Was Brazil the real birthplace of modernism?

A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they conceived of the future. If today we foresee the future in the East, previous generations looked westward. In the last century, Europeans, having inherited a seemingly aged and decrepit civilisation, determined that the future of art was to be found in the New World. That much is well known. But this did not always mean America. Indeed, the true cognoscenti had a different country in mind: Brazil.

For the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, it was Brazil that was the Land of the Future: the title of a book he wrote in his final years, which were spent exiled from the Nazis not far from Rio de Janeiro. It was written alongside his bestselling elegy for Europe, The World of Yesterday. One mourns Europe’s suicide; the other celebrates Brazil’s birth. Brazil, Zweig optimistically writes, was ‘a new kind of civilisation’.

This utopian fantasy of Brazil was surprisingly popular in the 20th century. Little trace of it remains, except, perhaps, for the testimony of its still functioning capital Brasilia, a sprawling city-sized concrete spaceship designed by the avant-garde Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. But where did this peculiar conception of Brazil come from? How did it arise?

Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, a groundbreaking exhibition at the Royal Academy, brings back into view the invention of the modernist movement in Brazil by looking at its pioneering painters – above all Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral – tracing their legacy in the visual arts from 1910 onwards. Implicit in the title is a subtle provocation; it hints at the possibility that Brazil was the birthplace of modernism tout court. Conventionally, the lineage of modernism is traced to a European point of origin, to wit Paris or London or Berlin.