The Brooklyn Rail

For Brazil, the first decades of the twentieth century were a time of breakneck change as well as, more often than not, tumult and conflict. Slavery had only been abolished in 1888, and the republic that was established as a result of the military coup that deposed the emperor a year later was still busy finding its footing in the world. In particular, this new liberal regime—itself rife with corruption and cronyism—needed to create a national narrative that would accommodate the interests of a few regional oligarchies while bringing together Brazil’s different demographics: the Black slaves that had recently been released from bondage, the caboclo mixed-race peasants of the dry and inhospitable northeastern plains, the Indigenous people of the Amazon, and also the Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants who, beginning in the late 1890s, flocked to its rapidly-growing cities and factories.

This “Old Republic,” as it came to be disparagingly called later, would soon crumble under the weight of its own contradictions and—following a rather recognizable historical trajectory—it eventually gave way to the dictatorship of Getélio Vargas (1882–1954). After seizing power during the Revolution of 1930, Vargas exploited the political instability that followed to establish Estado Novo, a period of authoritarian rule that lasted from 1937 to 1945 and, for better or worse, helped lay the foundations of today’s Brazil. Whatever the shortcomings of the republic that Vargas overthrew, the soul-searching that characterized the period proved fertile ground for a new generation of artists whose work is the subject of Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, now on view at the Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition’s stated goal was no less than providing the young nation with a coherent identity, a narrative they hoped to make bigger than the sum of its (disparate) parts.

Rallying around the banner of Antropofagia, a programmatic form of cultural cannibalism, these artists rejected the stale academicism of their forebears and instead embraced a purposefully hybrid, mestiço poetics in which everything—from the European avant-garde, to the Afro-Brazilian cult of Candomblé, to pre-Cabraline Indigenous art—was fair game for appropriation and digestion into something truly Brazilian. Showcasing ten different artists whose works together span the better part of six decades, the current exhibition retraces this defining moment in Brazilian culture which continued to reverberate through Brazilian culture in the years to come, influencing the work of a better-known generation of artists like Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) and other adherents of Tropicália.

After a prologue which pays homage to a show put up by the RA in 1944, which features a few paintings by landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx (1909–94), the exhibition opens with a room juxtaposing the works of two early importers of European modernism to Brazil: Anita Malfatti (1889–1964), a member of the Grupo dos Cinco [Group of Five] and the organizer of the groundbreaking Semana da Arte Moderna exhibition in 1922, and Lithuanian-born Jewish painter Lasar Segall (1889–1957).

The central section of exhibition is taken up by Brazil’s two greatest painters of the period: Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), another integrant of Grupo dos Cinco whose 1928 masterpiece Abaporu (not on view here) inspired her husband Oswald de Andrade to write the “Manifesto antropófago” the same year, and Candido Portinari (1903–62). Similarly, the last third of the show is dominated by founder of Concretism, Geraldo de Barros (1923–98), and Rubem Valentim (1922–91), whose Afro-Brazilian totems bridge geometric abstraction and Candomblé syncretic symbolism.

Admittedly, some of the works and artists on show feel a bit of their time, but there are many others that justify the price of the ticket. As someone who doesn’t turn up his nose to socially-committed figuration and is fascinated with the sertão, the sprawling northeastern drylands that inspired so much literature and film—I found myself especially appreciating the work of Candido Portinari. Far from derivative or passé, his paintings O lavrador de café [Coffee Agricultural Worker] (1934) and Retirantes [Migrants] (1944) belong to a lost canon of Communist-inspired art, including the likes of Renato Guttuso (1912–87) and the Mexican muralists, which did not shy away from celebrating the working classes and shining a spotlight on their struggles.

I was also fascinated by the wonderful black-and-white images and abstract details belonging to the series “Fotoforma” by Geraldo de Barros and was literally bowled over by primitivist canvases by Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899–1970). Sampling the material culture of the Amazon, and in particular the pre-Cabraline pottery of the lost Marajoara civilization, images like Archer (1925)—itself inspired by a picturesque illustration by French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768–1848)—present themselves with all sorts of knotty questions concerning cultural appropriation that, incidentally, could be extended to Antropofagia as a project more generally. Yet even if problematic from a contemporary vantage point, these works maintain a hieratic foreignness that is all the more striking.

Considered as a far-reaching retrospective that aims to introduce the public to a lesser-known chapter of Brazilian art, the show suffers from a lack of context and an unwillingness to acknowledge the political climate I briefly sketched at the beginning of this review, in which—unsurprisingly—the peasant revolts immortalized by Euclides da Cunha’s 1902 volume Os sertões [Rebellion in the Backlands] and the rise of workers’ movements, anarchism, and communism all feature prominently. Fundamental pointers are provided throughout, but for the most part the art is left to speak for itself. Just to give one example, Mário de Andrade (1893-1945)—another member of Grupo Dos Cinco—is showcased in at least four different portraits by four different artists. However, the viewer will leave the show scarcely knowing the reason behind his prominence: the “hero without a character” of his novel Macunaíma became a powerful allegory of the country itself, and as a result Brazil’s undefined, multiracial make-up—previously considered a stain or blight—was adopted as a state ideology of sorts during the Vargas Era.

One can appreciate the impulse to avoid the pitfalls of unnecessary pedantry and make the show easily enjoyable for everyone, but in so doing Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism does a disservice to some of the art on view which, for better or for worse, was clearly in conversation with this project of nation building—and as such feels like a bit like a lost opportunity.