Arte no Brasil: Uma História do Modernismo na Pinacoteca de São Paulo

The long-term exhibition Arte no Brasil: Uma História do Modernismo na Pinacoteca de São Paulo [Art in Brazil: A History of Modernist in the Pinacoteca de São Paulo] presents 50 paintings and sculptures by artists like Alfredo Volpi (1896, Italy – 1988, Brazil), Candido Portinari (1903 – 1962, Brazil), Carlos Prado (1908 – 1992, Brazil),  Emiliano Di Cavalcanti (1897 – 1976, Brazil), Ernesto De Fiori (1884, Italy – 1945, Brazil), Flávio de Carvalho (1899 – 1974, Brazil), José Pancetti (1902 – 1958, Brazil), Lasar Segall (1891, Lithuania – 1957, Brazil), Sérgio Camargo (1930 – 1990, Brazil), Tarsila do Amaral (1886 – 1973, Brazil), Victor Brecheret (1894 – 1955, Brazil), and others.

Gathering a selection of works from the collections of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and the José and Paulina Nemirovsky Foundation, the exhibition is the follow up of the previous show presented at Pinacoteca, “Arte no Brasil: Uma História na Pinacoteca de São Paulo” that explored the formation of the Brazilian artistic visuality and the constitution of a system for the arts in the country, starting from the colonial period up until the beginning of the 20th century. The current exhibition, by its turn, is focused in the three marks of Brazilian Modernism: the formal innovations of the first Modernism (from Lasar Segall to Flávio de Carvalho), the return to the traditions of painting (specially on the 1930s and 1940s, with artist like Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896 – 1962, Brazil) and Pancetti), and finally the works that started to suffer the influence of abstraction (such as Aldo Bonadei (1906 – 1974, Brazil) and Volpi), pointing towards Concretism, that would be established in the 1950s.

Amongst the most noteworthy works in the show, there is the painting “Antropofagia”, by Tarsila do Amaral, from 1929, alongside the sculpture “Homem”, by Ernesto de Fiori (1936/37), and Volpi’s “Fachada”, a painting from 1955.