Almeida Júnior (Itu SP 1850 - Piracicaba SP 1899)
Almeida Júnior was a Brazilian painter and draftsman. He entered the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes (Aiba) in 1869, where he took drawing classes with Jules Le Chevrel (ca. 1810-1872) and painting classes with Victor Meirelles (1832-1903). He completed his studies in 1874, but did not compete for the travel prize and returned to Itu. In 1875, he opened a studio and began working as a portraitist and drawing teacher. During a visit to the interior of São Paulo, Emperor Pedro II (1825-1891) was impressed by his work and granted him a scholarship to study in Europe.
He lived in Paris between 1876 and 1882, where he studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts as a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889). During his stay in the French capital, he took part in four editions of the Salon Officiel des Artistes Français. He returned to Brazil in 1882 and exhibited at the Aiba the works he had produced in Paris. In 1883, he set up a studio in São Paulo. In 1886, Victor Meirelles invited him to take over his post at the Aiba as professor of history painting, but he preferred to remain in São Paulo.
Part of Brazilian art criticism regards him as the "painter of the national", for depicting regional customs, colors and light in his canvases, in contrast with the Eurocentric tradition of academic painting. By setting up his studio in São Paulo in 1883, he brought artistic maturity to the city and contributed to the training of new artists, among them Pedro Alexandrino (1856-1942).
Critical Commentary
Almeida Júnior showed an early inclination for drawing and painting and, at the age of 19 (1869), left his hometown of Itu for Rio de Janeiro, with financial help from relatives and friends, in order to enter the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes - Aiba. During his time at the institution, he followed the traditional path of every academic painter: he attended the two years of compulsory drawing classes, considered a prerequisite for learning painting. He then took specific subjects such as geometric and figure drawing, life model, history painting, anatomy and physiology of the passions, aesthetics and applied mathematics. His teachers included Jules Le Chevrel (ca. 1810 - 1872) and Victor Meirelles (1832 - 1903). He completed his studies in 1874, standing out for the quality of his work, as shown by the distinctions he received during his training in figure drawing, history painting and life model, and by the gold medal won with the canvas Belizário Esmolando [Belisarius Begging], in his last participation as a student in the General Exhibition of Fine Arts at the Aiba.
Without competing for the travel prize, Almeida Júnior returned to Itu, São Paulo, in early 1875. He offered his services in his own studio as a drawing teacher and painter. He carried out a series of commissions, mainly portraits, among them those of Antônio Queiroz Telles, president of the Mogiana Railway, and Antônio Pinheiro de Ulhoa Cintra, vice-president of São Paulo. These works were largely responsible for the scholarship for further study abroad offered to the artist by Emperor Pedro II (1825 - 1891).
At the emperor's expense, he spent 1877 attending drawing classes in Paris, entering the traditional École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1878. He took a three-year course, with Alexandre Cabanel (1823 - 1889), one of the greatest opponents of the Impressionists, as his main teacher. This stay served more to confirm the values learned at the Aiba and to refine his technique (mastery of drawing and of compositional geometry, for example) than to change Almeida Júnior's artistic direction. He took part in the Salon Officiel des Artistes Français from 1879 to 1882, presenting works regarded as important in his production. At the 1880 Salon, for example, he exhibited Derrubador Brasileiro [Brazilian Woodcutter] (1879), considered a forerunner of his group of paintings on regional themes (though still far from the realism and luminosity of his "caipira" paintings).
He returned to Brazil in 1882 and held an exhibition of his European works at the Aiba. By setting up a studio in São Paulo that same year, he became one of those responsible for the maturing of the São Paulo art scene: besides establishing a more modern relationship with the local market, holding private viewings for the press and potential buyers and writing explanatory texts about his paintings, he contributed to the training of new generations of artists, of whom Pedro Alexandrino (1856 - 1942) was the most successful.
