuss’s Madí Painting (1946), for example, consists of a shaped canvas on which he painted brightly coloured squares and rectangles in a pattern that echoes the canvas’s edges. The Arte Madí artists also experimented with three-dimensions, as in Kosice’s playful wooden sculpture Röyi (1944).

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The artists associated with Concreto-Invención were more restrictive in their activities than those of Arte Madí. Maldonado was a teacher at the National School of Fine Arts, and the Concreto-Invención artists tended to have more formal artistic training than those of Arte Madí. The Concreto-Invención group adopted communist politics and envisioned a utopian role for art in a new revolutionary society. They too published a journal, Arte Concreto-Invención, in which they attacked Torres García’s use of symbols in his otherwise geometrically abstract paintings. These artists embraced the purist aesthetics of Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. They also experimented with shaped canvases, as in Lidy Prati’s Concrete (1945), which consisted of three irregular geometric forms—two white and one red—linked by strips of black canvas. Often, however, they used traditional canvases, such as Alfredo Hlito’s Chromatic Rhythms (1947), a square canvas on which horizontal bands in red, yellow, blue, green, and black separate similarly coloured rectangles.

Despite their differing practices, the artists of both Arte Madí and the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención would influence a generation of artists throughout South America, who would experiment with geometric art in new ways, such as kinetic art, in the 1950s and ’60s.