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Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism @ the Royal Academy

Executive summary

To be really blunt, my wife said, ‘If this is the best Brazilian art has to offer, you can see why we’ve never heard of it before.’ A proper review needs to be more nuanced and caveated than that, and as you study each of the individual artists, you come to appreciate them more deeply… but it is a not unreasonable thumbnail summary. There are lots of really good works here, easily enough to make it worth visiting, but no one artist that really, really broke through – and many of the works I liked partly because they so clearly showed their European influences and origins.

Because as you read the wall panels, the key point to emerge is that almost all of the artists featured here spent some or a lot of time in Europe studying art – especially in the early part of the show, during the period just before and after the First World War – which is why, in the first half, you are continually seeing paintings which remind you of cubism, the Fauves, German Expressionism, then later on, Art Deco and 1930s socialist realism.

This process of assimilation from European sources was directly addressed in the ‘Anthropophagic Manifesto’ by a writer closely associated with the early Brazilian modernists (and husband of the great Tarsila do Amaral) Oswald de Andrade. The manifesto describes modern Brazilian artists eating and digesting the great European innovations of the early twentieth century, mixing them with local subject matter and non-European traditions to produce a distinctive new hybrid.

Watching the artists’ Western influences and training being remodelled and fused with Brazilian subject matter to create each artist’s personal vision is one of the main interests of the show. (Although important to be clear that some of them never went to study in Europe and so developed their own native or naive style from scratch.)

For what it’s worth, in my opinion Tarsila do Amaral emerges as the artist with the most distinctive and fully formed vision in her own right, closely followed by Lasar Segall and Vicente do Rego Monteiro (see below for all of them).

This is a big exhibition, filling the Royal Academy’s main galleries and yet it doesn’t quite feel like it. Most of the works are relatively modest in scale and, with the exception of a handful of massive paintings and a few large sculptures towards the end, the rows of medium-sized paintings often feel over-awed by the hugeness of the gallery space. I couldn’t help seeing this as a metaphor for the way this often very striking post-colonial art, despite everyone’s best intentions, derived its strength from the series of innovations taking place in the European heartland and, latterly, in America.

Anyway, on to a more detailed review.

Overview

In the early 20th century a new modern art was emerging in Brazil. Starting in the 1910s and continuing through the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Brazilian artists adapted contemporary trends, international influences and artistic traditions to create new visual styles informed by the vibrant cultures, identities and landscapes of Brazil.

This exhibition celebrates this 60-year period between 1910 and the 1970s through the stories of ten influential artists. The show reveals the development of their artistic styles and the context in which they were created. It brings together over 130 works to capture the diversity of Brazilian art at the time. The artists are, in (rough) chronological order:

  1. Anita Malfatti (1889 to 1964)
  2. Lasar Segall (1891 to 1957)
  3. Tarsila do Amaral (1886 to 1973)
  4. Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899 to 1970)
  5. Candido Portinari (1903 to 1962)
  6. Flávio de Carvalho (1899 to 1973)
  7. Djanira (1914 to 1979)
  8. Alfredo Volpi (1896 to 1988)
  9. Rubem Valentim (1922 to 1991)
  10. Geraldo de Barros (1923 to 1998)

The majority of works come from rarely-seen Brazilian private collections, as well as Brazilian public collections, most of which have never been exhibited in the UK. So this is a unique opportunity to see key works by ten of Brazil’s major twentieth century artists brought together in one place, and to get a sense of how pioneers of Brazilian visual culture took their European sources, developed and moulded them for their own purposes.

Brazil: history and ethnicities

1. History

I take a historical view of everything (art, politics, literature) so I liked it being explained right at the start that Brazilian history can be divided into four eras:

  • pre-Colombian i.e. before Europeans arrived
  • colonial (1500 to 1815)
  • Imperial (1815 to 1889)
  • modern since Brazil became a republic in 1889

The original inhabitants of this vast area of north-east South America consisted of numerous tribes and clans with their own languages and religions. The Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, hoping to sail west around the world to India, arrived in the territory that would become Brazil on April 22 1500, claiming the land for the King of Portugal.

2. African slavery

There followed centuries of colonisation and settlement by the Portuguese who first of all enslaved the local inhabitants to work on their ranches and mines, and then set up a transatlantic slave trade importing kidnapped Africans. In 1526 Portuguese mariners carried the first shipload of African slaves to Brazil. Of the 12 million enslaved Africans brought to the New World, almost half – 5.5 million people – were forcibly taken to Brazil as early as 1540 and until the 1860s. Slavery was only abolished in Brazil in May 1888, one year before the country overthrew its imperial regime to become a republic.

3. Mass immigration

The abolition of slavery in 1888 and the expansion of coffee plantations created a demand for labour. Many people internally migrated from the impoverished north-east, but Brazil also became a popular destination for immigrants. In the last decades of the nineteenth century Brazil experienced a surge in immigration, particularly from Europe, with Italians, Portuguese and Spanish immigrants fleeing poverty in their own countries, as well as Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. Between 1872 and 1903 almost two million immigrants arrived in Brazil, increasing the population to around 17 million.

4. Technological change

Like every other country, Brazil (well, the cities and more developed regions) experienced the shock of new technologies, which seemed to follow each other with dizzying speed: the telegraph, the telephone, electrification of street lights and homes, the tram, the motor car.

These four factors explain why, as the twentieth century dawned, many Brazilian intellectuals realised they needed to create new literary and art styles to capture their newly republican, newly modern, newly multicultural society. They had to break away from the stuffiness and formality of the country’s nineteenth century Salon art, with its fondness for bog historical and religious subjects painted with painstaking realism.

Some of the leading figures were women who, like women in all the developed countries, thought women’s art and artists needed promoting. Some came from very poor backgrounds and reckoned the working classes needed to be sympathetically represented in art. And some were of Indigenous extraction and reckoned the original peoples of the land deserved better representation.

A curatorial mistake

The curators make what I think is a very big mistake right at the start of the exhibition. As usual the first room you enter is the octagonally-shaped Central Hall. Now the early wall labels emphasise the heaviness of the country’s nineteenth century art, with its European tastes for academic art and typical subjects such as historical allegories and religious scenes, as approved by Brazil’s own Royal Academy, the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes, which dominated Brazil’s arts and crafts for a century.

