His extensive preaching in favor of spiritual rectitude led Joaquin Torres García to reject the “superfluous” in art and keep the fundamental elements that make up the concept and structure of Constructivist art. The resulting logic of this discourse is that its aesthetic is based on ethics and metaphysics; the personal attitude that the master preaches as the foundation of “what our art should be.” This “lesson” has strong ethical content in its first part; it is the support of the own choices that Torres García carries out on an aesthetic level. The lesson is aimed at justifying a reluctant attitude to all corporatism and to any institutional type of alliance based on what it means by “righteous spirit.”

The lesson of “Cuál debiera ser nuestro arte,” included in the book Universalismo Constructivo by Joaquín Torres García, was written in 1935 to point out the undercurrents of the “visual arts” in painting. It is something that would reappear in “Lesson 50” subordinated by the idea of geometrics. Indeed, since that year he had stated that “the visual arts should give us its own poetry and its own music,” which are the conditions that are conducive to the existence of a “structure.” This is what Torres García understands as “aesthetic unity” in painting; however, his most significant suggestion, with regard to “what our art should be” was that in his analysis, Uruguay was a clueless country, in cultural tradition, and in the environmental circumstances and in the capability of providing support to the artists for their artistic efforts. Torres García understood that “there, as in Egypt confronted with a desert, a monumental art needed to be built. The denuding of the native environment would justify this idea of a monumental art that does not imply a large formal scale of grandeur, but instead grandeur in the sense of universal, or as the cosmic. The monumental is therefore not assumed as being particular but instead universal. Not producing an “elegant art,” but instead a “powerful” art, an art “that removes the anguish of being shocked by the immensity of the monotonous blade.” This was the “geographical" and cultural argument that Torres García presented in order to foster a culture promoting the anonymous and structural character of Constructivist art in Uruguay. [As supplementary reading, see in the ICAA digital archive the texts written by Joaquín Torres García: “Con respecto a una futura creación literaria” (doc. no. 730292), “Lección 132. El hombre americano y el arte de América” (doc. no. 832022), “Mi opinión sobre la exposición de artistas norteamericanos: contribución” (doc. no. 833512), “Nuestro problema de arte en América: lección VI del ciclo de conferencias dictado en la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de Montevideo” (doc. no. 731106), “Introducción [en] Universalismo Constructivo” (doc. no. 1242032), “Sentido de lo moderno [en Universalismo Constructivo]” (doc. no. 1242015), “Bases y fundamentos del arte constructivo” (doc. no. 1242058), and “Manifiesto 2, Constructivo 100%” (doc. no. 1250878)].