REVIEW : 'Brazil! Brazil! The Birth of Modernism'
- Rui G. Cepeda
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Royal Academy of Arts, London
28th January – 21st April 2025
Publish by 11th International Awards for Art Criticism (English Language Entries)
Colonialism in Everyday Curatorship: Brazil, Identity, and the Failure of Curatorial Imagination at the Royal Academy of Arts
Brazil! Brazil! The Birth of Modernism, held at the Royal Academy of Arts (RAA) in London from January to April 2025, attempted to present a comprehensive overview of Brazilian modern art. Spanning over a hundred works - including paintings, sculptures, and photographs - across the institution’s neoclassical galleries, the exhibition aimed to narrate Brazil’s modernist legacy. However, beneath its celebratory tone lay a troubling reliance on Western-centric frameworks. The curatorial approach re-inscribed colonial hierarchies, casting Brazilian modernism as a derivative of Western art, rather than a movement with its own epistemologies, memory, and cultural logic.
Rather than decenter the Western gaze, the exhibition reinforced it. What unfolded was less a showcase of Brazilian artistic autonomy than an aestheticised continuation of colonial narratives. The art was framed not as a dynamic expression of Brazilian modernity, but as culturally subordinated remnants of Western influence. The exhibition ultimately reflected the persistent contradiction of post-colonial Europe: willing to acknowledge historical injustice, yet unwilling to relinquish the symbolic power that maintains cultural dominance.
The artworks - landscapes and portraits saturated with intense colour - appeared to be positioned as extensions of French Impressionism, offered to the viewer as exotic yet familiar. The exhibition opened with a suggestive nod to inclusivity, perhaps responding to the idea that “we are all foreigners.” However, its formal layout - structured around a rigid, neoclassical corridor (Image 1 - above) - echoed the ceremonial diplomacy of the Baroque, distancing the viewer from the real sociopolitical tensions at play. Brazilian artists who had long grappled with colonial legacies were reduced to footnotes in a Western-dominated narrative, their resistance softened by curatorial convenience.
The exhibition design aimed to offer multiple perspectives. Yet, these were framed within a singular, linear path through the galleries - artist by artist, room by room - rarely allowing for cross-dialogue or critical juxtaposition. Visitors entered through the Central Hall, where works by canonical figures such as Lasar Segall (1880 - 1957), Tarsila do Amaral (1886 - 1873), Candido Portinari (1903 - 1962), and landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1909 - 1994) (Image 2 - below) were displayed together. The symbolism of returning these artists to the same space used in the 1944 exhibition was heavy-handed, reinforcing institutional archetypes rather than challenging them. Once again, Brazil's cultural identity was presented through a lens crafted - and curated - by the former colonising powers.
In formal terms, the exhibition missed key opportunities to explore the cultural entanglements that shape Brazil’s hybrid modernity. There was little attempt to provoke visual or thematic conflict, or to reflect the complexity of Brazil’s multicultural society, born of colonial fragmentation and modernist aspirations. Instead of interrogating the nation’s tangled intercultural heritage, the layout reaffirmed tidy categories, simplifying the dynamics of race, migration, and identity.
From the Central Hall, visitors moved through a series of galleries highlighting the so-called pillars of Brazilian modernism. Galleries 3, 4, and 6 were dedicated to Segall, do Amaral, and Portinari, respectively. Gallery 5 focused on Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899 - 1970) and his stylised depictions of Indigenous Amazonian culture. In Gallery 3, the curatorial aim was to stage a dialogue between Anita Malfatti (1898 - 1964) and Segall, particularly around shared themes such as displacement and migration. Later galleries presented Flávio de Carvalho’s (1899 - 1973) psychological portraits, Djanira de Motta e Silva’s (1914 - 1979) depictions of rural and urban life, and Alfredo Volpi’s (1896 - 1988) colour blocks, which hinted at the rise of Concretism. The final space - the Lecture Room - contained Geraldo de Barros’s (1923 - 1998) experimental photography and Rubem Valentim’s (1922 - 1991) sculptures, grounded in Afro-Brazilian spirituality, specifically Candomblé (Image 3 - below).