Alongside other genres of painting, in the last decade of his life Almeida Júnior produced the group of canvases on regional themes that would definitively secure his place in the history of Brazilian art. In paintings such as Caipiras Negaceando [Caipiras Lying in Wait] (1888), Caipira Picando Fumo [Caipira Cutting Tobacco] (1893), Amolação Interrompida [Interrupted Sharpening] (1894), Apertando o Lombilho [Tightening the Saddle] (1895) and O Violeiro [The Guitar Player] (1899), he reveals his admiration for painters who were not academic but were of great importance in 19th-century France, such as the realist Gustave Courbet (1819 - 1877) or Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796 - 1875). There is a desire for a realistic approach to the daily life of the countryman without the filter of the universalist formulas of academic painting. For this reason, he does not hesitate to portray the caipira (country dweller of São Paulo) in his poor and simple surroundings, in his calm and sad life, without ever ridiculing him or turning him into a picturesque character.
However, it should be remembered that despite the innovations introduced in these canvases, beginning with the subject matter but also including the sunlit luminosity seen in the brighter palette and the freer brushwork, Almeida Júnior did not abandon the lessons in drawing and geometric composition of his academic training.
His caipira paintings and his genre painting, generally featuring scenes of bourgeois daily life (for example Leitura [Reading], 1892), were well received by a bourgeoisie engaged in building an image and a history for itself, the history of the people of São Paulo. It is worth noting that almost all art critics, both contemporary with the artist and later, celebrate in him what they see as a first burst of national character in Brazilian painting, including intellectuals on sides as opposed as Monteiro Lobato (1882 - 1948) and Mário de Andrade (1893 - 1945). The exception is the Rio de Janeiro critic Gonzaga Duque (1863 - 1911), in a text on the 1904 salon, in which he laments that Almeida Júnior had become a thick-handed, mannered and stiff painter, criticizing his "intermittent pretension to found a national art on the painting of customs".
Collections
Banco Itaú S.A. Collection - São Paulo SP
Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo Collection (Brazil) - São Paulo SP
Museu Paulista Collection - São Paulo SP
Igreja Matriz de Nossa Senhora da Candelária - Itu SP
Museu de Antropologia do Vale do Paraíba - Jacareí SP
Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand - Masp - São Paulo SP
Museu Nacional de Belas Artes - MNBA - Rio de Janeiro RJ
Critiques
"The dawn of the following day breaks with Almeida Junior, who leads by the hand something new and true - naturalism. Among us, he fulfills the mission of Courbet in France. He paints not man, but a man - the son of the land, and thereby creates national painting as opposed to the dominant international one. He comes from France, where he had perfected his studies, bringing biblical paintings unlike anything else, highly personal, revealing an extremely lucid understanding of true art. A Fuga para o Egito [The Flight into Egypt] is truly a humble carpenter fleeing across real sand, with a real wife and son, riding a real donkey. Change the costumes of those figures, dress them in our fashion, give them our landscape as a setting, and the biblical painting will remain true: it is always a husband, a wife and a little son, all deeply human, fleeing to save their lives. If the painter was like this in a picture of that kind, a genre in which art usually founders in the sea of anti-human and anti-natural conventionalism, he remains so, human and natural, unconcerned with fashions and schools, until the end of his career. No body of work is more unified than his. He was never anything but Almeida Júnior as an individual; a Paulista as a species; a Brazilian as a genus".
Monteiro Lobato
LOBATO, Monteiro. Almeida Junior. In: ______. Idéias de Jéca Tatú. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1956. p. 79 (Obras Completas de Monteiro Lobato, 4). [Text first published in Revista do Brasil, São Paulo, n. 13, v. 2, Jan. 1917, p. 33-51.]
"Already in the last days of the monarchy, Brazilian artistic intelligence began to concern itself with its national function, in a way heralding modern times. The influence of European technique still predominates, and will predominate to this day, but the most valuable artists turn to the expression of the land and of man. Teles Júnior, from Pernambuco, creates northeastern landscapes of vigorous and faithful character; and in São Paulo, Almeida Júnior, in open struggle with the light of our day and the color of the land that his Parisian palette had not learned, firmly analyzes the customs and the type of the caipira. But this was already the Republic, and it echoes what Alexandre Levi and Alberto Nepomuceno were doing in music, with the same hesitations and intermittent success".
