Culture

At a time when Brazil is ever more in the public eye owing to the major role it is playing in the ascendance of the BRICS community of nations (it is represented by the initial “B” in the acronym), this impressive exhibit takes us back to a time when Brazil was also very much in the eye of the entire world – and also very much in the ascendance – but for another reason.

Following the First World war and for over four subsequent decades, Brazil’s artists and architests rivaled – and often led – those of Europe and North America in developing the forms of artistic expression we now identify with the twentieth century and its steady – and sometimes brusque – move away from European classical, academic formalism. Despite their prominence and enduring heritage, the role they played in this pivotal evolution is little known beyond South America.

Subtitled “The Birth of Modernism”, the exhibit at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern casts Brazil in the leading role at the center of what one might call the Western world’s great leap forward in the arts. And Brazil was uniquely positioned to play this role.

Europe was stunned by the unprecedented losses of life and treasure caused by the war, and the United States and its millionaire class were still heavily under the influence of the French Beaux Arts canons. Brazil, however, declared a republic in 1889, was industrializing, its cities, especially São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, were coming into their own as significant urban centers, and the economy was booming. After the grim days of over four years of war, the country’s vitality was exhilarating.

But Brazil’s greatest asset in this great leap forward was to be the amazing heterogeneity of its burgeoning population, given a boost by immigration from war-torn Europe. In addition to a vast multitude of indigenous peoples, whose art and culture were to enrich the development of modernism at every level, there was an equally vast population of western Africans, the heritage of the country’s long dependence on slave labor, emancipated only in 1888. Their culture and customs were also to serve as an abundant source of inspiration. To that was added the diversity of Brazil’s population of European origin, for every nationality of Europe contributed to the mix.

In 1922, one of the country’s most influential oligarchs, the coffee magnate Paulo Prado, financed the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) transforming the country’s economic center, São Paulo, into a capital of modern artistic movements as well. Rather than a sudden beginning, the Semana was a concentration of, and catalyst to, innumerable small experiments in new art forms taking place throughout the country. The effect turned out to be permanent, for it launched São Paulo as a center of Brazil’s artistic world distinct from Rio de Janeiro, the capital, whose wealthy families were still turned toward Europe.

In 1924, the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars sketched out a plan for a public relations film about Brazil that would make Brazil known throughout the world. Subsequently, in the 1920s, Paulo Prado invited him to Brazil three times, and he traveled extensively with the artist Tarsila do Amaral and her husband, the writer Oswald de Andrade. He was deeply impressed by the Afro-Brazilian culture he discovered in Rio de Janeiro, and by the Baroque in Minas Gerais. It was after this visit that Tarsila do Amaral began to incorporate these motifs into her work motifs. Lasar Segall, a Lithuanian immigrant who had been living in Berlin, was struck from his first days in the country by these motifs as well.

The crash of the New York stock market in October 1929 triggered a collapse in coffee prices that pushed the country toward depression and contributed to a revolution the next year. The military installed the populist Getúlio Vargas, who became an outright dictator in 1937, leading a regime characterized by nationalism and authoritarianism attenuated by a considerable element of social reform intended to appease the populace. The emphasis on nationalism was reflected in a steady increase in everything peculiarly Brazilian in art, with all its vast diversity, while the social programs created an awareness of the lower strata of society, until then ignored, as subject matter for art.

The movement early on overflowed into the realm of “design”, following and expanding on the work of the Bauhaus movement, all with an unmistakable Brazilian imprint. In addition to interior design of all aspects of the human habitation, there was architecture and landscaping, with Tersila do Amaral creating the first tropical garden as a setting for her home.

Of the ten artists to each of whose work a gallery is devoted, she is the oldest, born in 1886 but living on until 1973. The youngest is Geraldo de Barros, who life ran from 1923 to 1998. Some 130 paintings, some gigantic, present Brazilian modernism from its earliest days to its culmination in the design and construction of the new capital city of Brasilia. Inaugurated in 1960, it was not guaranteed to be a success. However, Rio de Janerio, sandwiched into its enclave on the coast, was inescapably cramped and on the geographic periphery, to say the least.

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 century of modernism in every aspect of the arts. Its buildings with their landscaping and its spacious esplanades have aged remarkably well and have had a lasting influence on urban planning and architecture. And the “new” capital has since become the country’s third biggest city after São Paulo and Rio de Janiero.

In 1964, the United States engineered a military coup d’état that lasted for 21 years. With it came draconian censorship and a rapid stifling of artistic creation. While there was some artistic creation focused on the oppression, the country lost many of artists to exile. The only aspect of the arts that survived the heavy hand of the censors was poetry, which the censors usually ignored, obviously unable to understand it.

But modernism, and in particular its spectacular Brazilian flowering, had already found its place in artistic expression the Western world and beyond, and, despite the stifling oppression, its influence never died. Better days came with the end of the dictatorship, and Brazil is once again a major center of Western art. Now it is time for Europe to renew its connection with this grand legacy. This exhibit goes a long way to promoting that.

The exhibit runs through 5 January 2025. It is accompanied by a sumptuous 300 page catalog.

Robert James Parsons