Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A pink manacá flower pirouettes on its petals, a mountain soars then swoops into the outline of a blue head and shoulders, and — although it is broad daylight — a sunset glares from within a monstrous cactus. In 1928, the year that Tarsila do Amaral (known simply as Tarsila) painted stylised forms dancing around a glassy pool in “Lake”, Brazilian modern art came of age. Her magical realist landscape is the poster image for the Royal Academy’s upbeat winter tonic of an exhibition Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, presenting 10 artists from two generations, born 1880s-1920s.It feels like summer in here. Lasar Segall’s hot jungle landscape “Boy with Geckos” (1924), Alfredo Volpi’s fluttering street banners “Façade” (1963) and “Flags and Poles”, Candido Portinari’s ghostly buskers spinning a slum dwelling into luminous cubes “Favela with Musicians” (1957), are typical of the paintings, spanning cubist-influenced figuration to abstraction, beaming warmth, light and wit. The show, arranged as individual artist displays, introduces some of Latin America’s most exuberant painters, and is lightly curated, refreshingly free of politics and jargon even though it hinges on a postcolonial narrative.In different ways, each artist pondered the question posed by Tarsila’s husband, the poet Oswald de Andrade, in his 1928 “Cannibal Manifesto”, demanding his countrymen gobble up European art to spit out something freshly, authentically Brazilian. “Tupi or not Tupi?” Andrade asked: could a mestiço nation throw off colonialism and create a culture built on heritages of Tupi-speaking indigenous people, African ancestry brought by slavery, and Portuguese settlers, fused with the excitement of Europe’s avant-garde?Andrade’s friend Anita Malfatti painted “Portrait of Oswald” (1925), the poet as a spiky firebrand whom you might meet in a prewar Berlin café. He glowers at the show’s entrance, declaring Malfatti as the pioneer who, after studying in Germany, brought expressionism to São Paulo in 1916 with “Man of Seven Colours”, a yellow-green-purple figure growing out of jungle vegetation. Tarsila, a coffee heiress born in 1886, two years before Brazil abolished slavery, was bolder. She took off for Paris in 1920 and returned to paint the seminal nude “Black Woman” (1923) — exaggerated thick lips shooting off the face, a single drooping breast, simplified heavy body, showing the impact of her teacher Fernand Léger. The preliminary sketch is displayed here. The model was one of Tarsila’s servants, and today it reads as racist distortion; in fact it was emancipatory, claiming Afro-Brazilian identity for a new national art defying colonialist academicism.European experience was indispensable, but transformed as it hit Brazilian soil. Tarsila’s “Favela Hill” (1924) applies Léger’s chunky forms, bright hues and flat perspective to depict a Rio shanty town peopled by confident, jaunty Black figures. Segall’s “Bananal” (1927) is a cubist banana plantation whose flickering, fractured leaves frame the face of a Brazilian labourer resembling an African mask — the sort of “primitivist” sculptures that had mesmerised the artists with whom Segall trained in Dresden. “Bananal”, bought by São Paulo city in 1928, was the first modernist painting purchased by the Brazilian state.Lithuanian immigrant Segall arrived in São Paulo in 1923, brimming with hope. “I saw myself transported under a dazzling sun, whose rays illuminated the people and objects,” he wrote. “Everything seemed to give the impression of radiating pulses of light. I saw purple earth, brick-red earth, almost black earth, a luxurious vegetation overflowing in fantastic decorative forms.” “Light Reflecting in the Forest” (1954), its vertical stripes of subtle colour modulations piercing the dark depths to hint at mysterious pulsing forms among the dense Campos do Jordão pines, vibrates like an abstract metallic sculpture swaying in the wind.Tropical tropes underpin modern expression in myriad unexpected ways. Portinari the social realist — “I am a son of the red earth. I decided to paint the Brazilian reality, naked and crude as it is” — simplifies landscape and figures into a kind of grotesquerie. “Coffee Agricultural Worker” (1934) is a giant with oversized feet and hands, statuesque in a stark ochre-black landscape, “Migrants” (1944) a frieze of macabre skeletal figures circled by vultures.Flávio de Carvalho painted “Our Lady of Desire” (1955), a fashionista in striped blouse and pleated skirt deconstructed into multihued abstract shapes; then, decked in a similar costume he called “New Look”, he paraded through São Paulo for his bizarre performance “Experiência N 3”. A photograph shows this protest at gendered and colonial norms of European attire. Carvalho is the show’s anarchist; his biomorphic forms twisted into animal-human figures dotted with large piercing eyes — “Ancestral Portrait”, “Christ’s Final Ascension” (both 1932) — are as gloriously weird as Miró’s and Dalí’s inventions. Not for nearly a decade — since Painting the Modern Garden in 2016 — have Burlington House’s sumptuous main galleries looked as resplendent and eye-popping as now. Although quality of work varies — Djanira’s formulaic folk pictures are the low point — a strong theatrical design of yellow, pink or azure walls, big funky geometric-shaped seats, and deco graphics helps disparate strands cohere. As in the garden show, the broad optimistic theme is growth and renewal, and the power of cultural roots. The abstract artists especially look far back. Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s “Indigenous Composition” (1922) imitates designs from precolonial Marajoara ceramics. Rubem Valentim transforms symbols of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé deities into the language of geometric abstraction in his monumental totem series “Emblems” and “Emblematic Objects”. The show ends with Geraldo de Barros’s shimmering photographic abstractions: his “Fotoforma” series (1946-51) uses multiple exposures, rotated images, beautiful arabesques — “Abstraction (São Paulo)” (1949), “Untitled, Pampulha, Belo Horizonte” (1951), an abstraction of an Oscar Niemeyer project — to chronicle Brazil’s exponential urbanisation. Barros is the link to Brazil’s future — Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica’s arte concreto, beyond the scope here — although still the human element leaps out in his work. Reminiscent of Klee’s visages, “Homenagem a Paul Klee” (1949) is a face formed by over-painting the holes, abrasions and scores on a negative depicting an old cemetery wall.Brasil! Brasil! arrives in London from Bern’s Zentrum Paul Klee, and also commemorates the RA’s 1944 Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, a wartime diplomatic venture that sparked little curiosity. Brazilian modernism remains unfamiliar, although that is changing: this show rides a wave of recent global interest, kick-started by MoMA’s 2018 Tarsila retrospective, and consolidated by Adriano Pedrosa’s excellent display at last year’s Venice Biennale. The movement’s themes of hybridity and metamorphosis appeal today, as do its powerful female artists. Women have rarely pioneered art revolutions, but Malfatti’s and particularly Tarsila’s leading roles are incontrovertible — Tarsila’s surreal figure “Abaporu” (1928, “man who eats human flesh” in Tupi; not in the show) sparked Andrade’s landmark “Cannibal Manifesto”. Tarsila’s current touring exhibition (Paris then Bilbao) deprives the RA of key works, but still her visionary paintings sing and surprise, like so much in this joyous exhibition.To April 21, royalacademy.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
