Projeto Portinari

A painter of the New World

By Israel Pedrosa

'Whenever one wanted to define Portinari from the point of view of his work, this definition was so far-reaching that it went far beyond a simply human characterization of the painter.

This was the case when he was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, presenting him as Portinari of Brazil, a formulation that gave him the status of his country's national painter.

In the catalog of the exhibition One Hundred Masterpieces by Portinari, held by MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand), its director Pietro Maria Bardi described him as "an interpreter of the miseries of the Third World", and Antônio Bento later called him simply: "The painter of the Third World."

By reducing the term, Bento broadened its meaning, as if to say that he was not only the interpreter of the miseries but also of the struggles, joys and hopes common to this majority universe on our planet.

Today, several decades on from these efforts at definition, Portinari's profile is clearly delineated as the painter of the New World. An epithet that, going beyond its simply geographical meaning, represents above all the new social and spiritual world that perennial human labor has been building, as the fruit of its best desires: the New Age of which Paul Klee and David Alfaro Siqueiros dreamed of being the pioneers. And they really were, each in their own way.

This New World, of which Portinari would become its great interpreter and representative, is the New World that is beginning to emerge amid the struggles and aspirations, not only of the visionaries of the peripheral regions and the current emerging countries, but also those of the whole of progressive humanity. A world of peace, of productive work, of joy, happiness and love between human beings, and of fraternal trust between peoples.

A world that is oblivious to the disheartening cerebral speculations about the end of history, is beginning to tread the glimpsed paths of higher social stages of irrepressible history, nourished by the tireless search for the perfectibility of the human condition.

Realism in the 20th century

If we apply John Ruskin's concept to Portinari's work, the first question to ask when analyzing a work of art is: - what does it teach us? The answer will be amazement. We'll see that better than the compendiums of history, economics, sociology or politics, Portinari's visual account expresses the most advanced concepts of the culture of his time, which always points to a promising horizon.

Taken as a whole, it is an immense panel that covers all aspects of the human soul and social life, from misery and misfortune to the longings for earthly bliss. The sparkle in the eyes of his miserable and degraded lovable beings has the vindicating flame of hope. His work, a coherent expression of his generous vision of the world, is not just the result of an "optimism of the will" in the midst of the "pessimism of reason". It is the expression of a fighting reason that, in the midst of adversity, unveils the joy of a cantata to the future.

Thus, like Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart or Goethe, in pure contribution to the Gramiscian concept, his art "teaches as art, not as educational art", entering the realm of sensible knowledge, as Vico had envisioned.

Without fail, Portinari's work is an authentic expression of 20th-century Realism. Realism inherited from the same spiritual climate as Goya, Turner, Daumier, Millet and Courbet.

Nourished by the hermeneutics of the entire art history, the Portinari saga reveals sensitive resonances of the pre-Renaissance, the Renaissance, Grunewald's torments, expressionist raptures and even unusual cubist angles. His Realism, a sublimated expression of 20th century aesthetic modernism, is clothed in all the ancestral richness of the universal plastic vocabulary.

However, it is not a "Realism without borders", as Roger Garaudy aspired to, because in it, as Portinari himself points out in his poem "Grunewald", there is an unequivocal humanistic orientation:

"The good is yours, it will remain.
Damn the owners of evil
They won't exist."

The universality of his plastic vocabulary is at the same time the only way of expressing his aesthetic postulate.

From the very beginning of his saga, it is with her that he reveals a new universe for the historicity of art. From there come the rural reminiscences of his childhood, the humble scenery of the nascent metropolises, scenes and soul of Brazilian life.

The simplicity and monumentality of these visions are expressed in the murals of the Brodowski house, the Pampulha chapel, the Ministry of Education, the Library of Congress in Washington, and the panels and paintings that have traveled throughout the three Americas.

In a dark period for humanity, the exhibition of elements of this immense work was part of the "good neighbor policy" between the United States of America and the peoples of Latin America, in the continental mobilization against Nazifacism. This period preceded Brazil's entry into World War II on the side of the Allied powers.

The Charpentier Gallery Exhibition

In the immediate post-war period, when Paris was preparing to resume its position as the world capital of painting, the Charpentier Gallery held a major exhibition of Candido Portinari in the fall of 1946, conceived by the art historian and curator of the Louvre Museum, Germain Bazin, who wrote the preface to the show's catalog.

