Brazilian painting

Last updated
Painting of Pedro Alvares Cabral, the discovery of Brazil in 1500. Pedro Alvares Cabral sees the land that would later be known as Brazil for the first time. Pedro alvares cabral discovery of brazil 1500.jpg
Painting of Pedro Álvares Cabral, the discovery of Brazil in 1500. Pedro Álvares Cabral sees the land that would later be known as Brazil for the first time.
Antonio Rocco: The immigrants, 1910. It portrays immigration to Brazil. Os emigrantes.jpg
Antonio Rocco: The immigrants, 1910. It portrays immigration to Brazil.
A Brazilian landscape, 1650. With a westward march, a Brazilian territorial and population expansionist movement that also took place in the United States. A Brazilian Landscape MET DP145952.jpg
A Brazilian landscape, 1650. With a westward march, a Brazilian territorial and population expansionist movement that also took place in the United States.

Brazilian painting, or visual arts, emerged in the late 16th century, influenced by the Baroque style imported from Portugal. Until the beginning of the 19th century, that style was the dominant school of painting in Brazil, flourishing across the whole of the settled territories, mainly along the coast but also in important inland centers like Minas Gerais.

Contents

A sudden break with the Baroque tradition was imposed on the art of the nation by the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808, fleeing the French invasion of Portugal. However, Baroque painting still survived in many places until the end of the 19th century. In 1816, the king, John VI, supported the project of creating a national Academy at the suggestion of some French artists led by Joachim Lebreton, a group later known as the French Artistic Mission. They were instrumental in introducing the Neoclassical style and a new concept of artistic education mirroring the European academies, being the first teachers at the newly founded school of art.

Through the following 70 years, the Royal School of Sciences, Arts and Crafts, later renamed the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, would dictate the standards in art, a mixed trend of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism with nationalist inclinations which would be the basis for the production of a large amount of canvases depicting the nation's history, battle scenes, landscapes, portraits, genre painting, and still lifes, and featuring national characters like black people and Indians. Victor Meirelles, Pedro Américo, W. Reichardt, and Almeida Junior were the leaders of such academic art, but this period also received important contributions from foreigners like Georg Grimm, Augusto Müller, and Nicola Antonio Facchinetti.

In 1889 the monarchy was abolished, and the republican government renamed the Imperial Academy the National School of the Fine Arts, which would be short-lived, absorbed in 1931 by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Meanwhile, Modernism was already being cultivated in São Paulo and by some academic painters, and the new movement superseded Academicism. In 1922 the event called Week of Modern Art broke definitely with academic tradition and started a nationalist trend which was, however, influenced by Primitivism and by European Expressionism, Surrealism and Cubism. Anita Malfatti, Ismael Nery, Lasar Segall, Emiliano di Cavalcanti, Vicente do Rego Monteiro, and Tarsila do Amaral wrought major changes in painting, while groups like Santa Helena and Núcleo Bernardelli evolved toward a moderate interpretation of Modernism, with important artists such as Aldo Bonadei and José Pancetti. Cândido Portinari is the best example of this last tendency. Under government patronage he dominated Brazilian painting in the mid-20th century until Abstractionism showed up in the 1950s.

The period between 1950 and 1970 witnessed the emergence of many new styles. Action painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Neoconcretism, Neoexpressionism, Pop art, Neorealism — all contributed to some extent to the creation of huge diversity in Brazilian painting and to the updating of Brazilian art. After a period of relative decline in the conceptualist 1970s, national art revived in the 1980s under the influence of the world's renewed interest in traditional painting. Then Brazilian painting showed a new strength, spread across the whole country, and started being appreciated in international forums.

History

Before the Portuguese discovery

Prehistoric paintings at Serra da Capivara National Park. Serra da Capivara - Several Paintings 2.jpg
Prehistoric paintings at Serra da Capivara National Park.

Relatively little is known in respect to the pictorial art practiced in Brazil before the Portuguese discovery of the territory. The indigenous people the colonizers encountered did not practice painting as it was known in Europe, using paint for bodily decoration and the decoration of ceramic artifacts. Among the indigenous relics that survived this era, a good collection of pieces from the Marajoara, Tapajós and Santarém cultures stand out, but the ceramic tradition as much as that of body painting have been preserved by the indigenous that still reside in Brazil, the elements among them being some of the most distinctive of their cultures. There also exist diverse painted panels of hunting scenes and other figures created by pre-historic peoples in caves and on rock walls in certain archeological sites.

