Rosa Acle

Rosa Acle

Rosa Acle (January 1, 1919-June 11, 1990) was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Brazilian father of Lebanese origin and a Lebanese mother. Shortly after her birth, her parents settled in Montevideo, Uruguay. Here Rosa carved a path for herself as a champion of the budding Constructivism art movement in South America.

Early Constructivism

Young Rosa Acle took lessons from well-known Constructivist painter Joaquín Torres-García in 1934 and 1935. In 1935 Torres-García founded the Asociación de Arte Constructivo(AAC), dedicated to the promulgation of universal and indigenous Constructivism. The AAC’s local investigations of pre-Columbian art were complemented by programmatic instruction in European avant-garde movements—Cubism, Neo-plasticism, Constructivism—through lectures, radio broadcasts, and publications. Encouraged by her literary professor, the poet and writer Esther de Cáceres, Acle joined the AAC in 1935. In 1936, at the age of twenty, Acle’s work was already being reviewed in Círculo y Cuadrado, (The Circle and the Square), the official magazine of the Association. She wrote an article for Circle and Square, entitled "A Profession of Faith." In 1938 she illustrated the book “Voces de Oriente”, prose translation by Khalil Gibrán, made by Leila Neffa. Her first individual exhibition took place in 1939 at Amigos del Arte in Montevideo. Torres García wrote a prologue for the catalog entitled "Rosa Acle y Constructivismo", there he expressed that she was a student endowed and committed to the highest level of discipline and ethical standard, qualities necessary for the development of a deep intellectual search. He also stressed that she was a promoter of Constructivism. He also asserted that her paintings reminded him of “Persian and ancient Chaldean art." Stating that, “this feature that undoubtedly is of ancestral origin; a certain orientalism that approaches us to the ancient Persian art or to the warming of Ur or another related current in the ancient art, and that Rosa Acle gives with the most free and natural spontaneity. Torres-García's words testify to Rosa Acle's precocity and the "astonishment" that caused "her rapid assimilation and understanding of the doctrine, as well as the rules derived from it.

Europe and Australia

Her father, Tufic Acle, was a prosperous and conservative businessman who had difficulty controlling his independent and talented daughter. Prejudices in the family and social environment of the 30s and 40s, would remove the artist from the AAC. Acle left for Paris with letters of introduction to Torres- García's old friends Julio Gonzalez, Wassily Kandinsky, Jacques Lipchitz, and Pablo Picasso. This was also the time that she became involved with a group of Hindus discovering Hatha Yoga, a practice she pursued for the rest of her life. In that same year Rosa Acle visited Italy, Switzerland, Egypt, Java and arrived in Australia just as World War II broke out. For eight years she would reside in Australia. She settled in Melbourne until the end of the war, painted intensely during the first years, and corresponded with her teacher Torres-García. She married and had two sons. As with so many women artists, marriage, motherhood, and the vicissitudes of life became the priority. In a letter to Lipchitz, with whom she continued to correspond, she confided “seeking to be a good wife and mother, I relegated all my aesthetic concerns to my subconscious. In the love for my husband, I looked for succor and meaning to the moral and religious preoccupations that always tortured me.” She returned to Montevideo in 1947 having left all of her Australian work behind, which she never managed to recover and, unfortunately, the majority of her early AAC paintings, drawings, and sculptures that had been left in Montevideo had been discarded and lost. Very few pieces of her earlier works remain. Although she visited her former teacher, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and continued to work in Constructivist style for many years, Acle never joined his famous workshop, El Taller.

Later Period

After divorce and the death of her old teacher, Torres- García, she resumed painting with intensity. In 1956 she married again and from this second marriage a daughter was born. From 1950 her work was characterized by an imaginary element of classical iconography, Hindu philosophy, oriental decoration and Torresgarcian constructivism converged. In the search for a truth, she becomes a member of the Rosicrucians, attracted by the mystical aspect, which emerges in many of her paintings. Already installed in Montevideo and urged by economic urgency she devoted herself to teaching yoga for 30 years. Acle’s work incorporates classical, religious, and indigenous iconography into complex, highly structured architectural compositions. Her work has never been widely exhibited, but it is highly regarded.