Mário de Andrade
ANDRADE, Mário. As artes plásticas no Brasil. Revista da Academia Paulista de Letras, year VII, n. 26, June 12, 1944, p. 27. Cited in ALMEIDA JÚNIOR: vida e obra. São Paulo: Art Editora, 1979, p. 30.
"We can say that he did not have the strength needed to be moved by the avant-garde movement in Europe, his sensibility being dominated as it was by academic mentors both at home and in France. Almeida Júnior would thus have lacked a capacity to divine the transformation (...). One can hardly speak of originality, since what originality there is consists only of an anecdotal facet, a matter of treating the surrounding human data, yet singularly non-documentary, since there is no document where there is no concern for fidelity, only for a pretty illustration of the subject. Almeida Júnior will therefore be, in his caipira phase, the painter of the Brazilian subject in the light not of euphoric conditions of a surrounding economy, but of a happy, triumphant temperament, treating the picturesque of his milieu with the freedom of someone whose greatest concerns are a chromaticism and an ethnic human material that had not been explored until then".
Geraldo Ferraz
FERRAZ, Geraldo. Revisões Sobre a Pintura de Almeida Júnior - Diante do Centenário de Artista. Jornal de Notícias, Rio de Janeiro, May 7, 1950. Cited in ALMEIDA Júnior: vida e obra. São Paulo: Art Editora, 1979, pp. 37-38.
"It is not possible to fully understand Brazilian painting before modernism without reference to his work, which helped to suppress the monumentality of works, to renew subjects and characters, to link figures organically to their surroundings and perhaps to reformulate the treatment of light. It is with him that the Brazilian man enters painting for the first time (...). Critics agree in pointing to him as an indisputable dividing line in painting of Brazilian character, but they differ when it comes to locating precisely where the innovation took place. That is, did the reformulation he brought about in the code occur at the level of themes, establishing a certain regionalism in painting, or at the level of chromatic and luminous notation, transferring the much-vaunted Brazilian light to the canvas? (...) What he achieved, following not the Impressionists, as has been said, but secondary academic painters, was an accommodation between two different systems of notation that coexisted at the same time in Europe, one innovative, the other retrograde, adapting them to Brazilian reality".
Gilda de Mello e Souza
SOUZA, Gilda de Mello e. Pintura brasileira contemporânea: os precursores. Discurso. São Paulo, Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo, year V, n. 5, 1974, p. 119-29. Cited in ALMEIDA JÚNIOR: vida e obra. São Paulo: Art Editora, 1979, p. 45.
"In some canvases painted in São Paulo he lightened his palette, which was an innovation for the local scene, though not for Europe, as Gilda de Mello e Souza, among others, rightly observed, since many French artists stopped halfway, between Impressionist innovations and traditional solutions. This view therefore contradicts the statement of authors such as Luis Martins, who, in his essay on the artist published in the Revista do Arquivo Municipal in 1940 (p. 12), declared that his canvases acquired a livelier and more luminous color through contact with the tropical nature of Brazil. Would it be, however, a Brazilian influence, or the use of French lessons combined with an adaptation to the taste of the people of his land, endorsed in its various manifestations (houses, clothes...)? In portraying the nature of his country, Almeida Júnior shows more the application of intellectualized and absorbed theories than an intoxication with the sun and colors of the countryside, which would have made him more emotional and free".
Maria Cecília França Lourenço
LOURENÇO, Maria Cecília França. Revendo Almeida Júnior. 1980. 427 f. Master's dissertation - Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo - ECA/USP, 1980.
"In Almeida Júnior one feels, in his last works, the laziness, the languor, the drowsy surrender before the punishing sun - an irresistible suggestion of cornfields burning on summer afternoons, bamboo groves leaning over the soft water of lakes and the melancholy song of a cicada (...) There is an unmistakable Brazilian spirit in his paintings, something unconsciously barbaric and profound, the fate of a young land - which no great foreigner could ever translate. He is the first classic of our painting. This influence of the land, certainly unconscious, showed itself in a characteristic circumstance I have already mentioned: after his return to Brazil, Almeida Júnior completely changed his color, making it lighter, brighter, more solar".