These paintings probably had ritual functions and would have been seen as endowed with magical powers, capable of capturing the souls of depicted animals and therefore allowing for successful hunts. The most ancient complex of sites known is that of the Serra da Capivara, at Piauí, which exhibits painted remains dated 32 thousand years ago. None of these traditions, however, was incorporated into the artistic current introduced by the Portuguese colonizers, which became predominant. As Roberto Burle Marx put it, the art of colonial Brazil is, in every sense, art of the Portuguese mother country, although on Brazilian soil various imposed adaptations have occurred through the specific local circumstances of the colonial process.

Precursors

Belchior Paulo: Adoration of the Magi, Church of the Magi, Nova Almeida, Espirito Santo. Belchior-reismagos.jpg
Belchior Paulo: Adoration of the Magi, Church of the Magi, Nova Almeida, Espírito Santo.
Victor Meirelles: The first Mass in Brazil, 1861. Museu Nacional de Belas Artes. Meirelles-primeiramissa2.jpg
Victor Meirelles: The first Mass in Brazil, 1861. Museu Nacional de Belas Artes.

Among the first explorers of the newly discovered land came artists and naturalists, charged with making a visual register of the flora, fauna, geography and native peoples, working only with watercolor and engraving. One can cite the Frenchman, Jean Gardien, who produced illustrations of animals for the book, Histoire d'un Voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, autrement dite Amerique, published in 1578 by Jean de Lery, and the priest André Thevet, who declared to have naturally produced all of the illustrations for his three scientific books edited in 1557, 1575, and 1584, where a portrait of the Indian Cunhambebe [1] was included.

Such output from the travelers still displayed features of late renaissance art, also known as Mannerism, and became increasingly part of the European artistic atmosphere, for whose public it was produced, than the Brazilian, even though of larger interest were the landscape portraits and those of people from the early colonial period. The first known European painter that left work in Brazil was the Jesuit priest Manuel Sanches (or Manuel Alves), who passed through Salvador in 1560 en route to the West Indies but left at least one painted panel at the Jesuit Society school in that city. Even more noteworthy was the frier Belchior Paulo, who docked here in 1587 together with other Jesuits, and left decorative works spread out among many of the major Jesuit Society schools until his trail was abruptly lost in 1619. With Belchior, the history of Brazilian painting had effectively begun. [2] [3]

Pernambuco and the Dutch

The first Brazilian cultural nucleus that resembled a European court was founded in Recife in 1637 by the Dutch administrator, count Maurício de Nassau. Heir of the Renaissance spirit, as described by Gouvêa, Nassau implemented a series of administrative and infrastructural reforms in what was known as, Dutch Brazil . Furthermore, he brought in his entourage a plethora of scientists, humanists and artists, who brought about a brilliant outside culture to the locale, and although they weren't able to reach all of their higher objectives, their presence resulted in the preparation, by white men in the tropics, of an unparalleled cultural work for the time and something considerably superior to what was being carried out by the Portuguese in other parts of the territory. Two painters stood out in their circle, Frans Post and Albert Eckhout, producing works that allied a detailed documentary character to a superlative aesthetic quality, and up to today they stand as one of the primary sources of the study of landscape, nature and life of indigenous peoples and slaves of that region. This work, though it was returned to Europe upon the departure of the count in 1644, represented, in painting, the last echo of the Renaissance aesthetic on Brazilian soil. [4]

The flourishing Baroque

Between the 17th and 18th Centuries the Brazilian painting style was the Baroque, a reaction against the classicism of the Renaissance, originating through the asymmetry, the excessive, the expressive, and the irregular. Far from representing a purely aesthetic tendency, these features constituted a true way of life and gave tone to the whole culture of the period, a culture that emphasized contrast, the conflict, the dynamic, the dramatic, the grandiloquent, the dissolution of limits, together with an accentuated taste for opulence of forms and materials, transforming into a perfect vehicle for the Catholic Church of the counter reform and the ascending absolute monarchies to express their ideas visually. The monumental structures raised during the Baroque, such as the palaces and the great theaters and churches, sought to create a spectacular and exuberant natural impact, offering an integration between the various artistic languages and catching the observer in a cathartic and impassioned atmosphere. For Sevcenko, no piece of Baroque artwork can be adequately analyzed divested from its context, since its nature is synthetic, binding, and compelling. This aesthetic had great approval in the Iberian Peninsula, especially in Portugal, whose culture, beyond being essentially catholic and monarchic, was filled with millenarianism and mysticism inherited from the Arabs and Jews, favoring a religiousness characterized by emotional intensity. And from Portugal the movement passed to their colony in America, where the cultural context of the indigenous peoples, marked by ritualism and festivity, supplied a receptive backdrop. [5] [6]