In my opinion, the curators would have done well to fill this Central Hall with examples of this stuffy old art, introducing us to the key figures of the old style, showing us massive realist depictions of some important battle and sentimental images of saints turning their tearful eyes towards heaven etc. This would very effectively have indicated what the ten artists in the subsequent galleries were breaking away from and given a better sense of just how radical their artistic revolution was.

Instead, with lamentable solipsism, the curators choose to fill this room by telling us that in November 1944, the Royal Academy of Arts hosted the first and, at that date, largest exhibition of modern Brazilian art in the UK. It was divided into two sections containing 80 paintings and 86 works on paper and was linked to a related exhibition about contemporary Brazilian architecture.

Now this is sort of interesting but only for art historians, and it doesn’t directly shed light on what is to follow. I thought it was a distraction and, as I say, a lost opportunity to provide deeper historical context.

Key historic event: Semana de Arte Moderna 1922

The early presentation of modernist art in Brazil crystallised in the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) that took place in Sao Paolo in 1922. ‘A cultural milestone in Brazil’, the Semana played a crucial role in bringing Brazilian Modernism to public awareness, and is referred to in the introduction and the biographies of the four or five artists who featured in it.

So, to the ten artists. Ten is a lot to take in. I’ll give a thumbnail sketch of each and a work which is either characteristic or exemplifies a theme of the show.

1. Anita Malfatti (1889 to 1964)

Pioneering woman artist who first brought European avant-garde styles (cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism) to Brazil.

  • the first Brazilian artist to introduce European and American forms of Modernism to Brazil
  • born in São Paulo, of Italian and German-American descent, when her father died the family moved to Germany
  • lived in Berlin from 1910 to 1914, attended drawing classes, influenced by German museum collections
  • 1915 moved to continue her education in the United States

Malfatti returned to Brazil in the autumn of 1916 and in December 1917 held the ‘Exposição de pintura moderna Anita Malfatti’ (Anita Malfatti Modern Painting Exhibition) in São Paulo. She must have blown people’s minds. The show was the first to challenge the orthodoxy of academic and Salon art and is now celebrated as the first modernist exhibition in Brazil. You know I mentioned the obvious influence of European pioneers on many of the Brazilians? Well:

First Cubist Nude or The Little Nude by Anita Malfatti (1916) Private collection, Rio de Janeiro

In 1923 Malfatti moved back to Europe, to Paris on a scholarship. She lived in Montparnasse and was mentored by French painter Maurice Denis, exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne in 1927. She returned to São Paulo in 1928 but the days of her experimental and progressive art were behind her.

The wall of her works is mostly portraits in a cubist-modernist style. I really liked two or three of these which leaned more towards German Expressionism in their strident colouring.

Portrait of Oswald by Anita Malfatti (1925) Collection of Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel. Photo by Jaime Acioli © Anita Malfatti

As usual this drab reproduction doesn’t convey the subtlety and vibrancy of the original.

2. Lasar Segall (1891 to 1957)

Colourful, stylised depictions of rural life, lots of green palm tree leaves, until his midlife turn to grimmer subject matter.

  • Jewish, born in 1891 in Vilnius, Lithuania, and so an outsider to a tropical country, to Catholic culture etc
  • 1906: moved to Berlin and studied at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts of Berlin and Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he was exposed to the Expressionist and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movements
  • first visited Brazil in 1913, meeting fellow artists and intellectuals, and exhibiting and selling his work before returning to Europe
  • leading figure of the Dresden Expressionist movement – 1919 set up the Dresden Secession group with Expressionist painter Otto Dix
  • 1923 Segall migrated to São Paulo and was quickly welcomed by modernist artists and writers who saw him as a representative of the European avant-garde
  • 1932, with Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral, he founded the Sociedade Pró-Arte Moderna (SPAM) in 1932 to promote modern art
  • his work was at times subject to anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic attacks

His early depictions of favelas in a naive style are lovely, really simplified, stylised, semi-abstract. A scholar calls it a tropicalisation of early cubism but surely it’s more readable, less distorted than cubism. For example, Boy with Gecko (1924).

This is the painting which is included in the articles and promo material. Early on you realise that green, numerous shades of green, are a recurring colour in many of these paintings, capturing the distinctive greenness of tropical foliage.

Banana Plantation by Lasar Segall (1927) Collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Photo by Isabella Matheus © Lasar Segall

There are half a dozen of these deliberately stylised and naive paintings and then the viewer is brought up short by a very big painting in a completely different style. This is Pogrom from 1937. As the Nazi tyranny proceeded, Segall who had such an attachment to Germany, turned to depicting the horrors being inflicted on his co-religionists.

Pogrom by Lasar Segall (1937)

Note the headstone with Hebrew writing at the bottom left. The curators point out the dove at the top of the work, which indicates, or aspires to, a kind of hope. Ill-placed though, wasn’t it? There was no hope.

After the war Segall’s images became increasingly abstracted in the 1950s, producing a series of paintings featuring forests, brown paintings of vertical lines. These look like a traumatised response to the Holocaust, in the same way that Francis Bacon or Giacometti convey post-war trauma. A bit dazed by ‘Pogrom’, I read these as references to the thick forests of his native Lithuania, where so many Jews were murdered and buried.

3. Tarsila do Amaral (1886 to 1973)

do Amaral is the first painter you feel who develops a really distinctively Brazilian, non-European style, depicting the jungle and village life. Her work is very attractive.

  • pioneering woman artist who developed a distinctively Brazilian modern style
  • daughter of wealthy parents who owned numerous coffee plantations, and so ‘a coffee heiress’
  • private painting lessons then moved to Paris in 1920 to enrol at the Académie Julian, one of the few schools which offered women artists life drawing classes
  • 1922: returned to São Paulo where she formed the Grupo dos Cinco (Group of Five) alongside Anita Malfatti, Mário de Andrade, Menotti Del Picchia and Oswald de Andrade, who became her partner (whose portrait was painted by Anita Malfatti, see above)
  • 1923: she returned to Paris with Oswald where they lived till 1928
  • Tarsila’s art became known for its vibrant colours, simplified forms and distinctly Brazilian themes
  • her 1928 painting Abaporu, a simplified solitary figure with distorted proportions, inspired Oswald to write the ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, which proposed artists engage in “cultural cannibalism” that would metaphorically “devour” wide-ranging influences to create something new and uniquely Brazilianhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abaporu
  • 1929: economic crash, she separated from Oswald
  • 1931: held an exhibition in Moscow, returned to Brazil and attended meetings of the Brazilian Communist Party. Paintings from this period, such as ‘Second Class’ (1933), reflect her more socially aware perspective

do Amaral produced the exhibition’s keynote image, the one used on the poster and all the promotional material and you can see why – it’s nice to look at. Pinks and greens and blues, very relaxing. Obviously she has taken a Brazilian jungle scene and utterly transformed it from the old Salon realism, into a series of semi-abstract shapes which are strongly reminiscent of Surrealism.

