Royal Academy takes pride in ‘Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism’
By James Brewer
Brasil! Brasil! – it sounds like the refrain for a samba, but it is the impelling title of an exhibition meant to awaken the wider world to Brazil’s breakthrough a century ago into dynamic new art trends
First, from their travels in Europe, and then from indigenous sources, young artists absorbed new sights and insights, as the Royal Academy explains in its show Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism.
It features 130 works from the 1910s to the 1970s by ten foremost practitioners, capturing the evolving aesthetics and exciting diversity of Brazilian art.
Early in the 1900s, there were few museums in the South American country where you could see international art, but the rising, inquisitive generation voyaged to Paris and other centres – those who could afford to do so – to investigate for themselves the latest trends. Radical new questions of visualisation arose.
The London institution has boldly allotted lots of space until April 21, 2025, for its exploration of the cultural upheaval, by giving over its main galleries – where its Summer Exhibition each year packs in around 1,700 paintings, sculptures and maquettes – to the phenomenon.
It is a rare treat to engage in one location with the series of pioneers of Brazilian Modernism, whose circuitry was sparked by the 27-year-old Anita Malfatti. Her enthusiasm had been stirred by the museum collections she had seen in Berlin. Anita put on an innovative exhibition in 1917 in São Paulo which was viciously criticised for showing Brazilians in all their diversity going about their daily work, rather than following the bourgeois scheme of historical allegories and religious imagery.
Brazil, with its 8.5m sq. km landmass being half of the entire continent of South America, provided refreshing new perspectives for her and her friends, who became the mainsprings for expressing the new, individualistic sensibilities. The country had become a republic in 1889, and protagonists in literature, music, poetry, theatre, design and art began to light the way to a new national identity. Coincidentally, 1889 was the birth year of two of the artists at the forefront of the new art – of Anita, and of Lasar Segall.
The impulse for Anna’s endeavour was her cosmopolitan background. Born in São Paulo of Italian and German American descent, she lived in Berlin for four years and studied for a year in the US. In the wake of her exhibition shocker, a flurry of collaborative artmaking soon drew on the indigenous roots of the country. In 1923, with writers Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, and Paulo Menotti del Picchia, and the painter Tarsila do Amaral she formed the Group of Five.
Of such personalities, it is Tarsila – she was widely known by her first name – who will perhaps have the greatest appeal to visitors to the London exhibition because of her joyous and generous application of colours reflecting the lushness of Brazilian landscapes.
Born in 1886 in Capivari, in the state of São Paulo, Tarsila was raised on her family’s coffee plantations. Following private painting lessons, she moved in 1920 to Paris where she enrolled at the Académie Julian, a school unusually offering women access to classes in life drawing. In France she turned to Brazilian culture for artistic inspiration, painting The Black Woman (1923), a Cubist-style, racially defiant portrait of a naked Afro-Brazilian woman against a background of colours of earth and sky.
Tarsila returned to São Paulo in June 1922, where the poet Oswald de Andrade became her partner. In February of that year, a coffee tycoon, Paulo Prado, financed a week of cultural events known as the Semana de Arte Moderna(Modern Art Week) in São Paulo with the aim of challenging the conservative cultural establishment. It motivated Tarsila to explore her heritage: she wanted to be “the painter of my country” and its population, both indigenes and those descended from the 1.7m of the total 4m enslaved people that Portuguese colonists forcibly shipped from West Africa. After more than three centuries of colonial rule, Brazil declared independence in 1822, but slavery was abolished only in 1888. Meanwhile, people from Europe, Japan and Syria settled in Brazil, further marginalising the aboriginal base.
In Paris, Tarsila studied with French Cubist painters André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Fernand Léger. Her 1928 canvas Abaporu, stemming from two Tupi-Guarani words meaning “the man who eats human flesh,” was painted as a birthday present for Oswald. The painting of an abnormally small-headed figure leaning on an elbow, next to a cactus that looked like a sun, became the signature illustration of the Anthropophagy Manifesto written by Oswald. The word anthropophagy is from the Greek anthrôpophágos or flesh-eating, and the idea was that artists should consume artistic influences from both modern European art and traditional Brazilian culture, to create something uniquely Brazilian. Cannibalism had taken place historically among native Brazilians; and it so happened that in 1920s Paris, surrealist intellectuals and artists were fascinated by such lore. The influence of the anthropophagic movement was revived by artists in the 1960s, notably by the Tropicália movement, including the singer and composer Caetano Veloso, in the service of musical liberty and against the brutal military dictatorship of the time.
