The Colors of Brazil
During his studies in France, Portinari decided to paint the Brazilian reality, with its colors and its people.
Scarecrow (1959) by Candido PortinariProjeto Portinari
“... The lost souls, the bogs, and the untouched forests accompany me like a scarecrow, which is my self-portrait. ... All fragile, poor things look like me.”
Candido Portinari
Landscape of Brodowski (1940) by Candido PortinariProjeto Portinari
“His journey starts in a slab of people called Brodowski, São Paulo, and ends in a summer morning in Rio de Janeiro.”
José Cardoso Pires, writer
“Between the coffee plantation and the dram, the kid paints a golden star in the chapel’s wall, and nothing else resists the painting hand…”
Excerpt from the poem “A mão” [The hand], written by Carlos Drummond de Andrade on occasion of the painter’s death.
“Do you know why I paint so many girls and boys in seesaws and swings? To get them on the air, like angels…”
Candido Portinari
“This immense artist who had, no doubt, a divine spark and kept himself forever as a child.”
Dom Helder Câmara
“A Carnaval play ... sometimes in black and white, sometimes in color, the language of dreams …”
O Globo, 1983
“Fires, mulled wine, and brown sugar candy. Girls in Sunday clothes prayed to Saint Anthony [the saint of marriage]. The sky was whole and clear. Each person waited for their joy.”
Candido Portinari
“In my painting … I always with to represent the people of Brazil: being born, suffering, working, partying at home and on the streets, with their clothes and their color; getting married, singing, crying, burying, and dying. … Whether I am painting, writing or even resting, these subjects are permanently on my mind.”
Candido Portinari
“... From no other artist or sage, painter or writer have we received a legacy that lyrically transcends our history the way his does.
Clarival do Prado Valladares
"And if we add his great murals of 1941—Discovery of the Land, Teaching of the Indians, Entry into the Forest, and Discovery of Gold—for the Library of Congress, in Washington, to other works such as The First Mass (1943), the study for the Father Anchieta panel (1953-1961), Arrival of Dom João VI (1952), Slave Ship (1950), Tiradentes (1949), Discovery of Brazil (1954), and, what’s more, to the themes in the polyptych in the Ministry of Education and Health (1936-1944) then called Work in Brazilian Land or Economic Evolution, to the famous Coffee (1934) and the Disposessed series (1945), we will be faced with a collection of social-historical paintings of a certain people and region that can be recognized as one of history’s most noteworthy.”
Clarival do Prado Valladares
Tiradentes (1948) by Candido PortinariProjeto Portinari
“An epic panel: surely, one of the high points of 20th-century muralism.”
Antonio Bento
Discovery of the Land (1941) by Candido PortinariProjeto Portinari
“Characteristically, his painting is dominated not by captains, admirals or the priests of the Conquest, but by the common sailors in the fleet.”
Robert Smith
“He said he was a materialist, but the saints certainly did not believe it. One who painted that wonderful Pampulha, who had the gift of portraying the mystique in a Saint Francis, who expressed, as only Candinho did, the torture and calling of sanctity in his figures prayed a great deal through his brushes.”
Dinah Silveira de Queiroz
“The dispossessed are coming with bundles and packs They come from dry, dark lands; rocks Sore as sparks of burning coal.”
Candido Portinari
“The true Way of the Cross is his Dispossessed series. Few museums in the world have such a dramatic series about the men of their land that could compare to the Dispossessed in the São Paulo Art Museum.”
Clarival do Prado Valladares
“... the favelas from his later paintings had become spectral, translucent, much more disturbing than those he painted twenty years earlier, where the raw misery was lessened by the figure of handymen and of women carrying tin cans on their heads.”
Antonio Callado
“I was impressed with the feet of the coffee plantation workers. Misshapen feet. Feet that could tell a story. ... Feet only saints have. ... Feet that inspired mercy and respect.”
Candido Portinari
