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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/

György Lukács on Franz Kafka (1955)

Brief biography of György Lukács

From the 1920s to the 1960s György Lukács was one of the leading Marxist philosophers and literary critics in Europe.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1885, the son of a very affluent Jewish banker, he benefited from a superb education and was a leading intellectual at Budapest university, combining interests in literature and (Neo-Kantian) philosophy, and founded a salon which featured leading Hungarian writers and composers during the Great War.

The experience of the war (although he was himself exempted from military service) radicalised Lukács and he joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918. His cultural eminence led to him being appointed People’s Commissar for Education and Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic which lasted from 21 March to 1 August 1919 and took its orders directly from Lenin. Lukács was an enthusiastic exponent of Lenin’s theory of Red Terror.

When the Republic was overthrown by army generals who instituted the right-wing dictatorship which was to run Hungary for the rest of the interwar period, Lukács fled to Vienna where he spent the 1920s developing a philosophical basis for the Leninist version of Marxism.

In 1930 he was ‘summoned’ to Moscow to work at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, although he soon got caught up in Stalin’s purges and was sent into exile in Tashkent. But Lukács was fortunate enough to survive – unlike an estimated 80% of Hungarian exiles in Russia, who perished.

At the end of the Second World War Lukács was sent back to Hungary to take part in the new Hungarian communist government, where he was directly responsible for written attacks on non-communist intellectuals, and took part in the removal of independent and non-communist intellectuals from their jobs, many being forced to take jobs as manual labourers.

Lickspittle apparatchik though that makes him sound, Lukács in fact trod a careful line which managed to be critical of Stalinism, albeit in coded and often abstruse philosophical phraseology. Due to his experience and seniority, Lukács was made a minister in the government of Imry Nagy which in 1956 tried to break away from Russia’s control during the so-called Hungarian Uprising. Nagy’s government was suppressed by the Soviets, and Lukács along with the rest of the Nagy government was exiled to Romania. Nagy himself was executed, Lukács only just escaped that fate. Yet again Lukács had experienced at first hand the brutal and repressive force of Soviet tyranny.

He was allowed back to Budapest in 1957 on the condition that he abandoned his former criticisms of the Soviet Union, engaged in public self-criticism, and on this basis was allowed to keep his academic posts, to continue writing and publishing his theoretical and critical works, up to his death in 1971.

His was a highly representative life of a certain kind of Central European intellectual in the twentieth century. He was reviled at the time by the people whose lives he blighted and by a wide range of liberal and conservative opponents.

Modernism as a symptom of capitalist society

In 1955 Lukács delivered a series of lectures on the clash between Realism and Modernism and a year later the lectures were published in essay form in a short book titled The Meaning of Contemporary Realism.

The message is simple: Realism good, Modernism bad. Simple enough, but the interest and, for me at any rate, the great pleasure to be had from reading this book is in the secondary arguments, in the clarity with which he presents his premises and works through the ideas and theories which support his case.

Lukács begins with a sweeping premise: the era we live in is dominated by the conflict between capitalism and socialism. Looking back at the nineteenth century we can see how Realism in the arts emerged with the newly triumphant bourgeoisie, and was a result of the new social conditions brought about by their rise and overthrow of the last vestiges of power of the European aristocracy.

(Realist authors would include Stendhal, Balzac and early Flaubert in France, Tolstoy in Russia, George Eliot in England, Mark Twain in America.)

Realism in literature was followed by Naturalism in the final third of the nineteenth century, which paid more attention to the grim social conditions of mature capitalist society but also, in the hands of a novelist like Zola, began the process of reducing human beings to ciphers worked on by malign environments. Darwinism, when applied to society by right-wing theorists, could be made to make people appear simple tools of their genetic inheritance, while late-Victorian socialist theories could make people appear pawns and slaves of their working environments.

Émile Zola (1840 to 1902) was the chief exponent of Naturalism. He regarded his novels as sociological experiments. In Lukács’s opinion, Zola abandoned the tricky balance which the realist novelists maintained between character and ‘type’, in favour of the latter: he created countless social types, which helps explain why Zola wrote nearly forty novels without a single memorable character in any of them.

(Naturalist authors are spearheaded by Zola in France, with maybe Jack London in America, George Gissing and Arthur Morrison in England.)

