Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A pink manac\u00e1 flower pirouettes on its petals, a mountain soars then swoops into the outline of a blue head and shoulders, and \u2014 although it is broad daylight \u2014 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 \u201cLake\u201d, Brazilian modern art came of age. Her magical realist landscape is the poster image for the Royal Academy\u2019s 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.\u00a0Lasar Segall\u2019s hot jungle landscape \u201cBoy with Geckos\u201d (1924),\u00a0Alfredo Volpi\u2019s fluttering street banners \u201cFa\u00e7ade\u201d (1963) and \u201cFlags and Poles\u201d, Candido Portinari\u2019s ghostly buskers spinning a slum dwelling into luminous cubes \u201cFavela with Musicians\u201d (1957),\u00a0are typical of the paintings, spanning cubist-influenced figuration to abstraction, beaming warmth, light and\u00a0wit. The show, arranged as individual artist displays, introduces some of Latin America\u2019s 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\u2019s husband, the poet Oswald de Andrade, in his 1928 \u201cCannibal Manifesto\u201d, demanding his countrymen gobble up European art to spit out something freshly, authentically Brazilian. \u201cTupi or not Tupi?\u201d Andrade asked: could a mesti\u00e7o 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\u2019s avant-garde?Andrade\u2019s friend Anita Malfatti painted \u201cPortrait of Oswald\u201d (1925), the poet as a spiky firebrand whom you might meet in a prewar Berlin caf\u00e9. He glowers at the show\u2019s entrance, declaring\u00a0Malfatti as the pioneer who, after studying in Germany, brought expressionism to S\u00e3o Paulo in 1916 with \u201cMan of Seven Colours\u201d, a yellow-green-purple figure growing out of jungle vegetation.\u00a0Tarsila, 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 \u201cBlack Woman\u201d (1923) \u2014 exaggerated thick lips shooting off the face, a single drooping breast,\u00a0simplified heavy body, showing the impact of her teacher Fernand L\u00e9ger. The preliminary sketch is displayed here.\u00a0The model was one of Tarsila\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cFavela Hill\u201d (1924) applies L\u00e9ger\u2019s chunky forms, bright hues and flat perspective to depict a Rio shanty town peopled by confident, jaunty Black figures. Segall\u2019s \u201cBananal\u201d (1927) is a cubist banana plantation whose flickering, fractured leaves frame the face of a Brazilian labourer resembling an African mask \u2014 the sort of \u201cprimitivist\u201d sculptures that had mesmerised the artists with whom Segall trained in Dresden. \u201cBananal\u201d, bought by S\u00e3o Paulo city in 1928, was the first modernist painting purchased by the Brazilian state.Lithuanian immigrant Segall arrived in S\u00e3o Paulo in 1923, brimming with hope. \u201cI saw myself transported under a dazzling sun, whose rays illuminated the people and objects,\u201d he wrote. \u201cEverything 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.\u201d\u00a0\u201cLight Reflecting in the Forest\u201d (1954), its vertical stripes of subtle colour modulations piercing the dark depths to hint at mysterious pulsing forms among the dense Campos do Jord\u00e3o pines, vibrates like an abstract metallic sculpture swaying in the wind.Tropical tropes underpin modern expression in myriad unexpected ways. Portinari the social realist \u2014 \u201cI am a son of the red earth. I decided to paint the Brazilian reality, naked and crude as it is\u201d \u2014 simplifies landscape and figures into a kind of grotesquerie. \u201cCoffee Agricultural Worker\u201d (1934) is a giant with oversized feet and hands, statuesque in a stark ochre-black landscape, \u201cMigrants\u201d (1944) a frieze of macabre skeletal figures circled by vultures.Fl\u00e1vio de Carvalho painted \u201cOur Lady of Desire\u201d (1955), a fashionista in striped blouse and pleated skirt deconstructed into multihued abstract shapes; then, decked in a similar costume he called \u201cNew Look\u201d, he paraded through S\u00e3o Paulo for his bizarre performance \u201cExperi\u00eancia N 3\u201d. A photograph shows this protest at gendered and colonial norms of European attire. Carvalho is the show\u2019s anarchist; his biomorphic forms twisted into animal-human figures dotted with large piercing eyes \u2014 \u201cAncestral Portrait\u201d, \u201cChrist\u2019s Final Ascension\u201d (both 1932) \u2014 are as gloriously weird as Mir\u00f3\u2019s and Dal\u00ed\u2019s inventions.\u00a0Not for nearly a decade \u2014 since Painting the Modern Garden in 2016 \u2014 have Burlington House\u2019s sumptuous main galleries looked as resplendent and eye-popping as now.\u00a0Although quality of work varies \u2014 Djanira\u2019s formulaic folk pictures are the low point \u2014\u00a0a 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.\u00a0The abstract artists especially look far back. Vicente do Rego Monteiro\u2019s \u201cIndigenous Composition\u201d (1922) imitates designs from precolonial Marajoara ceramics. Rubem Valentim transforms symbols of Afro-Brazilian Candombl\u00e9 deities into the language of geometric abstraction in his monumental totem series \u201cEmblems\u201d and \u201cEmblematic Objects\u201d.\u00a0The show ends with Geraldo de Barros\u2019s shimmering photographic abstractions:\u00a0his \u201cFotoforma\u201d series (1946-51) uses multiple exposures, rotated images, beautiful arabesques \u2014 \u201cAbstraction (S\u00e3o Paulo)\u201d (1949), \u201cUntitled, Pampulha, Belo Horizonte\u201d (1951), an abstraction of an Oscar Niemeyer project \u2014 to chronicle Brazil\u2019s exponential urbanisation. Barros is the link to Brazil\u2019s future \u2014 Lygia Clark and H\u00e9lio Oiticica\u2019s arte concreto, beyond the scope here \u2014 although still the human element leaps out in his work. Reminiscent of Klee\u2019s visages, \u201cHomenagem a Paul Klee\u201d (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\u2019s Zentrum Paul Klee, and also commemorates the RA\u2019s 1944 Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, a wartime diplomatic venture that sparked little curiosity.\u00a0Brazilian modernism remains unfamiliar, although that is changing: this show rides a wave of recent global interest, kick-started by MoMA\u2019s 2018 Tarsila retrospective, and consolidated by Adriano Pedrosa\u2019s excellent display at last year\u2019s Venice Biennale.\u00a0The movement\u2019s themes of hybridity and metamorphosis appeal today, as do its powerful female artists. Women have rarely pioneered art revolutions, but Malfatti\u2019s and particularly Tarsila\u2019s leading roles are incontrovertible \u2014 Tarsila\u2019s surreal figure \u201cAbaporu\u201d (1928, \u201cman who eats human flesh\u201d in Tupi; not in the show) sparked Andrade\u2019s landmark \u201cCannibal Manifesto\u201d. Tarsila\u2019s 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 \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A pink manac\u00e1 flower pirouettes on its petals, a mountain soars then swoops into the outline of a blue head and shoulders, and \u2014 although it is broad daylight \u2014 a sunset glares from within a monstrous cactus. In 1928, the year that Tarsila<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":183790,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-183789","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183789"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183791,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183789\/revisions\/183791"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}