{"id":1780,"date":"2016-02-18T20:01:50","date_gmt":"2016-02-19T02:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/?p=1780"},"modified":"2019-07-29T16:16:25","modified_gmt":"2019-07-29T21:16:25","slug":"brazilian-modernists-andrade-segall-and-portinari","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/?p=1780","title":{"rendered":"Brazilian Modernists: Andrade, Portinari and Segall"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\u00a0\n

An exposition at the Lesar Segall Museum in S\u00e3o Paulo in the fall of 2015 highlighted a famous trio of artists in the history of Brazilian Modernism. The central figure was Mario (Raul de Morais) Andrade (1893-45). He was a prominent poet, novelist, musicologist and photographer, but he also had a strong voice as an art critic and promoter of modernist tradition. He was especially intertwined with Segall<\/strong> and Portinari<\/strong> whom he called \u201chis artists.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

This portrait of Mario de Andrade<\/em> was done by Lasar Segall<\/em>, one of two artists featured with Andrade in the exposition of Brazilian Modernism in the Lasar Segall Museum, S\u00e3o Paulo. The second portrait is by Portinari.\u00a0 Andrade said that Segall<\/em> caught the \u201cdemonic\u201d in him, while Portinari<\/em> saw the \u201cangelic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0928\" — Portrait of Mario de Andrade by Lasar Segall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 $Image result for \"Candido Portinari\"$ <\/strong> Portrait of Andrade by C\u00e2ndido Portinari
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
**\u00a0<\/p>\n**
Andrade<\/strong> was trained in music but was unable to pursue a musical career. He turned these skills to what later to ethnomusicology in his famous 1938 Mission to collect folk culture in Brazil.\u00a0\u00a0 Americans familiar with the work of Alan Lomax in documenting blues and folk traditions in the United States will recognize the spirit of this Mission.<\/p>\n
Lomax \u201cdiscovered\u201d and popularized iconic figures such as McKinley Morgenfield (Muddy Waters) and Huddy Ledbetter (Leadbelly), and Woody Guthrie. Andrade did not bring new talent to the public in the same way, but he created a basis for the understanding and honoring folk culture. His recordings from 1938 capture songs and music from the Brazilian interior and are available in a multiple-CD set. His book Dan\u00e7as Dramaticas<\/em> (*Dramatic Dances<\/em>) did much the same for annotation and analysis of popular (\u201cfolk\u201d) dance forms.<\/p>\n*
Lomax had various academic connections much of his career (though never a formal academic appointment).\u00a0 In addition to documenting and disseminating American folk music, he also developed theories of folk music and dance (e.g., \u201cchoreometrics\u201d).<\/p>\n
By contrast, Andrade was a protean figure in the arts generally. His book Macana\u00edma<\/em> is a modernist classic in Brazil, as are his books of poetry and art criticism. He was not formally connected with a university, but was a prominent figure in various cultural agencies in S\u00e3o Paulo which supported his mission to the Northeast.<\/p>\n
***The 2015 S\u00e3o Paulo exhibit was held in the Lasar Segall Museum, once the artist\u2019s home and studio.<\/p>\n***
Andrade\u2019s artists were Lasar Segall and C\u00e2ndido Portinari. Segall<\/em> was a Lithuanian Jew transplanted from Europe to S\u00e3o Paulo. Portinari<\/em> was born of a working class Italian family but was trained in the arts in Brazil and Europe.\u00a0 As different as they were in background, Portinari and Segall, with the support of Andrade, helped define modernism in Brazilian art.<\/p>\n
***\u00a0<\/p>\n***
$\"IMG_0930\"$ <\/a>
C\u00e2ndido Portinari\u2019s paintings of rural workers and peasants were unlike the romantic peasant paintings that preceded him<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
C\u00e2ndido Portinari (1903-1962) was born to Italian immigrants who worked on a coffee plantation in S\u00e3o Paulo. This background later brought him to the Brazilian Communist Party where he ran as a party candidate for senator in the 1940s. Along the way he had also become a prominent artist<\/p>\n
He had won recognition at the National School of Fine Arts (ENBA) and went to Paris between 1928 and 1930. He absorbed elements of European tradition, but combined them with his Brazilian working class sensitivity. He shared with Segall a sympathy for the socially marginalized, especially the urban working class and rural workers. In another similarity, both artists had several works featuring prostitutes.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0931\"$ <\/a>
Another Portinari peasant, in a style that has an obvious kinship with European styles as well as his own Brazilian sympathy for those who were marginalized and oppressed<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0932\"$ <\/a>
Some see a racial metaphor in this Portinari painting, though others just see a couple of Modernist chickens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0933\"$ <\/a>
