Joaquín Torres García (28 July 1874 – 8 August 1949) was an Uruguayan-Spanish artist ("l'artista uruguaianocatalà Joaquim Torres Garcia"), born in Montevideo, Uruguay on July 28, 1874. As an adolescent, he emigrated to Catalunya, Spain, where he started his career as an artist in 1891. For the next three decades, he embraced the Catalan identity and led Barcelona’s and Europe's art and culture to its utmost vanguards. Joaquín Torres-García was considered to be a ‘renaissance or universal man’ because he was a painter, sculptor, muralist, novelist, writer, teacher and theorist. He was also active in the United States, Italy, France and Uruguay from where his influence encompasses a personal presence in European, North American and South American modern art. He dealt with the eternal dilemma between the old and the modern, the classical and the avant-garde, reason and feeling, figuration and abstraction with a simple metaphor: there is no contradiction or incompatibility. Like Goethe, he seeks integration between classicism and modernity.