This post was originally published on artnews.com
In November 1944, during the final months of World War II, the Royal Academy of Arts in London mounted an exhibition to support the Allied cause. This was no showing of national pride or antifascist art. Instead, it was a presentation of Brazilian modernism, organized by Brazilian statesman a future UN General Assembly president Oswaldo Aranha. Part of a cultural mission between the two countries benefiting the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund, the exhibition gathered together more than 150 works, with 23 sold as gifts to UK museums.
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More than 80 years later, Brazil’s modernist art movement is once again the subject of a major exhibition at the Royal Academy, “Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism”—this time without the political coercion of the Foreign Office. (The National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery both said they were “not in the position to accept extraneous exhibitions,” while Tate said its galleries were too bomb-damaged to host the exhibition.)
“I’m hoping that this exhibition, in a way, is a compensation for the 1944 show and also raises the profile of artists who are not known in Britain,” Royal Academy chief curator Adrian Locke told ARTnews, noting that the Royal Academy might not have had much of a choice in mounting the show.
Organized by the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, in collaboration with the Royal Academy, and on view until April 21, Locke curated the exhibition with Zentrum’s chief curator Fabienne Eggelhöfer and Roberta Saraiva Coutinho, director of the Museu da Língua Portuguesa in São Paulo. Featuring 130 works, “Brasil! Brasil!” expands the original 1944 exhibition’s purview, focusing on art made between 1910 and 1970 by 10 artists, including well-known artists like Tarsila do Amaral, Rubem Valentim, and Alfredo Volpi alongside ones with smaller international profiles such as Anita Malfatti, often considered the first Brazilian modernist; Djanira da Motta e Silva, a self-taught artist of Guaraní descent; Geraldo de Barros, a cofounder of the concrete art movement’s Grupo Ruptura; and Flávio de Carvalho, one of Brazil’s first queer performance artists. Locke said this small grouping of artists is “an opportunity to shine a light on some of those artists that were significant figures in Brazilian art but [who are] much less well known outside of Brazil.”
This 60-year period saw the arts, from painting and architecture to literature and music, bloom across the country as modernists shifted away from the traditional arts dominant during the colonial era (1500–1815) and the historical allegories, portraits, and landscape paintings of the Imperial period (1815–89). As an independent republic beginning in 1889, the young country wanted to establish a new identity that represented the diversity and culture of Brazil. Modernism ushered in new ways of representing people as well as new techniques and color palettes.
“What is interesting is that when you look at Brazilian Modernism, what [the artists] start doing very early on is to represent ordinary resilience,” Locke said. “You get more of a sense of the country and the diversity. Artists are interested in exploring the country rather than celebrating the European way of life. They start to embrace the vegetation, the architecture, and the faces of what it is to be Brazilian.”
At the exhibition’s entrance, a neon-colored video projected on the wall shows Brazil’s cityscapes and favelas, forests and waterfalls, as well as views of Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf Mountain and Christ the Redeemer. A soundtrack accompanies the exhibition, transitioning from birdsong and rainforest sounds to the rhythmic beat of samba drums and Bossa nova music as viewers navigate the show.
Near the show’s beginning are works by Lasar Segall, a Jewish Lithuanian immigrant whose paintings chronicle his experience as an outsider in both Europe and Brazil. Banana Plantation (1927) and Favela (1954–55), for example, take as their subjects oppression and displacement in Brazil. (Favelas, historically viewed as places with high crime and poverty, developed on Rio de Janeiro’s hillsides between the 1890s and 1930s after the city demolished high-density tenement blocks called cortiços.) But Segall approaches these topics by painting his subjects in forest and favela settings, areas built by its inhabitants. With Banana Plantation, a man is centered within the dense, green leaves of the banana groves, as if he’s being absorbed into the vegetation. The painting refers to the European migrants who moved to Brazil en masse to work its plantations following the abolition of the slave trade in 1888.
Further along are Candido Portinari’s paintings of farmers from Brazil’s hinterlands and the harsh lives they lead. Migrants (1944) shows a family from the northeast rural communities who leave their homelands, searching for work and better opportunities. They walk barefoot on dry terrain with vultures flying above them, waiting to feast on the bodies of those who do not make the trek.
“In Brazil today, one speaks of ‘Modernismos’—or modernisms in plural,” cocurator Saraiva Coutinho told ARTnews. “These diverse artistic perspectives are intended to demonstrate just how varied the search for a Brazilian culture was in a place where plurality is understood to be part of its DNA.”
Throughout the exhibition, we see how these modernists shocked Brazilian society with their avant-garde art. Malfatti’s 1929 Portrait of Oswald, a vividly colored of portrait of a man whose striking green eyes shine like emeralds, depicts Oswald de Andrade, the Brazilian modernist poet and novelist and a member of the Grupo dos Cinco.
Meanwhile, Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s canvases incorporate various Indigenous cultural expressions including Amazonian legends and talismans, while Flávio de Carvalho’s experimental abstractions, like Final Ascension of Christ (1932), show a synthesis of the European avant-garde—Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism—from a distinctly Brazilian point of view.
Works by Djanira, as the artist is affectionately called in Brazil, reflect a similar syncretism; Three Orishas (1966) shows three faceless priestesses of Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion that mixes Catholicism with West African beliefs brought over by enslaved Africans. Wearing white dresses adorned with different patterns, their sumptuous headdresses and beaded necklaces glowing bright against the golden background dazzle. Djanira, whose works have historically been labeled as “naïve painting” in Brazil, said “I might be naive, but my painting is not.”
Eggelhöfer, Zentrum’s chief curator, said that this is the case with several of the exhibition’s artists in the exhibition. Because they “were not classically trained, their work was long regarded as ‘primitive’ or ‘popular.’ And unlike the other artists, they were not mere observers but members of these cultures. De Carvalho moved between the visual arts, architecture, design, and performance, making his work difficult to categorize.”
The exhibition ends with artists whose work achieves pure abstraction, like Volpi’s paintings from the 1940s and onwards. Untitled (1950), a painting of symmetrical, black and white triangle patterns against a dark blue background, is a sharp contrast to his earlier figurative works. Valentim’s sculptures and geometric paintings bridge Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions and modernism. De Barros’s unconventional black-and-white “Fotoformas” photographs (1946–51) incorporate unusual medium-altering techniques like long exposures, applying ink to negatives, and solarization in which a photographic image goes through a tone reversal through re-exposing a print to the light during development.
“One of the points we wanted to make with this exhibition,” Locke said, “is that when you talk about Brazilian Modernism, it’s not like Cubism. It’s not just a contained group of artists doing the same thing. It’s much more amorphous. They are all part of that shifting landscape that takes place in Brazil.”