Lake by Tarsila do Amaral (1928) Collection of Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel. Photo by Jaime Acioli © Tarsila do Amaral S/A

4. Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899 to 1970)

Big brown stylised Art Deco figures with a strong pre-Colombian flavour.

  • Rego Monteiro was born in the coastal city of Recife in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco
  • 1911 moved to Paris, where he studied drawing and sculpture
  • 1914: at the outbreak of the First World War his family moved back to Brazil, to Rio de Janeiro where he became interested in the culture of the Amazon and started using native themes and motifs into his work
  • 1922: joined the group who organised the famous Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo
  • he returned to Paris where he lived for the next decade and thereafter alternated between Paris and Recife

Rego Monteiro’s is arguably the most distinctive of the set. They are highly stylised brown paintings which depict human figures in a style derived from pre-Colombian native traditions.

Archer by Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1925) Courtesy of Almeida and Dale Galeria de Arte. Photo by Sergio Guerini © Vicente do Rego Monteiro

Initially I thought they felt the most free from any European influence – none of the cubism or Expressionism or Surrealism we’ve seen up till now. Until my wife pointed out that they’re Art Deco, with the repetitions and symmetries of the stylised human figures. Yes. Or like the stylised figures in the friezes of Eric Gill.

Before he developed this primitive style, he produced some lovely Art Deco images. The most famous is Tennis from 1928. As Mrs Simon pointed out, this is a rare instance of someone having fun in a painting. Most paintings show portraits of intense intellectuals or hard working peasants or murdered Jews or African-Brazilians working in the fields. People having fun is a rarity in art, which may be why it remains such a minority interest.

5. Candido Portinari (1903 to 1962)

Portinari is something else again. Born the son of Italian immigrants and he grew up in relative poverty on a coffee plantation and had a lifelong concern for the lives of the poor. This led him to a kind of 1930s social realism we haven’t yet seen in the rather elite Group of Five artists we’ve hitherto been learning about.

  • 1918 sent by his parents to Rio de Janeiro where he studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes
  • 1928: won a scholarship to travel Europe in 1928 and spent two years moving around France, England, Italy and Spain, studying the old master
  • on his return determined to paint the hard lives of peasants in the backlands and developed his socialist-realist style

My wife pointed out a common theme of his paintings is the figures have enormous chunky feet. I thought this was a facetious remark, but it is picked up by the curators who state: ‘He enlarges the hands and feet of the coffee-plantation worker to emphasise his connection to the land.’

Coffee Agricultural Worker by Candido Portinari (1934)

A bit of historical background. The 1929 crash in world markets led to the collapse in Brazil of the coffee industry and widespread unemployment, impoverishment. This led to a coup establishing the populist government of Getúlio Vargas. (Vargas served as president of Brazil from 1930 to 1945 and then again from 1951 until 1954. Due to his long and controversial tenure as Brazil’s provisional, constitutional, dictatorial and democratic leader, he is considered by historians as the most influential Brazilian politician of the 20th century.) It was against this troubled economic, social and political background that Portinari copied Picasso’s 1930s style of big chunky figures, but for political effect.

Like his Mexican contemporary Diego Rivera, Portinari created massive public murals depicting the dignity of labour. He collaborated on numerous projects with the modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer. He received various high-profile commissions, including a Rivera-style commission to create huge murals, titled ‘War and Peace’, for the United Nations Headquarters in New York (1952 to 1956). The curators, a tad disappointingly, don’t include even photos of these, but there’s always the internet.

Commissions like this gave Portinari a huge international profile, so that in the mid-century he was widely seen as Brazil’s most important artist.

Portinari had a song written to him, ‘Un Son para Portinari’, regularly performed by the legendary Argentine singer, Mercedes Sosa.

6.Flávio de Carvalho (1899 to 1973)

de Carvalho was a painter, architect, theatre producer and designer, but appears to be mainly remembered as the first performance artist in Brazil.

  • born in Rio de Janeiro into an aristocratic family, raised in São Paulo, studied in Paris, and gained a degree in civil engineering from Durham University (!)
  • as an artist he was largely self-taught, his only formal training being the evening drawing classes he took while at university
  • he returned to Brazil in time to take part in the famous Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922
  • he entered national and international architecture competitions for public buildings with outlandishly ambitious designs, experimented with writing, and designed and staged several avant-garde theatre productions
  • 1933: founding member of the multidisciplinary Clube dos Artistas Modernos (Modern Artists’ Club) which attracted the attention of established modernists including Oswald de Andrade (author of the manifesto, partner of Tarsila do Amaral) who dubbed de Carvalho ‘the Ideal Anthropophagus’
  • his paintings blended Surrealist, Cubist and Expressionist influences
  • 1934: first public exhibition closed down on the grounds of obscenity

I think I liked de Carvalho’s paintings the least of any in the set. Grungy, they gave me the shivers. They reminded me of Graham Sutherland’s art, one of the few modern artists I really dislike, but de Carvalho caught the mood: he was successful and was invited to represent Brazil at the 1950 Venice Biennial.

In stark contrast to all his paintings is a photo recording one of de Carvalho’s several ‘performances’. He started doing these as early as the 1930s. According to Wikipedia, he created:

what he called ‘Experiências’ (experiments), ‘performance art’ before that term was introduced. In 1931, he joined a Catholic Corpus Christi parade in São Paulo, walking in the opposite direction and wearing a cap although removing headgear was considered a necessary sign of respect, driving the crowd to call for his lynching, which he later said was an experiment in crowd psychology. This work, the Experiência n. 2, has come to be understood as an early work of performance art, but it could also be understood in terms of Surrealist provocation that comments on the contested structures of political and religious authority in São Paulo following the Revolution of 1930.