Tarsila’s The Lake, from 1928, is reproduced as the poster for the current exhibition – as well as for a tote bag motif in the shop. Tarsila’s mastery of naïve art produced assertive foliage in irresistibly bright pinks, greens, and blues, populating the lakeshore in surrealist and seductive cadence.
Another colourful scene replete with idyllic flora and fauna is Tarsila’s Favela Hill, of 1924, depicting a lively shanty community of residents and their colourful houses. Nearly 20 years later, Tarsila was still attracted to primitivism, as shown by the charmingly accessible Farm with seven piglets.
These last mentioned are in the huge collection of the late lawyer Sérgio Fadel and his wife Hecilda, who over 35 years amassed in Rio de Janeiro 1,500 pieces of Baroque and 19th and 20th century art, while some other collectors remained fixated on the colonial period.
Although women became prominent in art movements throughout Latin America, it took some time for Anita and Tarsila to be acknowledged as heroines of Brazilian modernism, Djanira da Motta e Silva, widely known by her first name, was born in Avaré, a city 270 km from São Paulo, as the grandchild of Austro-Hungarian immigrants on her mother’s side, and of indigenous Brazilian heritage from her father. Largely self-taught as an artist, she began to paint while recovering from tuberculosis, saying with great conviction: “My roots are firmly planted in the earth, and I do not shy away from my origins. I am not ashamed of being a native. I trust in the development of an art that is truly our own.”
Much of her output drew on everyday life in Rio: depicting a group of barefoot children in front of city apartment blocks, Flying a Kite (1950) is one of her vivid hybrids of figuration and abstraction.
She lived at one stage in New York where she met the influential Joan Miró and Marc Chagall, and her travels in Brazil included the state of Bahia where she encountered Candomblé, a religious practice based on West African traditions which was brought by slaves shipped to the Portuguese colonies. Candomblé developed prominently in the port city of Salvador. In 1966, Djanira encapsulated its rituals and beliefs in her painting Three Orishas, now in the Collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.
The Orishas are holy spirits which rule over nature and humanity. In the picture are Yemanja, a maternal figure often depicted as a mermaid; Oxala, the creator, unusually represented here as a woman; and Cxum, deity of the river and fresh water, luxury, pleasure and love. Musicians in the background beat drums to summon spirits and gods to help the living, ease their pain, increase their joys, and hypnotise people taking part in the ceremony.
The provocative artist and architect Flávio de Carvalho was one of Brazil’s first performance artists. He wrote O bailado do Deus morto (The Dance of the Dead God) a play staged in 1933 with dances and songs from the era of slavery, for the inauguration of the Teatro da Experiência in São Paulo but the production was quickly shut down by the censors. He had hoped to stage plays by Oswald de Andrade there. Two years earlier, his counter-cultural Experience No. 2 had enraged religious devotees when without removing his hat he walked against the flow of a Corpus Christi procession. His antics continued over the years: in 1956, came Experience No. 3, in which the lanky de Carvalho paraded in central São Paulo in his New Look for men in the tropics: a blouse and skirt and fishnet stockings.
Flávio de Carvalho’s expressionist paintings, such as Portrait of Mário de Andrade, from 1939, are in shifting planes, in this case highlighting the character’s face. The polymath Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), was one of the most important figures in propagating modern art in Brazil. Andrade was captivated by the work of Anita Malfatti at her controversial 1917 exhibition and championed the renewal of Brazil’s art institutions.
Flávio de Carvalho designed architectural projects in São Paulo, such as Cidade do homem nu (City of the Naked Man), a kind of manifesto for a modernist city; he advocated the unity of art and architecture.
