Walter Zanini offers a retrospective vision of the work of Vicente do Rêgo Monteiro, an artist from the state of Pernambuco, one year after his death. Professor Zanini’s far-reaching analysis provides context for a chronological understanding of a multifaceted artist with a diverse body of work (do Rêgo Monteiro was not only a draftsman and painter, but also a poet, printer, and inventor). Through quotations and notes on the era, the artist’s role in Brazilian and European Modernism is discussed along with the changes in his linguistic interests in the spheres of painting and poetry. Zanini clearly intends to legitimize do Rêgo Monteiro’s work, while also informing Brazilian researchers of other “Modernists” from the state of Pernambuco, among them poet Manoel Bandeira, and artists Cícero Dias and Joaquim Cardozo.

This text was featured in the catalogue to the retrospective exhibition Vicente do Rêgo Monteiro held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP) from November 18 to December 18, 1971; Walter Zanini (1925-2013) directed the museum at the time. The exhibition organized by Zanini reveals the experimental nature of the work of an artist who was indisputably a pioneer in Modern art from Brazil. Later, Zanini would further his study of do Rêgo Monteiro’s extremely diverse and complex body of work, ultimately publishing the book Vicente do Rêgo Monteiro, Artista e Poeta (São Paulo: Empresa das Artes-Marigo Editora, 1997) in the nineties.

In another text by Zanini on a show of artists from Pernambuco held at the MAC-USP, he argues that there is continuity between the art featured in that show and the work of Joaquim and Vicente do Rego Monteiro (who were brothers), Cícero Dias, and Lula Cardoso Ayres—all of whom were interested in popular and folk art (see ICAA digital archive doc. no. 1111183).

Walter Zanini (1925-2013) was one of the curators of the first edition of the São Paulo Biennial (1951) and the first director of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea (a part of the USP). From that post, which he held from 1963 to 1978, he encouraged the production of emerging artists and supported marginalized forms of artistic expression, from technological and conceptual proposals to multimedia works that made use of visual poetics. Zanini was a professor at the Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (ECA-USP).

For another perspective on Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899-1970), an artist from Pernambuco, see the text sociologist Gilberto Freyre wrote after having visited the artist’s studio in Paris (“Notas a lápis sobre um pintor indiferente,” doc. no. 785071). Freyre considered do Rego Monteiro an artist who rebelled from academic painting.