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Candido Portinari was born on December 30, 1903, on a coffee farm near Brodósqui, a town in the state of São Paulo. A child of humble Italian immigrants, he had no more than a primary-school education. His artistic vocation was manifested quite early. At the age of fifteen he went to Rio de Janeiro in order to learn painting more systematically, and enrolled in the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. In 1928 he was awarded the Foreign Trip Prize at the academic Exposição Geral de Belas-Artes. He went to Paris, where he lived for a year in 1930. Homesick, Portinari decided that when he returned to his country in 1931 he would portray the Brazilian people, gradually weaning himself away from his academic training and blending the ancient craft of painting with an experimental, antiacademic modern personality. Recognition abroad came for the first time in 1935, when he won the second honorable mention at the Carnegie Institute's International Exhibition, in Pittsburgh, U.S., with a large canvas titled "Café" ("Coffee"), depicting a harvest scene typical of his native region. His taste for mural painting was vigorously manifested in the panels for the Monumento Rodoviário on the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo highway, in 1936, and in the frescoes for the new Education and Health Ministry building, painted between 1936 and 1944. These works, taken as a whole and in terms of their artistic conception, were decisive for the evolution of Portinari's art, underscoring the option for social themes that was to be the hallmark of all his later work. A friend of poets, writers, newspapermen, and diplomats, Portinari was a member of the Brazilian intellectual élite at a time when a remarkable change was taking place in the country's aesthetic attitudes and culture. In the late thirties, Portinari's prestige in the U.S. was consolidated. In 1939 he painted three large panels for the Brazilian pavilion at the New York World's Fair. In the same year, New York's Museum of Modern Art bought his canvas "O morro" ("The Slum"). In 1940 he took part in a group show of Latin American art at New York's Riverside Museum, and put on one-man shows at Detroit's Institute of Arts and New York's MOMA that were successful among critics and the public, and sold many of his works. In December 1940 the University of Chicago published the first book on the painter, Portinari, His Life and Art, with an introduction by the artist Rockwell Kent and a large number of reproductions of Portinari's works. In 1941 he painted four large murals at the Library of Congress's Hispanic Foundation, in Washington, D.C., on Latin American historical themes. Back in Brazil, in 1943, he made eight panels known as the "Série Bíblica" ("Biblical Series"), strongly influenced by Picasso's "Guernica", under the impact of World War II. In 1944, invited by the architect Oscar Niemeyer, he began decorative work for the Pampulha architectural complex, in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais State, featuring the mural "São Francisco" ("St. Francis") and the "Via Sacra" ("Stations of the Cross") in the Pampulha Church. The rise of Nazism and Fascism and the horrors of the war reinforced the social and tragic aspect of his work, inspiring such works as the "Retirantes" ("Migrants") and "Meninos de Brodósqui" ("Brodósqui Children") series, between 1944 and 1946, as well as spurring him to become politically active - he joined the Brazilian Communist Party, ran for deputy in 1945 and for senator in 1947. In 1946 Portinari returned to Paris to hold his first exhibition in Europe, at the Galerie Charpentier. The exhibition was highly successful and earned Portinari the Légion d'Honneur. In 1947 he exhibited at Buenos Aires's Salón Peuser and at Montevideo's Comisión Nacional de Bellas Artes, and was greatly honored by Argentinian and Uruguayan artists, intellectuals, and authorities. In the late forties Portinari began to explore historical themes in mural paintings. In 1948, he sought political asylum in Uruguay, where he produced the panel "A Primeira Missa no Brasil" ("The First Mass in Brazil"),
commissioned by a Brazilian bank, Banco Boavista. In 1949 he made the great panel "Tiradentes", telling the story of the trial and execution of the Brazilian hero who fought against Portuguese colonial domination. This work earned Portinari the 1950 gold medal awarded by the committee of the International Peace Prize, in Warsaw. In 1952 he was again commissioned by a bank, Banco da Bahia, to paint another panel on a historical theme, "A Chegada da Família Real Portuguesa à Bahia" ("Arrival of the Portuguese Royal Family at Bahia"), and began studies for the panels "Guerra" ("War") and "Paz" ("Peace"), which the Brazilian government offered to the new headquarters of the United Nations. Finished in 1956, the panels - measuring about 14 meters by 10 meters each, the largest ever made by Portinari - are to be seen in the entrance hall of the United Nations Building, in New York. In 1954 Portinari painted, for the Banco Português do Brasil, the panel "Descobrimento do Brasil" ("Discovery of Brazil"). In 1955 he won the gold medal awarded by New York's International Fine-Arts Council, as best painter of the year. In 1956, invited by the Israeli government, Portinari traveled to Israel, where he exhibited at several museums and made drawings inspired by his contact with the then recently-founded country, later exhibited in Bologna, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro. Also in 1956 he was awarded the Guggenheim Prize of Brazil, and in 1957 he won an honorable mention at Hallmark Card's Fourth International Contest, New York, for watercolor painting. In the late fifties he held a number of exhibitions abroad. In 1957 there were Portinari shows in Paris and Munich. In 1958 he was the only Brazilian artist represented at the 50 Ans d'Art Moderne exhibition at Brussel's Palais des Beaux Arts. As a guest of honor, he showed 39 works in a special room at the I Bienal de Artes Plasticas in Mexico City, in 1958; in the same year he exhibited his works in Buenos Aires. In 1959 he showed his paintings at New York's Wildenstein gallery, and together with other great Latin American artists, such as Tamayo, Cuevas, Matta, Orozco, and Rivera, participated in the Collección de Arte Interamericana, at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. Candido Portinari died on February 6, 1962, while preparing a great exhibition with about 200 works that had been proposed by the city of Milan. He was poisoned by the toxic elements contained in the paints he used in his work.
translated by Paulo Henriques Britto
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