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culture

invited him to Brazil three times, and he traveled Of the ten artists to each of whose work a gallery is devoted, she is the
extensively with the artist Tarsila do Amaral and oldest, born in 1886 but living on until 1973. The youngest is Geraldo
her husband, the writer Oswald de Andrade. de Barros, who life ran from 1923 to 1998. Some 130 paintings, some
He was deeply impressed by the Afro-Brazilian gigantic, present Brazilian modernism from its earliest days to its
culture he discovered in Rio de Janeiro, and by culmination in the design and construction of the new capital city of
the Baroque in Minas Gerais. It was after this Brasilia. Inaugurated in 1960, it was not guaranteed to be a success.
visit that Tarsila do Amaral began to incorporate However, Rio de Janerio, sandwiched into its enclave on the coast,
these motifs into her work motifs. Lasar Segall, was inescapably cramped and on the geographic periphery, to say the
a Lithuanian immigrant who had been living least.
in Berlin, was struck from his first days in the
country by these motifs as well. As an expression of a national identity, the new capital turned out to
be spectacular, to say the least, a celebration of the rich heritage a half
The crash of the New York stock market in century of modernism in every aspect of the arts. Its buildings with their
October 1929 triggered a collapse in coffee prices landscaping and its spacious esplanades have aged remarkably well and
that pushed the country toward depression and have had a lasting influence on urban planning and architecture. And
contributed to a revolution the next year. The the “new” capital has since become the country’s third biggest city after
military installed the populist Getúlio Vargas, São Paulo and Rio de Janiero.
who became an outright dictator in 1937, leading
a regime characterized by nationalism and In 1964, the United States engineered a military coup d’état that lasted
authoritarianism attenuated by a considerable for 21 years. With it came draconian censorship and a rapid stifling of
element of social reform intended to appease artistic creation. While there was some artistic creation focused on the
the populace. The emphasis on nationalism oppression, the country lost many of artists to exile. The only aspect of
was reflected in a steady increase in everything the arts that survived the heavy hand of the censors was poetry, which
peculiarly Brazilian in art, with all its vast the censors usually ignored, obviously unable to understand it.
diversity, while the social programs created an
awareness of the lower strata of society, until But modernism, and in particular its spectacular Brazilian flowering,
then ignored, as subject matter for art. had already found its place in artistic expression the Western world
and beyond, and, despite the stifling oppression, its influence never
The movement early on overflowed into the died. Better days came with the end of the dictatorship, and Brazil is
realm of “design”, following and expanding once again a major center of Western art. Now it is time for Europe to
on the work of the Bauhaus movement, all renew its connection with this grand legacy. This exhibit goes a long
with an unmistakable Brazilian imprint. In way to promoting that.
addition to interior design of all aspects of the
human habitation, there was architecture and The exhibit ran through 5 January 2025. It was accompanied by a
landscaping, with Tersila do Amaral creating sumptuous 300 page catalog.
the first tropical garden as a setting for her Robert J. Parsons
home.

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