LONDON — In 2018, the New Yorker ran a review entitled “Introducing New York to the First Brazilian Modernist,” which is enticing, though misleading. Tarsila do Amaral wasn’t the first Brazilian Modernist (how would one even bestow this moniker?), but rather among the first introduced to New Yorkers, thanks to that show at the Museum of Modern Art.
When it comes to Brazilian Modernism, Tarsila, as Brazilians call her, is indeed a great opener. Her work crystallizes the movement’s characteristics: its ties to the European art movements of the 1910s and ‘20s, striking synthesis between figuration and abstraction, and turn to local traditions and motifs, particularly those stemming from rural folklore and Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous cultures. But, needless to say, forefronting her singular trajectory belies just how diverse the movement actually was.
Brasil! Brasil!: The Birth of Modernism at the Royal Academy of Art (RA) helps bridge this gap. Curated by Fabienne Eggelhöfer, chief curator at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern and Roberta Saraiva Coutinho, director of the Museu da Língua Portuguesa in São Paulo, with Adrian Locke, senior curator at the RA, the exhibition presents over 130 works from the 1910s to the 1970s, centering on 10 Brazilian artists. Five of those participated in São Paulo’s inaugural Modern Art Week, in 1922; the other five others were outsiders to the circle of moneyed, intellectual, and progressive art elites from which artist like Tarsila hailed.
Amongst the former group, the most intriguing is perhaps Anita Malfatti, featured in the same room with another Berlin-trained Modernist, the Lithuanian-born Lasar Segall. Malfatti’s career didn’t shine as brightly as her contemporaries; the fact that Brazilian critic Monteiro Lobato panned her early work didn’t help. But at the RA, one can appreciate her bold Expressionist portraits and landscapes, as well as the mysterious pastel-and-charcoal “Man of Seven Colours” (1915–16), in which a nearly headless male torso fuses with lush palm trees, encapsulating the Brazilian Modernists’ love for their country’s exuberant flora.
As the essays in the exhibition catalog explain, Malftatti’s subsequent turn to realism was emblematic of the 1930s, when Brazil came under the conservative government of Getúlio Vargas, whose program of social reform bore hints of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The works at RA from this period convey uniquely modern concerns such as rapid industrialization and the misery of rural folk-turned-migrants and Afro-Brazilians emancipated from slavery. Tarsila’s painting “Second Class” (1933), depicting ashen train passengers such as those fleeing the drought- and poverty-stricken northeast for big cities, is a fine example. But no artist encapsulated these themes more powerfully than Candido Portinari in his large painting, “Migrants” (1944): With their sooty visages and deathly aura, his hollowed, skeletal figures lost in a lunar landscape convey the anguish of unbroken peregrination and endless famine.
The tempo picks up as the exhibition progresses, and as the visitors leave behind the more formal experiments evocative of European movements such as Expressionism or Cubism and enter a more fragmented but also exciting pictorial landscape. Three paintings in the series Indigenous Composition (1922) by Vicente do Rego Monteiro, a conservative artist rather indifferent to the Modernist vanguard, remind viewers that geometric patterns were not only being imported to Brazil from abroad — the country was already rich in geometric representation in the form of the vast system of symbolism in Indigenous crafts.
A similar point applies to Brazilian arte popular, encompassing many folkloric traditions. Alfredo Volpi, a self-taught artist whose colorful abstractions took after brightly painted facades of working-class houses and popular street decorations, is shown in a room adjacent to another lower-class autodidact, Djanira da Motta e Silva. The latter’s painting, “Market Scene” (1960), in which a Black female food-seller wearing a traditional Bahian dress sits nearby yet isolated from three White men wearing suits and sun hats, is a bitingly ironic commentary on the persistent racial, class, and gender divides characteristic of Brazilian society.
Brasil! Brasil!’s last room is both a climax and a cliffhanger. Here, the works of Afro-Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim hang opposite the black and white photographs and paintings of Geraldo de Barros. The fortuitous pairing again underscores the message that Brazilian Modernism was as much a homegrown as imported phenomenon. Valentim’s wooden totemic sculptures — for instance one titled “Emblematic Object 1” (1969) — derive their form from the symbols employed in Afro-Brazilian religious and ritual objects. His painting “Untitled” (1962), for instance, seamlessly combines his admiration for the streamlined geometries he encountered in the works of Paul Klee with his knowledge of Afro-Brazilian emblems. Seen opposite de Barros’s photographs, which capture urban surroundings in an abstracted manner, it’s clear how works of this movement paved the way for the Brazilian art of the future. Concrete Art, hinted at by Valentim’s power of synthesis and de Barros’s strict geometries, is only a step away.
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism continues at the Royal Academy of Arts (Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, United Kingdom) through April 21. The exhibition was organized by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibition was curated by Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Roberta Saraiva Coutinho, and Adrian Locke.
