From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Twentieth-century Brazilians were forever pledging devotion to the new. In 1937, President Getúlio Vargas announced the establishment of the Estado Novo (‘New State’). Its aim, no less, was the creation of a ‘new man, Brazilian and modern’. Then, in 1946 – a year after Vargas’s Estado Novo had been consigned to history – came a new constitution, which mandated that within 60 days work should begin on a new capital, to be built on Brazil’s central plateau. It was a decade, rather than 60 days, before diggers started flattening the earth where that city, Brasília, would stand, but by 1960, the year of the angular new capital’s inauguration, the words ‘Brazilian’ and ‘modern’ were starting to seem like plausible companions. Meanwhile, in the old capital, Rio de Janeiro, musicians such as Tom Jobim were making their own covenant with the new in songs like ‘Chega de Saudade’ (‘Enough of Nostalgia’), which launched bossa nova (‘new wave’) on the world.
Next to the architecture of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer and the sounds of bossa nova, the art of 20th-century Brazil is little known. Yet as ‘Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism’ documents, Brazilian artists were no less committed to novelty than their compatriots in other fields. In 1922, to coincide with the centenary of Brazil’s independence, the city of São Paulo hosted the Semana de Arte Moderna, a week of exhibitions, happenings and performances designed not to celebrate the artistic achievements of the country’s hundred years but to repudiate them.
Flying a Kite (1950), Djanira. Banco Itaú Collection. Photo: Humberto Pimentel/Itaú Cultural. © Instituto Pintora Djanira
What the oracles of Brazil’s avant-garde were offering instead might have been new to a country where there was little between the poles of folk art and academic painting, but it was hardly revolutionary. Anita Malfatti, to whom half of the exhibition’s first room is devoted, studied in Germany in the 1910s; one might easily mistake the subjects of two lightly Expressionistic portraits, Oswald and Mário de Andrade, for Berlin boulevardiers painted by a follower of Kirchner. Another participant in the Semana de Arte Moderna represented here, the painter Vicente do Rego Monteiro, studied in Paris, where he picked up the elements of abstraction. He put them to service in various red, white and black combinations, which were given an unconvincing Brazilian veneer by way of the title Indigenous Composition.
Four of the eight other painters on whom the exhibition focuses had significant spells in Europe too. Candido Portinari, who was commissioned by the Vargas government to create patriotic artistic programmes for official buildings, spent two years studying in France. Lasar Segall, who shares the first room with Malfatti, was actually born in Vilnius before moving to Berlin and then Dresden to study. Even after migrating to Brazil in 1923, he kept a weather eye on events in Europe, producing an unnerving depiction of a pogrom, executed in a Neue Sachlichkeit manner, in 1937.
Banana Plantation (1927), Lasar Segall. Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Photo: Isabella Matheus; © Lasar Segall
It would not be inaccurate to say, then, that modernism came to Brazil less via an act of birth than one of adoption. The works on display here show again and again artists playing with different styles. So we see Portinari trying out symbolist techniques in his sinister Scarecrow (1940) and Surrealism in his Boy with Ram (1941), while also producing a body of social-realist paintings exalting the agricultural labourer and deploring the lot of the poor. Tarsila do Amaral – one of three female artists represented here, along with Malfatti and Djanira da Motta e Silva (known as ‘Djanira’) – achieved celebrity in the 1920s with her surrealist Abaporu (not in the exhibition), but in the same period occupied herself painting attractive, brightly coloured landscapes that, with their flattened trees, blank houses and faceless figures, verge on the naive. Flávio de Carvalho, another of the painters showcased here, pursued a career as a performance artist when not trying to combine the various modes of Picasso on a single canvas. In 1956, this alumnus of Lancashire boys’ boarding school Stonyhurst promenaded through the streets of São Paulo in a skirt and fishnet stockings.
While a large exhibition, ‘Brasil! Brasil!’ has the feel of a set of mini-retrospectives. Each of the ten artists is given a room, or at least a long wall, of their own. This arrangement makes sense, considering the need to introduce little-known artists to uninitiated viewers. It does, though, mean that the distinctly Brazilian themes among the works tend to get lost. For instance, the exhibition presents three very different treatments – by Tarsila, Segall and Portinari – of one of the most recognisable artefacts of Brazilian modernity, the favela. Yet separated from each other and set among works of a general kind, each painting becomes just one more example of the individual artist’s output.
Lake (1928), Tarsila do Amaral. Collection of Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel. Photo: Jaime Acioli; ©️ Tarsila do Amaral S/A
Indeed, there is remarkably little in these very varied artworks, beyond the odd palm tree or banana plant, to signal their nationality. The only real exception to this rule is provided by the paintings of Djanira. In the 1950s and ’60s, this self-taught artist produced highly stylised depictions of Brazilian folklore and popular culture, replete with Candomblecistas, Caboclinhos and Congadas (which look dangerously like Morris dances). By the time Djanira came to prominence, however, modernism had settled into respectable middle age, and it is difficult to associate her with the generation of Tarsila, Malfatti and the rest.
An artist much more deserving of inclusion but strangely absent from the show is Emiliano Di Cavalcanti. A leading light of the Semana de Arte Moderna, he married modernist styling with Brazilian subjects more originally than almost all the individuals encompassed by this exhibition. When in 1953 he learned that he had been jointly awarded a prize with the painter Alfredo Volpi – who, on the evidence of the penultimate room, was like an out-ofcontrol printer in his production of impressions of banderoles – he reacted with disgust: ‘An artist is not one who makes works of art, but one who creates them.’
Certainly, ‘Brasil! Brasil!’ offers more in the way of imitation than innovation. Yet there is much in this vivid exhibition that will be new to visitors, conceived in Europe but unsighted there until now.
‘Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism’ is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 21 April.
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.