Brazilian painting - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Brazilian painting emerged in the late 16th century, influenced by the Baroque

Baroque

The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...

style imported from Portugal

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

. Until the beginning of the 19th century, that style was the dominant school of painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

in Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

, flourishing across the whole of the settled settled territories, mainly along the coast but also in important inland centers like Minas Gerais

Minas Gerais

Minas Gerais is one of the 26 states of Brazil, of which it is the second most populous, the third richest, and the fourth largest in area. Minas Gerais is the Brazilian state with the largest number of Presidents of Brazil, the current one, Dilma Rousseff, being one of them. The capital is the...

. Major painters in this period were Ricardo do Pilar, José Joaquim da Rocha, José Teófilo de Jesus, Joaquim José da Natividade, José Eloy, Manuel de Jesus Pinto, João de Deus Sepúlveda, Manuel da Cunha, but chief among them was Manuel da Costa Ataíde

Manuel da Costa Ataíde

Manuel da Costa Ataíde , was a Brazilian painter, decorator, teacher and woodcarver. He is the greatest name of Brazilian Baroque painting...

, working towards the end of the 18th century, head of the first original school of painting in the country, with a delicate and somewhat personal interpretation of Rococo

Rococo

Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...

style in which he first depicted angels and saints with mulato features.

A sudden break with the Baroque tradition was imposed on the art of the nation by the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808, fleeing the French invasion of Portugal. However, Baroque painting still survived in many places until the end of the 19th century. In 1816, the king, John VI

John VI of Portugal

John VI John VI John VI (full name: João Maria José Francisco Xavier de Paula Luís António Domingos Rafael; (13 May 1767 – 10 March 1826) was King of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves (later changed to just King of Portugal and the Algarves, after Brazil was recognized...

, supported the project of creating a national Academy at the suggestion of some French artists led by Joachim Lebreton

Joachim Lebreton

Joachim Lebreton was a French professor, public administrator and legislator.- Biography :Lebreton began his career as professor of Rhetoric at the Collège de Tulle....

, a group later known as the French Artistic Mission

Missão Artística Francesa

The French Artistic Mission in Brazil was composed by a group of French artists and architects that came to Rio de Janeiro, then the capital city of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves in March 1816, under the auspices of the royal court of Portugal, which was exiled in Brazil...

. They were instrumental in introducing the Neoclassical

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...

style and a new concept of artistic education mirroring the European academies, being the first teachers at the newly founded school of art. Through the following 70 years, the Royal School of Sciences, Arts and Crafts, later renamed the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, would dictate the standards in art, a mixed trend of Neoclassicism, Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

, and Realism

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

with nationalist inclinations which would be the basis for the production of a large amount of canvases depicting the nation's history, battle scenes, landscapes, portraits, genre painting, and still lifes, and featuring national characters like black people and Indians. Victor Meirelles

Victor Meirelles

Victor Meirelles de Lima was a 19th century painter. He studied art in Paris but painted most of his works in and about his native Brazil. His religious and military paintings helped him become one of the most popular and celebrated Brazilian painters...

, Pedro Américo

Pedro Américo

Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Melo was one of the most important academic painters of Brazil. He was also a writer and a teacher....

, and Almeida Junior were the leaders of such academic art, but this period also received important contributions from foreigners like Georg Grimm, Augusto Müller, and Nicola Antonio Facchinetti.

In 1889 the monarchy was abolished, and the republican government renamed the Imperial Academy the National School of the Fine Arts, which would be short-lived, absorbed in 1931 by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Meanwhile, Modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

was already being cultivated in São Paulo

São Paulo

São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...

and by some academic painters, and the new movement superseded Academicism. In 1922 the event called Week of Modern Art
Week of Modern Art
The Modern Art Week was an arts festival in São Paulo, Brazil, that ran from February 11 to February 18, 1922...

broke definitely with academic tradition and started a nationalist trend which was, however, influenced by Primitivism

Primitivism

Primitivism is a Western art movement that borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, such as Paul Gauguin's inclusion of Tahitian motifs in paintings and ceramics...

and by European Expressionism

Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...

, Surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

and Cubism

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...

. Anita Malfatti

Anita Malfatti

Anita Catarina Malfatti is heralded as the first Brazilian artist to introduce European and American forms of Modernism to Brazil...

, Ismael Nery

Ismael Nery

Ismael Nery was a Brazilian artist.Born in Belém, Pará of Dutch, Native-Brazilian and African ancestry, he studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro and at the Académie Julian in Paris...

, Lasar Segall

Lasar Segall

The artist Lasar Segall was a Brazilian Jewish painter, engraver and sculptor born in Lithuania. Segall's work is derived from impressionism, expressionism and modernism...

, Emiliano di Cavalcanti

Emiliano Di Cavalcanti

Emiliano Augusto Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Melo , known as Di Cavalcanti, was a Brazilian painter who sought to produce a form of Brazilian art free of any noticeable European influences...

, Vicente do Rego Monteiro

Vicente do Rego Monteiro

Vicente do Rego Monteiro , born in Recife, in a family of artists, was a Brazilian painter.Already in 1911 Vicente do Rego Monteiro was in Paris , attending a course, for little time, at the Académie Julian. Precocious talent, in 1913 he participated of the Hall of the Independent Artists, in the...

, and Tarsila do Amaral

Tarsila do Amaral

Tarsila do Amaral, , known simply as Tarsila, is considered to be one of the leading Latin American modernist artists, described as "the Brazilian painter who best achieved Brazilian aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style." She was a member of the Grupo dos Cinco , which...

wrought major changes in painting, while groups like Santa Helena

Grupo Santa Helena

Grupo Santa Helena, or Santa Helena Group, was the name given by the critic Sérgio Milliet to the painters that met in the ateliers of Francisco Rebolo and Mario Zanini starting in the 1930s. The ateliers belonged to a Praça da Sé building named Palacete Santa Helena...

and Núcleo Bernardelli evolved toward a moderate interpretation of Modernism, with important artists such as Aldo Bonadei

Aldo Bonadei

Aldo Cláudio Felipe Bonadei, widely known as Aldo Bonadei was a Brazilian painter. As a member of the Grupo Santa Helena he was distinguished for his erudition....

and José Pancetti

José Pancetti

Giuseppe Giannini Pancetti, better known as José Pancetti was a Brazilian modernist painter.-Biography:Born into a humble family of immigrants from Tuscany, Italy...

. Cândido Portinari

Cândido Portinari

Candido Portinari was one of the most important Brazilian painters and also a prominent and influential practitioner of the neo-realism style in painting....

is the best example of this last tendency. Under government patronage he dominated Brazilian painting in the mid-20th century until Abstractionism

Abstractionism

See also Abstract artAbstractionism is the theory that the mind obtains some or all of its concepts by abstracting them from concepts it already has, or from experience. One may, for example, abstract 'green' from a set of experiences which involve green along with other properties...

showed up in the 1950s.

The period between 1950 and 1970 witnessed the emergence of many new styles. Action painting

Action painting

Action painting sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied...

, Lyrical Abstraction

Lyrical Abstraction

Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...

, Neoconcretism, Neoexpressionism, Pop art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

, Neorealism

Neorealism (art)

In art, neorealism was established by the ex-Camden Town Group painters Charles Ginner and Harold Gilman at the beginning of World War I. They set out to explore the spirit of their age through the shapes and colours of daily life...

—all contributed to some extent to the creation of huge diversity in Brazilian painting and to the updating of Brazilian art. After a period of relative decline in the conceptualist 1970s, national art revived in the 1980s under the influence of the world's renewed interest in traditional painting. Then Brazilian painting showed a new strength, spread across the whole country, and started being appreciated in international forums.