Oil painting -> List of Painters ->Candido Portinari

Candido Portinari

Early Days: Candido Portinari (Brodowski, December 29, 1903 - Rio de Janeiro, February 6, 1962) was one of the most important Brazilian painters and also a prominent and influential practitioner of the neo-realism style in painting. Born of Italian immigrants in a coffee plantation near Brodowski, in Sao Paulo Portinari studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (ENBA) in Rio de Janeiro. In 1928 he won a gold medal at the ENBA and a trip to Paris where he stayed until 1930, when he returned to Brazil.

Career:

His career coincided with and included collaboration with Oscar Niemeyer amongst others. Portinari's works can be found in galleries and settings in Brazil and abroad, ranging from the family chapel in his childhood home in Brodowski to his panels Guerra e Paz (War and Peace) in the United Nations building in New York. The range and sweep of his output is quite remarkable. It includes images of childhood, paintings depicting rural and urban labour, refugees fleeing the hardships of Brazil's rural north-east, treatments of the key events in the history of Brazil since the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500, portraits of members of his family and leading Brazilian intellectuals, illustrations for books, tiles decorating the Church of São Francisco at Pampulha, Belo Horizonte. There were a number of commemorative events in the centenary of his birth in 2003, including an exhibition of his work in London.

On December 20, 2007, his painting O lavrador de café was stolen from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art along with Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Suzanne Bloch. The paintings remained missing until January 8, 2008, when they were recovered in Ferraz de Vasconcelos by the Police of Sao Paulo. The paintings were returned, undamaged, to the Sao Paulo Museum of Art.