I have been startled to discover, which I probably should have known, that there was an exhibition of Brazilian paintings held at the Royal Academy in 1944 under the title Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, with an exhibition catalogue whose preface was written by Sacheverell Sitwell.   The authorities seem not to have bern particularly enthusiastic about the project, since the Tate, the National Gallery and the V&A all turned the exhibition down even in spite of the fact that all three had acres of empty galleries and Munnings, the then PRA, insisted on a statement in the catalogue to the effect that ‘no responsibility for its quality will rest on the Royal Academy’.   But this did not prevent over 100,000 people visiting the exhibition, including the Queen.

Most of what I have seen of São Paulo has been from the back (or, occasionally, the front) of a minibus.

A city of infinite extent, it goes without saying:-

Much graffiti:-

Smart gardens:-

Urban forest:-

Telegraph poles:-

And unexpected juxtapositions:-

We started the day at the Pinacoteca, which was originally attached to the art school, founded in 1905, and is located in an older building, designed as the headquarters of the Lyceum of the Arts and Crafts.   In the late 1990s, it was radically renovated by Paulo Mendes da Rocha in a style which preserved the fabric of the original building, but roughly – an idea which goes back to Carlo Scarpa and has been used to particularly good effect in the Neues Museum by David Chipperfield and Julian Harrap:-

It’s now in the heart of Cracolândia, one of the more dangerous bits of São Paulo.

The last of my posts from Brazil today is of the Pavilhão Lucas Nogueira Garces, commonly known as the Oca, designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1951 for the Ibirapuera Park, originally as a Museum of Folklore, now used as a venue for exhibitions, and looking otherworldly in the afternoon light:-

The amazing quality of the collection is owing to the fact that Lina Bo Bardi was married to Pietro Maria Bardi, an Italian journalist and art critic, who established the museum in 1947 and only died in 1999.

Bellini, Madonna with Standing Child (1480-90):-

Memling, The Virgin Lamenting (1485-90):-

A very early Raphael Resurrection, painted just after he had left the workshop of Perugino:-

A Bosch Temptation of St. Anthony:-

I was very keen to see Lino Bo Bardi’s masterpiece, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo on the Avenue Paolista, first planned in 1957, begun in 1961, and not opened officially till 1968 by HM the Queen (Brazil was a dictatorship) and to the general public in 1969:-

They have reinstated Bo Bardi’s original system of display on the top floor, which is now more strictly chronological than it was when originally established:-

Down in the basement is a bright red scissor staircase, which presumably was the inspiration for Amanda Levete’s new staircases at the V&A:-

And chairs which must be original:-

We started the day by seeing an exhibition of work attributed to Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as the Aleijadinho (‘the little cripple’), the son of a Portuguese master of works and his slave until freed.   He produced a large collection of devotional works.

São Manuel (c.1760):-

Christ of the Scourging (1791-1812):-

Our Lady of the Rosary:-

Our Lady of Sorrows:-

The exhibition is a way of exploring the Portuguese diaspora, its derivation from Austrian and German, as well as Portuguese baroque, and the abolition of slavery only in 1888.

I have been puzzling over one aspect of Jeremy Hutchinson’s life which I learned from Simon Rendell, the typographer and grandson of Edward McKnight Kauffer, which was that, in the early stages of the war, when Hutchinson had already joined the navy, he visited New York and was entertained by Kauffer in the saloon bars of Harlem, listening to jazz. The answer is that Jeremy’s mother Mary, as well as being painted by Vanessa Bell and sleeping with Clive, was a friend of Kauffer and T.S. Eliot, who consulted them both on the original manuscript of The Four Quartets, although paid no attention to whatever advice they gave (although Kauffer illustrated A Song for Simeon published by the Ariel Press in September 1928). So, it is perhaps not so surprising that Hutchinson was the guest of Kauffer in the slums of New York.

I have been mourning the death of Gillian Ayres, an RA, although in recent years not a very active one, because in Devon and temperamentally not at all keen on committees or, indeed, organisations (she briefly resigned over Sensation);  but even in Devon, and especially on her occasional visits to show work at Alan Cristea, she managed to convey a smoky joie-de-vivre, vitality and moral support.   I wrote an introduction to an exhibition held not long ago in Beijing and realised what a life force and art force she had been from the time she went to Camberwell alongside Howard Hodgkin, teaching at Corsham, again alongside Hodgkin, working on the Lleyn Peninsula in north Wales (I sadly missed her recent exhibition at the National Museum of Wales), before moving to north Devon.   A great painter and a great loss.

I am a touch discombobulated having flown to São Paulo overnight, following a generous invitation to visit SP-Arte, the annual South American art fair.   So, a new country, a new continent.   So far, so good.   It’s as if Los Angeles had mated with New York (the infinite extent of Los Angeles and the high-rise energy of New York).

We started with a visit to Pivô, a small experimental space in the ground floor of Oscar Niemeyer’s great curved, Corbusian Edificio Copan, designed in 1951 as apartments for singles and as a leisure complex as well:-

Steak in Figuera Rubaiyat, a local restaurant in Jardins under a tropical fig tree:-

Then to SP-Arte, which is held in the pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1957 for the Bienal de São Paulo. It is an art fair which is much more fun than its European equivalents because the art is (to me) so totally unfamiliar and because I was introduced in succession to nearly all the gallery owners who talked me through the work on display.

The biggest and most unexpected surprise was in a back room of Rafael Moraes on the top floor, where there was a display of eighteenth and nineteenth-century slave jewellery – something I had never seen or heard of before – apparently given as gifts from owners to their slaves:-