The noted Brazilian intellectual, Mário de Andrade presents Candido Portinari’s drawings for the Ministério da Educação e Saúde building in Rio de Janeiro, the signature project of Brazilian modern architecture. De Andrade explains that the drawings indicate the artist’s profound understanding of mural painting, and while discussing how Portinari transitions from easel painting to the scale of a public mural, compares his work to the murals of Diego Rivera. According to de Andrade, if the Mexican muralist is a “combatant,” Portinari is a “missionary.” In other words, Portinari paints in an “optimistic” realist style that glorifies work and dignifies the worker and the peasant. De Andrade thinks that the distorted quality of the painting highlights a collective, choreographic, and traditional dynamic. In short, Portinari’s “public-mural” painting is essentially an architectural and educational form of visual art, owing to his innate grasp of monumentality.   

Candido Portinari (1903–1962), together with Emiliano Di Cavalcanti (1897–1976), was Brazil’s official painter from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. He was a controversial figure in academic circles and among Brazilian supporters of abstract art. The sociologist Gilberto Freyre wrote about Portinari’s work during that period [see ICAA digital archive, doc. no. 1075292]. 

During the 1930s, Portinari was among those who were keenly interested in modern architecture and urban design; he reviewed the 1931 Salão that was organized as part of the architect Lucio Costa’s modernizing administration at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, in Rio de Janeiro; see “Salão Lucio Costa” (doc. no. 1111007). Portinari’s relationship with Costa led to the former’s involvement in the MES project (Ministério de Educação e Saúde, 1936–1942). His political leanings prompted him to join the PCB (Partido Comunista Brasileño) during the following decade, and in 1947, he ran for a senate seat. Persecuted by Eurico Gaspar Dutra’s anticommunist government, he went into exile in Uruguay.

It would be difficult to sum up in just a few words the legacy and the writings of Mário de Andrade, who was a folklore researcher, cultural administrator, art critic, poet, and musicologist. In addition to his creative works, de Andrade was the driving force behind the internal structuring of SPAN (Servicio del Patrimonio Artístico Nacional), and a key figure in the group that was involved in the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna. He was a prolific writer whose works were widely published in Brazilian periodicals, and whose subjects included history, literature, music, folklore, and photography, a field he practiced himself.    

The book by Annateresa Fabris, Portinari, amico mio: cartas de Mário de Andrade a Cândido Portinari (1995) discusses in detail the intellectual dialogue between these two artists.

The Revista Acadêmica was published in Rio de Janeiro from 1933 to 1945, edited by Murilo Miranda. Over the course of the life of the magazine, the editorial board included writers, such as Mário de Andrade, Aníbal Machado, Graciliano Ramos, Oswald de Andrade, Érico Veríssimo, Sérgio Milliet, and Jorge Amado, and the painters, Santa Rosa and Candido Portinari.