By the end of the century (during the 1890s) a shoal of literary movements developed which prioritised an interest in decadence, perversion, the macabre and gruesome, the so-called Decadent movement and the gloomy atmosphere of Symbolism.

This brings us to the eruption of Modernism about the time of the First World War, the movement which, Lukács claims, is still praised and defended by bourgeois capitalist critics at the time he’s writing (1955). But for Lukács, Modernism represents a colossal failure of humanity. Modernism turns its back on history and society, its protagonists are almost all loners undergoing nervous breakdowns, hopelessly alienated from societies which are portrayed as stuck, static, incapable of change or improvement.

From T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land to Samuel Beckett in Waiting For Godot, Modernist writers depict complete psychological collapse, in Beckett’s case the degradation of human beings into mumbling vegetables. He backs it up with references to Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and other European works which foreground hopelessness and despair, and he was, of course, writing during the heyday of French existentialism, which became a byword in the 1950s for black sweaters and anguish.

All of these Modernist works and writers, Lukács argues, are symptoms of the alienating effect of living under Western capitalism. All these writers, artists and composers bear out Marx’s insight that in the capitalist system people are alienated from each other and from themselves.

Specific points about Kafka

This makes Lukács sound like a cumbersome Stalinist commissar, but in fact the book is a pleasure to read from start to finish because:

  1. it moves relatively quickly, not belabouring the points
  2. it makes references to all kinds of writers, most from the European and not the Anglo-Saxon tradition so which we Brits are not very familiar with
  3. it features a whole series of thought-provoking ideas

Time

There is a fascinating discussion of subjective versus objective time, and how Modernists of all stripe, including Modernist philosophers, became fascinated by trying to describe the undifferentiated flow of sense impressions and ideas which became known as stream-of-consciousness, most famously in the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

Lukács compares and contrasts Joyce and Woolf’s approaches with the way Thomas Mann uses what, at first sight, is also stream of consciousness to capture the thoughts of the poet Goethe in his novel Lotte in Weimar (1939). Mann is a realist writer and so, in Lukács’s opinion, when he uses stream of consciousness it is as a tool to help particular individuals and events emerge against a clearly defined social backdrop.

Static Modernism versus dynamic Realism

Joyce’s worldview is static. More than one critic has pointed out how Ulysses portrays a Dublin trapped in stasis and his masterpiece, Finnegan’s Wake, portrays a vast circular movement. But, says Lukács, human beings only achieve their personhood, only become fully human, by interacting with other humans in a constantly changing, dynamic society. Realist authors select characters and details to portray their understanding of this ceaseless dialectic between the individual and society.

Solipsism and nihilism

A full and proper understanding of society in all its relations is empowering, an analysis and understanding which gives people the confidence to mobilise and change things. By contrast, Lukács accuses Modernists of turning their backs on a healthy interaction with the world, of rejecting society, and rejecting a historical understanding of how societies change and evolve.

And it is no great leap for Modernists, in Lukács’s view, to pass from the belief that nothing ever changes, to despair. Rejecting society and history leads the protagonists of Modernist fictions to:

  1. be confined within the limits of their own subjective experiences (Joyce, stream of consciousness, Beckett’s monads)
  2. ultimately deprive the protagonist of even a self – a personal history, since that history is (in a normal person) largely a record of the interaction between themselves and the host of others, starting with their family and moving outwards, which constitute society

As Lukács puts it:

By exalting man’s subjectivity, at the expense of the objective reality of his environment, man’s subjectivity is itself impoverished. (page 24)

Man is reduced to a sequence of unrelated experiential fragments. (page 26)

Heidegger versus Hegel

In this context, Lukács invokes the teachings of Heidegger, the godfather of 20th century existentialism, with his fundamental idea of Geworfenheit ins Dasein, that human beings have been ‘thrown-into-Being’, abandoned in a godless universe etc etc, all the self-pitying tropes which have been promoted by existentialist philosophers, critics, playwrights, novelists, film-makers, rock stars and millions of teenagers in their lonely bedrooms ever since.

