Five Brazilian cultural icons from the 20th century
Published on 28 February 2025
From Copacabana Beach to footballing legend, Pelé, Brazil’s modern culture has made a lasting mark on the world.
1. Copacabana Beach
One of the most famous beaches in the world, the 4km of sweeping, golden Rio de Janeiro sand is an icon in its own right.
The enduring glamour of this stretch of coastline is only enhanced by the pavement mosaics of landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx. Commissioned in 1970, Burle Marx used the promenade’s existing Portuguese tiles from 1910 and modernised the design.
Buffering the 2.5 miles of sand from the Art Deco hotels and apartments his geometric abstract design has swooping lines of ochre-red stone weave between zebra-striped grids and blocks.
This expressionist masterpiece in perfect harmony with the surrounding nature. The designer included benches along the pavement and integrated seating areas shaded by palms indigenous to the Atlantic Forest.
2. Pelé
Pelé was known as O Rei (The King). His reputation was established at the 1958 World Cup when, as a 17-year-old, he scored two of the five goals that brought the Canarinhos their first trophy.
He was more than a footballer for Brazil – he was an ambassador for the country around the world, instantly recognisable to any football fan. He was a figure so emblematic to Brazil’s modern national identity, that for most of his career he was banned from playing for foreign teams.
When he died, in 2022, he was laid in an open casket in the centre of Santos FC’s stadium, as fans young and old queued for up to six hours to pay their last respects to an icon the likes the world would maybe never see again.
3. Carmen Miranda
Also known as the ‘Brazilian Bombshell’, Carmen Miranda was a singer, dancer, and actress. Born in northern Portugal, her family immigrated to Brazil when she was still a baby.
She’s probably best remembered for the iconic fruit hat she wore in films. But she was much more than a human fruit bowl. Her career first took off in 1930 when her recording of Taí (Pra Você Gostar de Mim) earned her a contract with Brazil’s most popular radio station. She is credited with popularising samba music and bringing Brazilian culture to the masses.
Stardom in the Sates beckoned, and she moved to New York in 1939 to star in a Broadway production. Movies and performances followed and at the peak of her Hollywood career, she was the highest-paid female performer in the USA. As her popularity in the U.S. grew, some Brazilian fans felt like she’d lost touch with South America.
4. Oscar Niemeyer
In 1960 a new capital city was constructed on a vast stretch of empty savannah in Brazil’s central plateau. Braśilia was to be a sign of the country’s industrialisation and urbanisation.
To encapsulate this new age, in 1956 planner Lúcio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer sketched out the shape of an aeroplane. The ‘fuselage’ would be created by a pair of expansive avenues to run alongside a large park with the ‘cockpit’ made up by Praça dos Três Poderes, an area which would be home to the three branches of government.
Niemeyer, a ‘sculptor of monuments’, created white modernist spectacles that retain their space-age aesthetic 70 years on.
Though his work can be found throughout Brazil and beyond, the capital proved Niemeyer’s lifelong preoccupation and the city remained his canvas even when he himself was in his nineties.
5. Tropicália music
As the darkest decade of Brazil’s military dictatorship began, the so-called ‘years of lead’ from 1968 to 1978, a group of musicians from Bahia, who had decamped to São Paulo, introduced the anarchic fun of the Tropicália movement.
The album Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis served as its manifesto, a collaboration between some of the most avant-garde artists of the time, led by the now iconic figures of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso.
The musicians merged Afro-Brazilian sounds and the influence of Brazilian hinterlands with British and American rock (the album cover was a homage to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band).
It was more than an album of catchy beats, it was a form of political dissent, rejecting both the nationalist agenda of the government and the isolationist tendencies of the opposition Left.
Book tickets for Brasil! Brasil!
In the early 20th century a new modern art was emerging in Brazil. See over 130 works by ten important Brazilian artists from the twentieth century, capturing the diversity of Brazilian art at the time.
Exhibition organised by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
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