The life of Candido Portinari

He received only an elementary school education. He showed talent for art even as a child. He began painting when he was nine years old. And – from the coffee plantation to the United Nations – he became one of the greatest painters of his time.

At age fifteen, he left for Rio de Janeiro. He enrolled at the National School of Fine Arts.

In 1928 he won the European Travel Prize with his Portrait of Olegário Mariano. This was a milestone in the young painter’s artistic and existential development. He stayed in Paris for all of 1930.

He could see his homeland better from a distance. He decided: I’m going to paint those people with those clothes and that color…

... the history,...

... the people,...

... the culture,...

... the flora, the fauna.

His paintings, prints and murals reflect the Brazilian soul.

Also concerned about the suffering, Portinari used strong colors to depict the poverty, the hardships, the pain. Little by little, his visual expression transcended the academic art of his training, melting the old science of painting into a modern experimentalist spirit. Writer Antonio Callado said that his work was a monumental book of art that teaches Brazilians to love their homeland more.

Companion to poets, writers, journalists, diplomats, Candido Portinari was part of Brazil's intellectual elite in an era of sweeping changes in the country’s cultural and aesthetic understanding.

This select group also reflected on the world’s problems and the country's situation. The escalation of Nazi-Fascism and the horrors of war, as well as close contact with Brazil’s troubled past reinforced the tragic sense of the social messages in Portinari’s work and led him into political activism. He joined the Communist Party. He ran for the House and then the Senate, but was not elected for either.

Later, as political repression tightened, he went into exile in Uruguay for a time.

The essential theme of Candido Portinari’s work is Mankind.

The greater public knew him most for the power of his social themes.

Perhaps less well-known was Portinari’s lyrical side. This other dimension was populated by elements from his childhood memories:

... the children from Brodowski with their games,...

... dances,...

... the circus;...

... the lovers;...

... the peasants...

... human beings expressing tenderness,...

... peace.

The importance of his aesthetic production and conscientious involvement in Brazilian political and cultural life earned Candido Portinari recognition in and beyond his country.

His value is reflected in the multitude of invitations he received from cultural, political and religious institutions to have exhibitions and to create works; in the awards and honors he won in many different parts of the world; in the aura of friendship and respect surrounding his image; in the pride of the Brazilian people that his work portrayed so well.

Candido Portinari died on February 6, 1962, poisoned by his paints.

This culminating work is the most important of the painter’s lifetime. The most universal, the most profound as well, in its majestic dialogue between the tragic and the lyrical, between the fury and the tenderness, between the drama and the poetry. Artist Enrico Bianco sees "War and Peace" as two great pages from the moving message the philosopher / painter sends to humanity.