In such text, the French critic states that alone and on the other side of the world, the painter from Brodósqui had spontaneously taken up this social position, the restlessness of which was just beginning to emerge in France. He added that his work confronted all the forces of expression. He acted as if he had invented painting on his own, tackling every technique and every harmony. Alongside canvases full of tenderness, there were others of a poignant expressionism, whose unbridled violence perhaps came as a surprise to the Parisians, who were used to seeing the canons elaborated by thirty years of plastic speculation obedient to good taste respected, even in the most audacious cases.

This violence blew like an impetuous wind from his own country. The dominating land of the tropics, whose strength, in the space of a generation, marked out men from all over the world, thus managing to shape a surprising national unity: Brazil.

According to the critic Antônio Bento, who attended this Portinari exhibition in Paris alongside countless other Brazilian journalists and intellectuals, in his book Portinari (p 195), Jean Cassou, then director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, in an introductory text to the catalog said: "The Brazilian's canvases were a narrative and a song. They described and sang of a young America, a new tragedy. He referred to their free coloring, their broad composition, their stabbing drawing... similar to a hitherto unheard song."

According to the Brazilian critic, on the eve of the opening, Paris was covered in posters advertising Portinari's exhibition at the Charpentier Gallery. The success of the show was recorded in numerous news reports and more than fifty critical articles, and was attended by a large audience: "mass attendance, a real crowd."

Louis Aragon, a poet and one of the creators of surrealism, emphasized the profound, exact, human and surprising expression of a foreign artist like Portinari, whose work represented his nation...

At the same time as Portinari's show, the Salon d'Autumn and Kandinsky's exhibition were held in Paris, beginning the revival of pictorial abstraction.

The origin of this revival was to be found on the other side of the Atlantic, in the success of the 1913 Armory Show in New York. This event was a catalyst for the public and prestige of the artistic avant-garde and the entire European modernist movement, creating the decisive support among artists, intellectuals and the American upper bourgeoisie for the triumph and global expansion of these artistic currents that characterized the culture and arts of the last century.

During the second half of that century, the so-called artistic avant-garde died out, beginning the cycle of worshipping the great artists they had revealed.

The end of the so-called artistic avant-garde may go hand in hand with the decline in power of the hegemonic aesthetic poles of the major Western powers.

As a result of the vigorous surge of cultural renewal that had been developing since the 19th and early 20th centuries in the former peripheral regions, now characterized as an emerging universe, along with the best of what some artists from developed countries had produced, exceptional examples of an art that paved the way to new stages of aesthetic fruition emerged over the last century, pointing to a longed-for and unparalleled new world. We're talking about a worldview founded on the disparate sounds of Aran Katchaturian, Samuel Barber and Heitor Villa-Lobos; the dramaturgy of Bertold Brecht; the astonishing literary visions of Mikhail Cholokhov, Theodore Dreiser, Guimarães Rosa and Gabriel García Márquez; the poetry of Nazim Hikmet, Paul Valéry, Pablo Neruda and Carlos Drummond de Andrade; the seismic flashes of Serguei Eisenstein, Akira Kurosawa, Frederico Fellini and Glauber Rocha, the imagery of Paul Klee, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Candido Portinari.

The War and Peace panels

For Portinari, the last years of the 1940s and the first years of the following decade were marked by his large mobile panels: "The First Mass in Brazil" (1948), Tiradentes (1949), Arrival of King João VI in Brazil (1952) and War and Peace (1952-1956).

In 1952, at the invitation of Itamaraty, Portinari began to create models of the two huge panels (14 x 10m each) to decorate the UN headquarters building in New York. The building had been designed by Le Corbusier, and Oscar Niemeyer had worked on it. The themes chosen for the panels were War and Peace A synthesis of the primary concerns and objectives of the work of the United Nations.

After four years of hard work, on January 5, 1956, the huge panels were handed over to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The press in Brazil and abroad followed the artist's work with interest. When it was announced that it would be finished, a huge movement of public opinion was unleashed, led by eminent intellectuals, artists, cultural organizations and even workers' unions, who wanted the panels to be exhibited in Brazil before they were sent to New York.

In response to this general request, Itamaraty organized the exhibition of the War and Peace panels at the Municipal Theatre in Rio de Janeiro, transforming it into the largest exhibition hall ever seen in Brazil and into a reverential temple to a specific moment in our contribution to the artistic history of humanity.

On February 27, 1956, in the presence of the President of the Republic, Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, and high authorities, political representatives of all stripes, intellectuals, artists and a euphoric crowd in a mood of national jubilation, the extraordinary exhibition was inaugurated.

