
Start here: Brazilian Modernism
Published on 22 January 2025
Discover new artists and explore a rich period of Brazilian art history in our latest exhibition, ‘Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism’.

The birth of a new nation
In the early 20th century, Brazil was a young, ambitious and optimistic nation. It was a nation that wanted to define itself and an important way to do this was through artistic endeavour.
The arts were flourishing and a new wave of painting, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, music and literature swept across the country. This dynamic Brazilian modern art scene set a new course for modernism that was borne out across South America.
This exhibition celebrates this 60-year period between 1910 and the 1970s through the stories of ten influential artists. The show reveals the development of their artistic styles and the context in which they were created.

Painting a new cultural identity
Brazil became a republic in 1889, and this emerging nation wanted to create its own distinctive identity.
Brazil had a significant Indigenous population, one increasingly marginalised following the arrival of immigrant settlers. Portuguese colonists forcibly brought more than four million enslaved people from West Africa. Later, populations from Europe, Japan and Syria settled in Brazil, further enriching its extraordinary ethnic diversity. Creating an independent national identity from this mix of cultures was a challenge.
To reflect this, Brazilian modernists wanted to looked inwards as well as outwards for inspiration. Traditional European artistic tastes and typical subjects such as historical allegories and religious scenes were rejected in favour of one which reflected and celebrated the country’s cultural diversity.
Artist Lasar Segall was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, to a Jewish family. He first moved to Brazil in 1923 and was welcomed by modernist artists there. This move led to the arrival of colourful tropical landscapes in Segall’s work and he took the country’s population as his subjects.

Brazil through the eyes of its artists
The artists who represented this new Brazilian culture were as diverse as the nation itself. Those with work on display in this exhibition include women artists Anita Malfatti, and Tarsila do Amaral, self-taught artists Alfredo Volpi and Djanira (an artist of Indigenous descent), Afro-Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim and multidisciplinary artist Flávio de Carvalho.
Although many modernists who were early influencers in the movement lived and studied abroad, they returned to Brazil to ensure that art played a decisive role in their country’s development.
Some of the artists travelled across the country reflecting on the different peoples and places they encountered, integrating them into their art, and appreciating the country’s cultural history before European colonisation.
Djanira, a largely self-taught artist, was born in Brazil to a working-class family of Indigenous heritage. Her lively paintings reflected the world around her. She immersed herself in the lives, occupations, and beliefs of her subjects, saying: “My roots are firmly planted in the earth, and I do not shy away from my origins. I am not ashamed of being a native. I trust in the development of an art that is truly our own.”

Women artists at the heart
Women artists played an important role in Brazil’s modern art history. Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti were close friends, and both were members of the Grupo dos Cinco (Group of Five), a pioneering circle of writers and artists active in the 1920s.
Malfatti was a trailblazer whose paintings shocked the Brazilian establishment. Born in São Paulo, she lived in Berlin in the early 20th century where she attended drawing classes. A year after her return to Brazil in 1916, she held first exhibition of modernist painting in Brazil, which clearly positioned herself as a modernist artist. Her work depicted ordinary Brazilians going about everyday tasks, a subject previously deemed unworthy for paintings.
Probably the best known of all the artists in our exhibition is Tarsila do Amaral. Like Malfatti, she went to Europe where she studied. Tarsila wanted to be “the painter of my country”, and developed a distinctly Brazilian voice within modern art. Her work during this period was filled with vibrant colours, highly simplified forms, and had distinctly Brazilian themes. Her 1928 painting Abaporu was the inspiration for Manifesto Antropófago, by Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade, which helped to shape the direction of modernism in Brazil.
The prominence of both artists within Brazilian modernism was not acknowledged from the outset, and it was not until the mid-20th century that Malfatti and Tarsila were hailed as national stars.

A return to the Royal Academy
In 1944 Brazilian Modernism came to the Royal Academy, with the ‘Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings’. This initiative of Brazilian statesman Oswaldo Aranha was a prime example of using culture to enhance diplomatic relations between nations.
The original exhibition comprised over 150 works. In 2024, four paintings by Lasar Segall, Tarsila do Amaral and Candido Portinari, and three works by the landscape architect and artist Roberto Burle Marx, have been reunited in our Main Galleries.
The 1944 exhibition subsequently toured to several venues in the UK, including the National Gallery of Scotland, before being shown in Paris.
The exhibition was well received and some 100,000 visitors saw it on its UK tour. Now, 81 years later, you can come and discover Brazilian modernism for yourself and see beautiful works that represent the rich cultural identity of 20th-century Brazil.

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.
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