The birth of modernism in Brazil: ‘A young, ambitious nation trying to express itself’

‘We must look and see what’s really ours,’ said the Brazilian artist Djanira, part way through the 20th century. ‘We eat churrasco and eat vatapá, yet insist on painting French still lifes.’

Djanira’s point was that, artistically speaking, her country lacked identity. Yes, her compatriots cooked in distinctly Brazilian fashion (churrasco being the country’s traditional style of barbecue) and ate distinctly Brazilian food (vatapá being a shrimp stew from the state of Bahia). However, when it came to art, Djanira lamented that the nation still took its cues from Europe.

Fast-forward to the present day, and she is one of 10 artists being celebrated in Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (28 January to 21 April 2025). Others include Candido Portinari, Tarsila do Amaral, Rubem Valentim and Alfredo Volpi, the common factor being the part they played in transforming art in Brazil.

The exhibition includes more than 130 works, most of them from Brazilian private collections and rarely seen in public. ‘This was a period which saw a flourishing of the arts,’ says the show’s assistant curator, Rebecca Bray, ‘and that flourishing was a way of a young, ambitious nation trying to express itself.’

The show spans from the late 1910s to the 1970s, but to truly appreciate the artists’ achievements, one needs to look farther back into Brazil’s past.

After more than three centuries of colonial rule by Portugal, Brazil declared its independence in 1822. A monarchy prevailed for several decades, until the proclamation of a republic in 1889. The utopian hopes of Brazil’s new leaders were captured in the motto written in capital letters at the centre of the new national flag: Ordem e Progresso (‘Order and Progress’).

The population was a heterogeneous mix of indigenous groups, Portuguese colonisers’ descendants, recent immigrants from Europe and erstwhile slaves (most of them with West African roots), slavery having been abolished in Brazil in 1888.

The economy at that time was thriving, in no small part thanks to the country’s domination of the international coffee trade. At the turn of the 20th century, Brazil produced more than half of the world’s supply.

In February 1922, one coffee magnate, Paulo Prado, financed a week of cultural events known as the Semana de Arte Moderna (‘Modern Art Week’) in the city of São Paulo. Though it wasn’t hugely well attended, it is regarded today as a key moment in the birth of Brazilian modernism.

The festival featured a selection of talks, concerts, poetry readings and dance performances, as well as an art exhibition — all with the aim of challenging the nation’s cultural establishment. In the view of the protagonists, that establishment was conservative, institutionalised and rooted in 19th-century academicism.

Among the dozen artists to exhibit were Anita Malfatti and Vicente de Rego Monteiro (both of whom feature in Brasil! Brasil!). The former had studied in Berlin before the First World War, and her work thereafter — under the influence of German Expressionism — was characterised by violent forms and exuberant colours. Upon returning to Brazil, Malfatti reportedly opened her suitcase and showed a few canvases to her uncle, who recoiled and exclaimed: ‘This is not painting, these are Dantesque things!’

Worse criticism was to come when the influential art critic Monteiro Lobato reviewed a solo exhibition of hers in São Paulo in 1917. An advocate of naturalistic representation, Lobato — writing in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo — accused Malfatti of ‘seeing things abnormally’. He added that her pictures were ‘boils of excessive culture’, made under the ‘strabismal influence of rebel schools’.

Despite such denunciation, Malfatti persevered, continuing to make and show art in a progressive vein — including at the Semana de Arte Moderna. According to Bray, she can be considered the ‘godmother figure’ of Brazilian modernism.

Many of the movement’s early figures came from well-off families, which allowed them to travel to Europe and witness avant-garde art there.

Monteiro, do Amaral, Portinari and Flávio de Carvalho all spent considerable time in Paris, their engagement with new styles such as Cubism, Fauvism and Futurism leaving traces in their work. In the case of de Carvalho’s painting Christ’s Final Ascension (1932), the artist produced a Surrealist reimagining of the biblical scene, featuring a host of amoeboid forms.

It was in such a context that the writer Oswald de Andrade penned his Manifesto Antropófago in 1928. In this seminal modernist text, de Andrade called for his compatriots to consume European culture at will — before ‘digesting’ it in such a way that something fresh and uniquely Brazilian resulted.

