Brasil! Brasil!, the new show at the Royal Academy in London, claims that at the time of the emergence of its modernist art movement in the 1910s, Brazil was ‘a young, ambitious, and optimistic nation’ and that its modernist artists’ rejected European tastes for academic art.’ As a Brazilian-British national, I can safely say this is untrue. First, no Brazilian would ever describe our nation or ourselves as ambitious. In fact, until very recently, in our inherited Catholic culture, ambition was considered a sin, equated with greed. Humility was the virtue to be pursued. Second, Europe itself had begun the trend of rejecting European academic art quite sometime before the 1910s! Conspicuously, all of the artists in the exhibition were of European descent and/or studied art in Europe. I am certainly not criticising these artists, given that I am also of European descent. All my art education has been in London, and I always cringe when I see ‘ambition’ presented as an honourable core value.
What I want to highlight is that Brazilian modernist artists were deeply influenced by and passionate about the European avant-garde and that their work is a testament that they embraced it. So, let’s be honest here: Brasil! Brasil! brings works that employ European modernist styles and techniques but speak of Brazilian realities. It seems to me that talking about the dialogue and relationship between Brazilian and European arts would have been a more accurate and observant approach to what really happened. Of course, this could have been potentially contentious as the dynamics between coloniser and colonised would have to be addressed. But Brazil was not a British colony, you might say. Well, not directly or officially. Through its long ‘special relationship’ with Portugal, however, the UK substantially benefited from the exploitation of Brazilian resources, gold in particular. But that is a story for another time.
The curatorial strategy is most problematic in its lack of general contextualisation and more in-depth explanative pointers. One of many works that suffer from this is The Migrants (1944) by Candido Portinari. One of the strongest pieces in the show, and it surely required effort and negotiation with MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo) to be shipped over the pond. But it gets no prominence or meaningful supporting information. The Migrants depicts a destitute family from the Northeast of Brazil fleeing one of the severe droughts that plagued the region for decades. They head south in search of a better life. Style-wise, the painting unequivocally draws on Expressionism and Surrealism. Mask-like faces, reminiscent of James Ensor, and the depth of the horizon, evocative of Salvador Dalí, are employed to conjure profound desolation, misery and the long length of their journey. Bone fragments on the ground tell us of the arid death animals endured. The only other living creatures in the barren landscape are vultures, ready to eat those who do not endure the arduous journey. Note how Portinari positioned one of the vultures close to the top of the older man’s walking stick on the left of the painting. Its curving wings make the walking stick look like a scythe, rendering it a double symbol of death. The older man is simultaneously about to die, and the Grim Reaper himself. Analogous to this painting is Kevin Carter’s award-winning photo The Vulture and the Little Girl (1993), which shows a hungry vulture waiting for a skeletal Sudanese child to die. The Migrants, I would say, needs to be better sign-posted to non-Brazilian audiences for its immediacy to resonate as powerfully as The Little Girl’s.
Another conspicuous absence is any mention of the military dictatorship Brazil went through between 1964 and 1985. True, the exhibition does not present many post-coup d’état works. However, it does coincide with the 40th anniversary of the end of the dictatorship, the 15th of March. It is estimated that 475,000 civilians were tortured and killed in those 21 brutal years. Some of my schoolteachers were survivors of torture, and my parents were participants in the activist movement for the reinstalment of democracy. As a ‘dictatorship baby’ who remembers vividly the mounting tension in the weeks that led to the end of the regime, I felt cheated by this exhibition. It made me imagine the following scenario: the year is also 2025 and British war babies visit an art exhibition in Brazil. The show is dedicated to British art and includes works from the 1940s, but there is no mention of WWII, let alone the 80th anniversary of its end. How would they have felt?
Nevertheless, I recommend Brasil! Brasil! because it allows us to see some important Brazilian modernist art. But visit it with peeled eyes and your thinking hat on. Question captions and other textual support. And don’t blindly fall for the loveliness of the candy-floss pink room dedicated to Tarsila do Amaral, much as it’s delightful. Some of the work on display can reveal much about the relationship between the UK and Brazil if one has an informed gaze. A pointer: go look at the Lavrador do Cafe (Coffee Farm Worker) (1934), also by Italian immigrant Candido Portinari. Its caption reads that the train symbolises modernisation in Brazil. Does it remind you of a train painting by a certain William Turner? Now, guess where that train was made and where all the coffee it carried was being shipped once it was dropped off at Santos Port. Scratch the surface and Brasil! Brasil! will be more enlightening than you think.
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism – 28 January – 21 April 2025, Royal Academy of Arts
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