Alfredo Volpi: a collector’s guide

Who was Alfredo Volpi?

Alfredo Volpi (1896-1988) was among the most important Brazilian painters of the 20th century, achieving a synthesis of figuration and abstraction as well as fine and popular art. Alongside many of his contemporaries, he helped forge a new path between European tradition and Brazilian modernism.

Volpi won many awards, including the Best National Painter prize at 1953’s São Paulo Biennial, but during his lifetime was feted predominantly in Brazil. Only in the past 15 years or so has his fame spread internationally.

In 2018, the artist was the subject of a major retrospective at the NMNM — Nouveau Musée National de Monaco: Alfredo Volpi. The Poetics of Colour. In 2024, his work will be included in Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism at the Zentrum Paul Klee museum in Bern, before the exhibition moves to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, in 2025.

Volpi’s early life, influences and themes

Born in the Italian city of Lucca in 1896, Volpi emigrated with his family to Brazil while he was still a baby. The Volpis settled in a working-class district of São Paulo called Cambuci, where Alfredo would spend most of his life. His early jobs saw him working as a woodcarver, a bookbinder, and a painter-decorator for São Paulo’s upper class and bourgeoisie.

As an artist, he was entirely self-taught, though his initial work shows that he managed to absorb the influence of both Impressionism and Expressionism. In the 1930s, he formed part of a collective called the Grupo Santa Helena, a set of São Paulo-based artists loosely united by imagery with proletarian themes. Volpi, for his part, was fond of depicting street festivities.

In the 1940s, he made regular visits to the coastal town of Itanhaém, where he became friends with the seascape painter Emidio de Souza. Volpi produced several scenes of Itanhaém, and his art — under de Souza’s influence — underwent a marked stylistic shift, as he began to simplify his forms considerably.

Volpi’s breakthroughs

In 1944, Volpi had his first solo exhibition — at Galeria Itá, in São Paulo — and was one of 70 artists who contributed to that year’s Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, held at the Royal Academy in London and several other venues across the UK. A total of 100,000 people visited the events, with picture sales raising more than £1,200 for the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund.

Six years later, in 1950, Volpi returned to the country of his birth for several months, participating in that year’s Venice Biennale and taking the chance to see as many artistic masterpieces as possible. (He visited Giotto’s fresco cycle at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua no fewer than 18 times.)

In 1958, Volpi was invited to paint the frescoes for Igrejinha Nossa Senhora de Fátima, one of the first churches in Brasilia, a city then being constructed from scratch specifically to become Brazil’s capital. The church is considered one of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s landmark buildings.

Some critics suggest that the geometrical compositions Volpi saw by the early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca would influence the geometric patterning in his own work from later that decade onwards.

Volpi’s most famous motifs: Bandeirinhas and Fachadas

The artist’s most famous paintings, made between the late 1950s and the 1970s, featured two motifs in particular: Bandeirinhas (festival flags) and Fachadas (building façades). To some extent, these were an evolution of his early street scenes, although his art was now characterised by exuberant colour and — more crucially — simple geometric forms (oblongs, semi-circles, chevrons, etc). The façades and flags themselves were distilled to the point of abstraction.

These paintings are marked by playful repetition and the rhythmic interaction of colours and forms. Volpi thus heralded the Neo-Concrete movement (a group of Brazilian abstract artists now better known than him on the world stage, including Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica).

In 2011, one of Volpi’s flag paintings, Bandeirinhas estruturadas, fetched $842,500 at Christie’s in New York, setting a world auction record for the artist that stills stands. The second-highest price achieved at auction was for a façade work: $783,750 at Christie’s in New York for Fachada (No. 1331), from the late 1960s.

The market for Volpi’s art

Volpi died in 1988, aged 92, but it was only in the second decade of the 21st century that his star began to rise. The five highest prices for his paintings at auction have all come since 2011 — all of them set at Christie’s. Three of the five works in question were Bandeirinhas and two of them Fachadas — which is unsurprising, given they were his signature motifs. Although paintings from other periods do appear in the market, most coveted among collectors are the the flags and façades. Echoing the late work of Matisse with their rich patterning and colour schemes, these are images that transcend national boundaries.