'Realism' rubbery idea in French art show in Brazil

Friday, June 26, 2009

AFP - Friday, June 26SAO PAULO (AFP) - - A retrospective of French- and French-inspired art from 1860 to 1960 on display in Brazil is taking a liberal approach to its theme of "realism."
The exhibition, currently in Sao Paulo's Museum of Art (MASP), features everyday people or scenes painted by Renoir, Manet, Cezanne and Toulouse-Latrec -- but also surrealist visions imagined by masters Salvador Dali, Joan Miro and Max Ernst.
But while the theme, and its subversive opposite, battle it out on the walls, the organizers of the show are hailing its ability to attract 100,000-plus visitors.
The popularity of the exhibit makes it one of the prime events of a Year of France in Brazil cultural program that is currently feting all things Gallic in this Latin American nation.
"Ten percent of the works are loans from French museums," notably the Musee d'Orsay, the Pompidou Center and l'Orangerie Museum, the cultural attache to the French consulate in Sao Paulo, Jean-Martin Tidori, told AFP.
Others come from Portugal's Colecao Berardo Museum in Lisbon. But most are jealously prized possessions of the MASP itself -- the biggest repertoire of European art in Latin America.
The aim of the show, Tidori said, is to highlight "the distance between subjectivity and objectivity... The more one wants to represent things as they are, the more we detach them from reality."
The parentheses of that ambition could be seen in one of the very first works, a photo-realistic 1849 painting of cows harnessed for the "First Plowing in Vineyard" by French artist Rose Bonheur, and, at the end, a 1960s pop-inspired tableaux of a French gangsta youth surrounded by graffiti.
In between lies the progression not only of artists themselves (a Picasso portrait from his early, literal period already showing leanings towards his later angular distortions), but also the increasingly inward inspiration through generations of artists who sought to symbolize rather than capture reality.
The influence of Africa and the Pacific is there in paintings by Modigliani and Gauguin.
And in turn the influence of the French paintings is seen on some Brazilian offerings fitted harmoniously into the exhibit.
But it's clearly a one-way street.
The European urbanized modern pictures of the 1950s and 1960s diverge markedly from the emerging Brazilian esthetic, which is infused with a New World search for identity and, later, an ironic homage -- or sometimes critique -- of Old World perceptions.
The works of some of Brazil's most renowned artists -- Ibere Camargo, Claudio Portinari, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti -- borrow the European conventions, and then embellish them with colors, extravagant fauna and commentary on black servitude until a national school is formed, one that continues to evolve today.
"O Realismo" will complete its two-month run at the MASP at the end of this month before heading to the southern city of Porto Alegre.
Not all the works may make the voyage, though.
The Musee d'Orsay is said to be reluctant to allow the Bonheur painting and other loans to continue on, to the disappointment of Brazilian officials, who are confronted with the "realism" of cultural bureaucracy.