Word: portinari
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...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...
...opening of Lula Cardoso Ayres' one-man show went off like a high-society ball, with all of Rio's granfinos present and newsreel cameras clicking. More important, handsome Lula Ayres was clearly the best Brazilian painter to come along since Candido Portinari. He had the sophistication of Rio's salons and the simplicity of the backwoods...