At Portinari’s Studio: 1920-45
In an essay written in 1939, Mário de Andrade highlights in Candido Portinari the intimate union of artist and craftsman, giving it the name “plastic”. The two main elements of his artistic personality originate from it: technical richness and expressive variety. In Portinari, the “craftsman”, interested in experimenting with all the processes, in unveiling all the secrets of the craft, coexists with the “artist”, capable of infusing a poetic sense into what could be simple technical virtuosity.
Although the critic uses the mature artist's work as a parameter, the analysis of Portinaria's first production (1920-30) allows us to affirm that both traits were already present during learning and training. At this moment, the artist-apprentice demonstrates seeking to configure his own lexicon, using different sources (Ingres, Zuloaga, Manet, Whistler, Sargent and Boldini, among others) and testing the possibilities of different artistic languages (human figure, scenes mythological and genre, landscape, nude and, above all, portrait).
Disbelieving in “schools” and “uniform individualities”, defending classicism as “a grammar”, as “an element of order”, the young Portinari embarked for Europe in June 1929, excited by an unshakable decision: to make his stay the opportunity to “observe, research, extract from the work of great artists […] the elements that best lend themselves to the affirmation of a personality”. True to this script, Portinari regularly frequents museums and galleries, marveling at the examples of Giotto, Masaccio, della Francesca, Signorelli, Fra Angelico, del Castagno, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Veronese, El Greco and Goya. Fewer modern artists arouse his interest: Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso and Carena.
The small European production does not mean, however, that Portinari has not fine-tuned his artistic and technical instruments. This is demonstrated by the works carried out from 1931 onwards, in which concerns of a constructive nature are present (geometrization, spatial dynamics, agency of figures), combined with anatomical deformations and gigantism that merge harmoniously with the rationalization process. The countless Brazilian scenes created after returning to Brazil, in January 1931, are placed under the sign of an idea of painting stimulated by the observation of Veronese's works: the creation of “large canvases, with many figures grouped in huge compositions, with varied structures”.
Having learned from Picasso that all styles are contemporary, that the artist must be open to all types of experimentation, moving from one register to another, Portinari does not hesitate to draw inspiration from the lessons of Italian primitives, combined with the use of expressive deformations. , in carrying out the Economic cycles (1936-44) commissioned by Minister Gustavo Capanema for the headquarters of the Ministry of Education and Health. Between 1936 and 1938, the artist carried out hundreds of studies in different techniques (crayon, tempera, gouache, charcoal and watercolor, among others) and experimented varied scales, from miniature representations to life-size drawings for hanging on the wall.
Characterized by the balance achieved between the deformation of human figures and the geometric rigor of the composition, Portinari's first muralist venture will be followed by other works of vast dimensions. Among them, the four temperas at the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress (Washington, DC, USA, 1941) stand out, in which the artist demonstrates, once again, his own virtuosity and capacity for experimentation, as Mário Pedrosa opportunely points out. . Another important achievement is located in the church of São Francisco de Assis da Pampulha (Belo Horizonte, 1944-5). In this, Portinari gives free rein to an expressionist vein – tempered, however, by a classical conception, which Sérgio Milliet refers to as a “humanization of cubism”, due to the balance between a fluid, but rigorous, geometric structuring and the expressive deformation of the figures.
Portinari also took his experimentation to the field of applied arts, as demonstrated by the tiles created for the exterior of the Ministry of Education and Health (1941-4), characterized by the superposition of planes. Another example are the tiles from the Belo Horizonte church, in which the artist plays with two registers: synthetic and simplified in the baptistery; expressionist on the exterior, in order to create continuity with the altar panel.
It is this multiple artist that the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art presents in the exhibition In Portinari’s studio: 1920-45, guided by the objective of presenting to the public the two central aspects of the artist's poetics: compositional processes and varied stylistic resources, which include experiments with abstraction, which he vehemently criticized.
Annateresa Fabris
curator
