This article is about the painter from Minas Gerais, Alberto da Veiga Guignard’s early years as an art professor in the city of Belo Horizonte. He taught a free course on painting and drawing, originally at the Parque Municipal and later at the Instituto de Belas Artes. The well-known writer and art critic Mário de Andrade describes how Guignard’s teaching method differs from the academic model advocated by the Fine Arts. De Andrade quotes Guignard’s claim that constant practice based on a trial and error approach is the most effective way to learn how to paint and train as an artist, as opposed to simply handing out formal sketches based on formulaic concepts and copies of classical works of art. The critic feels optimistic about the teacher’s presence in the state capital, in view of what he expects will be a general improvement in Brazilian art in the future. So much so that De Andrade speculates that, in two or three years, Belo Horizonte will become a focal point for the visual arts in Brazil.  

In this article, the writer and critic Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) focuses on the teaching career of the painter Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896–1962) in Belo Horizonte, but he also discusses the state of art education in Brazil, especially the kind that is beyond the reach of the academic world of the Fine Arts. While on this subject, he mentions the fleeting (yet paradigmatic) presence of the Instituto de Artes da Universidade do Distrito Federal (which, at the time was in Rio de Janeiro), from 1935 to 1939, where the painter Candido Portinari (1903−1962) and Guignard himself were both teachers.

The Instituto de Belas Artes in the capital city of Minas Gerais to which the writer refers actually did train some students who went on to become outstanding artists in the late 1940s, including the sculptors Amílcar de Castro (1920–2002), Farnese de Andrade (1926–96), Franz Weissmann (1911–2005), and Mary Vieira (1927–2001).

Alberto da Veiga Guignard’s death in 1962 brought an end to an important era for the Instituto which, sometime later was renamed the Fundação Escola Guignard in his honor. The school has since been incorporated into the Departamento de Artes Plásticas da Universidade Estadual de Minas Gerais.