The photo on display here is from 25 years later, when, on 18 October 1956, de Carvalho staged ‘Experiência N.3’, walking through São Paulo in the ‘New Look’ outfit he had designed for men in the tropics, which comprised a skirt, blouse and fishnet stockings, scandalising the crowd who gathered to watch him.

Photo of Experiência N.3’ by Flávio de Carvalho

7. Djanira (1914 to 1979)

Christened Djanira da Motta e Silva (she preferred to be referred to simply as Djanira) was a largely self-taught artist whose simple, dynamic paintings reflected the working class world of her upbringing.

  • born in Avaré, São Paulo, to a working-class family, father was of Indigenous ancestry, her mother the daughter of Austro-Hungarian immigrants
  • throughout her childhood Djanira worked as a seamstress and on a coffee plantation
  • her artistic practice began aged 23 (1937) while recovering from tuberculosis in a sanatorium in São José dos Campos
  • 1939: Djanira settled in the Bohemian neighbourhood of Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, where she established a boarding house where many intellectuals lodged, including Emeric Marcier (1916 to 1990) who taught her the basics of painting
  • the only other formal training Djanira received was through evening classes in drawing
    at a private art school in São Paulo

Her subjects were self- portraits, portraits of people close to her, and the landscapes and everyday life of Rio. Her style, a hybrid of figuration and abstraction, was sometimes described as naïve, a description she rejected: ‘I might be naïve, but my painting is not.’

From 1945 to 1947, Djanira lived in New York, where she met the Surrealist artists Joan Miró and Marc Chagall. During the 1950s she journeyed around Brazil to study its landscapes, peoples, customs and social realities. Notably, she travelled to Bahia, where she experienced the Candomblé religion, and she also lived among the Canela people in Maranhão, which allowed her to reflect on her Indigenous Brazilian heritage. This explains why many of her paintings are accompanied by sociological or anthropological explanations.

Flying a Kite by Djanira (1950) Banco Itaú Collection. Photo by Humberto Pimentel/Itaú Cultural © Instituto Pintora Djanira

All her paintings are in this style. I could see what she was doing, the socio-political and artistic aims of it, but I didn’t warm to them. The best and biggest, one of the biggest works in the show, is ‘Three Orishas’ from 1966. It has a backstory:

Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian religion of West African origin that combines elements of Yoruba, Fon and Bantu. Enslaved peoples brought the religion to Brazil and it developed in the port city of Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia. Djanira encapsulates the rituals and beliefs of Candomblé with a triad of Afro-Brazilian deities, from right to left: Yemanjá, a maternal, protective deity; Oxalá, the creator, unusually represented as a woman here; and Oxum, deity of the river and fresh water.

Installation view of ‘Three Orishas’ by Djanira in Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism @ the Royal Academy. Photo by the author

8. Alfredo Volpi (1896 to 1988)

Volpi was self-taught and a pioneer of pure abstraction.

  • born in Lucca, Italy, his family emigrated to Brazil when he was just two years old
  • grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in São Paulo, and left school at 12 to work as a painter-decorator to support his family
  • never receiving a formal artistic education, Volpi began painting in the 1920s, adapting the materials and techniques of his trade, including preparing his own paints and canvases

Volpi’s early paintings were relatively conventional. He made landscapes and genre scenes alongside a group of other self-taught artists on weekend trips to the countryside, including to the seaside fishing village of Itanhaém.

His style changed significantly in the 1940s, when he turned his attention to urban scenes and began to work with egg tempera instead of oil paint. Some of them are naive and stylised depictions of buildings, such as the many paintings he titled Facade. These alternated with completely abstract works based on repeated geometric patterns.

Untitled by Alfredo Volpi (1950) Daniela and Alfredo Villela Collection. Photo by Jaime Acioli © Alfredo Volpi

His work became increasingly abstracted, taking architectural elements including apartment blocks, windows and roof tiles, and simplifying them to bold geometric shapes with a flat use of vibrant colour, reflecting the vitality and life of the cities he portrayed.

Volpi received widespread recognition during his lifetime; he was joint winner of the prestigious São Paulo Biennial Prize in 1953. He aligned himself with no particular art movement but followed artistic developments both in Brazil and Europe. He was responsible for introducing a generation of Brazilian artists to the work of Swiss-German artist Paul Klee (1879 to 1940) who emerges as an influence on the following two artists, as well.

Today his work is understood as a bridge between Brazil’s earlier modernists and the Concrete Art movement of the later twentieth century, which emphasised geometric abstraction, see Geraldo de Barros, below.

9. Rubem Valentim (1922 to 1991)

Lovely, Klee-like, colourful abstract paintings and sculptures.

  • born in Salvador, in the north-eastern state of Bahia, Rubem Valentim grew up in a region deeply influenced by spirituality, both Roman Catholicism and Candomblé, a religion rooted in West African beliefs, that would profoundly shape his art
  • Valentim initially trained in dentistry, but left the profession by the late 1940s to pursue painting
  • early work adopted the social-realism popular among local artists, but by the 1950s he began to develop his own distinct visual language
  • this geometric abstract style synthesised African symbols, particularly those associated with Candomblé, with modernist forms
  • his works came to feature vibrant colours and structured arrangements of symbols, evoking sacred Afro-Brazilian totems and spiritual iconography

The charming home-made quality of Valentim’s abstract paintings reminded me of Paul Klee, geometric shapes strung together on straight lines like kebabs. Here’s what I mean.

Installation view of Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism @ the Royal Academy showing Untitled (1962) by Valentim Rubem. Photo by the author

The paintings are complemented by four or five big sculptures which repeat the technique of abstract symmetrical designs.

Installation view of Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism @ the Royal Academy showing a painting and two reliefs by Valentim Rubem. Photo by the author

By the 1960s, Valentim had gained national and international recognition and took part in the São Paulo Biennial, the Venice Biennale, and the First World Festival of Black Arts in Senegal, which helped to cement his reputation as a leading voice in Brazilian art.

Calling himself an ‘artist-priest’, Valentim infused his works with powerful cultural significance as a means of preserving and celebrating African identity in Brazil.

In 1976 he wrote ‘Manifesto ainda que tardio’ (‘A Manifesto, Albeit Late’) in which he advocated for recognition of African cultural heritage as a vital part of Brazilian identity, challenged Eurocentric artistic norms, and promoted a greater cultural synthesis: ‘The Afro- Amerindian-Northeastern-Brazilian iconology is alive… and we must drink in it with lucidity and great love.’

