Tarsila do Amaral’s shift to dreamlike modernism in celebration of Brazil’s natural beauty.” width=”970″ height=”783″ data-caption=’Tarsila do Amaral, <em>Lake</em>, 1928. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Photo by Jaime Acioli, copyright Tarsila do Amaral</span>’>
Brazilian Modernism in art was born out of nationalistic pride. Isolated from contemporary international creative developments until the early 1910s, Brazilian art traditionally revolved around religious iconography, portraiture and landscapes. Brazilian art academies were fiercely protectionist, viewing any new international art movement as radical and, therefore, at odds with their country’s traditions. Plus, Brazil was experiencing an economic boom orchestrated by wealthy industrialists, and the national exhibitions the nouveau riche funded reflected their conservative tastes. Brazilian Modernism propelled the country’s national artistic identity into the new century, and “Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism,” a group exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, takes a lingering look at the artists who brought a freer, more contemporary sense of self-identity to the country’s art legacy.
Modernism in painting had been bubbling in Europe from the 1860s as art moved away from formal, story-telling tropes towards work that explored how paint could be more expressive and expansive. By the 1910s, Paris and Berlin were hotbeds of Modernism as Picasso, Braque, Kirchner and others smashed through painterly boundaries. Born in São Paulo in 1889, Brazilian artist Anita Malfatti’s 1912 visit to Europe blew her mind. Ending up in Berlin, she immersed herself in the new art ideas and, when she returned to Brazil, blended them into her paintings. Malfatti became a member of Grupo dos Cinco, a collective of artists and writers working towards shaking off old-school ideas that included fellow painter Tarsila do Amaral. The Grupo dos Cinco were the first Brazilian Modernists, and Malfatti and do Amaral are key figures among the ten artists in the Academy’s show.
Brazil’s Modernist timeline is a long one. Starting in earnest in the early twentieth century, it’s generally agreed that the movement petered out at the start of the 1970s, and the Academy’s exhibition succeeds in illustrating how Brazilian Modernist art became looser and more colorful as time passed. Tarsila do Amaral’s artworks show this flowering, and her Lake painting from 1928 is a glorious celebration of nature that’s at odds with her introspective portrait work—like the painting of poet and Grupo dos Cinco member Oswald de Andrade—from six years before.
Anita Malfatti also painted Oswald de Andrade, and her rendering shows how the Brazilian Modernists were embracing fresh takes on paint manipulation. Malfatti’s Oswald is on the move, traversing the canvas in front of an energetic background of intersecting planes of color. Similarly, Flávio de Carvalho used portraiture to push his practice forward. His portrait of Mário de Andrade (another Grupo dos Cinco poet and stalwart) from 1939 is a fuzzy exercise in cutting loose with a paintbrush. Flávio de Carvalho was a wild card. Starting out as an architect and engineer, his artistic excursions included Experience N. 2, Brazil’s first act of performance art in which he walked the opposite way of a religious procession (very frowned upon), flirting with women as he wended through the crowd (even worse).
Lasar Segall and Vicente do Rego Monteiro were contemporaries of Malfatti and do Amaral. Born in Lithuania in 1891 and educated in Germany, Segall moved to São Paulo in 1912, bringing his experience of European Expressionism with him. In Banana Plantation, painted in 1927, Segall acknowledges the presence of African culture brought to Brazil following the trafficking of slaves from Africa to the country by Portuguese colonists. A plantation worker stares stoically from the canvas, seemingly close to drowning in the banana plants around him. Vicente do Rego Monteiro exhibited alongside Segall and Malfatti in the 1920s, and his roundly painted human figures—like Archer from 1925—recall the curving forms of British Modernists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
Working during the Second World War, Candido Portinari’s output had its basis in the gulf between the rich and the poor in Brazil. He used drawings and paintings of scarecrows to convey the plight of his country’s impoverished people, and his 1940 painting The Scarecrow is of a young girl in ragged clothes. In contrast, Alfredo Volpi reduced his paintings down to simple, geometric forms. His Untitled piece from 1950 is a mixture of willful naivety and trompe l’oeil as its triangles appear to vibrate and shudder against their blue grounding. Geraldo de Barros was also intrigued by geometry and the trajectory of shapes, and the title of his Arrangement of Three Similar Shapes within a Circle artwork tells it like it is: a pinwheeling ice-cream swirl of flat color.
Djanira da Motta e Silva is the third female artist in the survey. Known simply as Djanira, her Three Orishas painting from 1966 is a showstopper. Brazilian Modernism was established as a formidable force by the 1960s, and Djanira has spent time in New York, where she hung out with Marc Chagall and Joan Miró. As with Segall, she represented the influence of African culture on her country, and her Three Orishas painting shows a trio of orishas, or West African goddesses, looming imperiously in front of a pair of drummers. Rubem Valentim also found inspiration in the orisha myths. The only artist showcased here who worked in three—as well as two—dimensions, Valentim’s orishas are unrecognizably cubic in his oil paintings and totem-like in his wooden cut-outs and carvings. Made in 1980, Emblematic Sacral Alter Set – E59 is one of a long series of Valentim sculptures that he saw as holy tributes to the African deities.
In all, “Brasil! Brasil!” is a steady show but there’s a staid quality to its staging. In 2022, the Royal Academy held a William Kentridge retrospective, and the whole deal was a spell-binding treat. Lighting bounced from intense to subtle as the exhibition unfolded, and Kentridge’s creations were presented in a kind of well-managed chaos. There’s none of that playfulness or chaos here, which is a shame given the vibrancy and dynamism of the artwork on show.
“Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism” is at the Royal Academy in London through April 21, 2025. Advance booking is recommended.
