O Café de Portinari na Exposição do Mundo Português: modernidade e tradição na imagem do Estado Novo brasileiro

Abstract

The book O Café de Portinari na Exposição do Mundo Português: modernidade e tradição na imagem do Estado Novo brasileiro by the historian Luciene Lehmkuhl, a member of staff at the Federal University of Uberlândia, was originally a doctoral dissertation defended in the PostGraduate Program in History in the Federal University of Santa Catarina and is methodologically inserted in the ranks of Cultural History, and with rare sensibility enters the so-called 'pictorial turn.' Café (1935), 1 an oil painting on canvass by the painter from Brodósqui, is seen as an icon of Brazilian cultural history. It belongs to the collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts, and with this picture Portinari got the second honorable mention of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1935, a distinction obtained by Salvador Dalí and Kokoschka. The picture shows black laborers collecting coffee and loading sacks with it, at the time the principal export of Brazil and a symbol of national strength. This picture is symbolical of the contradictions inherent in Brazilian society emerging from centuries of slavery, but in it there also emerge representations that will populate Portinari's work in the future, namely its columns, laborers, blacks and mestiços, as well as crop raising-such as coffee growing-, which would integrate the universe of his pictorial production. Café was the 'dissonant note to the aesthetic harmony'-according to the expression of Prof. Maria Bernardete Ramos Flores who wrote the preface to the book-among the Brazilian works that were part of the Art Stand of the Brazilian Pavilion in the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, held in Lisbon in 1940,