We have come a long way from Malfatti and do Amaral bravely importing cubist or Expressionist motifs.

10. Geraldo de Barros (1923 to 1998)

Right at the end of the exhibition there comes a sharp change in format. All nine of the preceding artists had been painters. Suddenly there’s a wall of black and white photos, clever modernist studies in sharp angles and abstract shapes made by things like rooftops and telegraph wires, shot from high up or low down to emphasise their geometric shapes, or multiple exposures overlaying different perspectives of stark industrial artefacts (railway stations, electricity pylons). de Barros has his own website which includes a page of these photos under the title ‘Fotoformas’.

Here’s a thumbnail bio:

  • de Barros born in a small town in the state of São Paulo; shortly afterwards his family moved to the state capital
  • his interest in art began in 1941, and for several years he juggled working in a bank with studying for a degree in economics and taking art classes at the Associação Paulista de Belas Artes (São Paulo Association of Fine Arts)
  • de Barros soon found himself drawn to abstraction
  • in 1946 de Barros acquired his first camera and soon focused his artistic energies on photography
  • his approach was highly experimental, employing techniques such as photomontage, multiple exposures and physical interventions on negatives to explore the medium’s conceptual potential
  • by 1949 he was invited to set up the Museu de Arte de São Paulo’s photographic lab, and it was there in 1950 that he held the influential solo exhibition ‘Fotoforma’

All the photos on display here are really good in their way, although they reminded me of other modernist photographic experiments from the 1920s and ’30s, specifically the Bauhaus photos of Constructivist artist László Moholy-Nagy.

But the de Barros wall also featured a series of small quirky paintings which look exactly like Paul Klee paintings. He was well aware of the influence. One of photos is titled ‘Homage to Paul Klee’. I really liked Port View which I can see on the internet but can’t open as a separate image. Here it is in Google Images.

So he produced lovely Paul Klee-esque paintings, as well as a striking body of semi-abstract, modernist photographs. But it’s actually as a founded or pure abstraction in Brazil that he’s remembered.

  • 1951: a scholarship from the French government enabled de Barros to spend a year
    studying in Europe
  • on his return he founded the Grupo Ruptura (Rupture Group) which championed geometric abstraction as a means of transforming society, overcoming limits of language, geography and nationality
  • these ideas became cornerstones of Brazil’s Concrete Art movement

Arrangement of Three Similar Shapes within a Circle by Geraldo de Barros (1953) Collection Lenora and Fabiana de Barros. Courtesy Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo. Photo by Gustavo Scatena, Imagem Paulista © Geraldo de Barros

de Barro’s progressive approach extended to furniture design, marrying technical innovations with a Concrete aesthetic.

In 1954 he co-founded Unilabor, a cooperative that sought to merge modernist principles with accessible, affordable production and was in production until 1961. There’s a page devoted to Unilabor on his website.

In 1964 he founded a new furniture company, Hobjeto. This was a more commercial operation and it’s interesting to compare the 1950s Unilabor designs with the bolder, more colourful 1960s Hobjeto designs.

His output continued until his retirement in 1989. In terms of his range, from fine art to commercial furniture design, de Barros was obviously a major cultural influence.

The Klee connection

The three final artists in the show – Alfredo Volpi, Rubem Valentim and Geraldo de Barro – produced works that look very like Paul Klee paintings and watercolours, and even namecheck Klee directly.

It was intriguing, then, to read, on the credits label right at the end of the show, that this exhibition was organised by the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. Not contributed to, but organised by. Did that influence the selection of artists in this show? Were they chosen deliberately to reflect Klee’s influence? Or because the Zentrum just happens to own a lot of Brazilian art? At the time of writing, não sei.

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by Simon on March 22, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography, Sculpture, Slavery
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Posted by Simon on March 22, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/22/brasil-brasil-the-birth-of-modernism-the-royal-academy/

Feminine power: the divine to the demonic @ the British Museum

This is the first major exhibition ever held at the British Museum focusing solely on goddesses – on female spiritual beings from mythological traditions from around the world – and it is absolutely fabulous!

Queen of the night relief, c. 1750 BCE, Iraq, painted clay © The Trustees of the British Museum

Questions about women and femininity

The exhibition sets out to ask questions about images and ideas of the divine: How do different traditions view femininity? How has female authority been perceived in ancient cultures? Are sex and desire the foundations of civilisation or their disruptors? To what extent do female deities reinforce patriarchal social systems or subvert them? What relevance to goddess from ancient or remote cultures have for us, here, today?

To ‘answer and explore’ these questions the exhibition brings together female divine and demonic figures feared and revered for over 5,000 years from traditions all round the world. It includes painted scrolls from Tibet, Roman sculpture, intricate personal amulets from Egypt, Japanese prints, Indian relief carvings, statuettes and figurines, alongside contemporary sculptures.

Ancient and modern

It’s important to realise that the exhibition combines ancient and modern. It brings together historical artifacts – ancient sculptures and sacred objects relating to female goddesses from all around the world – but also includes modern and recent works of art by contemporary female artists such as the renowned American feminist artist Judy Chicago, and the creations of less well-known woman artists from various cultures, such as this fearsome headpiece from India.

Dance mask of Taraka, workshop of Sri Kajal Datta (1994) India, papier mâché © The Trustees of the British Museum

The aim is to explore the multitude of ways in which femininity has been perceived, conceived, created and depicted across the globe, from the ancient world to today. The exhibition explores the embodiment of feminine power in deities, goddesses, demons, saints and other spiritual beings, associated with the widest possible range of human experiences and attributes, from sex and fertility, through wisdom, passion and nature, to war, mercy and justice.

18th century Chinese porcelain of Guanyin, the Chinese translation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, with child and attendants © The Trustees of the British Museum

Treasures

What makes the exhibition so enjoyable is not necessarily its feminist aims (although many visitors will, of course, identify with these) but a much simpler factor. Recent British Museum exhibitions about Nero or Stonehenge featured fabulous objects but also a lot of run-of-the-mill coins or skeletons or shards of pottery. These were important because they tell us about the subject’s archaeology and history, but sometimes they can get a bit, well, boring.

