Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism – a show to warm a 'sun-starved soul'

The Royal Academy's new survey of Brazilian modernism is a show to warm a "sun-starved soul", said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. It is "awash" with images of "far-flung climes", and teems with "jungly forests", "coffee plantations and banana groves" and "dense, jerry-built favelas". There are "resplendent Afro-Brazilian deities", "barefoot children flying kites", "suave, white-clad tennis players", among many other things.

The show focuses on the work of ten very different artists who were active between the 1910s and the 1970s. Few will be familiar to British visitors and none shared any particular style in common, but all absorbed the radical modernist trends coming out of Europe and refracted them through a distinctly Brazilian filter. Featuring more than 130 works, almost all of which are paintings, the exhibition contains some remarkable discoveries, from the "delightful, optimistic" 1920s works by Tarsila do Amaral to a late-1950s image by the Italian-born Alfredo Volpi composed of "shapes like flying molars" hovering against a light pink background. Not everything here is so successful, but "if you wish to be transported, for an hour or two, to another time and place, then this show should provide satisfaction".

"Brasil! Brasil!" plunges us into "the early avant garde of a nation convulsed by dictatorships and coups", said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Indeed, such is the focus on political history that the art frequently feels like an afterthought. There are a few great things: Rubem Valentim (1922-1991), in particular, is a "wonderful discovery", his "ultra-sharp geometric paintings and gleaming wooden constructions" incorporate a host of symbols – arrows, circles, triangles – significant in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. By and large, however, this is "a lavish exhibition of bafflingly weak art" – a "weird mishmash of weakly adapted pastiches of European modernism" and "crude socialist realism". Do Amaral's "Second Class" (1933), for instance, is a piece of "woeful agitprop", depicting "barefoot Brazilians as mawkish puppets with uniform faces". Honestly, "I am sorry I saw this painting".

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The mediocrity is made all the more baffling because Brazil really did produce some "highly original and globally renowned modern art", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Whereas American postwar abstraction was "splashy and expressive", Brazil's was "hard" and "mathematical". We do see hints of this: Geraldo de Barros "designs and colours with precision", cutting up and intersecting rectangles and triangles, or finding geometric patterns in his photos of city streets. The rest, alas, largely consists of "lightly cubist portraits, tropical forest scenes heavily influenced by Rousseau and the obligatory depictions of poverty". It's devoid of "funk and fun". "What a waste to stage such a self-deluded bore of a show in the grandest exhibition rooms in Britain."

Royal Academy, London W1. Until 21 April