A Place Called Space: Brasil, Brasil, Part 3

Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism - Part 3

at the Royal Academy of Art.

In this part 3 of this wonderful exhibition I am copying the introduction from section 1 so that if people don't want to look at the previous sections which you can see here and here they can still get a full understanding. If you do not want to read the introduction again, scroll down to the first artist.

The exhibition is exploring Brazilian art history through the work of ten artists, active between 1910 and the 1970s. During that time a flourishing in the arts - including painting, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, music and literature - swept across the country, and was known collectively as Brazilian Modernism. This was not a defined movement but rather a coming together of different cultural figures who campaigned for Brazil to move away from the old-fashioned traditional forms of art that were rooted in the colonial (1500-1815) and Imperial (1815-89) periods before Brazil became a republic in 1889. As a young, ambitious and optimistic nation, Brazil wanted to create its own distinctive identity. It rejected European tastes for academic art and typical subjects such as historical allegories and religious scenes in favour of those that reflected and celebrated the country's cultural diversity.

Brazil has a significant Indigenous population but one that has been increasingly marginalised following the influx of immigrant settles that began during the colonial period. Portuguese colonists forcibly brought more than four million enslaved people from West Africa across the Atlantic, with the aboliton of slavery only taking place in 1888. Later, significant populations of Italians, Japanese, Germans and Syrians settled in Brazil, further enriching its extraordinary ethnic diversity.

Although many modernists lived and studied abroad, mainly in Europe of the US, they returned to Brazil determined to fashion a new artistic identity that looked inwards rather than outwards for inspiration. Aside from incorporating modern approaches to art, artists travelled across the country reflecting on the different peoples and places they encountered and integrating them into their work. This exhibition celebrates this 60 year period, revealing the gradual move from the representational to the abstract.

Flavio de Carvalho, 1899-1973:

Painter, architect, performance artist, theatre producer and designer Flavio de Carvalho was a provocative force of Brazilian Modernism. As an artist he was largely self-taught, his only formal training being the evening drawing classes he took while at university. De Carvallo immersed himself in the country's growing modernist scene. He entered national and international architecture competitions for public buildings with outlandishly ambitious designs, experimented with writing and designed and staged several avant-garde theatre productions.

Having declared that he intended to 'de-provincialise' Sao Paulo, de Carvalho's work often attracted controversy. His paintings blended Surrealist, Cubist and Expressionist influences, and were often met with public incomprehension. His first public exhibition in 1934 was closed down on the grounds of obscenity, and his intentionally provocative Experiencias - among the first performance art to take place in Brazil - drew even greater hostility.

Study for Miss Brazil, 1931, (oil on canvas)

Reclined Female Nude, 1932, (oil on canvas)

Couple, 1932, (oil on canvas)

Ancestral Portrait, 1932, (oil on canvas)

Christ's Final Ascension, 1932, (oil on canvas)

Inferiority of God, 1931, (oil on canvas)

Portrait of Niomar Moniz Sodre Bittencourt, 1955, (oil on canvas)

Portrait of Ivone Levi, 1951, (oil on canvas)

Our Lady of Desire, 1955, (oil on canvas)

Interior Landscape Composition, 1955, (oil on canvas)

Mario de Andrade, 1939, (oil on canvas)

Djanira da Motta e Silva, 1914-1979:

Djanira, as she signed her work and is commonly known, was a largely self taught artist whose lively paintings reflected the world around her. Born to a working class family, her father was of Indigenous ancestry and her mother was the daughter of Austro-Hungarian immigrants. Throughout her childhood, Djanira worked as a seamstress and on a coffee plantation. Her artistic practice began aged 23 while recovering from tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Sao Jose dos Campos.

In 1939, she settled in a Bohemian neighbourhood where she established a boarding house where many intellectuals lodged. In this way, she met many artists, notably Emeric Marcier who taught her the basics of painting. The only other formal training Djanira received was through evening classes in drawing at a private art school in Sao Paulo. Self-portraits, portraits of people close to her, and the landscapes and everyday life of Rio were her subjects. Her style, a hybrid of figuration and abstraction, was sometimes described as naive, a characterisation she rejected: 'I might be naive, but my painting is not'.

In the late 40s she lived in New York, where she met artists Joan Miro and Marc Chagall. During the 50s she journeyed around Brazil to study its landscapes, peoples, customs and social realities. Notably, she travelled to Bahia, where she experienced the Camdomble religion, and she also lived among the Canela people in Maranhao, which allowed her to reflect on her Indigenous Brazilian Heritage. With her travels also came a transformation in her palette, with the introduction of vibrant colours.

Self-Portrait, 1945, (oil on canvas)

Market Scene, 1960, (oil on canvas)

Marraaia Dance, Parati, 1961, (oil on canvas)

Kite Flying, 1950, (oil on canvas)

Young Cabocios, 1951, (oil on canvas)

Three Orishas, 1966, (oil on canvas)

Composition No. 1, 1942, (oil on canvas)

Seamstress, 1951, (oil on canvas)

Boats, 1962, (oil on canvas)

Coffee Plantation, 1962, (oil on canvas)

In addition to recording religious and cultural celebrations, Djanira's later artistic practice was dedicated to representing working-class realities by depicting artisans and labourers in Brazil's factories and on its plantations. Here she captures the transformation of rural life and the Brazilian landscape brought about by urbanisation and modernisation.

Alfredo Volpi, 1896-1988:

Self-taught painter Alfredo Volpi was a pioneer of abstraction in Brazil. Growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Sao Paulo, Volpi left school at twelve to work as a painter-decorator to support his family. Never having received a formal artistic education, he began painting in the 1920, adapting the materials and techniques of his trade, including preparing his own paints and canvases.

Volpi's early paintings were relatively conventional. He made landscapes and genre scenes alongside a group of other self-taught artists on weekend trips to the countryside, including to the seaside fishing village of Itanhaem. His style changed significantly in the 1940s, when he turned his attention to urban scenes and began to work with egg tempera instead of oil paint. His work became increasingly abstracted, taking architectural elements including facades, windows and roof tiles and simplifying them to bold geometric shapes with a flat use of vibrant colour, reflecting the vitality and life of the cities he portrayed.

Volpi received widespread recognition during his lifetime. He never fully alighed himself with any particular art movement. Today his work is understood as a bridge between Brazil's earlier modernists and the Comcrete Art movement of the later 20th cetury which emphasised geometric abstraction.

Little Chapel, late 1940s, (tempera on canvas)

Woman from Bahia, 1930, (oil on canvas)

In this early painting, Volpi depicts a woman, from the northeastern state of Bahia, carrying fruit. Bahia had been the locus of the Brazilian trade in enslaved people, and is still home to the largest concentration of Brazilians with African heritage.