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| Guignard’s
Paradoxical Landscapes Taisa Palhares, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil |
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| In this paper we shall examine the role played by artist Alberto da Veiga Guignard (Nova Friburgo, RJ 1896 – Belo Horizonte, MG, 1962) in the development of modern art in Brazil. A painter, drawer and teacher belonging to the second generation of modern artists active in Brazil from the 1930s on, Guignard is recognized today as one of the most original and important Brazilian artists of the 20th century. His quite irregular oeuvre reached its high point in the early 1940s, with his first “Imaginary Landscapes” and “Saint John Nights”, themes he would continue to work on throughout his life. Along with some portraits, these landscapes allow for a perception of Guignard’s singular contribution to the formation of a distinctly Brazilian visuality in modern art. Although often mistakenly taken for a naïve or primitive artist, Guignard underwent solid academic training in Europe, particularly in Germany. His father died when he was a child, and in 1907 his family moved to Switzerland. Before his final return to Brazil in 1929, already in his adulthood, Guignard had studied in Switzerland, France and Germany, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Munich in 1917. His studies at the academy provided him with training in drawing and painting, with rigorous discipline. Yet, even the artist himself seemed rather unclear about this period, he referred vaguely to an exhibition of the Die Brücke group that he had seen in Munich and which had deeply impressed him. He did however confess that it was at the Munich Art Collection, more than in school, that he had learned his art, observing and copying the works there by Flemish and Dutch artists. Although Guignard participated in exhibitions since 1922, his European production remains lost, which makes it difficult for us to know how his artwork evolved during his years there. The only thing we know about this period is based on the artist’s own recollection that refers to the time he spent in Florence from 1925 to 1928 which represented his “path to freedom.” According to Argentine painter Emílio Pettoruti, a friend of Guignard’s since the 1920s, in Florence he assiduously studied the work of Botticelli, which together with his studies of Japanese printmaking gave him a sense for the decorative. During these years he took part in exhibitions which included the Biennale di Venezia as well as the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants in Paris. He met Picasso and Utrillo at the Café Duomo and became interested mainly in the painting of Dufy, Matisse and Rousseau. Although it is not possible to analyze Guignard’s painting from this period, we can certainly find echoes of his European experience and his direct contact with modern art in the work he developed following his return to Brazil. As he related twenty years later, upon his arrival in Rio de Janeiro he suffered two shocks: the first was the conservative spirit of the city’s art world at that time; the second, even more profound, was Brazil’s particular nature, colors and landscape. From this point on, until the end of his life, his technique underwent a slow but steady and complete revision. Before focusing on an analysis of some of his artworks, it is worth remembering the situation of modern art in Brazil in the late ’20s and early ’30s. Roughly speaking, the late-coming development of Brazilian modern art took place in two phases. The first was centered on the provincial city of São Paulo in the late 1910s, and is characterized by an attitude of rupture with the preceding art. This small group included Anita Malfatti, Di Cavalcanti, Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral and Victor Brecheret and sought – as one of its main theoreticians, writer and art critic Mário de Andrade, pointed out – to renovate the cultural environment and the national intelligence, which at the beginning of the 1920s required a “warlike and eminently destructive” attitude. At this moment, the challenge was to combine the desire for formal updating, by way of the European avant-garde, with the aim to rediscover Brazil in terms of its popular traditions and heterogeneous culture suffocated by the 19th-century Brazilian intelligentsia’s “colonized and conservative veneration of things French.” At his 1942 conference on the modernist movement, Mário de Andrade summarized this double aim according to three fundamental principles: “the permanent right to aesthetic research; the updating of Brazilian artistic intelligence; and the establishment of a national creative consciousness.” Initially, this group did not espouse