Portinari\u2019s \u201cGroup of Girls Playing.\u201d\u00a0 Of the artist\u2019s many stylistic approaches, this one is softer and a bit more abstract (compare to the angularity and harshness of the rural peasant above).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lasar Segall (1891-1957) was Lithuanian Jew and world citizen who traveled between Europe and Brazil until the Nazis came to power. He studied and worked in Europe, was a Russian citizen, moved back and forth to Brazil, and eventually became a Brazilian citizen in the 1920. He was attracted to the \u201cRed Light\u201d districts\u00a0 of Rio de Janeiro, and later adopted themes of the Brazilian interior, slums, and suffering of the socially and economically marginal.<\/p>\n
In Europe his work was lumped together with that of other \u201cDegenerate Artists\u201d attacked by the Nazis in their famous exhibition of the same name (1937). As a Jew, a modernist, and social critic he was safer and had more artistic freedom in Brazil.<\/p>\n
Segall later married his student Jenny Klabin, the daughter of wealthy entrepreneurs in the wood and paper industry. The Klabins became a major economic force in Brazil, but various members of the family also became patrons of the arts and collectors. The first-generation Klabins were, like Segall, Lithuanian emigr\u00e9s.<\/p>\n
His style seems to have softened in his later years, but he never totally left the themes of immigration, rural peonage and slavery, and urban marginality.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0936\"$ <\/a>
Segall, like Portinari, returned often to themes of prostitutes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0938\"$ <\/a>
This work from the 1920\u2019s is one of Segall\u2019s most famous.\u00a0 It depicting Jewish dead left by a Russian pogrom<\/em>.\u00a0 His later mural-sized painting Ship of Immigrants from 1939 has much of the same tonality and is one of his best known paintings.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Segall\u2019s *Ship of Immigrants<\/em><\/p>\n*
$\"\"$ <\/a>
Segall\u2019s Ship of Immigrants<\/em> has a somewhat similar color palette as his pogrom picture, but is sharper and more detailed. The theme of heaped, dead or suffering bodies, is similar.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0940\"$ <\/a>
One of Segall\u2019s most obviously \u201cEuropean\u201d works, Eternal Wanders<\/em> from 1919.\u00a0 This work was generally seen by the Nazis as part of the \u201cDegenerate Art\u201d works in the German exhibit of 1937.\u00a0 The original Nazi exposition\u201dEntartete Kunst\u201d attracted millions and traveled widely in Germany and Austria.\u00a0 Most of the works had been confiscated originally and many were later destroyed or sold.\u00a0 One of the Nazi curators joked that they were \u201csold by the kilo,\u201d but other reports say that much of the modernist art work was sold in highly profitable international art markets.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 An exposition at the Lesar Segall Museum in S\u00e3o Paulo in the fall of 2015 highlighted a famous trio of artists in the history of Brazilian Modernism. The central figure was Mario (Raul de Morais) Andrade (1893-45). He was a prominent poet, novelist, musicologist and photographer, but he also had a strong voice as … Continue reading Brazilian Modernists: Andrade, Portinari and Segall<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-in-brazil-and-latin-america"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1780"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2111,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions\/2111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

Portrait of Mario de Andrade by Lasar Segall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 $Image result for \"Candido Portinari\"$ <\/strong> Portrait of Andrade by C\u00e2ndido Portinari
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
**\u00a0<\/p>\n**
Andrade<\/strong> was trained in music but was unable to pursue a musical career. He turned these skills to what later to ethnomusicology in his famous 1938 Mission to collect folk culture in Brazil.\u00a0\u00a0 Americans familiar with the work of Alan Lomax in documenting blues and folk traditions in the United States will recognize the spirit of this Mission.<\/p>\n
Lomax \u201cdiscovered\u201d and popularized iconic figures such as McKinley Morgenfield (Muddy Waters) and Huddy Ledbetter (Leadbelly), and Woody Guthrie. Andrade did not bring new talent to the public in the same way, but he created a basis for the understanding and honoring folk culture. His recordings from 1938 capture songs and music from the Brazilian interior and are available in a multiple-CD set. His book Dan\u00e7as Dramaticas<\/em> (*Dramatic Dances<\/em>) did much the same for annotation and analysis of popular (\u201cfolk\u201d) dance forms.<\/p>\n*
Lomax had various academic connections much of his career (though never a formal academic appointment).\u00a0 In addition to documenting and disseminating American folk music, he also developed theories of folk music and dance (e.g., \u201cchoreometrics\u201d).<\/p>\n
By contrast, Andrade was a protean figure in the arts generally. His book Macana\u00edma<\/em> is a modernist classic in Brazil, as are his books of poetry and art criticism. He was not formally connected with a university, but was a prominent figure in various cultural agencies in S\u00e3o Paulo which supported his mission to the Northeast.<\/p>\n
***The 2015 S\u00e3o Paulo exhibit was held in the Lasar Segall Museum, once the artist\u2019s home and studio.<\/p>\n***
Andrade\u2019s artists were Lasar Segall and C\u00e2ndido Portinari. Segall<\/em> was a Lithuanian Jew transplanted from Europe to S\u00e3o Paulo. Portinari<\/em> was born of a working class Italian family but was trained in the arts in Brazil and Europe.\u00a0 As different as they were in background, Portinari and Segall, with the support of Andrade, helped define modernism in Brazilian art.<\/p>\n
