The Art of the Tropics: Painting and Sculpture in Brazil
by JOSÉ VALLADARES
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DURING the last twenty years, a taste for the fine arts has spread widely in Brazil, as it has in the other nations of the Americas, and with it has appeared a deepening cultural self-consciousness. We Brazilians are more alert than ever to the various strains of our heritage; we cultivate them without any fear of becoming lost in a cultural backwater. To a large extent, the fine arts, especially painting, have been responsible for this change.
The background can be sketched briefly, because in many respects it is similar to the artistic development of the United States or any other transplanted nation. Our art history falls broadly into three periods. During the colonial period, when Brazil was virtually an extension of Lisbon, we produced several original and genuinely creative artists. Later, when the country began to assume a semiindependent status, provincialism and cultural naivete became dominant, and a long period of imitative academicism settled upon the arts. Finally, in the twentieth century, came the new awakening.
Brazil had a relatively simple indigenous inheritance, and our Indians, like those of eastern North America, were less creative than the inhabitants of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. This made a difference in our colonial painting, which was very little influenced by native elements, and when the twentieth-century flowering occurred, our artists did not, as did those of some neighboring countries, return for a part of their rationale to the Indian predecessors. Instead they have painted life as it is in Brazil, the colors and shapes of a tropical, hybrid, and new world culture.
It is important to remember that, although from the year 1500, when Cabral discovered Brazil, we have had a predominantly Portuguese culture, nevertheless the French, Spanish, and Dutch had footholds in Brazil during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of these three, the Dutch, led by Maurice of Nassau, who ruled Pernambuco in the 1630’s and 1640’s, left the strongest imprint, especially on the architecture of the region. The first pictures of the Brazilian scene to arrive in Europe were painted during this period by Dutch artists, of whom Franz Post and Albert Eckhout were the most distinguished.
Artists and artisans accompanied the waves of Portuguese colonizers and fortune hunters who sought treasure in the Brazilian hills. It was in the mining community of Minas Gerais that t he greatest of these colonial artists was bom in 1730. He was Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as O Aleijadinho (the Little Cripple), one of the most versatile artists to work in the New World. Perhaps the fact that he never left his country intensified the Brazilian quality of his church sculpture and architecture. At any rate, his exuberant, baroque designs, executed in local stone, wood, and precious metals, remain today among the glories of the hemisphere.
In 1816 a cultural mission they are not the twentieth-century novelty that some suppose — came from Paris to the Rio de Janeiro court of Rom Joao VI. In the group of nrlists, sculptors, and other craftsmen were such excellent painters as J. B. Debret and N. A. Taunay, who helped lo found the Academy of Fine Arts. This was the beginning of a constant flow back and forth across the Atlantic of artists who were no better or worse than their academic contemporaries in other American countries.
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THE belated introduction of the Brazilian public to a type of painting that was not academic probably occurred first at the exhibition of Lasar Sega IPs work in Sao Paulo in 1913. Nine years later, this same city was host to the famous Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), which was chiefly a literary event but which had far-reaching repercussions among the fine arts as well. During the next fifteen years, Brazilian painting attained an international level and came into its own.
For Brazil, this meant giving up the traditional academic teaching of Europe and experimenting with a type of painting more closely related to its own life. To be explicit, the ingredients of the Brazilian melting pot are more highly integrated than, for instance, the disparate ethnic strains of the I’nited States. The Moorish, African, and indigenous Indian elements have been amalgamated with lHe European heritage, so that today one finds in Brazilian art a unique tropical flavor, a combination of the Portuguese tradition of opulent design and the native propensity for the picturesque.
Fauvism, cubism, futurism, primitivism, and surrealism began to make their way into the studios and discussions of Brazilian artists in the 1920’s. The new conventions of taste and sensibility in a very short time proved to be better adapted to the depiction of Brazilian scenery, people, customs, and the national soul than the strict middle-of-theroad formalisms of nineteent h-century academic art.
Some years ago it was observed that modern Brazilian painting was split into two schools, one in Sao Paulo and one in Bio. The division stems from different approaches to painting, a difference in subject matter and local flavor. The Paulistas are more concerned with spiritual values and with workmanship, and they very often reflect the industrial, grayish, somber atmosphere of their fastgrowing city; while the Cariocas tend toward a type of painting that is more monumental, more decorative, and related to the bright colors and sunny vistas of their environment. During the last few years, cities like Pôrto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Recife, and Salvador have also become small art centers where painters admire but do not depend on the examples set by their colleagues in Rio and Sao Paulo.