The Brazilian Baroque was formed through a complex fabric of European and local influences, although generally colored by the Portuguese interpretation of the style. The context in which the Baroque developed in the colony was completely different from its European origins. Here, the environment was one of poverty and scarcity, with everything yet to be done, [7] and contrary to Europe, within the immense colony of Brazil, there was no court, the local administration was inefficient and sluggish, opening a vast performance space for the Church and its missionary battalions, who administered in addition to divine services, a series of civil services such as issuance of birth and death certificates. They were on the vanguard of conquest of the interior of the territory, serving as evangelists and pacifiers to indigenous populations.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Culture of Brazil</span> Overview of the culture in Brazil

The culture of Brazil has been shaped by the amalgamation of diverse indigenous cultures, and the cultural fusion that took place among Indigenous communities, Portuguese colonizers, and Africans, primarily during the Brazilian colonial period. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Brazil received a significant number of immigrants, primarily of Portuguese, Italian and Spanish origin, which along with smaller numbers of Germans, Austrians, Arabs, Japanese, Poles and Ukrainians gave a relevant contribution to the formation of regional cultures in Brazil, and thus contributed to its current existence as a plural and racially diverse society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bandeirantes</span> Explorers, slavers, and fortune hunters in colonial Brazil (15th–18th centuries)

The bandeirantes were slavers, explorers, adventurers, and fortune hunters in early Colonial Brazil. They are largely responsible for Brazil's great expansion westward, far beyond the Tordesillas Line of 1494, by which Pope Alexander VI divided the new continent into a western, Castilian section, and an eastern, Portuguese section.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aleijadinho</span> Colonial Brazilian sculptor and architect (c.1738–1814)

Antônio Francisco Lisboa, better known as Aleijadinho, was a sculptor, carver and architect of Colonial Brazil, noted for his works on and in various churches of Brazil. With a style related to Baroque and Rococo, Aleijadinho is considered almost by consensus as the greatest exponent of colonial art in Brazil by Brazilian critics and, surpassing Brazilian borders, for some foreign scholars he is the greatest name of Baroque in the Americas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tarsila do Amaral</span> Brazilian painter, draftswoman and translator

Tarsila de Aguiar do Amaral was a Brazilian painter, draftswoman, and translator. She is considered one of the leading Latin American modernist artists, and is regarded as the painter who best achieved Brazilian aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style. As a member of the Grupo dos Cinco, Tarsila is also considered a major influence in the modern art movement in Brazil, alongside Anita Malfatti, Menotti Del Picchia, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade. She was instrumental in the formation of the aesthetic movement, Antropofagia (1928–1929); in fact, Tarsila was the one with her celebrated painting, Abaporu, who inspired Oswald de Andrade's famous Manifesto Antropófago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oswald de Andrade</span> Brazilian poet novelist and cultural critic

José Oswald de Souza Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist and cultural critic. He was born in, spent most of his life in, and died in São Paulo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anita Malfatti</span> Brazilian artist

Anita Catarina Malfatti is heralded as the first Brazilian artist to introduce European and American forms of Modernism to Brazil. Her solo exhibition in Sao Paulo, from 1917–1918, was controversial at the time, and her expressionist style and subject were revolutionary for the complacently old-fashioned art expectations of Brazilians who were searching for a national identity in art, but who were not prepared for the influences Malfatti would bring to the country. Malfatti's presence was also highly felt during the Week of Modern Art in 1922, where she and the Group of Five made huge revolutionary changes in the structure and response to modern art in Brazil.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victor Meirelles</span> Brazilian painter (1832–1903)

