Word: portinari
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
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...