Portinari, Cândido Torquato (1903–1962)

Cândido Torquato Portinari (b. 29 December 1903; d. 6 February 1962), Brazilian genre painter. Born in Bródosqui, São Paulo, the second of twelve children of Italian immigrants, Portinari was raised in an impoverished working-class environment. His experiences as a youth on coffee and cotton plantations made him aware of the harshness of plantation work.

Considered by many to be the only Latin American painter outside Mexico able to create a national epic through his work, Portinari revealed an interest in painting at an early age, while assisting in the decoration of a local church. At fifteen, he began study at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro. In 1928, he received an award from the National Salon that enabled him to travel and study in Europe, where he was influenced by the works of Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Joan Miró.

In the 1930s Portinari, known as a social realist painter, was involved in an art movement in which Latin American social themes and a rejection of European forms predominated. Using both mural and easel painting, he concentrated on depicting the harsh working conditions and poverty of the coffee plantation workers and miners. His first international recognition came in 1935 with the exhibition of a painting titled Coffee at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh. Having won second prize at the exhibition, the painting established Portinari in the art world. Combining traditionalism, lyricism, realism, and nationalism, his portraits of both common people (like The Mestizo) and Brazilian celebrities (like poet Olegário Mariano) reflected a keen awareness of the ethnic diversity in Brazilian society.

In 1941 he was commissioned by the Hispanic Foundation of the U.S. Library of Congress to produce four murals titled Discovery of the New World. The individual murals were Discovery of the Land, the Entry into the Forest, the Teaching of the Indians, and The Mining of Gold. Two of his most significant projects were completed in 1945: the Way of the Cross murals for Brazil's first modern church, the Church of São Francisco in Pampulha, and the Epic of Brazil murals for the Ministry of Education and Health Building in Rio de Janeiro, which depicted the cultivation of sugarcane, tobacco, cotton, coffee, and rubber; cattle raising; and gold prospecting. He completed the War and Peace murals for the United Nations Building in New York City in 1953, and in 1957, he received the Guggenheim National Award. In 1961 he returned to Rio de Janeiro, where he died the following year from paint poisoning.

See alsoArt: The Twentieth Century; Coffee Industry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Murals by Cândido Portinari in the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress (1943).

Cândido Portinari, Portinari (1943).

Gilbert Chase, Contemporary Art in Latin America (1970).

Carlos Lemos, The Art of Brazil (1983).

Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America (1989).

Sarah Lemmon, "Cândido Portinari, the Protest Period," in Latin American Art 3 (Winter 1991): 31-34.

Additional Bibliography

Giunta, Andrea, ed. Candido Portinari y el sentido social del arte. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores Argentina, 2005.

Moreira, Marcos. Cândido Portinari. São Paulo: Grupo de Comunicação Três, 2001.

                                           Mary Jo Miles