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".
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