An exposition at the Lesar Segall Museum in São Paulo in the fall of 2015 highlighted a famous trio of artists in the history of Brazilian Modernism. The central figure was Mario (Raul de Morais) Andrade (1893-45). He was a prominent poet, novelist, musicologist and photographer, but he also had a strong voice as an art critic and promoter of modernist tradition. He was especially intertwined with Segall and Portinari whom he called “his artists.”
This portrait of Mario de Andrade was done by Lasar Segall, one of two artists featured with Andrade in the exposition of Brazilian Modernism in the Lasar Segall Museum, São Paulo. The second portrait is by Portinari. Andrade said that Segall caught the “demonic” in him, while Portinari saw the “angelic.”
Portrait of Andrade by Cândido Portinari
Andrade was trained in music but was unable to pursue a musical career. He turned these skills to what later to ethnomusicology in his famous 1938 Mission to collect folk culture in Brazil. Americans familiar with the work of Alan Lomax in documenting blues and folk traditions in the United States will recognize the spirit of this Mission.
Lomax “discovered” and popularized iconic figures such as McKinley Morgenfield (Muddy Waters) and Huddy Ledbetter (Leadbelly), and Woody Guthrie. Andrade did not bring new talent to the public in the same way, but he created a basis for the understanding and honoring folk culture. His recordings from 1938 capture songs and music from the Brazilian interior and are available in a multiple-CD set. His book Danças Dramaticas (Dramatic Dances) did much the same for annotation and analysis of popular (“folk”) dance forms.
Lomax had various academic connections much of his career (though never a formal academic appointment). In addition to documenting and disseminating American folk music, he also developed theories of folk music and dance (e.g., “choreometrics”).
By contrast, Andrade was a protean figure in the arts generally. His book Macanaíma is a modernist classic in Brazil, as are his books of poetry and art criticism. He was not formally connected with a university, but was a prominent figure in various cultural agencies in São Paulo which supported his mission to the Northeast.
The 2015 São Paulo exhibit was held in the Lasar Segall Museum, once the artist’s home and studio.
Andrade’s artists were Lasar Segall and Cândido Portinari. Segall was a Lithuanian Jew transplanted from Europe to São Paulo. Portinari was born of a working class Italian family but was trained in the arts in Brazil and Europe. As different as they were in background, Portinari and Segall, with the support of Andrade, helped define modernism in Brazilian art.
Cândido Portinari (1903-1962) was born to Italian immigrants who worked on a coffee plantation in São Paulo. This background later brought him to the Brazilian Communist Party where he ran as a party candidate for senator in the 1940s. Along the way he had also become a prominent artist
He had won recognition at the National School of Fine Arts (ENBA) and went to Paris between 1928 and 1930. He absorbed elements of European tradition, but combined them with his Brazilian working class sensitivity. He shared with Segall a sympathy for the socially marginalized, especially the urban working class and rural workers. In another similarity, both artists had several works featuring prostitutes.
Lasar Segall (1891-1957) was Lithuanian Jew and world citizen who traveled between Europe and Brazil until the Nazis came to power. He studied and worked in Europe, was a Russian citizen, moved back and forth to Brazil, and eventually became a Brazilian citizen in the 1920. He was attracted to the “Red Light” districts of Rio de Janeiro, and later adopted themes of the Brazilian interior, slums, and suffering of the socially and economically marginal.
In Europe his work was lumped together with that of other “Degenerate Artists” attacked by the Nazis in their famous exhibition of the same name (1937). As a Jew, a modernist, and social critic he was safer and had more artistic freedom in Brazil.
Segall later married his student Jenny Klabin, the daughter of wealthy entrepreneurs in the wood and paper industry. The Klabins became a major economic force in Brazil, but various members of the family also became patrons of the arts and collectors. The first-generation Klabins were, like Segall, Lithuanian emigrés.
His style seems to have softened in his later years, but he never totally left the themes of immigration, rural peonage and slavery, and urban marginality.
Segall’s Ship of Immigrants
