Numerario (Number Game)

“If a child breaks his toys, it is first to investigate, then to modify: knowledge and creation. Give him, then, the toys in pieces and let him do as he pleases. That way, we will adapt to his psychology”. With this sentence Joaquín Torres García presented the wooden toys he had started to design in 1917, exhibiting them in Barcelona at the Dalmau and Laietanes Galleries and at Universitat Industrial prior to his departure for New York in 1920. After arriving in the Leopoldina steamship and struck by the new mechanical city he encountered, he founded Artist Toy Makers for the purposes of overhauling his artistic output. New York’s urban and cultural environment saw him forge a new aesthetic and theme in his toys, including factories, cities and caricatured metropolitan figures he would call Funny People.
In 1922, faced with the lack of carpentry workshops interested in his designs, he founded in Florence the Aladdin Toy Co., a new industrial company with which he produced large-scale toys before finally moving to Paris in 1926. It is from this last period mentioned, in Paris, and before his return to Montevideo in 1934, that this Numerario (Numerary) dates. Focused on the educational use of the toys and children’s perceptive-motor structuring via exercises to disassemble and recompose, the production of these “small art objects” became a family project. In the design of numeraires and spelling books he would work actively with his children Olimpia and Augusto and his wife Manolita Piña de Rubies, who was also interested in the revolutionary theories of Maria Montessori, Friedrich Fröbel and Ovide Decroly.

Francisco Javier Rodríguez Sepúlveda