Here, by contrast, having selected 50 or so of the most interesting, relevant or thought-provoking goddesses from traditions around the world, the curators were free to pick only the very best objects to represent them. Almost all of the objects are from the museum’s own collection and they showcase its extraordinary breadth and range. But more importantly, lots and lots of them are really beautiful or, if not beautiful, then striking and fascinating.

Statue of Venus, 1st to 2nd century Rome © The Trustees of the British Museum

I studied the labels and read the extensive feminist commentary but then I have read the same kind of thing thousands of times, and read it every day in the papers and hear it every day on the radio and TV. Discussions of gender and sexuality and gender stereotyping and #metoo and the gender pay gap and female empowerment and strong independent women and women pioneers in culture and science and sport are now part of the permanent background hum of modern life.

What is not an everyday experience is to be able to take a walk through the mythologies of the world, to savour the beauty and force of a carefully curated selection of exquisite and surprising and fascinating historical and cultural artifacts.

Not all the objects on display are masterpieces, but many of them are really, really beautiful, and all of them have fascinating stories to tell and many of them shed lights on countries and cultures I knew little or nothing about. The exhibition amounts to a kind of David Attenborough odyssey through the weird and wonderful products of the human imagination.

Mami Wata headpiece, Nigeria, early 1900s, painted wood and metal © The Trustees of the British Museum

Five themes

One of the curators explained that they went out of their way to consult far and wide, with heads of departments across the museum, with stakeholders and members, in order to draw up a long list of themes and subjects relating to female power. Alongside this they drew up a long list of objects to illustrate the themes, at the same time drafting a list of feminist commentators who might be interested in commenting on them.

The outcome of this long process of consultation and consideration has been to divide the exhibition into five themes, each of which is introduced and explained by the curators – and then a leading contemporary feminist was invited to contribute thoughts on the theme and reflections on the objects.

The five themes are:

  • Passion and Desire, introduced and analysed by Classics Professor Mary Beard
  • Magic and Malice, commented on by writer and podcaster Elizabeth Day
  • Forces of Nature, commented on by psychotherapist and campaigner against violence against women, Dr Leyla Hussein
  • Justice and Defence commented on by human rights lawyer Rabia Siddique
  • Compassion and Salvation commented on by writer, comedian and podcaster Deborah Frances-White

Thus each section each of the individual exhibits has two panels, one a factual description by the curators and one a subjective and thoughtful comment by the contributors. There are also some standalone video ‘thought-pieces’ of the five commentators giving their thoughts about women and power.

Creation and nature

To give an idea of the sheer number and range of goddesses and deities involved, this is a list of some of the exhibits in just the first section, devoted to ‘Creation and nature’.

  • Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes with flaming red hair and a fiery temper
  • Sedna, the Inuit mistress of the sea
  • Lashmi, the Hindu goddess of abundance
  • Oshun, the Yoruba orisha of water, coolness and healing
  • Mami Wata, the mother water of African spiritual traditions
  • Izarami-no-mikoto, a creator deity of both creation and death in Japanese Shinto mythology
  • sheela-na-gigs, the primitive stone figures found in the Middle Ages across Britain, France and Spain
  • Papatūānuku, the mother earth figure of In Māori tradition, who gives birth to all things, including people

You get the idea. Not so much about the goddesses as such, but the impressive range and diversity of cultures represented.

Kali

The exhibition includes a newly acquired icon of the Hindu goddess Kali by contemporary Bengali artist, Kaushik Ghosh, the first contemporary 3D representation of Kali in the collection.

As one of the most prominent and widely venerated goddesses in India, this devotional image of Kali reflects the living tradition of her worship, important for millions of Hindus around the world today.

The statuette was commissioned especially for the exhibition, together with the London Durgotsav Committee, who run the annual Kali Puja festival in Camden, in Kali’s honour.

According to the curators: ‘Loved and feared for her formidable power and aggression, Kali is the goddess of destruction and salvation, who transcends time and death, destroys ignorance and guides her followers to enlightenment. Although superficially terrifying, the bloodied heads that she wears and carries represent her power to destroy the ego, setting her followers free from worldly concerns, and the belt of severed arms signifies that she liberates them from the cycle of death and rebirth, by the many weapons she wields.’

Kali Murti, Kaushik Ghosh, India, 2022. Image © The Trustees of the British Museum

Ancient and modern

There’s a kind of doubled or paired approach to everything. I’ve mentioned the way many of the exhibits feature a panel giving the historical and cultural facts, as written by the curators, and next to it a panel giving the more subjective view and reflections of the guest commentator. Doubling. Two perspectives.

But I mean it in another way as well, which is the curators’ deliberate juxtaposition of the very old and the very contemporary. This is announced right at the beginning of the exhibition (although it was only when the curator pointed it out that I understood it).

Right at the beginning of the ‘Creation and nature’ section they have two exhibits, not quite next to each other, a bit more subtly placed than that. One is a trio of Cycladic figurines of women, those primitive, flat faced half-abstract figures which date from as long ago as 3,000 BC.

A figurine of a woman, from the Cyclades, over 4,000 years old.

These are so beautiful as objects and shapes that I could look at them all day. Anyway, just round the corner from them the curators have hung a print titled ‘The Creation’ by the American feminist artist, Judy Chicago (born in 1939 and still going strong).

I needee a bit of help deciphering this but it is an image of a woman giving birth, taken from between her parted thighs, with her two breasts as hills on the horizon, one a volcano exploding. Obviously it’s heavily stylised, and features strata of creation on the right including sea life and, above them, lizards and apes and humans.

The Creation, Judy Chicago, USA, 1985, coloured screen print in 45 colours on black paper. Image © The Trustees of the British Museum

In other words, it’s a stylised image of the creation of life on earth. An interview with Chicago is quoted in which she jokes that Michelangelo’s famous image of the ‘Creation’ depicts a man (Adam) lying lazily on his back while a complacent God reaches out and touches his finger. Chicago wanted to counterpoint this patriarchal fantasy with a depiction of the more effortful, bloody and seismic moment of creation in a woman giving birth, but at the same time give it modern mythic overtones, reflecting our knowledge of geology and evolution.

So far so interesting and both works are examples of what I meant by saying that all of the exhibition’s artefacts are powerful and beautiful. It also exemplifies the juxtaposition of ancient and modern I was talking about.

