The Royal Academy’s first exhibition of 2025 will be Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism. This major new exhibition in the Main Galleries will feature over 130 works from the 1910s to the 1970s by ten important Brazilian artists. It will capture the diversity of Brazilian art at this time.
In early twentieth-century Brazil, artists were adapting contemporary trends, international influences, and artistic traditions to create new modern art inspired by and celebrated by its distinct, vibrant cultures, identities, and landscapes. Most works in the exhibition will come from rarely seen private collections in Brazil. They will be shown alongside those drawn from Brazilian public collections, most of which have never been exhibited in the UK.
The ten featured artists will include pioneers of early Brazilian Modernism, a movement spearheaded by Anita Malfatti followed by Vicente do Rego Monteiro, the Jewish Lithuanian emigré Lasar Segall, Candido Portinari, and Tarsila do Amaral, now internationally celebrated as a leading female figure of Brazilian Modernism. The exhibition will also include the self-taught artists Alfredo Volpi and Djanira da Motta e Silva, an artist of indigenous descent, Afro-Brazilian artist Ruben Valentim, the early NeoConcrete polymath Geraldo de Barros, and the artist and architect Flávio de Carvalho, who was also one of Brazil’s first queer performance artists. Each artist will be represented by at least ten works, many of whom will have their own dedicated gallery space. Collectively, the works will take the visitor on a journey through 70 years of a new art in Brazil, which moves from figuration to abstraction.
The exhibition will also feature a section dedicated to the historic Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, which took place at the Royal Academy in 1944, the first exhibition of modern Brazilian art in the UK. Initiated by the Brazilian Government and supported by the Foreign Office, 168 works by 70 artists were donated and exhibited to raise funds for the war effort, specifically the RAF Benevolent Fund. Around 23 works were purchased from the exhibition and donated to UK museums. Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism will include four paintings originally shown in the same galleries 80 years ago in a section that celebrates that gesture of solidarity by Brazilian artists. Brazil was seen as a land of opportunity and sanctuary with its vast territory and huge natural resources.
Alongside a multiplicity of Indigenous cultural groups were descendants of the original Portuguese colonisers and of enslaved West Africans (slavery was only abolished in 1888), as well as a wide variety of immigrants, not only from Europe but significant populations of Japanese, Syrians, Italians and Germans among many others. Urbanisation led to the expansion of cities such as Rio de Janeiro (the capital until 1960 when Brasília was inaugurated) and São Paulo; with immigration came new political, social, economic and artistic ideas. Brazilians were no longer interested in following Europe and North America, not just in terms of literature, poetry, theatre, music and design but also, significantly, in art. Brazil was seeking its own identity, which was freed from external influences and reflected the reality of life in Brazil. Artists began to emerge in the 1910s, wanting to be modern, reflecting new forms of expression that many had been exposed to in Europe (mainly in France between the wars) and the US. These artists returned to Brazil, reflecting these modern tendencies but adapting them to create new forms of art that celebrated their national identity.
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism will be a unique opportunity to see a wide variety of work by these ten significant artists together, representing the particularly diverse nature of such a multicultural society and vividly illustrating this century of cultural change in Brazil.
Artists:
Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) Anita Malfatti (1889–1964) Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988) Lasar Segall (1891–1957) Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899–1970) Flávio de Carvalho (1899–1973) Candido Portinari (1903–1962) Djanira da Motta e Silva (1914–1979) Rubem Valentim (1922–1991) Geraldo de Barros (1923–1998)
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, Royal Academy of Arts, 28 January – 21 April 2025
Lead image: Lasar Segall, Banana Plantation, 1927. Oil on canvas, 87 x 127 cm. Collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, purchased by the Governo do Estado de São Paulo, 1928. © Lasar Segall (Vilnius, Lituânia, 1889 – São Paulo, Brasil, 1957)