Word: portinari
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...