a single approach for Brazilian art, and in terms of the visual arts it accommodated the formal lessons of cubism, the spirit of expressionism and the colorful fauvism without major conflicts. A second generation of modern artists, or a second modernist phase, took place from 1930 onward, when Brazilian modern art became more socially engaged, showing more concern for depicting Brazil’s social reality while focusing less on formal issues. Naturally, this movement closely followed a recession of European avant-garde experimentation and the expansion of Mexican muralism throughout the Americas. The artist who best represents this interwar period is Candido Portinari, Brazil’s official modernist painter in the 1940s. Although a fuller discussion of the subject lies outside the scope of this article, it should be pointed out that, with few exceptions, the modernist movement in Brazil was indissociable from nationalist aims. At an early stage, the modernist nationalism took the form, for example, of Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagic primitivism in 1928. For him, the mere updating of the medium was not enough; it was necessary to “swallow” what came from outside and to re-create it based on local experience. As early as 1920, Mário de Andrade was suspicious of the praise that Tarsila do Amaral, then living in Paris, heaped on cubism. For him, modern art as it was being developed in the hegemonic center ran the risk of becoming “excessively aestheticizing” and, in a good-humored tone, he invited Tarsila to return to Brazil to found a new movement, “Matavirgismo” [Virginforestism]. In fact, there are various versions of Nationalism. There exists a series of gradations lying between the one end of the spectrum – the position of these first modernists, who sought to give rise to the “new man” by rejecting the classical European values while re-valorizing the Brazilian primitive art with African and indigenous roots (and which art critic Mário Pedrosa called, kindly, “primordial, irreducible and anti-erudite” “primitive, naïve Nationalism”) ; on the other, the superficial and strict forms of patriotic Nationalism serving conservative and reactionary aims, especially from the mid-1930s onward. During the era instated by President Getúlio Vargas and called the Estado Novo – the moment at which modern art finally became publicly accepted and to a certain extent institutionalized in Brazil – Portinari’s socially motivated ideological Nationalism provided the acceptable model of modern art. In a classical-realist form, but with expressive and salient deformations (of the feet and hands, for example), this art was nevertheless constrained within an acceptable decorum, and embodied the nationalist question and that of the Brazilian man in the figure of the worker. For art critic Ronaldo Brito, Portinari represented the triumph of the “literary character of the ideology of Brazilianness.” In short, for better or for worse, the nationalist question was a constant in the Brazilian modernism of the first half of the 20th century. While the research into “Brazilianness” enriched the Brazilian visuality, raising awareness in regard to popular manifestations and the image of the common folk which up to then had hovered at the fringe of the cultural system, on the other hand, at certain moments, it acted as a censor when it was taken as a doctrine to be followed and as an antidote to the more radical experiments. This ambiguity – the commitment to national awareness and the autonomy of visual-arts research – marks a good part of the most consistent production of Brazilian modern art. Although it was not an outgrowth of these developments, certainly Guignard’s Brazilian production was influenced by these issues. What makes it so singular, however, is the fact that its primitive appearance rarely resorts to the ease of anecdote nor recurs to solutions based on extra-artistic commitment. As art historian Sônia Salzstein has observed, “his specificity does not derive from ‘Brazilian thematics,’ but from the original way that this thematics is infused within the essential power of his oeuvre. After a production with surrealist leanings in the late 1920s, Guignard began a series of paintings in which he sought to capture simple scenes or people from Brazilian life, in family portraits and interior scenes such as Os Noivos [The Fiancés], 1937 [Figure 1], or Família do Fuzileiro Naval [The Marine’s Family], no date [Figure 2]. This production, which at the time was called “Lyric Nationalism” evinced Guignard’s preference for the more prosaic and less heroic aspects of national life. Both paintings feature people from a less-favored social class, whom Guignard nevertheless valorizes through colorist treatment and Matisse-influenced composition.