Like other countries, Brazil has a group of painters who possess definite personal characteristics and a style which distinguishes them from the adepts of internationalism in art. They range from a primitive like Heitor dos Prazeres or José Antônio da Silva to a master in composition and drawing like Portinari; from a realist like Pancetti to an abstractionist like Cícero Dias. Some, like Djanira, are intensely aware of local color, while others, like Guignard, use colors that are less local but very expressive of the subject.
Our best, painter today, a man whose name and importance have been internationally recognized for many years, is Cândido Portinari, who was born in 1903 in Brodowski, Sao Paulo, of Italian parents and who now lives in Rio. His works have already appeared in textbooks on the history of art, and he was considered one of the few New World painters worth discussing in the recent Dictionnaire de la Peinture Moderne. The exceptional quality of Portinari’s painting largely derives from his mastery of design and his innate feeling for monumental composition. On such good foundations he builds color to a surface of richness and brilliance, in fresco as well as in tempera and oil. There is dramatic feeling in his work, but it is conveyed through space and light rather than through actual gestures. His justly famous frescoes at the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress in Washington, as well as those in the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro, his gigantic canvases, First Mass in Brazil or the Tiradentes, all testify to his wise understanding of the problems of a bare wall. Portinari’s work has revealed a very obvious tenderness for the people of his own country; he is the painter who has most faithfully and convincingly represented the Indian, the Negro, the mestiço, and the white man who have made Brazil what it is. He has used these typical figures in compositions that show the basic activities of Brazilian economic lift*, past and present, in a way far more eloquent than any artist before him. Canvases by Portinari are found in several European and American museums and private collections. At present, he is working on two huge allegories of war and peace, which are to decorate one of the rooms of the United Nations Building in New York.
It would be erroneous to pretend that the work of Lasar Segall (born in 1890, in Vilna, Russia, and living in São Paulo) has the same Brazilian meaning that we find in Portinari. His paintings belong to a school that pays more attention to interior problems than to the world around him. As a representative of the expressionist group, Segall’s concern with the intricacies of the human spirit has very often led him to subjects that are autobiographical, and hence his painting offers a special insight into the experience of the many immigrants who have come from distant lands to live in Brazil. His paintings inspire a deep admiration for a sincere artist who has devoted all his talent and energy to the constant, improvement of his work, experimenting in different techniques with the utmost care, and always motivated by his desire for the perfection of his art and by a noble although discreet sense of human brotherhood. Although he is chiefly an easel painter, he has done a few large canvases. In these compositions every single detail is treated as if it were an isolated painting. Houses, street scenes, his family, friends and unknown people, landscapes and animals, all these subjects have been interpreted by Segall with great sympathy and a sure hand. His complete works make a truthful picture of t he react ions of a sensitive person to the problem of modern man in Brazil.
A precursor who should be mentioned along with Segall is Tarsila do Amaral, who not only was familiar with the school of Paris where she studied — the influence of Leger being strong at the time but also spent a year in New York. She thus brought an international point of view to Brazil in the twenties. This was rejected at first by certain dominant figures in the intellectual life of the country — notably the writer Monteiro Lobato — but her sincerity and true artistic personality ultimately won the day, and her technique came to be used more and more in a Brazilian manner. Two other colleagues, also widely traveled, Flávio de Carvalho and Oswald Andrade Filho, helped in other ways to enrich the new artistic climate.
Alberto Guignard (born in 1893, now living in Belo Horizonte) is a painter of candid reality. A nervous but clear design is the most effective element in his art, and it bespeaks a quick rhythm that reflects his own personality. Less preoccupied with the problems of society than Portinari and Segall, he transmits a sense of enjoyment and affection for the Brazilian scene. He is also a teacher of great influence, whose craftsman like approach to the problems of painting has attracted many students.
With Emiliano di Cavalcanti (born in 1897 in Rio and living in Sao Paulo) we come to one of the members of the old guard of modern painting in Brazil. In the early twenties, he was already one of the most talked-of artists in the country. A well-organized exhibition of his work would show how much he has evolved from a rather crude Fauvism to a type of painting related to cubism but full of personal discoveries. His favorite subject is the Brazilian mestiço and the everyday worker. In bright colors, expertly combined, he has peopled Brazilian painting with hundreds of sensuous women and violent men in a way paralleled by some of the country’s novelists. One may like these creatures or not, but they are strong personalities.
Many Latin Americans have more than one string to their bow, and therefore Jose Pancetti’s versatility should not surprise us. He is a poet who has also earned his living as a sailor in the Brazilian Navy, and his love of the sea is reflected in his marine painting, which has in fact made famous several sections of the Brazilian coast. Born a year before Portinari, and like him of Italian parentage, he has pursued his natural talent for landscape to the very heart of the Brazilian scene. His colors embrace a wide variety of nuances, since, although he is now a realist, he harks back to the postimpressionists. In his work nature undergoes a spontaneous purification.