***\u00a0<\/p>\n***
$\"IMG_0930\"$ <\/a>
C\u00e2ndido Portinari\u2019s paintings of rural workers and peasants were unlike the romantic peasant paintings that preceded him<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
C\u00e2ndido Portinari (1903-1962) was born to Italian immigrants who worked on a coffee plantation in S\u00e3o Paulo. This background later brought him to the Brazilian Communist Party where he ran as a party candidate for senator in the 1940s. Along the way he had also become a prominent artist<\/p>\n
He had won recognition at the National School of Fine Arts (ENBA) and went to Paris between 1928 and 1930. He absorbed elements of European tradition, but combined them with his Brazilian working class sensitivity. He shared with Segall a sympathy for the socially marginalized, especially the urban working class and rural workers. In another similarity, both artists had several works featuring prostitutes.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0931\"$ <\/a>
Another Portinari peasant, in a style that has an obvious kinship with European styles as well as his own Brazilian sympathy for those who were marginalized and oppressed<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0932\"$ <\/a>
Some see a racial metaphor in this Portinari painting, though others just see a couple of Modernist chickens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0933\"$ <\/a>
Portinari\u2019s \u201cGroup of Girls Playing.\u201d\u00a0 Of the artist\u2019s many stylistic approaches, this one is softer and a bit more abstract (compare to the angularity and harshness of the rural peasant above).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lasar Segall (1891-1957) was Lithuanian Jew and world citizen who traveled between Europe and Brazil until the Nazis came to power. He studied and worked in Europe, was a Russian citizen, moved back and forth to Brazil, and eventually became a Brazilian citizen in the 1920. He was attracted to the \u201cRed Light\u201d districts\u00a0 of Rio de Janeiro, and later adopted themes of the Brazilian interior, slums, and suffering of the socially and economically marginal.<\/p>\n
In Europe his work was lumped together with that of other \u201cDegenerate Artists\u201d attacked by the Nazis in their famous exhibition of the same name (1937). As a Jew, a modernist, and social critic he was safer and had more artistic freedom in Brazil.<\/p>\n
Segall later married his student Jenny Klabin, the daughter of wealthy entrepreneurs in the wood and paper industry. The Klabins became a major economic force in Brazil, but various members of the family also became patrons of the arts and collectors. The first-generation Klabins were, like Segall, Lithuanian emigr\u00e9s.<\/p>\n
His style seems to have softened in his later years, but he never totally left the themes of immigration, rural peonage and slavery, and urban marginality.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0936\"$ <\/a>
Segall, like Portinari, returned often to themes of prostitutes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0938\"$ <\/a>
This work from the 1920\u2019s is one of Segall\u2019s most famous.\u00a0 It depicting Jewish dead left by a Russian pogrom<\/em>.\u00a0 His later mural-sized painting Ship of Immigrants from 1939 has much of the same tonality and is one of his best known paintings.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Segall\u2019s *Ship of Immigrants<\/em><\/p>\n*
$\"\"$ <\/a>
Segall\u2019s Ship of Immigrants<\/em> has a somewhat similar color palette as his pogrom picture, but is sharper and more detailed. The theme of heaped, dead or suffering bodies, is similar.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
$\"IMG_0940\"$ <\/a>
One of Segall\u2019s most obviously \u201cEuropean\u201d works, Eternal Wanders<\/em> from 1919.\u00a0 This work was generally seen by the Nazis as part of the \u201cDegenerate Art\u201d works in the German exhibit of 1937.\u00a0 The original Nazi exposition\u201dEntartete Kunst\u201d attracted millions and traveled widely in Germany and Austria.\u00a0 Most of the works had been confiscated originally and many were later destroyed or sold.\u00a0 One of the Nazi curators joked that they were \u201csold by the kilo,\u201d but other reports say that much of the modernist art work was sold in highly profitable international art markets.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 An exposition at the Lesar Segall Museum in S\u00e3o Paulo in the fall of 2015 highlighted a famous trio of artists in the history of Brazilian Modernism. The central figure was Mario (Raul de Morais) Andrade (1893-45). He was a prominent poet, novelist, musicologist and photographer, but he also had a strong voice as … Continue reading Brazilian Modernists: Andrade, Portinari and Segall<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-in-brazil-and-latin-america"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1780"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2111,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions\/2111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meredithwwatts.com\/MWBrazilBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}