The multi-talented Vicente do Rego Monteiro – painter, engraver, sculptor, author, poet (he was awarded the Guillaume Apollinaire Prize for his poetry), book publisher, film producer and racing driver – is represented here by among other paintings, the oil on canvas Tennis, from 1928, which has travelled but a short distance – from the Museum & Art, Swindon. The picture is on the cover of the Routledge book International Tennis Art
Rego Monteiro’s art deco and geometric designs chime with the modes of the 1920s-1940s. He was one of the first modernists to respond to indigenous cultures despite having no direct contact with them. He relished the collection of Amazon artefacts at the Museu Nacional (National Museum) in Rio. Born in Recife, he relocated to Paris in 1911, where he studied drawing and sculpture at the Académie Julian, and became friends with Modigliani and Léger. He was frequently at the gatherings in the apartment of Tarsila and Oswald, a meeting point for artists and intellectuals flocking to Paris. Today he has more works in French galleries than any other Brazilian artist
The exhibition includes the self-taught artist Alfredo Volpi, who came under the sway of both Impressionism and Expressionism. He nevertheless remained independent of any movement but served as a bridge to the Neo-Concretists who in the 1950s gained international acclaim, led by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica.
If the show’s rhythm feels uneven, this only reflects the criss-crossing of the exponents’ varied paths.
A section is devoted to the Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, which took place at the Royal Academy in 1944. An initiative of Brazilian statesman Oswaldo Aranha on behalf of his government, it was supported by the UK Foreign Office to raise funds for the war effort. With 168 works by 70 artists, it toured to several venues in the UK. Some 23 works were donated to UK museums including the National Gallery of Scotland, which received from the British Council a canvas by Lasar Segall, Lucy with flower. Some 100,000 visitors saw the show in the UK before it toured to Paris.
The woman in the picture by Lasar Segall (born Vilnius 1889, died São Paulo 1957) is the painter and designer Lucy Citti Ferreira (1911-2008). Born in São Paul, she spent her early years in France and Italy and began her artistic training at L’École Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre. When she returned to Brazil in 1934, she became Segall’s student and model. Dated 1939-42, the portrait of Lucy was highly praised at the 1944 exhibition.
Four paintings from the 1944 event (by Lasar Segall, Tarsila do Amaral and Candido Portinari), and three works by the landscape architect and environmental advocate Roberto Burle Marx, have been ‘reunited’ in the new exhibition.
The exhibition is organised by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, in collaboration with the Royal Academy, London. It is curated by Dr Fabienne Eggelhöfer, chief curator of Zentrum Paul Klee; Roberta Saraiva Coutinho, former director of the Museu Lasar Segall in São Paulo and current director of the Museu da Língua Portugesa, São Paulo; with Dr Adrian Locke, chief curator of the Royal Academy. Adrian Locke spoke of his personal emotion in being involved in the project, given his family connections with Brazil.
Images:
Favela Hill, 1924. By Tarsila do Amaral. Oil on canvas. Collection of Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel.
Farm with seven piglets, 1943. By Tarsila do Amaral. Oil on canvas. Private collection, São Paulo.
The Lake, 1928. By Tarsila do Amaral. Oil on canvas. Collection of Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel. Photo: Jaime Acioli. ©️ Tarsila do Amaral S/A.
Self-portrait with orange dress, 1921. By Tarsila do Amaral. Oil on canvas. Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. On long-term loan from Banco Central.
Tennis, 1928. By Vicente do Rego Monteiro. Oil on canvas. On loan from Museum & Art, Swindon.
Three Orishas, 1966. By Djanira da Motta e Silva. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Purchased by the Governo do Estado de São Paulo, 1969.
Lucy with flower, 1939-42. By Lasar Segall. Oil on canvas. National Galleries of Scotland. Presented by the British Council in 1945, in recognition of collaboration in a series of exhibitions arranged during the 1939-45 War.
Flying a Kite, 1950. By Djanira da Motta e Silva. Oil on canvas. Banco Itaú Collection. Photo: Humberto Pimentel/Itaú Cultural. © Instituto Pintora Djanira.
Mário de Andrade, 1939. By Flávio de Carvalho. Oil on canvas. Art Collection of the City/ Collection Supervision/ CCSP/ SMC/ PMSP. Photo: Luiz Aureliano. © Flávio de Carvalho.
Banana Plantation, 1927. By Lasar Segall. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Purchased by the Governo do Estado de São Paulo, 1928. Photo: Isabella Matheus. © Lasar Segall.
Brasil! Brasil! The birth of Modernism, is at the Royal Academy Main Galleries until April 21, 2025.
