Art: Italo-Brazilicm

This year, egged on by Europe’s war and talk of Pan-American solidarity, U. S. art galleries have plastered their walls with Latin-American art. But though an unprecedented quantity of pictures and sculpture from south of the Rio Grande is being exhibited from coast to coast, Latin-American art plays to a poor box office. The biggest Latin-American show, at the San Francisco World’s Fair, has failed to draw. Even a bang-up Mexican show at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art (TIME, May 27) has attracted the lowest attendance recorded so far in the Museum’s swanky, streamlined 53rd Street building. Main reason for gallerygoers’ apathy: most of the contemporary Latin-American art shown has looked like the post cards tourists send home.

Last week in Manhattan, another Latin-American exhibition was getting installed at the Riverside Museum. Most of its paintings were as postcardy as the usual Latin-American run. But a group of 25-odd canvases stopped visitors in their tracks. They were by a little-known Brazilian, Candido Portinari. His landscapes and figure paintings had gusto. Some of them swarmed with quietly horrifying surrealist doodads, some showed Negroes sweltering under Yale-blue Brazilian skies. A few, weirdly spotted with vultures, skulls and blowing bed sheets, depicted odd, forbidding calvaries with scarecrows hanging from crosses. All of them were painted with a virtuoso’s brushstroke, an engineer’s sense of organization. Nearly all were as individualistic and original as anything U. S. gallerygoers have recently come across.

Disliked in his native Brazil because he insists on painting Negroes—who make up 30% of Brazil’s population although most high-brow Brazilians like to ignore the fact—37-year-old Candido Portinari has had hard sledding in the salons of Rio de Janeiro. Second of twelve children in a family of impoverished Italian immigrant coffee workers, he got his first ideas about painting at the age of eleven, when a group of itinerant muralists did a job in the church of the little Sao Paulo town where he was born. They let him help mix their paints, and even paint a star or two himself on the church’s ceiling. Four years later with a second-class railroad ticket, three shirts and a pair of pants, he set out for Rio to study art. Kindly professors at Rio’s School of Fine Arts offered to give him free lessons. At 15 milreis ($3.75) a month Candido Portinari took up lodgings in a bathroom, slept in the tub, had to get up at 5 a.m. so that other boarders could take their showers.

Before long Portinari began to make money. He did it by painting gooily flattering portraits of Rio de Janeiro’s dowagers, built himself a modest reputation as a portraitist whose talents for graphic euphemism could be depended on.

In 1928, on a scholarship, he visited Paris, returned with only one finished painting, but with his head full of ideas. Though he went on painting portraits for a living, he spent his spare time turning out weird pictures of hardhanded, black-skinned coffee workers. In 1935, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie International Exhibition gave him an honorable mention for a Negro painting called Coffee, Brazilians finally gave him a job teaching painting at the University of Brazil.

Today squat, whimsical Portinari is beginning to be rated as Brazil’s, and probably South America’s, No. i Painter. Already Detroit’s up-&-coming Institute of Arts and Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art have arranged one-man shows of 130-odd Portinari canvases (for typical examples, see cuts p. 37). Recently Brazilians have let him paint frescoes for Rio’s Department of Education Building and panels for Brazil’s pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. But Rio de Janeiro’s salons still deplore his Negro subjects, prefer his lacquered society portraits. To make money, Portinari still paints them.