Carmelo Arden Quin

Biography

In 1934, in the workshop of his uncle Miguel, Carmelo Arden Quin painted a Cubist work and suddenly decided to “reform” its rectangular shape. He took a pair of scissors and began to cut pieces out of the edge of the canvas. Later he regarded this experiment as the beginning of his career.

He was born on 16 March 1913 in Rivera, in northern Uruguay, and at birth was named Carmelo Heriberto Alves. His father had been murdered while his mother was still pregnant; the boy was raised by his mother and three uncles. His uncle Miguel painted and made sculpture himself and encouraged his interest in art. At eleven Carmelo made colourful kites and sold them to his classmates. He received his first painting lessons from a family friend; according to other accounts, from 1932 he studied in Santana do Livramento (Brazil) with the Spaniard Emilio Sanz. As a teenager he took part in political demonstrations, and his interest in politics lasted for a long time. In 1934 he moved to Montevideo. There he frequented the cafés where artists and writers gathered, and in January 1935 a friend took him to a lecture by Joaquín Torres-García at the Theosophical Society. After the lecture they met, and Torres-García invited the young man to his studio. Arden Quin regarded him as his teacher: according to biographers, this meeting set him on the path to abstraction. He showed his flat forms in primary colours at exhibitions in Montevideo, including benefit shows in aid of Spanish intellectuals.

In 1937 or 1938 (sources differ) he moved to Buenos Aires, again spent his time in cafés and attended university classes in philosophy and literature. Here he became friends with the poet Edgar Bayley; in 1939, on a visit to Uruguay for an exhibition, he noticed the young painter Rhod Rothfuss; and in 1940, at a pencil factory, he met a Hungarian immigrant, Fernando Fallik, the future Gyula Kosice. In the early 1940s he travelled up the river to Paraguay in the hope of finding work with a coffee company; he found no job, but brought back his first manifesto, part of a long prose poem and a series of six paintings, “Les Formes Noires”: black “masks” in oil on cardboard, each with a single “eye”.

Out of this circle came the journal “Arturo”. Arden Quin gathered contributions from across the region: in Rio de Janeiro he obtained pieces from the painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and the poet Murilo Mendes; from Torres-García he took a drawing, an essay and two long poems; the Chilean Vicente Huidobro sent a poem. Tomás Maldonado joined the project and designed the cover, followed by his fiancée, Lidia Prati. The single issue appeared in 1942, or according to other accounts in 1944; about two hundred and fifty copies were sold in Buenos Aires. The journal rejected “meaning and signification” in favour of “pure form”, and it made no immediate stir.

In 1946 Arden Quin, together with Martín Blaszko, Rhod Rothfuss and Gyula Kosice, founded the Madí movement. Its features were irregular frames, movable constructions, music and invented poetic propositions. On 3 August 1946 he read the Madí manifesto to critics and journalists at the French Institute for Higher Learning in Buenos Aires. A three-day festival followed, at which he showed suspended mobile sculptures, a transformable wooden sculpture, “Escultura Amvobile”, and about half a dozen curved-form works under the collective title “Cosmopolis”, which vaguely suggest aerial views of a city. The invitation to the festival read: “We express nothing, we represent nothing, we symbolize nothing... This work is in space and time: IT EXISTS.”

In 1947 the movement split: Arden Quin went one way, Rothfuss and Kosice another. In 1948 he left for Paris, where he met Michel Seuphor, Auguste Herbin, Jean Arp, Georges Braque and Francis Picabia and took part in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. In the same year, when his partner Sofía Kunst was expecting a child, he painted a series of nine “moons” (one for each month), “forme galbée bleue”, unusually light in colour. In 1954–1955 he briefly returned to Argentina and, with Aldo Pellegrini, founded the Asociación Arte Nuevo, and from 1956 he settled in Paris for good.

There he continued to work on Madí. Collage and découpage occupied him for years, and he worked almost exclusively in that technique until 1971, when he returned to painting. In 1962 he founded the journal “Ailleurs”, and in the 1960s he took part in the Concrete Poetry movement. He used wood, cardboard, Plexiglas and plastic tubing. His solo exhibitions were held in Paris, Brescia and Madrid; in 1998 the Ruth Benzacar gallery in Buenos Aires mounted a monographic show, “Carmelo Arden Quin. Pinturas y objetos 1945–1995”. In 1993 he was included in an exhibition of twentieth-century Latin American artists at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Arden Quin died on 27 September 2010 at his home in Savigny-sur-Orge, near Paris, at the age of 97. The Madí Museum in Dallas, open since 2003, holds twenty-five of his works. In 2012 he was posthumously awarded the Konex Award of Honour for his contribution to the visual arts in Argentina.