Art: Sad Pictures

Last week $50,000 worth of the best art of Brazil was on display in Buenos Aires’ fashionable Calle Florida. The paintings were Candido Portinari’s first showing since his return from Paris, and obviously he had come home with a paletteful of ideas. Gone was the eerie wind which had blown through his desolate landscapes, flattening figures to splashes of color enclosed in swift, sketchy lines. Instead, there were harshly patterned compositions with heavily outlined figures, thickly painted limbs that looked like kneaded dough, nubble-knuckled hands and feet.

Except for a gaunt, tormented Job, the subjects were still the same—Brazil’s button-eyed peasant women and tattered children. “I paint,” said Portinari, who is a Communist, “to teach my people what is wrong.”

Wait for Imagination. Portinari was born 43 years ago amid the desperate poverty he paints. His parents were Italian immigrants who became coffee-workers in the little village of Brodowsky, in the state of São Paulo. One of twelve children, Candido began painting as a boy; itinerant painters who were redecorating the village church let him do the stars on the ceiling. Portinari broke his leg in a village football game, giving him a permanent limp. From then on, unable to play as his fellows did, he worked at his art.

At 15 he was sent off to Rio to study, slept in a bathtub, learned a correct academic style that won him several medals. After that came a two-year scholarship in Paris. He angered his sponsors by returning to Brazil with only a single small painting. Portinari explained: “I can paint nothing at first sight. I must wait and let imagination work.”

His imagination went to work on the peasant life he knew, shaping it into raw-toned, spaciously planned pictures that were quickly acclaimed by Rio’s intellectuals. Soon even Brazil’s granfinos (upper crust), who disliked his serious works (“He paints big feet, he paints Negroes, he imitates Diego Rivera”), were commissioning him to paint their portraits, and Portinari obligingly turned out slick & sound conventional likenesses in the best School of Fine Arts manner. He made good money painting portraits of Helena Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Artur Rubinstein.

His murals at the Brazilian Pavilion in the 1939 New York World’s Fair and in the Library of Congress, and one-man shows in Detroit and Manhattan gave him a U.S. reputation. But things have not always gone well with him at home. He painted the Via Sacra on the walls of a modern church near Belo Horizonte, which Architect Oscar Niemeyer, friend and fellow Communist, designed. The archbishop refused to consecrate the church (TIME, May 13, 1946). Says Portinari: “The priests don’t like my way of expressing, sacred things. They want Virgins that look like Ingrid Bergman and Christs like Robert Taylor. For me, a saint is a saint and not a movie actor.”

Unforgettable Faces. Portinari lives in an old Portuguese colonial house with faded shutters and a tangled garden in Laranjeiras, a Rio suburb, with his dark-eyed, trim Uruguayan wife and their eight-year-old son.

Once a year, Portinari returns to the village of Brodowsky, where his father & mother still live. There he stays for several months, storing his mind with fresh images of the poverty-worn Negro and mulatto coffeeworkers among the red-brown hills. When he came back from Paris last December, he started a series of sad pictures and a series of happy pictures. “But now I don’t feel so much like painting happy pictures. I feel more like sad pictures.”