The individual, retreating into himself in despair at the cruelty of the age, may experience an intoxicated fascination with his forlorn condition. (page 38)

By contrast with this focus on isolation, Lukács goes back to the origins of Western philosophy to invoke the fundamental insight of one of its founders – Aristotle – that man is a social animal: we only fully live and have our being in a social context. This insight recurs in various Western thinkers and finds its fullest modern embodiment in the vast system of Georg Hegel (1770 to 1831) who, in the early nineteenth century, applies his theoretical model of the dialectic to the continual interplay between the healthily-adjusted individual and the society they find themselves in.

How does this play out in fiction? Well, the realist novelist such as George Eliot or Tolstoy chooses representative types, puts them in a narrative which represents realistic actions which capture the possibilities of their society, and selects details which highlight, bolster and bring out these two aspects. By and large things change in a realist novel, not least the characters, sometimes against the backdrop of dramatic social events (Middlemarch and the Great Reform Bill, War and Peace and the Napoleonic War).

It is the realist’s interest in the interplay between a character and his or her fully realised environment – from Homer’s Achilles to Thomas Mann’s Adrian Leverkuhn – which gives us a fully developed sense of character and, deeper than this, a dynamic sense of human potential. At bottom, the subject of the realist author is human change and development.

Moreover, Lukács goes on to point out that all literature is, at some level, realistic. It would be impossible to have a totally non-realist novel (whereas you can, for example, have an utterly abstract work of art). More to his point, about the value of society and history:

A writer’s pattern of choice is a function of his personality. But personality is not in fact timeless and absolute, however it may appear to the individual consciousness. Talent and character may be innate; but the manner in which they develop, or fail to develop, depends on the writer’s interaction with his environment, on his relationships with other human beings. His life is part of the life of his times; no matter whether he is conscious of this, approves or disapproves. He is part of a larger social and historical whole. (page 54)

So much for the Realist worldview, then.

The Modernist, on the other hand, rejects all this. More often than not Modernist characters are extremes, psychopaths, neurotic, going mad. Lukács points to all of Samuel Beckett’s characters, trapped in the cage of their solipsism, but also the many mentally challenged characters in William Faulkner, or of the man adrift on a sea of phenomena in Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities.

Details are chosen not to highlight the characters’ representativeness but to bring out the freakishness of themselves and the uncanny world they inhabit. And the plot or story is often sick and twisted (Faulkner), or barely exists (Joyce), or revels in degradation and decline (Beckett).

(I laughed out loud when he described the way Beckett stands at the end of this tradition, as an example of ‘a fully standardised nihilistic modernism’, making him sound like a standard edition family saloon or an entry-level fridge freezer, page 53)

In a striking manoeuvre Lukács invokes Freud as a godfather to Modernism, pointing out that Freud himself openly declared that his way of gaining insight into the structure of the ‘normal’ mind was via study of a colourful array of neurotics, obsessives and phobics. In other words, one of the major planks of thought underlying all Modernist psychology, Freudianism, is based on generalisations from the morbid and the unnatural (page 30).

Franz Kafka

Which brings us to Kafka. Kafka, for Lukács, even more than Beckett, for all his genius, represents the acme of the sickness that is Modernism. He points out a detail I’d forgotten which is that, as Joseph K is being led away to be executed, he thinks of flies stuck on flypaper, tearing their little legs off. This, Lukács says, is the vision at the heart of all Kafka’s fiction and at the heart of the Modernist worldview – humans are helpless insects, totally impotent, paralysed in a society they don’t understand, trapped in unintelligible situations.

Kafka’s angst is the experience par excellence of modernism. (page 36)

Lukács dwells on Kafka’s brilliant way with details, his eye for the telling aspect of a person or situation which brings it to life. But Lukács uses this fact to bring out the world of difference between the realistic detail in a realist fiction –which has been chosen because it is representative of the real world, properly conceived and understood – and the details in Kafka, which he selected with absolute genius in order to convey his crushing sense of the utter, paralysing futility and nonsense of existence.

Kafka’s fictions are absolutely brilliant allegories, but allegories of nothing, allegories of emptiness (pages 44 to 45).

Thoughts

Pros

This is just a selection of some of Lukács’s insights in this short and, for the most part, very readable book. He may have been a slimeball, he may have been a criminal, he may have been a hypocrite, he may have been a toady to power – but there is no denying he was a very clever man, very well read, and he conveys his learning fairly lightly. He doesn’t set out to be impenetrable, as most French theorists do.