In these paintings, the modern palate of contrasting colors is blended with decorative elements typical of popular culture. However, here these decorative elements – the flowers, the fabrics printed in popular patterns, the drawings on the wallpaper, the stripes on the boys’ clothes, the arabesques of the railing on the balcony – do not function as elements for structuring space. It seems that the conspicuous presence and energy of the decorative in the composition does not contaminate the human figures beyond the surface of their clothes. The latent happiness of the environment seems to contrast with the stern attitude of the people, who show no hint of a smile. There is a further, even more significant contrast. When we observe the landscape projected like a backdrop to the portrait of the Marine’s family, we perceive that there is a significant difference between the lines used inside the room and the colored patches making up the outside scene. Certainly, there is a transition between the interior and exterior colors, yet the landscape’s scarcely delineated character, its atmospheric expansion, contrasts with the relative rigidity of the architecture and the people. This same paradoxical construction can be observed in a 1939 landscape, in which Guignard deals with the theme of the “Saint John’s Festival” traditionally held in Brazil in the month of June. Festa de São João [Saint John’s Festival], 1939 [Figure 3], offers an aerial view, from a distance, of the nocturnal celebrations of Saint John’s Day in a typical Brazilian town. This is one of the most traditional festivals in popular culture, celebrated during the month of June, when colorful balloons rise into the night sky to celebrate the days of Saint John, Saint Anthony and Saint Peter. Here there is a striking contrast between the architecture of the colonial town in the foreground and the image of the mountains and sky that takes up nearly two-thirds of the canvas.
Guignard’s June festival landscapes were gradually taken over by this indefinite space that seems like a dilution, were it not for a paper balloon, a train or a church, or even a small image of the painter himself, which seem like attempts to delineate this nature in a process of change, though in no wise imposing a structure on it. Indeed, as we can see in Paisagem de Minas [Minas Gerais Landscape] (Figure 4), there is even a suggestion of movement in the cloud-mountains that appear in counterpoint to the static quality of the figures.
Obviously, this lack of integration between the well-delimited, floating characters and the space constructed through overlain patches of color cannot be attributed to a lack of technical skill on the part of the artist, which would approximate him to the so-called naïve artists. The spatial treatment used in this landscape blends techniques drawn from an entire erudite pictorial tradition stretching from Leonardo da Vinci to the German romantics, and also including impressionist landscape, with which Guignard dialogues here. In the countless landscapes the artist painted throughout his life, the paint gradually became more diluted. As it can be observed in this Noite de São João [Saint John’s Night] from 1961 (Figure 5), made one year before his death, the artist worked on the modernist problem of the relation between figure and background by means of a all-over space.
The autonomy of the pictorial material revealed in this canvas was a late-coming achievement, but an important one for Brazilian art. It indicates a freer cultural environment, in which the artist does not need to illustrate something in order to legitimize his existence. As I see it, this autonomy was at this moment a very helpful development for the conservative Brazilian art world, and in a certain way it contributed to the formation of a later generation of artists involved in important local movements (it should be noted that Guignard was the professor and friend, for example, of two neoconcrete artists, Amilcar de Castro and Franz Weissmann). Returning our attention to the painting Noite de São João, we note that the small figures that serve to orient us in this indefinite and blurred space – and which are a direct reference to Brazilian culture – almost seem to be floating, as though they were not actually rooted in the landscape. Made by quick brushstrokes that evoke only their outlines, the fragility of these little churches, little balloons and little trains somehow evinces Guignard’s melancholic view of this pre-industrial country, moving along at a slow pace. While there is certainly no condemnation of this situation, the nostalgia that seems to permeate this painting conveys an identity that perhaps pertains finally to the realm of imagination or memory, and which the painting sought to make real. Far from the overoptimistic patriotism and social realism prevailing in the culture and art in Brazil at that time, Guignard focused on this inward and mysterious country, and, solely through the visual arts, apprehended its irreducible experience.
Endnotes [1] Andrade, Mário. “O Movimento Modernista”
(Conference held at the Casa do Estudante do Brasil no Rio de Janeiro
em 1942). In: Mestres do Modernismo. Milliet, Maria Alice
(ed.). São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial, Fundação
José e Paulina Nemirovsky and Pinacoteca do Estado de São
Paulo, 2005, p. 238.
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