His inspiration is said to have come from a painting called Abaporu (1928), given to him as a birthday gift by his then wife, do Amaral. It’s a work that reveals the influence of many a forward-looking artist who was then, or until recently had been, based in Paris — Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi and Henri Rousseau, to name but three. It depicts an elongated humanoid figure with outsized feet sitting by a giant cactus, beneath a blue sky and a sun that looks like a slice of orange.

Do Amaral said that the origin of this figure, and the many others like it in her oeuvre, lay in tales she had heard as a child from the maids on her father’s farms in the state of São Paulo — tales of mythical beings associated with Brazil’s pre-colonial indigenous cultures.

‘I want to be the painter of my homeland,’ do Amaral said. ‘How grateful I am to have spent my entire childhood on the farm.’

The word abaporu, incidentally, means ‘cannibal’ — or ‘anthropophage’ — in the indigenous language of Tupí-Guaraní. Although it does not feature in Brasil! Brasil!, the painting is regarded as one of the most important Brazilian artworks of the 20th century. It was acquired at Christie’s in 1995 by the collector Eduardo Costantini, founder of the MALBA museum of Latin American art in Buenos Aires, where it is housed today.

In the wake of de Andrade’s manifesto, artists increasingly started to look to Brazil’s native cultures for inspiration. Indeed, over time, a younger, more modestly-off set of figures emerged, who were actually descended from indigenous (or enslaved African) peoples — among them Djanira and Rubem Valentim.

Djanira was the grandchild of Austro-Hungarian immigrants on her mother’s side, and of indigenous Brazilian heritage on her father’s. Depicting a group of barefoot children in front of a cluster of apartment blocks, Flying a Kite (1950) is typical of her output — a colourful, stylised take on a communal activity, with its elements geometrically arranged.

As for Valentim, born into a humble family of Afro-Brazilian roots in the north-eastern port city of Salvador, his art tended towards abstraction. He adopted symbols such as tridents, arrows and axes, all of which were integral to the rituals of Candomblé, a diasporic African religion that had spread through Brazil in the 19th century.

‘There was such a variety in these artworks, and in the artists who made them, that one might well speak of modernisms (plural) rather than modernism (singular)’, says Bray.

In the main, the works were paintings and drawings. However, also worthy of note was de Carvalho’s evolution into one of his country’s first performance artists. His feats included disrupting a huge Corpus Christi procession in downtown São Paulo (for which he almost got lynched) and undertaking a pioneering trip to the Rio Negro region in Brazil’s Amazonian far north (during which he almost died).

‘Where it used to be believed that modernism took place only in a few [European] cities,’ Bray says, ‘nowadays we think of it as having been a global phenomenon. And it’s this latter trend which the exhibition taps into.’ Just as a do Amaral retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) did in 2018.

Brasil! Brasil! also explores the wider cultural context in which modernist art developed: the late 1950s and early 1960s alone saw the emergence of both bossa nova music and the Cinema Novo film movement, not to mention the inauguration of the purpose-built city of Brasilia as the nation’s capital.

In that particular period, Brazil was led by a highly esteemed president, Juscelino Kubitschek. The exhibition curators don’t delve deeply into politics. However, the implication is that a military coup in 1964 — which brought about a dictatorship lasting more than two decades — marks an end point for the story of Brasil! Brasil!, even though a handful of works from after that date are included. (It’s worth adding that the show only features artists who came of age in the first half of the 20th century, and so omits members of the renowned Neo-Concrete movement — Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, et al — on grounds that they made their names in the second half.)

Brasil! Brasil! comes to the Royal Academy after showing first in Switzerland, at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. The choice of its London location has historical resonance. In 1944, after Brazil joined the Allied side in the Second World War, its government petitioned artists to donate works for an exhibition to be staged at a series of British venues. A total of 100,000 people ended up visiting Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, with picture sales raising more than £1,200 for the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund. The first, and largest, of the show’s eight venues was the Royal Academy.

Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from 28 January to 21 April 2025