And he’s candid enough to admit that many of the experiments and new techniques and works written by the Modernists were dazzling masterpieces, and to concede that much of the stuff written under the aegis of Stalin’s doctrine of Socialist Realism was tripe. He’s too sophisticated to defend rubbish.

But his basic critique that the Modernist works which Western critics, to this day, tend to uncritically adulate, do tend to foreground the outsider, the alienated, the loner, often with severe psychological problems, in fictions which often lack much plot or any interaction with other characters, and in which both hero and author have largely turned their back on wider society – this is very insightful. His analysis of these aspects of Modernist fiction is useful and stimulating.

And, having just read Kafka’s biography, his diagnosis of Kafka’s writings as the brilliant masterpieces of a very sick mind are completely spot on. I like the way he brings out the important of the just-so detail in Kafka’s works, the precise details which tip the whole thing over into paranoid nightmare.

Cons

However, all this good stuff is in the first part of the book. As the book progresses an increasingly more dogmatic tone emerges. What are at first scattered references early in the book to the Cold War and the Peace Movement coalesce into a sustained political polemic. Lukács links his concept of the Good Realist writer directly with the 1950s Peace Movement, which was strongly promoted by the Soviet Union amid disingenuous claims to want to end the Cold War (while all the time retaining a vice-like grip on Eastern Europe and funding destabilising communist insurgents around the world).

By contrast, Lukács explicitly links some of the philosophers and authors of angst (most notoriously Heidegger) with Nazism and so tries to tar all Modernist authors with the taint of Fascism, which is clearly not true, think of Kafka, and Joyce and Faulkner.

In other words, Lukács disappoints by dropping the insights of the early part in order to make a direct and crude connection between a writer’s underlying worldviews and current developments in international politics. He is not crude enough to blame individual writers for Fascism or capitalism – but he does point out repeatedly that they base their works on the same worldview that accepts the exploitation and alienation implicit in the capitalist system.

For most of the first half I enjoyed Lukács’s dissection of the psychopathology of Modernism. But when he began to directly relate it to capitalist-imperialism and to lecture the reader on how it led to The Wrong Side in the Cold War, the book suddenly felt crude, simplistic and hectoring. When he suddenly states that:

The diabolical character of the world of modern capitalism, and man’s impotence in the face of it, is the real subject matter of Kafka’s writing (page 77)

I thought, How can such a clever, well-read man write something so crude, and I immediately thought of counter-arguments:

  1. Kafka’s visions of human life crushed by a faceless and persecuting bureaucracy could equally well have come out of Czarist Russia with its notorious secret police or, indeed, Stalin’s Russia.
  2. Kafka didn’t in fact live in an advanced capitalist society such as America, Britain or Germany – the endless, useless bureaucracy lampooned in his books is precisely not that of snappily efficient America or dogmatically thorough Germany, but precisely that of provincial Bohemia, a sleepy backwater entangled in the vast and impenetrable civil service of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
  3. And Kafka would have been horribly out of place in any social system, at any time, as his biography brings home with startling force.

Worst of all, when, in the middle of the book, Lukács says that what counts about a writer isn’t their actual works, not their words or pages or techniques or style, but the general tendency of their thought… the implication is that this tendency can be measured by a communist commissar like himself – and suddenly I could hear the tones of Zhdanov and the other Soviet dictators of culture, whose crude diktats resulted in countless artists and writers being arbitrarily arrested and despatched to die in the gulag, crying out as they went that they meant no offence – while the apparatchiks calmly replied that they weren’t being punished for anything they’d actually said or done: they were being condemned to ten years hard labour for the tendency of their work.

At moments like this in this suave and sophisticated book, you suddenly glimpse the truncheon and the barbed wire of actual communist tyranny, which gives it a sudden thrill and horror not normally encountered in a genteel volume of literary criticism.

So it’s a complicated business, reading Lukács – at one moment, immensely rewarding, at the next genuinely disgusting.

Credit

‘The Meaning of Contemporary Realism’ by György Lukács was published in 1955. Page references are to the 1963 Merlin Press English translation. All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

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by Simon on October 3, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Communism, Literary criticism, Literature
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Posted by Simon on October 3, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/03/gyorgy-lukacs-franz-kafka/