Museum of Neo-Realism shows Candido Portinari
The Neo-Realism Museum, in Vila Franca de Xira, opens this weekend its space for the most complete exhibition of the Brazilian painter Candido Portinari in Portugal. The show presents all the artist’s works in Portugal and includes the mythical painting “Café”, which crossed the ocean on loan from the National Museum of Fine Arts of Rio de Janeiro. The work, one of the most significant of the Brazilian neo-realist painter, was exhibited in our country for the last time in 1940, in the Brazil pavilion of the “Exposition of the Portuguese World”.
But this exhibition project, curated by the Museum’s scientific director, Raquel Henriques da Silva, and Luísa Duarte Santos, also presents us with other relevant works, bringing together in the Museu do Neo-Realismo all the works by Candido Portinari that exist in Portugal and which, around Café, will allow us to celebrate the foreign artist who has the most works in Portugal. Candido Portinari in Portugal presents paintings and drawings on loan from the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Chiado (Lisbon), Soares dos Reis National Museum (Porto), Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon), Casa da Achada – Mário Dionísio Centre (Lisbon), Ferreira de Castro Museum (Sintra) and the Millennium BCP Foundation (Lisbon), as well as important documentary collections from the Museum of Neo-Realism itself (Vila Franca de Xira), in an Exhibition of great quality and international dimension, which also underlines the unique characteristics of the Museum of Neo-Realism in the Portuguese cultural panorama.
The exhibition Candido Portinari in Portugal has the high patronage of the President of the Republic and is open to the public until 3 March 2019.
Candido Portinari
Son of Italian emigrants, Candido Portinari was born in a village near São Paulo on 30 December 1903, where the population works in coffee plantations. He had a very poor childhood and only completed primary school, but early on began to demonstrate his mastery of painting.
At the age of 15, he left for Rio de Janeiro and enrolled at the National School of Fine Arts. At the age of 25, he won a competition that guaranteed him a trip to Europe, which would become a milestone in his career. He spent the whole of 1930 in Paris and it was there that he decided to portray Brazil and the Brazilians, with the warm palette of the tropics.
“Concerned, too, with those who suffer, Portinari depicted poverty, hardship and pain in strong colours. His plastic expression, little by little, overcomes the academicism of his training, fusing the ancient science of painting with a modern experimentalist personality,” reads the Portinari Project, a portal that brings together all the artist’s work and is developed by his son, João Candido Portinari in collaboration with the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.
In the 1940s he joined the Brazilian Communist Party and ran for several elections, going into exile for a time in Uruguay. His painting accompanied his militancy, maintaining a strong focus on social themes, and quickly gained national and international expression.
In the 1950s, he created the panel War and Peace for the United Nations headquarters in New York, considered by the leader of the Portinari Project, the work synthesizing his life: “the most universal, the most profound, also, in its majestic dialogue between the tragic and the lyrical, between fury and tenderness, between drama and poetry. In the opinion of the artist Enrico Bianco, War and Peace are the two great pages of the moving communication that the philosopher/painter delivers to humanity”.