Bern,
Brazil is by far the largest country in South America, one of the most populated in the world, and has an enormously diverse landscape, from the Amazon rainforest to the beaches of Copacabana, and is of great importance in terms of ecology and global climate. Its art and culture cannot be understood without taking into account the weight of indigenous communities, Portuguese domination, and the contributions of those who were deported as slaves from West Africa until the end of the 19th century. Today, it also receives a significant amount of immigration, and the cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasilia are highly populated metropolises that can be considered urban emblems of the contrasts that define Brazilian history and society.
On September 7, the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern (Switzerland) will open to the public the exhibition “Brazil! Brazil! The Birth of Modernism”, the first in that country to review these multiple facets of history, literature, music, design and architecture around the Amazon. A project that will travel to the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2025 and that will also offer us a historical approach to what was, at the beginning of the 20th century, a young nation in transition: in 1889, after 67 years of imperial rule, the First Brazilian Republic was proclaimed, with its capital in Rio de Janeiro. On the economic level, Brazil benefited at that time from its near-monopoly in the world coffee trade, centered in the port city of Santos, in the federal state of São Paulo; Slavery had been abolished a year earlier, in 1888, and many of those who had been exploited moved to the aforementioned region of São Paulo to take advantage of this commercial boom.
This optimistic period was reflected in the visual arts and architecture; the latter would acquire, decades later, its most celebrated expression in the works of Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi (at that time the Rio carnival also began to develop and become widespread). However, given the heterogeneity of the Brazilian population at that time and the conjunction of different regional cultures, the search for a national identity would be a challenge.
In 1922, coinciding with the centenary of independence – less turbulent than that of other Latin American countries, partly because the process was led by a member of the Portuguese royal family, Pedro I – the coffee magnate Paulo Prado, one of the country’s great oligarchs, introduced a week of cultural events, the so-called Modern Art Weekaimed at turning the economic centre of São Paulo into another capital of artistic development alongside Rio de Janeiro. In addition to exhibitions dedicated to art and architecture, concerts, dance performances, talks and readings were held: it was the first time that these various disciplines rowed in favour of a single avant-garde movement, Brazilian modernism.
As in the context of the European avant-garde, artists in Brazil were determined to overcome the classical, academic and institutionalized canon that had dominated in the 19th century and tried to find possible ways to break with the orientation marked by Portuguese domination and develop their own pictorial language. In any case, they sought to do so through exchange with their European contemporaries and Brazilian creators from wealthy families or with travel grants moved to the other side of the Atlantic on long stays: Anita Malfatti went to Berlin; Tarsila do Amaral, Candido Portinari, Vicente do Rego Monteiro and Geraldo de Barros, to Paris.
Expressionism, Futurism and Cubism would therefore leave their mark on their work, but back in Brazil, they all made an effort to create an art that was unique to the country and truly modern. They were committed to the deployment of indigenous traditions and themes: indigenous practices, Afro-Brazilian cultures introduced by slaves, ethnic plurality. Artists from the upper classes in particular appropriated features of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian pictorial languages, but adopted a perspective already given among the European avant-garde regarding primitive art, that is, illustration and idealization.
With the 1930 Revolution and the dictatorial “Estado Novo” introduced later by Getúlio Vargas, artists would turn to the representation of themes such as the exploitation of agricultural workers and social injustice, and their aesthetics became more realistic. From the 1950s, after the dictator was deposed, a second generation of contemporary authors would still address social and cultural issues, but from an approach closer to ethnicity or religion, as well as to the world of work, which is very characteristic of the Brazilian panorama. Those who came from more modest social backgrounds, and the descendants of indigenous inhabitants or African slaves, were able to articulate social inequalities based on their own personal experience.
Later, these themes reappeared in concrete art and the Tropicália movement, but also in architecture and music: the military coup of 1964 marked the beginning of a new era in which issues linked to political and social oppression were addressed.
This historical and artistic journey will mark the approach of this exhibition on Brazil in Bern, which comes after the triumphant entry of many Brazilian creations at this year’s Venice Biennale. “Brazil! Brazil! The Birth of Modernism” will feature pieces by a dozen significant artists from that period in the first half of the 20th century, whose works have sometimes barely been shown until now in European exhibitions and collections: Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfatti, Lasar Segall, Alfredo Volpi, Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Flávio de Carvalho, Candido Portinari, Djanira da Motta e Silva, Rubem Valentim and Geraldo de Barros. In addition, photographs, films and audios will delve into the fields of literature, music, design and architecture.
The artists represented can be divided into two categories: Anita Malfatti, Vicente de Rego Monteiro, Tarsila do Amaral, Lasar Segall and Cándido Portinari have long been part of the canon of modern Brazilian art; they maintained contacts with the European avant-garde and, to a certain extent, discovered the lesser-known facets of Brazilian culture through the eyes of intellectuals from the Old Continent. Their pictorial language was initially marked by the aforementioned expressionism, futurism and cubism: although they were involved early on with indigenous cultures, they did so mainly through books and visits to museums, without getting to grips with the reality of the life of these groups.
Flávio de Carvalho, Alfredo Volpi, Djanira da Motta e Silva, Rubem Valentim and Geraldo de Barros, on the other hand, were not accepted into the Brazilian artistic canon, also for a long time. Volpi and Motta e Silva took popular practices such as festivals or village rituals as the axis of their creations, and Valentim integrated symbols such as arrows, triangles, circles and axes into his compositions, which have their origins in the Afro-Brazilian religious rituals of Candomblé (Da Motta e Silva and Valentim belonged, in fact, to these cultures). Since they had no artistic training, in a classical sense, their work was seen as primitive or folkloric for decades.
As for De Barros and de Carvalho, they moved between the visual arts, architecture and design, making it difficult to label them. Moreover, with his performance-based actions and his expressionist portraits of women, De Carvalho even provoked violent reactions.
The approximately 130 works that we will be able to see at the Zentrum Paul Klee demonstrate, in short, the enormous diversity of modern Brazilian art; it will be an opportunity to discover creative codes that until now have remained relatively unknown to most people.
“Brazil! Brazil! The Birth of Modernism
PAUL KLEE ZENTRUM
Monument in the Fruitland 3
Bern
From September 7, 2024 to January 5, 2025
