Brazilian painting

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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.
A Brazilian landscape, 1650. With a westward march, a Brazilian territorial and population expansionist movement that also took place in the United States.
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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.

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

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

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.

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.

Relatively little is known in respect to the pictorial art practiced in Brazil before the Portuguese discovery of the territory. The

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, Espírito Santo.
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

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

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

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.

Gallery

See also

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. ISBN 9788587864222
    . Retrieved 2015-09-10.
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