The magazine Mensaje, devoted to the dissemination of Brazilian culture in Uruguay, dedicated its twenty-fourth issue, published December 1948, to an analysis of work by Candido Portinari, just at the conclusion of the Brazilian artist’s one-year stay in Montevideo. There were write-ups in the publication by Cipriano S. Vitureira, a poet and Uruguayan art critic, the aforementioned Portinari, Lelio Landucci, a Brazilian art historian born in Italy, and Eduardo Couture, a lawyer and professor. Landucci praises the exposure Portinari’s work had in New York, when he participated in the Latin American Art Exhibition at the Riverside Museum in 1940, and a year later when he returned to the United States to create work for the Hispanic Hall of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. One of the comments made by North American art critics, that Landucci highlights, considered Portinari’s figuration a humanistic approach to popular Brazilian phenotypes, without falling, however, into the stereotypes of tourist postcards or folklore for export. He also highlights the agreement between classicism and archaism presented in his work with an emphasis of a type of pagan mysticism, especially when comparing the religious images of A Primeira Missa no Brasil with archaic Christian iconography which, in Landucci’s opinion, are far from the “pettiness” of the religious imagery that resulted in the Counter-Reformation.

With the approach of 1930, Lelio Landucci, a friend of the artist Candido Portinari (1903−62) who had been the assistant to the French architect and sculptor Paul Landowski, worked on the iconic Cristo do Corcovado statue in Rio de Janeiro. The rigorous geometric Art Deco lines of this sculpture were reminiscent of the rhythmic structure of the human figures that were drawn by Portinari in A Primeira Missa no Brasil. The article written by the Italo-Brazilian was a fragment of a longer text he had published in Brazil [see “Portinari,” by Lélio Landucci and Alcides da Rocha Miranda, Coleção Arte no Brasil Nº 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Pinguim, 1947)].

In 1947, Portinari visited Montevideo, staying for a long time in the city, fourteen years after the visit of another celebrated artist, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896−1974). Between 1933 and 1947, in Uruguay, he had developed art with social purpose that was closely linked to the formal principles of Mexican muralism. Due to Portinari’s long stay in the country, his exhibitions in September 1947 and April 1948, and the fact that in Montevideo his designs for the large mural A Primeira Missa no Brasil were beginning to take form, made him a reference for “leftist art.” Nevertheless, his realism was imbued with mysticism, with a humanistic lyricism, and influenced by the European post-Cubist trends of European art, which diametrically distanced him from the Mexican artist. In effect, what Portinari wanted was to demonstrate that the legacy of modern art was a compilation of inexhaustible expressive resources that could be placed in the service of a realistic theme, and that were ethically and politically appropriate to the demands of the second postwar period. In a sense, in the Uruguayan capital, Portinari expands on the idea of a realistic “modern style” of art, a politicized art with nationalistic principles, with formal presuppositions about modernity.

[For further reading, please refer to the ICAA digital archive for the following texts on the presence of Portinari in Uruguay: “Sentido social del arte,” by Portinari (doc. no. 1313089); “Cándido Portinari no es un creador,” by Guido Castillo (doc .no 1263707); “Latitud Sur 34º, Longitud 58º Oeste. Exposición Cándido Portinari,” by Alfonso Domínguez (doc. no. 1226448); and “La libertad en Portinari” (doc. no. 1225346), and “La Primera Misa, mural de Cándido Portinari,” by Cipriano S. Vitureira (doc. no. 1312738)].