This essay is an article written by the Brazilian art critic Mário Baratta on his visit to the interior of the state of Ceará in 1951 with artist Antonio Bandeira. The article analyzes Bandeira’s work before and after he first resided in Paris between 1946 and 1950 on a scholarship sponsored by the French government. Baratta believes Bandeira had already “experienced and lived through all the problems derived from modern art.” His work was initially figurative with harmonic rhythms of form and color. Baratta compares Bandeira’s recent work to that of Oskar Kokoschka’s “technique,” who values the pictorial. He pinpoints a type of abstraction in Bandeira’s work that “does not completely eliminate form” and comes to refer to it as an aerial vision of the urban. He also notes that there were influences found in the Brazilian’s work from the artists Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and André Masson. There is a suggestive kineticism in Bandeira’s work that alludes to a universe that was incessantly changing.

This article by Mário Barata examines the painting works of Antonio Bandeira that were produced after he had joined the Banbryols group, which was formed in Paris between 1949 and 1951 by Camille Bryen and Wols. During this period in his career, Bandeira focused his creative efforts on gestural abstraction, the so-called “informal abstractionism” that incorporated stains, lines, and color. It is sketching with free brushstrokes without any previous drawing. From 1952 and on his return to Fortaleza, Brazil, the capital of the state of Ceará, Bandeira would intensify the improvisational method, and adopted the dribbling of drops of ink on his canvas. When he obtained the grand prize in 1953 at the second Bienal de São Paulo, Bandeira took advantage of the opportunity to return to France.

Mário Baratta was born in Rio de Janeiro (1914−83) and relocated in 1932 to Fortaleza in the state of Ceara, Brazil, becoming a “Cearense for life” and a local and cultural emblematic figure.  He worked as an art critic and was key in the establishment of the Centro Cultural de Belas Artes in Fortaleza, an entity that was responsible for the first art exhibition halls, the Salão Cearense de Pintura in 1941, followed by the Salão de Abril in 1943. Due to financial problems in 1944, the SCAP (Sociedade Cearense de Artes Plásticas) was created in 1946 to revive the Salão de Abril, an event that featured local artists that were in dialogue with what was being produced artistically in Brazil at the time, offering them national exposure.

[For additional reading, please refer to the ICAA digital archive for the following texts by Mário Baratta: “Aldemir Martins e a pintura” (doc. no. 1110782), “Carta a Mario de Andrade” (doc. no. 1110783), “De como deve ser visto o binômio Clã-SCAP” (doc. no. 1111385), “Exposição cearense” (doc. no. 1111388), “Pincéis e violinos” (doc. no. 1110784), and “II Salão de Abril” (doc. no.1111387)].