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Lot Essay
Celebrated as the patriarch of modern Brazilian painting, Di Cavalcanti celebrated the local customs and culture of his country across more than five decades of painting, portraying workaday lives and traditions with an exuberantly lyrical, expressive touch. Self-taught, with a background in illustration, he emerged on the national scene during São Paulo’s watershed Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922, an event that spurred the emergence of the Brazilian avant-garde through a groundbreaking art exhibition, concerts, and literary readings. A year later, Di Cavalcanti traveled for the first time to Paris, following the transatlantic paths of fellow artists Victor Brecheret, Tarsila do Amaral, and Anita Malfatti; while abroad, he encountered the work of Matisse and Picasso, among others, and discovered the Renaissance masters Titian, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci in Italy. “Paris left its mark on me,” he later reflected. “A new nature was created for me and my love for Europe became transformed into a love for life... I began to know my land” (in L. Rebollo Gonçalves, “The Brazilian Imagery of Di Cavalcanti,” Art Nexus 33, August-October 1999, p. 74). In 1953, Di Cavalcanti was awarded the prize for best Brazilian painter (shared with Alfredo Volpi) at the II Bienal de São Paulo; he was honored with a major retrospective of his work the following year at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro.
Although his work traversed landscape and still life, Di Cavalcanti remains best known for his paintings of women, drawn from the favelas and the slums and monumentalized in numerous group portraits that span his career, among them Cinco moças de Guaratinguetá (1930), O Nascimento de Vênus (1940), and the present Retirantes (Northeast Migrants). “Di Cavalcanti’s mulatto women symbolize another type of beauty and another concept of femininity,” critic Ferreira Gullar has explained. “Instead of slender white bodies, brown bodies, thick lips, large breast, exuding sensuality. If, in the figures of women in high society, the feminine charm manifested itself in discretion and chastity, in that of the common woman beauty was expressed in the spontaneity and frank sexuality. The exaltation of mixed beauty contains the ransom of a human value disregarded by prejudice and discrimination.” Di Cavalcanti conveyed his solidarity with the working classes through his painting, identifying with the prostitutes and the samba dancers and discerning in their lives the human drama of the nation. “There is in Di’s paintings an ideological component,” Gullar continues, “which expresses itself in the choice of those themes and a deep identification with the underprivileged, and even the outlaws, the ‘marginalized’ who oppose the values of the dominant class for what they are and what they represent. . . . If his pictorial language comes from the reinvention of the human figure conducted by Pablo Picasso, the ideology parallels that of the Mexican muralists” (“The Modernity in Di Cavalcanti,” Di Cavalcanti, 1897-1976: pinturas, desenhos, jóias, Rio de Janeiro, 2006, pp. 163-64).
In Retirantes, Di Cavalcanti portrays three women in states of dreamy languor, their bodies seemingly assimilated into the undulating ocher earth that stretches to the high horizon line. The figures and traditional still-life elements (urns, chest) recall his earlier studies of the European avant-garde—particularly Picasso, during his neoclassical period—but here they fully embody the Brazilian universe, their forms telluric and surreal. A master colorist, Di Cavalanti further shows his facility with the play of light and shadow, casting the landscape in a tactile chiaroscuro that illuminates its sleeping beauties. “If his themes, predominantly about Rio (and Brazil), made him one of the most original inventors of our pictorial universe, it is the essentially pictorial quality of his work that guarantees meaning and permanence,” Gullar concludes. “Di was not only a painter of enchanting mulatto women and picturesque scenes; he was also the author of exuberant landscapes, based not on tricks or mannerisms, and rather on a modern language, which is first and foremost, painting” (op. cit., p. 164).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Although his work traversed landscape and still life, Di Cavalcanti remains best known for his paintings of women, drawn from the favelas and the slums and monumentalized in numerous group portraits that span his career, among them Cinco moças de Guaratinguetá (1930), O Nascimento de Vênus (1940), and the present Retirantes (Northeast Migrants). “Di Cavalcanti’s mulatto women symbolize another type of beauty and another concept of femininity,” critic Ferreira Gullar has explained. “Instead of slender white bodies, brown bodies, thick lips, large breast, exuding sensuality. If, in the figures of women in high society, the feminine charm manifested itself in discretion and chastity, in that of the common woman beauty was expressed in the spontaneity and frank sexuality. The exaltation of mixed beauty contains the ransom of a human value disregarded by prejudice and discrimination.” Di Cavalcanti conveyed his solidarity with the working classes through his painting, identifying with the prostitutes and the samba dancers and discerning in their lives the human drama of the nation. “There is in Di’s paintings an ideological component,” Gullar continues, “which expresses itself in the choice of those themes and a deep identification with the underprivileged, and even the outlaws, the ‘marginalized’ who oppose the values of the dominant class for what they are and what they represent. . . . If his pictorial language comes from the reinvention of the human figure conducted by Pablo Picasso, the ideology parallels that of the Mexican muralists” (“The Modernity in Di Cavalcanti,” Di Cavalcanti, 1897-1976: pinturas, desenhos, jóias, Rio de Janeiro, 2006, pp. 163-64).
In Retirantes, Di Cavalcanti portrays three women in states of dreamy languor, their bodies seemingly assimilated into the undulating ocher earth that stretches to the high horizon line. The figures and traditional still-life elements (urns, chest) recall his earlier studies of the European avant-garde—particularly Picasso, during his neoclassical period—but here they fully embody the Brazilian universe, their forms telluric and surreal. A master colorist, Di Cavalanti further shows his facility with the play of light and shadow, casting the landscape in a tactile chiaroscuro that illuminates its sleeping beauties. “If his themes, predominantly about Rio (and Brazil), made him one of the most original inventors of our pictorial universe, it is the essentially pictorial quality of his work that guarantees meaning and permanence,” Gullar concludes. “Di was not only a painter of enchanting mulatto women and picturesque scenes; he was also the author of exuberant landscapes, based not on tricks or mannerisms, and rather on a modern language, which is first and foremost, painting” (op. cit., p. 164).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park