History and art

But it is a dichotomy or duality on another level, as well, which is that the Cycladic figures are conventionally thought of as being of predominantly archaeological and historical interest whereas the Chicago piece is clearly a modern ‘work of art’.

So the curators are enacting another form of doubling: they have deliberately mixed together works which come from the staid academic world of history and anthropology with living works of art.

So there are, arguably, three sets of pairing or doubling going on throughout the exhibition: ancient and modern, curator and commentator, history and art.

These juxtapositions set up forcefields of energy between ancient objects of worship and veneration whose purpose was clearly ‘religious’ and modern works of art whose purpose is, well, what?

In her speech the curator said she was explaining the difference between the consciously ‘sacred’ objects (depicting goddesses and ritual) and the modern ‘profane’ art works to an exhibition sponsor, and the sponsor asked: ‘Is there a difference?’

Good question, and the exhibition provides a fascinating field of study for similar questions and reflections, either prompted by our own impressions as we stroll among these weird and wonderful objects, or by the factual summaries of the curators, or by the reflections of the feminist commentators, or by the vibrant juxtaposition of objects from such different times, places and cultures.

The visitor strolls not only between beautiful objects but amidst a complex matrix of factual information, aesthetic experiences, and intellectual discourses, jangling and buzzing, prompting all manner of thoughts and feelings.

Lilith

Take the figure of Lilith. Since the late first millennium AD, Lilith has been known in Jewish demonology as the first wife of Adam and the consort of Satan. Her origins are thought to lie in Mesopotamian demons. The exhibition includes several representations of this talismanic figure, including a ceramic incantation bowl from Iraq (500 to 800 AD), featuring a rare early image of Lilith in female form. Buried upside down under the thresholds of houses these bowls were inscribed with charms to protect the owners (who are named in the text) from demonic forces. They regularly name Lilith as a demon to be warded off, sometimes as grammatically singular and feminine, but also masculine or plural, one among many indications of the gender fluidity found in many mythologies.

Ceramic incantation bowl from Iraq (500 to 800 AD) © The Trustees of the British Museum

So far, so historical or archaeological. But the exhibition also includes a very striking sculpture of Lilith by American artist Kiki Smith, made in 1994. Smith’s sculpture is cast from the body of a real woman and the striking thing is that this life-size black metal sculpture is attached half way up the gallery wall. This would be a striking installation in a gallery of contemporary art but in the staid world of the British Museum with its glass cases carefully spotlighting tiny coins and bits of pottery, it makes a huge statement, visually and physically. The artist herself writes of her work:

Lilith becomes this disembodied spirit that goes off and wreaks havoc and doesn’t want to be subjugated. Here she is transcending gravity and the constraints of her body.

Yes, the legends about Lilith and the havoc she wrought we may or may not be familiar with. But it’s the fact that she is a life-size sculpture hanging upside down on the gallery wall which makes the statement.

Lilith by Kiki Smith (1994) image © Pace Gallery

The exhibition poster

Of all the objects in the exhibition, the Lilith sculpture is the one the curators chose to go on the poster and promotional material. Personally, I think that was a mistake. I think it would have been better, more accurate, to use a montage of 3 or 4 of the most striking objects to give a true sense of the exhibition’s breadth and diversity. It’s also a bit boring that out of all the cultures of the big wide world, the curators have chosen an artist from America. Disappointing. As if we don’t hear enough about American artists already. Would have been more genuinely diverse to promote a work by a Hindu or Nigerian or Inuit artist.

But then again, it is a strange and disturbing object. Maybe it recaptures, in our blasé culture, some of the shock and mystery and weirdness that many of the more obviously ‘religious’ objects on display conveyed to their contemporaries, long ago and far away.

Lots of goddesses

If nothing else, the exhibition shows that there have been lots of goddesses and female spirits, in all societies, at all times. In the second half of the show I noted a fourth kind of doubling, which is where the curators have a panel describing an important goddess in a general sense, and then introduce a specific instance of the goddess, drawn from their vast collection.

So there’s a curator panel describing the figure of Eve, explaining her provenance and significance in Christian theology; the curators then give an example of the iconography of Eve in the form of a striking woodcut by Renaissance artist Cranach the Elder. Then one of the feminist commentators gives a more subjective assessment of the importance of Eve in shaping and projecting ideas of femininity in the Christian tradition.

A similar two-panel treatment (general explanation, then specific artifact) was meted out to (to name just the ones that really struck me):

  • Radha (Hindu)
  • Ishtar (Babylonia and Assyria)
  • Aphrodite (Greece)
  • Lilith (Jewish-Christian)
  • Tlazo Iteotl (Aztec)
  • Hekate (Greek)
  • Circe (Greek)
  • Cihuateteo (Aztec)
  • Rangda (Bali)
  • Taraka (Hindu)
  • Sekhmet (Egypt)
  • Athena (Greece)
  • Luba (Congo)
  • Mahadevi (Hindu)
  • Kali (Hindu) Isis (Egypt)
  • Maryam (Islam)
  • Mary (Christian)
  • Guanyin (China)
  • Tara (Tibet)
  • Medusa (Greece)
  • witches (Christendom)

Women and gender identity

The curators assert that the representation of feminine power in world belief and mythology has played – and continues to play – an important role in shaping global cultural attitudes towards women and gender identity.

I suppose this is true of many places, still, but…. there’s something not quite right with that statement. On reflection I think it’s that the curators are pushing it a bit far when they say the exhibition explores or investigates the role religion, and female deities, goddesses and spirits have played in representing, defining, limiting and empowering women through the ages. To really properly do that would require a library full of books and studies of religious sociology and anthropology. To be blunt the exhibition, big and broad though it is, only scratches the surface of a vast, global, pan-historical subject.

As an example, the exhibition includes a section devoted to the Virgin Mary who is (obviously) the most prominent female figure in Christianity, itself the most widespread religion on earth. This section contains five artefacts connected with her veneration, which is more than most of the other goddesses get, but, still… It would obviously need quite considerably more than that to amount to a proper ‘investigation’ or ‘exploration’ of the role of Mary in defining and limiting women’s roles in Western society over the past 2,000 years. Vastly more. Thousands of books and objects. A huge exhibition could be devoted to Mary alone. And that’s just one among the 50 or 60 female deities on display here.

And that thought brings out the exhibition’s weakness, which is that a lot of the very broad (and very familiar) generalisations which the feminist commentators make about gender and identity are not really supported by the exhibits.