Luís Martins
MARTINS, Luís. Almeida Júnior. Revista do Arquivo Municipal. São Paulo, Departamento de Cultura, year VI, v. LXVI, 1940, p. 5-22. Cited in ALMEIDA Júnior. São Paulo: Círculo do Livro, 1985, p. 9.
"If we divide Almeida Júnior's production into certain 'European' compositions (studio interiors, for example), those concerned with light, made in Europe or here, (...), portraiture, and the whole regionalist series that so marked his contribution, we will see that the artist, besides showing this empathy with his native surroundings and wishing to project it, also offers us in some canvases an escape from conventionalism, which makes him so appealing to this day: such is the case of Leitura [Reading], a setting built to hold this figure of a woman placidly seated and held, in space and time, under the same sunlight mentioned earlier. Moreover, we are drawn to Almeida Júnior's work as a document of a moment of transition experienced by his generation in São Paulo (...). The artists of the Academy lived on commissions from the government and the bourgeoisie, and Almeida Júnior was no exception: his countless portraits bear witness to his place in the system. However, by fixing his region and its customs as images on so many canvases, and putting them on the market, he bears witness to the emergence of a new society that embraced its own reality by buying these works, at the same time as the longing for Europeanization that was the most striking feature of the period, broken as a fashion only by the influence of Romanticism, which projected Indianism through literature and was a great influence on 19th-century Brazilian painting. (...) How can one see only sentimentality and empathy with his surroundings and fail to recognize that this motivation made his work original? It does not matter that others came later, imitating him with mediocrity in a regionalist academicism. Almeida Júnior remains sensitive to local light, handling it with rare mastery and making formal use of it. (...) But he also seems to visually project a swallowing of Impressionism from the Brazilian culture and sensibility of a time of which Almeida Júnior was, without doubt, the most expressive spokesman".
Aracy Amaral
AMARAL, Aracy. A luz de Almeida Júnior. Revista USP. São Paulo, n. 5, p. 57-60, Mar./Apr./May, 1990.
"I believe that the question of the possibility of a national painting was resolved right here in São Paulo by Almeida Júnior, who may well be adopted as forerunner, guide and model. His paintings, although they do not bear the mark of a genius, stupendous personality beyond criticism, are still the most authentically ours that we can present as an example of assimilated culture and practiced art".
Oswald de Andrade
ANDRADE, Oswald. Em prol de uma pintura nacional. In: ______. Estética e Política. São Paulo: Globo, 1992. [Text originally published in the magazine O Pirralho, São Paulo, Jan. 2, 1915, Lanterna Mágica section].
Solo Exhibitions
1885 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Livraria Garraux
1899 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Enba
Group Exhibitions
1879 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
1880 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
1881 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
1882 - Paris (France) - Paris Salon
1884 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 26th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Aiba
1893 - Chicago (United States) - World's Columbian Exposition - gold medal
1894 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 1st General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1895 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 2nd General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1895 - São Paulo SP - Almeida Júnior and Pedro Alexandrino, at Ateliê Almeida Júnior
1897 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 4th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1897 - São Paulo SP - First public showing of the work Partida da Monção [Departure of the Monsoon], at Rua do Paredão (now Xavier de Toledo)
1898 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 5th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1899 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
Posthumous Exhibitions
1900 - São Paulo SP - Almeida Júnior Exhibition - Tribute by the Committee of Friends, organized by Dr. José Maurício Sampaio Viana, with 130 canvases. The funds raised were intended for the construction of a monument in memory of the artist
1940 - São Paulo SP - Retrospective Exhibition: Works by the Great Masters of Painting and Their Disciples
1946 - São Paulo SP - 12th São Paulo Salon of Fine Arts, at Galeria Prestes Maia
1950 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Um Século da Pintura Brasileira: 1850-1950 [A Century of Brazilian Painting: 1850-1950], at MNBA