Victor Meirelles de Lima was a Brazilian painter and teacher who is best known for his works relating to his nation's culture and history. From humble origins, his talent was soon recognized, being admitted as a student at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. He specialized in the genre of history painting, and upon winning the Academy's Foreign Travel Award, he spent several years training in Europe. There he painted his best-known work, Primeira Missa no Brasil. Returning to Brazil, he became one of emperor Pedro II's favorite painters, joining the monarch's patronage program and aligning himself with his proposal to renew the image of Brazil through the creation of visual symbols of its history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museu Nacional de Belas Artes</span> Fine art museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The Museu Nacional de Belas Artes is a national art museum located in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The museum, officially established in 1937 by the initiative of education minister Gustavo Capanema, was inaugurated in 1938 by President Getúlio Vargas. The museum collection, on the other hand, takes its rise in the transfer of the Portuguese Court to Brazil in the early 19th century, when King John VI brought along with him part of the Portuguese Royal Collection. This art collection stayed in Brazil after the King's return to Europe and became the core collection of the National School of Fine Arts. When the museum was created in 1937, it became the heir not only the National School collection, but also of its headquarters, a 1908 eclectic style building projected by Spanish architect Adolfo Morales de los Ríos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brazilian art</span> Art from Brazil

The creation of art in the geographic area now known as Brazil begins with the earliest records of its human habitation. The original inhabitants of the land, pre-Columbian Indigenous or Natives peoples, produced various forms of art; specific cultures like the Marajoara left sophisticated painted pottery. This area was colonized by Portugal in the 16th century and given the modern name of Brazil. Brazilian art is most commonly used as an umbrella term for art created in this region post Portuguese colonization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brazilian sculpture</span> History of Brazilian sculptural art

The roots of Brazilian sculpture have been traced back to the late 16th century, emerging soon after the first settlements in the newly discovered land. Through the following century, most of the sculpture in Brazil was brought from Portugal and displayed Baroque features. The Baroque style would flourish within the religious culture of the country and would remain predominant until the first decades of the 19th century. In the 19th century, sculptural activity decreased, but it later revived when both the government and the public took a new interest in the art. Modernism fomented a period of intense research into a new language of sculpture, with great achievements, and the contemporary sculpture of Brazil enjoys worldwide respect.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baroque in Brazil</span>

The Baroque in Brazil was the dominant artistic style during most of the colonial period, finding an open ground for a rich flowering. It made its appearance in the country at the beginning of the 17th century, introduced by Catholic missionaries, especially Jesuits, who went there in order to catechize and acculturate the native indigenous peoples and assist the Portuguese in the colonizing process. In the course of the Colonial period, expressed a close association between the Church and the State, but in the colony there was not a court that would serve as a patron of the arts, the elites did not bother to build palaces, or to help sponsor the profane arts, but at the end of the period, and how the religion had a strong influence on the daily lives of everyone in this group of factors derives from the vast majority of the legacy of the Brazilian Baroque period, is the sacred art: statuary, painting, and the work of carving for the decoration of churches and convents, or for private worship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (Brazil)</span> Former arts school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was an institution of higher learning in the arts in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, established by King João VI. Despite facing many initial difficulties, the Academy was established and took its place at the forefront of Brazilian arts education in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Academy became the center of the diffusion of new aesthetic trends and the teaching of modern artistic techniques. It eventually became one of the principal arts institutions under the patronage of Emperor Dom Pedro II. With the Proclamation of the Republic, it became known as the National School of Fine Arts. It became extinct as an independent institution in 1931, when it was absorbed by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and became known as the UFRJ School of Fine Arts, which still operates today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Salvador</span>

The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, or the Basilica of the Conception, is a church in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. It is affiliated with the Catholic Church and was built in 1623, making it one of the oldest parishes in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of São Salvador da Bahia. It was the first church built by the first governor-general of Brazil, Tomé de Sousa. The current structure was prefabricated in Portugal and assembled in Salvador; its construction began in 1739 and ended in the mid 19th century. The art historian Germain Bazin classifies the church as Portuguese in design, rather than part of the Bahian tradition of religious structures of the 17th and 18th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gonzaga Duque</span>

Luís Gonzaga Duque Estrada, known as Gonzaga Duque was a Brazilian writer and critic. He was of Swedish descent on his father's side.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mário Pedrosa</span> Brazilian art critic

Mário Xavier de Andrade Pedrosa was a Brazilian art and literary critic, journalist and political activist.