The curators tell you the facts about Rangda (Bali) or Taraka (Hindu) or Sekhmet (ancient Egypt) and then the commentators shoehorn onto them one of the handful of familiar feminist concerns about gender stereotyping or gender fluidity or the power of desire or women as strong independent figures and so on. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s spot on. But sometimes it feels…contrived. You feel the unknowable weirdness of some of these objects, the strange worlds they inhabit and the fearsome spirits they represent are being hijacked to pad out a Guardian editorial.

A friend of mine, a designer, goes to lots of exhibitions and makes a point of never reading the labels. She likes to engage directly with the objects on display, unmediated by the curators’ editorialising. The commentators opinions are over familiar and tend to drag you into the squabbling world of the modern media and culture wars and twitter and so on.

Whereas the exhibition’s great strength is the way the objects themselves open doors in your head to weird and wonderful otherplaces and otherminds, leading you through the looking glass, through the back of the wardrobe, into a huge range of times and places and cultures.

And the way these beautiful or fascinating objects have been carefully juxtaposed with notable works of contemporary art to set up all kinds of resonances and vibrations. This – the often strange, haunting beauty of the objects themselves, and resonances set off by their artful positioning – is what I responded to, what I found very stimulating and rewarding.

(To be fair, the exhibition is accompanied by a big heavy catalogue packed with essays by feminist academics, and this does go into considerably more detail about the issues around women and gender and sexuality which the exhibition references. Read the catalogue blurb to get the publishers’ summary of it. ‘The publication concludes with a discussion of contemporary feminism…’)

The curators speak

Here are the voices of two women closely involved with the exhibition. Belinda Crerar, curator, British Museum, writes:

This exhibition is a tour through history and around the world to see the different ways that female power and authority have been perceived in spiritual belief. The diversity of these goddesses, spirits, enlightened beings and saints, and their profound influence in people’s lives today and in the past, gives us pause to reflect on how femininity – and indeed masculinity – are defined and valued now and in the future.

Muriel Gray, Deputy Chair of Trustees of the British Museum, writes:

The Citi exhibition Feminine power: the divine to the demonic is brimming with magic, wisdom, fury and passion. I am very proud that through the breadth and depth of the British Museum’s collection, alongside special loans, we can tell such powerful and universal stories of faith and femininity from the most ancient cultures to living traditions around the world. I would like to thank Citi, whose ongoing support has allowed the Museum to realise this ground-breaking exhibition.

A word from our sponsor

The exhibition is sponsored by Citi. Citi is the swish new name of what used to be Citigroup Inc, an American multinational investment bank and financial services corporation headquartered in New York (where Kiki Smith lives and works). A spokesman for the bank writes:

As a global bank, our mission is to serve as a trusted partner to our clients by responsibly providing financial services that enable growth and economic progress. Success in our mission is only possible if we can continue to foster a culture of equality and inclusion that enables and encourages diversity of thinking. To drive that message of equality and the power and influence of women over time, we are delighted to see the Museum use its collection, along with some spectacular loans, to create a thought-provoking look at the diversity of representations and complex meanings of the divine female over time.

So the exhibition, which the curators and contributors like to see as ‘subverting’ the patriarchy and ‘questioning’ masculinity and ‘interrogating’ gender stereotypes etc – is wholeheartedly aligned with the values of American multinational investment banks and financial services corporations.

Whether you like it or not, ‘equality’ and ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’ are now fully integrated into the lexicon of international capitalism, and it is money from American capitalism which makes possible exhibitions like this, makes possible the curators’ good intentions and the feminist commentators’ ‘subversive’ comments. What do you think of that, O goddesses of fire and flood and fury?

Tiare Wahine, Tom Pico, Hawai’i, 2001, Ohi’a wood © The Trustees of the British Museum

I’m not especially singling out this exhibition. It’s the same kind of irony which meant that the huge sculpture lamenting the transatlantic slave trade made by the American artist Kara Walker (also based in New York) was hosted at Tate Modern, a gallery founded by sugar plantation owner Henry Tate who, although he never owned slaves, made a fortune out of black labourers descended from slave in the Caribbean, whose name the Tate organisation insists on retaining despite protests.

Or that until recently Tate, whose exhibitions routinely campaign for a better world, was funded by BP, the oil corporation, which is actively engaged in destroying the world.

Ditto the National Portrait Gallery, which is only ending its funding by BP this year, having only just noticed global warming and oil companies’ role in creating it.

Or that the Serpentine Gallery in London has only just (2021) dropped ‘Sackler’ from its name because of the Sackler family’s involvement in selling the opioid painkillers which have made large numbers of Americans into addicts, wrecking hundreds of thousands of lives. (A link I was making two and a half years ago, Patrick Staff: On Venus @ Serpentine Sackler Gallery.)

In fact I attended a press launch of an exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery which was addressed by its Chief Executive, Yana Peel, and I squirmed a bit as she imperiously lectured us about sexism and racism (it was the exhibition by African-American female artist Faith Ringgold). So I was all the more surprised and amused when Peel was then forced to step down from her post after the Guardian revealed her involvement in ‘the NSO Group, an Israeli cyber intelligence company whose software has allegedly been used by authoritarian regimes to spy on dissidents’.

And then, of course, there are the many, many art galleries and cultural institutions which have spent the last 30 years deeply entwining themselves with the money or support of Russian oligarchs. Russia. Oligarchs. Putin. Nice company to keep.

So I’m just adding this exhibition to the many which promote high-minded values about gender and race, and advocate for sweeping social change, while being funded by money from harmful or immoral or deeply reactionary sources. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to find this kind of irony hilarious. There’s no point getting upset, it’s the way of the modern world. But you are allowed to smile at the ironies.

For young readers

There is, of course, a sumptuous catalogue accompanying the exhibition, but a book has also been written for younger readers, what the press release describes as a ‘fascinating and empowering introduction to 50 female figures from around the globe’, entitled Goddess: 50 Goddesses, Spirits, Saints and Other Female Figures Who Have Shaped Belief, written by Janina Ramirez and illustrated by Sarah Walsh.

Related links

Other British Museum exhibitions

2 Comments
by Simon on May 25, 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Art, Exhibition, Mythology
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Posted by Simon on May 25, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/05/25/feminine-power-the-divine-to-the-demonic-british-museum/