1950 - Bahia - Um Século da Pintura Brasileira: 1850-1950
1950 - Pernambuco - Um Século da Pintura Brasileira: 1850-1950
1950 - Paraíba - Um Século da Pintura Brasileira: 1850-1950
1950 - São Paulo SP - Centenary of the Birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the São Paulo State Government
1950 - Itu SP - Centenary of the Birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the São Paulo State Government
1950 - Piracicaba SP - Centenary of the Birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the São Paulo State Government
1950 - Campinas SP - Centenary of the Birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the São Paulo State Government
1950 - Araraquara SP - Centenary of the Birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the São Paulo State Government
1950 - Marília SP - Centenary of the Birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the São Paulo State Government
1950 - Guaratinguetá SP - Centenary of the Birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the São Paulo State Government
1950 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Centenary of the Birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the São Paulo State Government
1953 - São Paulo SP - 2nd São Paulo International Biennial, at Pavilhão dos Estados
1954 - Piracicaba SP - 2nd Piracicaba Salon of Fine Arts, at the Municipal Department of Culture of Piracicaba - honoree
1960 - São Paulo SP - 25th São Paulo Salon of Fine Arts, at Galeria Prestes Maia - honoree
1970 - São Paulo SP - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo 1970, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1976 - Itu SP - 1st Itu Salon of Visual Arts, at Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras Nossa Senhora do Patrocínio - honoree
1976 - São Paulo SP - The Portrait in the Pinacoteca Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1978 - São Paulo SP - The Landscape in the Pinacoteca Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1980 - São Paulo SP - The Brazilian Landscape: 1650-1976, at Paço das Artes
1981 - Curitiba PR - Works from the Collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, at Solar do Rosário
1983 - São Paulo SP - Projeto Releitura, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1984 - Itu SP - Remembering Our Itu Painter on His 134th Birthday, at Carlos Magazine
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, at Fundação Bienal
1985 - São Paulo SP - 100 Obras Itaú, at Masp
1985 - São Paulo SP - 18th São Paulo International Biennial, at Fundação Bienal
1986 - São Paulo SP - Dezenovevinte: uma Virada no Século [Nineteen-Twenty: A Turn of the Century], at Pinacoteca do Estado
1986 - São Paulo SP - Seis Tempos: 80 Anos [Six Times: 80 Years], at Pinacoteca do Estado
1987 - São Paulo SP - Brazil Painted by National and Foreign Masters: 18th - 20th Centuries, at Masp
1988 - São Paulo SP - Brasiliana: Man and Land, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1989 - Fortaleza CE - Brazilian Art of the 19th and 20th Centuries in Ceará Collections: Paintings and Drawings, at Espaço Cultural da Unifor
1990 - Santos SP - Almeida Júnior: 140 Years, at Centro Cultural Patrícia Galvão
1991 - São Paulo SP - Desire in the Academy: 1847-1916, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1992 - Itu SP - Almeida Júnior Week, at Espaço Cultural Almeida Júnior
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Nature: Four Centuries of Art in Brazil, at CCBB
1992 - São Paulo SP - Almeida Júnior at the Pinacoteca, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1994 - São Paulo SP - A Critical Look at the 19th-Century Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1998 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Negotiated Images: Portraits of the Brazilian Elite, at CCBB
1998 - São Paulo SP - São Paulo Iconography in Private Collections, at Museu da Casa Brasileira
2000 - Porto Alegre RS - From Frans Post to Eliseu Visconti: Collection of the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes - RJ, at Margs
2000 - São Paulo SP - 51st São Paulo Salon of Fine Arts, at the Legislative Assembly of the State of São Paulo - honoree
2000 - São Paulo SP - The Human Figure in the Itaú Collection, at Itaú Cultural
2000 - São Paulo SP - Almeida Júnior: An Artist Revisited, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brazil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition, at Fundação Bienal
2001 - São Paulo SP - 30 Masters of Painting in Brazil, at Masp
2001 - São Paulo SP - The Trajectory of Light in Brazilian Art, at Itaú Cultural
2002 - Brasília DF - Barão do Rio Branco: His Work and His Time, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Palácio do Itamaraty
2002 - São Paulo SP - Image and Identity: A Look at History in the Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, at Instituto Cultural Banco Santos
Source: Itaú Cultural