A little over a year later, in front of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold and Brazilian representatives Ambassador Cyro de Freitas-Valle and Minister Jayme de Barros, Candido Portinari's War and Peace panels were inaugurated in September 1957 at the UN headquarters in New York.

General considerations

In 2007, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of the panels, the Portinari Project published the commemorative book War and Peace - Portinari. In it, I stated that the two panels constituted "a single visual discourse in its complex complementarity on the extremes of misfortune and bliss, in the tragic and moving vision painted by Portinari."

In the pages of art history, where countless dated and localized wars appear, such as those of Troy and the Peloponnese painted by Euphronius, the Battles of San Romano and Anghiari by Paolo Uccello and Da Vinci, or Guernica by Picasso, all are narrated by scenes that identify, localize and date them. With their own resources linked to the time of the painting, each one of them takes part in the varied range of concepts from heroism to pain and despair, or defends a particular ground, idea or cause. Portinari's approach is different. He doesn't identify any war, as if to say that in essence they are all equivalent in unleashing horror and animality. There are no identifiable weapons in Portinari; the apocalyptic cavalcade that cuts across the scene in all directions with its procession of conquest, war, hunger and death does not bear the biblical colors of fire and blood, nor black, white or yellow. Blue takes over. A tragic and sorrowful symphony in blue, running through its entire scale. The dark, gloomy tones, rich in varied and deep violet nuances, draw the scenes against a background of clear blues with verdant reflections, tending towards light citrus fruits.

Contrasting with this bluish universe, enhancing it chromatically, in tonal counterpoint, the horse stained with carmine, the flesh of faces, arms and feet coming out of the dark garments, appear in vibrant oranges that range from dark violet shadows, to almost reds and pinks of intense luminous crackle. In this climate of violent contrasts, of gloomy féerie, the uninterrupted tromp unleashes the beasts that terrorize the world.

We are facing a terrifying cataclysm in which ancient times are confused with the origin of time. If the terror brings to mind reminiscences of anathemas by Luca Signorelli and Dürer, the conception, inventiveness and invoice bring us back to the reality of a timeless modernity.

Highlighted by clear light, a naked hermit, standing in penance, covers his eyes with his hands in prayer and lament. Figures in a compact group, genuflecting, arms raised with their hands flat and faces turned towards the sky, in this scene of death, they reveal an air of strength and life, of condemnation of the very existence of war.

In the Paz panel, as in its counterpart: "there are many reminiscences of Portinari's earlier works, just as there are many traces of these works in the Master's later paintings. This means that they are coherent links in an immense pictorial production of the highest representativeness of the creative power of the 20th century (...). What emanates from this panel, enchants and delights us, more than the idea of peace and peace, is the very peace that invades us when we contemplate it. It's the feeling of entering a serene universe, of fraternal communion in productive work, in a magical realm of bright colors, of the sound of the ciranda of young people in a universal song of fraternity and trust, or of the candor of children's games. With all these golden, cheerful tones, crackling with life, the painter seems to be telling us: Universal peace is possible. The day will come when humanity will enjoy peace without limits in space and time."

The book War and Peace - Portinari was published in two volumes, with identical graphics, in Portuguese and English. Its English version was presented by President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Ban-Ki- Moon, moments before the President of Brazil opened the 62nd UN General Assembly.

According to a report by mathematician João Candido Portinari, the painter's only son, founder and director of the Portinari Project, and a member of the presidential delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, President Lula closed his speech by saying:

"Ladies and gentlemen,

Upon entering the building, delegates can see a work of art that Brazil gave to the United Nations 50 years ago. These are the murals "War" and "Peace", painted by the great Brazilian artist Candido Portinari.

The suffering expressed in the mural depicting the war reminds us of the United Nations' high responsibility to avert the risk of armed conflict.

The second mural shows that peace goes far beyond the absence of war. It presupposes well-being, health and a harmonious coexistence with nature. It means social justice, freedom and overcoming the scourges of hunger and poverty.

It is no coincidence that the "War" mural faces those arriving and the "Peace" mural faces those leaving. The artist's message is simple but powerful: transforming afflictions into hope, war into peace, is the essence of the United Nations' mission.

Brazil will continue to work to make such high expectation a reality.

Thank you very much."

It is these monumental panels - the threshold of the new era, and of the current Temple of universal democracy that we long for - that the Portinari Project has been working to show to the French public, marking the return of Portinari's artistic presence to Paris, 64 years after his memorial exhibition at the Charpentier Gallery in 1946.

Intervention at the International Colloquium Portinari in Paris: 1946-2009, PUC-Rio, November 2009.