Djanira (born a Paulista in 1914, now living in Rio) is another extremely personal painter. After years of serious study, she has developed a style which reveals training and knowledge but preserves her original interest in primitivism. Hers is the most beautiful decorative painting in Brazil. In some of her works small things which she loves, such as flowers, may grow to the size of human heads, while a disliked skyscraper may shrink to the height of a child’s leg. In this world of magic, colors shine and sing, creating an intricate communion of man and nature.
The most consistent of Brazilian primitives is Heitor dos Prazeres who was born in 1908 in Rio, where he still lives. His paintings often depict the artistic world, where he is also known as a composer of popular music, with a brush which prefers gay subjects like samba parties and weddings. An absolutely self-taught artist, he belongs to the ever growing group that has sprung up in many countries during recent decades of artists who are good in spite of their unprofessional backgrounds.
The abstractionist Cicero Dias, born in Rio (1908) and now living in France, keeps in touch with the inventions of the School of Paris. Despite this, his paintings are clearly the work of a man who cannot escape the color, culture, and feeling of his motherland. Enigmatic as it may seem, no painter has given a clearer picture of the atmosphere of northeastern Brazil than Cicero Dias with his abstract com positions.
Alfredo Volpi (born in 1896 in Italy and now settled in São Paulo), after a long and varied career, has finally come to a type of painting that is a sort of delicate, musical arabesque, based on the most rudimentary forms and filled with sophisticated colors. His canvases give the impression of deliberate naivete but one cannot deny their charm. He has also designed tiles, a form of art which came to Brazil in colonial times with the Dutch and Portuguese and which is particularly appropriate to the tropical climate. In the 1940’s, Paulo Rossi Osir of São Paulo undertook to revive this art and gathered around him a group of competent and interested artists. The validity of the project is reflected in its successful architectural use.
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A SCULPTOR with the virtuosity and power of an Aleijadinho, the great colonial artist, cannot be expected to appear very often in the history of any country. Today, however, Brazil has some interesting sculptors, who receive important commissions and play leading roles in our artistic life.
Why does our sculpture lack the unmistakable Brazilian flavor so characteristic of our painting, architecture, and music? It may be simply that Brazilian sculptors turn their attention to the human figure, a dependable subject the world over. Nevertheless, to continue to express with freshness, nobility, and pathos various bodily and spiritual attitudes is perhaps as justifiable as to rely on wires and bits of machinery in the making of a piece of “ sculpture.”
There is only one sculptor, Victor Brecheret, bora in France, who has accompanied the development of our modern art from its beginning during the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922 to the present day. He is also the one who has most successfully solved the problem of monumentality, as in his huge Bandeirantes (Pioneers) group in São Paulo. Starting out as a neoclassicist, he has pared his expression down at times almost to the tender suggestiveness of a Henry Moore or the sinuous reductions of Arp, as in the Indio e a Suçuapara of 1951. One of his pupils, Bruno Giorgi, whose first work was also neoclassical, has grown in versatility and depth. His sculpture has perhaps more earthiness and warmth than Brecheret’s, and he won last year the National Prize at the second Paulista Bienal de Arte (Biennial Art Exhibition). Later he traveled to Italy where he made a large figure of Dante for the Municipal Library of Sao Paulo.
A woman sculptor of considerable power is Maria Martins, wife of the former Brazilian Ambassador to the United States. A pupil of Lipschitz, she possesses a strong personality, her themes deriving frequently from Brazilian life. Dances and Amazonian legends have moved her, as the sculptures Soul of the Samba, Macumba, Cobra Grande, and Uirapurú illustrate, yet she is also known for her many siudies of Salome and Christ.
A younger sculptor from Bahia, Mário Cravo, starts out with the premise that in order to be universal one must first be local. He has, for example, been inspired by Bahian baroque architecture and has made an interesting collection of ex-votos and folk objects. On the other hand, the style of each of his works is determined by its subject, so that one must look at many of them to appreciate his versatility.
Zamoyski, Lipschitz, and Calder, to name but three of the foreigners whose works are found in Brazil, have in various ways contributed to the artistic life of the country, and Zamoyski has taught at Rio and at São Paulo for a number of years.
In Rio de Janeiro there is a municipal law which requires architects to incorporate provisions for painting or sculpture in their designs for any new, large buildings to be erected in the city. One cannot legislate good art, of course, but such a law is an indication of the encouragement that artists find in Brazil today. Other indications are São Paulo’s international Bienal, the vigorous policies of the nation’s museums, and the thriving market for contemporary art. In other words, the flourishing community of Brazilian artists is being offered an ample opportunity to do good work, and a genuinely integrated art is now emerging.