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Lot Essay
We are grateful to the Projeto Portinari for confirming the authenticity of this painting.
Favela, 1957, takes on a theme the artist had tackled throughout his life and that was a mainstay of much Brazilian art of the prewar period--the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. Portinari previously depicted the subject in his 1933 painting Hill that was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1939. Steeped in the social realism that was the current style of that moment, the 1933 painting depicts the makeshift neighborhoods of cities like Rio de Janeiro that arose as a direct result of droughts and depressed sugar coffee prices, which had created unemployment crises, forcing rural workers to the cities. The artist alludes to the abysmal environmental, sanitary, and living conditions of the slums in the 1930s figurative work and made use of browns to highlight a sense of despair and disenfranchisement. Favela, in turn, represents a significant shift in Portinari's work that is emblematic of the changing tide toward abstraction of Brazilian modern art at midcentury.
Scintillating patterns of geometric blocks of color punctuate the abstracted hill of Favela and even extend beyond to stand in as hazy decorative clouds in the sky above. Portinari translates the rudimentary and provisional architecture of the shantytowns into a quasi-textile. Specters of abstracted figures emerge at the lower left, but the architectonic weaving and the syncopated rhythm of those geometric blocks dominate the composition. The painting at once calls to mind and diffuses social aspects of the staggering hillside shantytowns.
Beginning in the later 1930s and early 1940s, Portinari began to include more abstract expressions in his works, as for example, in his interior murals (1938-45) for the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro that explored the productive tension between figuration and abstraction. Later, specifically in the 1950s, he turned more completely away from social realism and began to work in a more concentrated fashion with the geometric abstraction that had come to dominate in Brazil and Latin America as a whole. As such, he was an important figure who grappled with and navigated midcentury stylistic shifts. A work like Favela, however, shows us how in his later embrace of abstraction he never fully let go of the representational or references to the real world, continuing to invest abstraction with images rooted in the social.
Anna Indych-López
Associate Professor of Latin American Art History
The City College of New York and The Graduate Center, CUNY
Favela, 1957, takes on a theme the artist had tackled throughout his life and that was a mainstay of much Brazilian art of the prewar period--the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. Portinari previously depicted the subject in his 1933 painting Hill that was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1939. Steeped in the social realism that was the current style of that moment, the 1933 painting depicts the makeshift neighborhoods of cities like Rio de Janeiro that arose as a direct result of droughts and depressed sugar coffee prices, which had created unemployment crises, forcing rural workers to the cities. The artist alludes to the abysmal environmental, sanitary, and living conditions of the slums in the 1930s figurative work and made use of browns to highlight a sense of despair and disenfranchisement. Favela, in turn, represents a significant shift in Portinari's work that is emblematic of the changing tide toward abstraction of Brazilian modern art at midcentury.
Scintillating patterns of geometric blocks of color punctuate the abstracted hill of Favela and even extend beyond to stand in as hazy decorative clouds in the sky above. Portinari translates the rudimentary and provisional architecture of the shantytowns into a quasi-textile. Specters of abstracted figures emerge at the lower left, but the architectonic weaving and the syncopated rhythm of those geometric blocks dominate the composition. The painting at once calls to mind and diffuses social aspects of the staggering hillside shantytowns.
Beginning in the later 1930s and early 1940s, Portinari began to include more abstract expressions in his works, as for example, in his interior murals (1938-45) for the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro that explored the productive tension between figuration and abstraction. Later, specifically in the 1950s, he turned more completely away from social realism and began to work in a more concentrated fashion with the geometric abstraction that had come to dominate in Brazil and Latin America as a whole. As such, he was an important figure who grappled with and navigated midcentury stylistic shifts. A work like Favela, however, shows us how in his later embrace of abstraction he never fully let go of the representational or references to the real world, continuing to invest abstraction with images rooted in the social.
Anna Indych-López
Associate Professor of Latin American Art History
The City College of New York and The Graduate Center, CUNY