War and Peace

Gifts from the Brazilian government for the UN headquarters building in New York, the painter was commissioned to make the War and Peace panels at the end of 1952.

Defying medical orders to refrain from painting – he was suffering from lead paint poisoning - Portinari accepted the invitation. For four years he persevered, working in the auditorium of the TV Tupi studios, to make the 180 studies, sketches and scale models for the murals.

Commission delivered. But no one had yet seen the panels in their entirety, not even the artist himself. This launched a mass movement resulting in a group of artists and intellectuals appealing to Itamaraty to exhibit the panels in Brazil before sending them to the United States, giving Brazilians their first and last opportunity to see them.

“It’s no wonder that at 11:00 the night of the inauguration Portinari had lost his voice,” wrote Mario Barata about the exhibition of War and Peace at the Municipal Theater of Rio de Janeiro, in 1956. “The vibration of friends, known and unknown, reached the painter. And the emotion filled voice of the panels’ creator fell lower, thinned to a mere thread, became silent. Portinari was seeing his life’s greatest triumph, unequaled in the last eighty years of Western history.

Never in modern art in the world has a painter seen his works superposed to the chords of Wagner and Verdi, to the fantasy of Chopin’s ballets, to the majesty of symphonic orchestras. For the first time in the 20th century, the largest theater in a city is turned into a temple of painting...

...Groups of students, workers, young women, senior citizens, people humbly dressed, one great throng replaced the next throughout the day and into the night, packing the theater during the exhibition’s brief stay. All the newspapers gave the event extensive coverage. The Imprensa Popular ran the headline: 'The people packed the Municipal Theater to see Portinari’s panels.' The subtitle read: 'I’ve never seen anything like it,' said the doorman who handed out brochures at the entrance...

...strange and devout was that little band of dark shadows, apparitions standing, immobile, spellbound, mesmerized, before the twin flames that filled their entire field of vision (...).

The initial wonder of the sight inhabits me still, and I know no other way to tell you of the exhibition of War and Peace at the Municipal Theater..."

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Soon after the exhibition was taken down, the panels were sent to the UN.

However, only on September 6, 1957, after the two huge crates containing the work had sat in the institution’s basement for one and a half years, were War and Peace finally donated to the UN in a formal ceremony.

Due to Portinari’s involvement with the Communist Party, he was not invited to this ceremony, but was represented by the head of Brazil’s mission to the UN, Ambassador Cyro de Freitas-Valle, who said: 'I’m sad to say I don’t see him here today.' He added: 'I want to emphasize that today Brazil is giving the United Nations what it considers to be the best it has to offer.'

“Be it by dimension or by the greatness of painting, these two Portinari panels that have been decorating the lobby of the United Nations Assembly in New York since 1956 can be considered among the main examples of universal painting of a community feeling in this century.”

Clarival do Prado Valladares

"If such paintings were not permanently engraved on your inner canvas, it is because you did not deserve to see them. In the language of a work of art, which is a perfect joy even when it exposes us to mourning and deathly solitude, Portinari tell us: Look. Truly see. Penetrate the depths of these images, and choose."

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, 1956.