Despite this breadth, the exhibition failed to allow Brazilian modernism to speak in its own terms. The works on display conveyed an unmistakable longing for a distinct national aesthetic - what might be called a “modernism made in Brazil.” Across the paintings, the power of colour pulsed with a desire to capture a political vision of social progress, modern infrastructure, and national identity. Portraits of individuals and families, depictions of favelas and rural landscapes, musical scenes, and religious iconography all illustrated the diversity of Brazil’s cultural fabric with a social realism framing. However, the curatorial framework treated these scenes more as ethnographic records, more similar to Soviet’s socialist realism, than as acts of creative sovereignty. In doing so, it reinforced the same colonial stereotypes the artists had sought to challenge.
During the early twentieth century, modernism was not a monolithic movement but a site of global redefinition. While Europe was marked by two devastating world wars and a deepening identity crisis, Latin America sought to reimagine itself on its own terms. In Mexico, the muralist tradition - led by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, who were influenced by Posada’s satirical engravings of skeleton figures and scenes of everyday life - reflected José Vasconcelos’s concept of the “Cosmic Race,” blending political idealism with Indigenous identity. In Brazil, the Anthropophagic movement, theorised by Oswald de Andrade and to a certain extent developed through the work of Tarsila do Amaral, proposed a radical cannibalisation of European influences. Yet even this movement was not immune to colonial blind spots. Despite its revolutionary and critical ambitions, it often served nationalist goals rooted in a white, elite gaze.
The exhibition, however, offered little engagement with this history. The curatorial approach positioned Brazilian art as an acculturated extension of European styles. Cultural anthropophagy - the very act of eating, digesting and transforming colonial influence - was only superficially acknowledged. Afro-Brazilian identity, in particular, was largely absent. Instead of creating new relational spaces between objects and viewers, the exhibition reduced the works to digestible, decontextualised sequences, ignoring the deeper questions of ancestry, memory, and race.
This raises fundamental concerns: Can the socio-cultural contradictions of Brazilian modernism be properly expressed through an exhibition model that prioritises visual harmony over ideological tension? Do these artworks resonate on their own terms, or are they made legible only through their resemblance to Western - Europe and North America - aesthetics? Brazil’s modern identity has been shaped by vast waves of immigration - from Italy, Japan, Germany, but also from Syria and Japan. Where, then, is the visual history that reflects this hybridity?
Notably absent were the paintings of women of colour, like Mulatas by Di Cavalcanti (1897 - 1976), which foregrounds the Afro-Brazilian female body; or the bold figurative-abstract works of Japanese-Brazilian artist Manabu Mabe (1924 - 1997), known for their unique chromatic and emotional vibrancy. These omissions are not simply curatorial oversights; they point to deeper exclusions embedded within institutional practice.
Similarly, little critical attention was given to works that problematise race. Malfatti’s Chinese Woman presents a racially stylised portrait that, while representative of her attempts to capture Brazil’s diversity, reflects colonial masculine stereotypes of the era. Today, such representations demand critical reflection - especially when displayed internationally. Without this reflection, the image risks being seen as either exoticised flattery or uncritical mimicry, particularly by Asian audiences.
What Brazil! Brazil! ultimately reveals is a kind of curatorial correctness - an institutional neutrality that cloaks deeper complicities. The exhibition’s logic is closer to a Soviet-style canonisation of national culture and imperialist ideology than the pluralist, European ideals it claims to uphold. While the selection of works may have been shaped by diplomatic agreements and institutional partnerships, its final form offers a politically safe, linear history. It sidesteps the more urgent curatorial challenges of our time: inclusion, post-colonial critique, cultural hybridity, and epistemic justice.
Rather than provoke, the exhibition reassures. Rather than question, it affirms. Brazil! Brazil! followed a neat, room-by-room progression that seemed more interested in palatable storytelling than in the complexities of history and identity. The result is a modernist narrative that is both regressive and bucolic - a comforting vision of Brazilian art that fits neatly within European frameworks of intelligibility.
This brings us to a final question: Can Brazilian modernism, shaped by Indigenous, African, Asian, and European influences, truly be understood when filtered through Western curatorial logic? The exhibition’s reluctance to explore alternative narratives, to highlight dissenting voices, or to open space for ambivalence, is symptomatic of a broader institutional failure. Rather than interrogate the legacies of empire and the complexities of identity, Brazil! Brazil! retreats into aesthetic nostalgia. It is, in the end, an exhibition that recognises the global, but remains blind to the plural.
London, August 2025
© Rui Gonçalves Cepeda
Comments