What words would you use to describe the design of this exhibition of Brazilian modernist art? “Chic bombast” perhaps. The biggest room in the main galleries of Burlington House is painted bold yellow with the names of its two featured artists in huge black graphics and, for visitors to sit on, funky curving furniture. But there’s a mismatch between this ostentatious layout and the small canvases lined up on the walls, in greys, greens and browns. This is the kind of exhibition where everything is “trailblazing” and every artist a “pioneer”. But the art completely fails to match that hyperbolic guff.
“Anita Malfatti was a trailblazing artist whose modernist paintings shocked the Brazilian establishment,” claims a huge wall text that’s much bigger than her works. They must have been easily shocked. Malfatti’s paintings that date from the first world war include cubist studies of the nude, fauvist portraits and expressionist landscapes. Before 1914, she had studied art in Germany and her paintings draw on what she saw and learned. They are fine, just not very original or revolutionary.
Yet Brazil was to produce highly original and globally renowned modern art, and still does. The neo-concretist experiments of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica from the 1950s to 70s, or today’s abstract star Beatriz Milhazes, might be what you expect to see in a blockbuster called Brasil! Brasil! But you won’t even hear a whisper of them.
The RA seems to assume we’re all so jaded and overfamiliar with this famous, very current Brazilian modern art that we want to tap into something more obscure and frankly less interesting. So instead of the recent era – when Brazilian artists shook up abstract art and turned it inside out, from a cold thing on a wall into a playful, fluid part of everyday life, giving modernism funk and fun – it turns the clock back in pursuit of tedious academic erudition.
We get to learn some really detailed stuff about the São Paulo scene in 1920, and how modern art in Brazil first took off. Or didn’t – not yet, not then. The story is not even told clearly as the show adopts a curious approach of giving us samples of 10 artists who often overlap in time, so as you go from one uninspiring gallery to another you lose any sense of development or even change. Essentially every artist here goes through a similar set of stylistic tics as they try to marry the European invention of modernism, which had first appeared in cities like Paris, Vienna, Munich and Barcelona, with the reality of Brazilian society and landscape.
So you get lightly cubist portraits, tropical forest scenes heavily influenced by Rousseau and the obligatory depictions of poverty. Tarsila do Amaral gives all three: her portraits of modern people are OK, her semi-abstract paintings of a bouncy, geometric Brazilian natural world quite good fun, yet there’s not much tension or shock – and her bizarre 1933 painting Second Class, of the peasantry as zombified idiots, shows no compassion at all.
There is little sense in this stodgy morass of mediocre paintings of art as a living act in the world. Flávio de Carvalho sounds like fun: the exhibition claims him as Brazil’s first performance artist and his exploits included walking the streets in fishnet stockings, skirt and blouse to demonstrate his new concept of appropriate clothing for the tropics. Sounds contemporary, radical, even anti-Trumpian? Don’t get your hopes up. De Carvalho is only represented here by his paintings, which are no good at all.
And so it goes on – a long detour through art history that doesn’t seem relevant to understanding either the later upsurge of Brazilian art, or anything else. Perhaps modern art does not have a single, flowing history. There are sudden brutal breaks and leaps. You finally glimpse one at the end of the show with the rise of concrete art.
Brazil’s modernists after the second world war invented a hard, mathematical kind of abstraction that challenged their contemporaries in North America. Where Pollock and Rothko are splashy and expressive, the concretists are geometric and highly controlled. Geraldo de Barros designs and colours with precision a red, orange and blue spiral in his 1953 work Arrangement of Three Similar Shapes Within a Circle.
Elsewhere, he cuts up and intersects rectangles and triangles, while in his black and white photographs he finds geometric forms in city streets and on rooftops – and at last we get out into the living world. Rubem Valentim, who shares the final room with De Barros, mixes this tough geometric style with echoes of African symbolism, paying homage to his African-Brazilian heritage. The rigour and hardness of his totemic shapes is incisive.
Out of concrete art came its neo-concrete subversion. But that’s another story and this exhibition stops dead at this point, just as it was twitching into life. What a waste to stage such a self-deluded bore of a show in the grandest exhibition rooms in Britain.
• Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism is at the Royal Academy, London, 28 January to 21 April
