Joaquín Torres-García (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1874 – Montevideo, Uruguay, 1949) spent a lifetime working toward a single synthesis: a visual language fusing European geometric abstraction with the pictographic sign-systems of pre-Columbian American art, legible, he believed, across cultures and centuries alike. Contemporaries called him a "universal man" for the range of his gifts as painter, sculptor, muralist, and theorist, though the label undersells how deliberately unified his purpose actually was.

His family moved to Catalonia when he was a teenager, and he trained at Barcelona's School of Fine Arts, where he came to know Pablo Picasso; his skill as a draughtsman led to a professional collaboration with the architect Antoni Gaudí, for whom he designed stained glass windows for the Sagrada Família and Palma Cathedral between 1903 and 1907. After years split between Barcelona, New York, and Italy, Torres-García settled in Paris in 1924, where he absorbed Cubism, Dada, and Constructivism and in 1929 co-founded the group Cercle et Carré with the critic Michel Seuphor, uniting geometric abstractionists including Piet Mondrian and Jean Arp under one banner.