Narrator: Architectonic Construction with Figures resembles the bottom segment of Torres-García’s third mural for Barcelona’s Palau de la Generalitat. The door in this panel replicates the actual door underneath the original fresco. Karen Grimson, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints, explains:
Karen Grimson: The figures are of Classical inspiration, clearly rooted in nature, but not exactly copying, through the illusion of perspective, what exists naturally. We can see the wooden strips highlighting the structural skeleton of the works_ _on the frames of the door and the column sustaining the roof of the construction.We see in his later production how these paintings on wood panels and the insertion of architectural motifs within a painting reappear in different ways.
Narrator: The image in this work refers to the original commission, which was significant for both Torres-García and the government. Curator Luis Pérez-Oramas:
Curator Luis Pérez-Oramas: The commission was probably the most important artistic commission done by the independentist Catalan movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, and made Torres-García the central figure of a kind of local modernity in Catalonia known as Noucentismo that proposed the idea of a return to the Mediterranean classic golden times.