This article describes the Núcleo Bernardelli, a group of young students at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (which operated in Rio de Janeiro from 1931 to 1942), who were interested in updating certain Brazilian art instruction methods. According to Quirino Campofiorito, the author of the article, this was a generation of artists with socialist leanings and a shared interest in community ideals who wanted to move on to a new phase of Brazilian modernism. Whereas a cosmopolitan (learned and elite) spirit had inspired the Semana de Arte in 1922, the visual art milieu in the 1930s had a distinctly democratic outlook which, among other things, placed no restrictions on either the practice of the profession or the leveling of social classes. In their efforts to oppose the early modernists, according to Campofiorito, the members of the Núcleo Bernardelli never sought to launch an “aesthetic” revolution rooted in international avant-garde values; their goal was to improve conditions for the Brazilian artist, though of course avoiding official interests.        

The preface to Núcleo Bernardelli - Arte brasileira nos anos 30 e 40, the book written by the critic Frederico Morais, includes this important report on the Núcleo Bernardelli contributed in 1982 by the artist Quirino Campofiorito (1902–93), who was not only a cofounder of the Núcleo but one of its last surviving members. In his book, Morais seeks to preserve the memory of the group that used to meet in the basement of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, motivated by a shared frustration over the stagnation of the school’s “elitist” and “academic” art instruction. The name of the group is a reference to the brothers Henrique and Rodolfo Bernardelli, a professor and director, respectively, of the Escola, who had rebelled against that same academic stagnation in the early twentieth century.        

Together with the Grupo Santa Helena, in São Paulo, the Núcleo Bernardelli was a moderate group whose members, on the whole, were young, lower-middle-class students, some of them children of recent immigrants, who were far more interested in perfecting their painting techniques than in formalist breaks with the past. In addition to Campofiorito, the members of the Núcleo Bernardelli included: Manoel Santiago, Edson Motta, João José Rescala, Ado Malagoli, Bráulio Poiava, Bustamante Sá, Expedido Camargo Freire, Eugênio Sigaud, Bruno Lechowski, José Pancetti, Yoshia Takaoka, Yuji Tamaki, Joaquim Tenreiro, Milton Dacosta, and José Gomez Correia.