Nicolau Sevcenko was a Brazilian historian, university professor, columnist, writer, and translator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brazilian Romantic painting</span>

Brazilian Romantic painting was the main expression of the plastic arts in Brazil in the second half of the 19th century. This pictorial production was part of the local evolution of the Romantic movement and approximately coincided with the period of the Second Reign, but its characteristics were unique, differing in several points in relation to the original version of European Romanticism and likewise cannot be considered an exact parallel to the manifestation of Romanticism in Brazilian literature of the same period. It had a palatial and restrained aspect, brought a strong neoclassical influence and soon blended with Realism, Symbolism and other schools, in an eclectic synthesis that prevailed until the early years of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mannerism in Brazil</span> Introduction of the Mannerist style in Brazil through Portuguese colonization

The introduction of Mannerism in Brazil represented the beginning of the country's European-descended artistic history. Discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil was until then inhabited by indigenous peoples, whose culture had rich immemorial traditions, but was in every way different from the Portuguese culture. With the arrival of the colonizers, the first elements of a large-scale domination that continues to this day were introduced. During the founding of a new American civilization, the main cultural current in force in Europe was Mannerism, a complex and often contradictory synthesis of classical elements derived from the Italian Renaissance - now questioned and transformed by the collapse of the unified, optimistic, idealistic, anthropocentric world view crystallized in the High Renaissance - and of regional traditions cultivated in various parts of Europe, including Portugal, which still had in the earlier Gothic style a strong reference base. Over the years the current was added of new elements, coming from a context deeply disturbed by the Reformation, against which the Catholic Church organized, in the second half of the sixteenth century, an aggressive disciplinary and proselytizing program, the so-called Counter-Reformation, revolutionizing the arts and culture of the time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sculpture of the Misiones Orientales</span> Sculptures of the Jesuit missions among the Guarani

The Sculpture of the Misiones Orientales represents one of the most substantial and valuable surviving legacies of the culture of the Misiones Orientales, a group of Jesuit missions among the Guarani founded in the current Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. At the time owned by Spain, the Misiones Orientales were typical examples of the missionary model developed by the Jesuits in the Americas: an indigenous community fixed in a more or less self-sufficient settlement, and administered by the priests of the Society of Jesus, with the help of the natives. The success of the missions was enormous, being social, cultural, political, economic, and urbanistic projects that were advanced for their time and place. The participation of the Indians was not achieved without difficulties, but thousands chose to live in these settlements voluntarily, being converted to Catholicism and acculturated to the forms and manners of European life, producing large quantities of art, always under Jesuit supervision.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colonial architecture of Brazil</span> Architecture carried out in the current Brazilian territory from 1500 until 1822.

The colonial architecture of Brazil is defined as the architecture carried out in the current Brazilian territory from 1500, the year of the Portuguese arrival, until its Independence, in 1822.

References

  1. Louzada, Maria Alice & Louzada, Julio. Os Primeiros Momentos da Arte Brasileira Archived July 6, 2011, at the Wayback Machine . Júlio Louzada Artes Plásticas Brasil. Acesso 5 out 2010
  2. Leite, José Roberto Teixeira & Lemos, Carlos A.C. Os Primeiros Cem Anos, in Civita, Victor. Arte no Brasil. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1979
  3. Fernandes, Cybele Vidal Neto. Labor e arte, registros e memórias. O fazer artístico no espaço luso-brasileiro. IN Actas do VII Colóquio Luso-Brasileiro de História da Arte. Porto: Universidade do Porto/CEPESE/FCT, 2007. p. 111
  4. Gouvêa, Fernando da Cruz. Maurício de Nassau e o Brasil Holandês. Editora Universitária UFPE, 1998. pp. 143-149; 186-188
  5. Costa, Maria Cristina Castilho. A imagem da mulher: um estudo de arte brasileira. Senac, 2002. pp. 55-56
  6. Sevcenko, Nicolau. Pindorama revisitada: cultura e sociedade em tempos de virada. Série Brasil cidadão. Editora Peirópolis, 2000. pp. 39-47
  7. Costa, M.C.C. (2002). A imagem da mulher: um estudo de arte brasileira. SENAC São Paulo Editora. p. 53. ISBN   9788587864222 . Retrieved 2015-09-10.