Almeida Júnior (ITU SP 1850 - Piracicaba SP 1899)
Almeida Júnior was a Brazilian painter and draftsman. He joined the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (AIBA) in 1869, where he took drawing classes with Jules Le Chevrel (ca. 1810–1872) and painting with Victor Meirelles (1832–1903). He completed his studies in 1874, but did not compete for the travel award and returned to Itu. In 1875, he opened a studio and began to act as a portraitist and drawing teacher. During a visit to the interior of São Paulo, Emperor Dom Pedro II (1825–1891) was impressed by his work and awarded him a scholarship to Europe.
He lived in Paris between 1876 and 1882, where he studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, being a student of Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889). During his stay in the French capital, he participated in four editions of the Salon Officiel des Artistes Français. He returned to Brazil in 1882 and exhibited in Aiba the works produced in Paris. In 1883, he installed a studio in São Paulo. In 1886, he received an invitation from Victor Meirelles to fill his position at Aiba as a professor of historical painting, but preferred to remain in São Paulo. customs, colors and regional luminosity, in contrast to the Eurocentric tradition of academic painting. When setting up his studio in São Paulo, in 1883, he brought to the city an artistic maturation and contributed to the formation of new artists, among them Pedro Alexandrino (1856–1942).
Critical Commentary
Almeida Júnior reveals from an early age to design and painting and at the age of 19 (1869) part of Itu, his hometown, for Rio de Janeiro, with the financial help of relatives and friends, in order to join the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts - Aiba. During his stay in this institution, he follows the traditional way of training every academic painter: he attends the two years of mandatory classes in the drawing discipline, considered a preliminary for the learning of painting. Subsequently, he takes specific subjects such as geometric and figurative design, living model, historical painting, anatomy and physiology of passions, aesthetics and applied mathematics. Among his teachers are Jules Le Chevrel (ca.1810 - 1872) and Victor Meirelles (1832 - 1903). He finished his studies in 1874, standing out for the quality of the work carried out, as evidenced by the decorations received in his training in the disciplines Figurative Design, Historical Painting and Vivo Modelo and the Gold Medal with the Belizário Esmolando canvas, in the last participation as a student in the General Exhibition of Fine Arts da Aiba.
Without competing for the travel award, Almeida Júnior returns to Itu, São Paulo, in early 1875. Offers his services in his own studio as a drawing teacher and painter. It makes a series of orders, mainly portraits. Among them, that of Antônio Queiroz Telles, president of the Mogiana Railroad and Antônio Pinheiro de Ulhoa Cintra, vice president of São Paulo. These works are the main responsible for the overseas improvement scholarship offered to the artist by Emperor Dom Pedro II (1825 - 1891).
At the Emperor's expense, he spends the year 1877 attending drawing classes in Paris, joining the traditional École National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts [Escola Nacional Superior de Belas Artes] in 1878. She takes a three-year course, with the main professor Alexandre Cabanel (1823 - 1889), one of the greatest enemies of the Impressionists. This stay serves more to ratify the values learned in AIBA and to improve technical (domain of design and composition geometry, for example) than to make a change in the artistic orientation of Almeida Júnior. Participates in the Salon Officiel des Artistes Français from 1879 to 1882, presenting works evaluated as important in their production. for example, in the 1880s Hall exposes Brazilian overthrow (1879), considered a precursor of the set of tables with a regionalist theme (however, still far from the realistic character and the luminosity of the "caipiras" paintings). Brazil in 1882 and holds an exhibition of his European works in AIBA. By installing this year atelier in São Paulo, he becomes one of those responsible for the maturation of the São Paulo artistic milieu, as in addition to establishing a more modern relationship with the local market, promoting exclusive vernissages for the press and potential buyers or writing informative texts on the tables, it contributes to the formation of new generations of artists, having been Pedro Alexandrino (1856 - 1942) the most successful among them.
In concomitant with other genres of painting, Almeida Júnior performs in the last decade of his life the set of canvases with a regionalist theme for which he would definitely conquer his place in the history of Brazilian art. In paintings such as rednecks negaceando (1888), redneck chopping tobacco (1893), interrupted amalation (1894), squeezing the lumbilho (1895), the guitar player (1899) reveals the admiration for Non-academic painters but of great importance in 19th century France, with 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 interior man without the filter of the universalist formulas of academic painting. Therefore, he does not hesitate to portray the redneck in his poor and simple environment, in his calm and sad life, without ever ridiculing him or transforming him into a picturesque character.
However, it is necessary to remember that despite the innovations introduced in these canvases, starting with the theme, but telling the solar luminosity present in the lightening of the palette and the freer gesture, Almeida Júnior does not abandon the drawing lessons and geometric composition of his academic training.
his caipira paintings and his genre painting, in general With scenes from the bourgeois daily life (for example reading, from 1892) they are well accepted by the bourgeoisie committed to the construction of an image and history for themselves, the history of the people of São Paulo. But it is worth mentioning that almost all contemporary art critics and later the artist celebrate in it what they see to be a first rapture of the national character in Brazilian painting, even intellectuals on sides as opposite as is the case of Monteiro Lobato (1882 - 1948) and Mário de Andrade (1893 - 1945). The exception appears in the Rio de Janeiro critic Gonzaga Duque (1863 - 1911) in a text about the 1904 salon, in which he regrets the fact that Almeida Júnior became a pasty, mannered and tough painter, criticizing the "Intermittent claim to base a national art with the painting of customs".
Acervos
Banca Itaú S.A. - São Paulo SP
Collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo/Brazil - São Paulo Paulo SP
Collection of the Museu Paulista - São Paulo SP
Igreja Matriz de Nossa Senhora da Candelária - Itu SP
Museum of Anthropology of the Vale do Paraíba - Jacareí SP
São Paulo Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand - MASP - São Paulo SP
National Museum of Fine Arts - MNBA - Rio de Janeiro RJ
Criticism
"The dawn of the following day with Almeida Junior, who carries a new and true thing by his hands - naturalism. We Courbet's mission in France paints, not man, but a man - the son of the earth, and thereby creates national painting as opposed to the dominant international. He comes from France, where he had perfected his studies, he brings with him biblical pictures different from everything else, very personal, revealing an extremely lucid understanding of true art. The escape to Egypt is a very humble carpenter fleeing through a real sand, with a real wife and son, riding a real donkey. Change the costumes to those figures, dress them in our own way, give them our landscape as an environment, and the biblical picture will remain true: it is always a husband, the wife and little boy, all very humane, who flee to save life. If the painter was like that in a picture of this order, a genre in which, in common, the art shipwrecks in the sea of anti-human and anti-natural conventionalism, remains thus human and natural, carefree about fashions and schools, until the end of his career. There is no work more than yours. Almeida Júnior was never but the individual; Paulista in the species; Brazilian in the genre".
Monteiro Lobato
LOBATO, Monteiro. Almeida Junior. In: ______. Ideas by Jéca Tatú. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1956. p. 79 (Complete works by Monteiro Lobato, 4). [Text published for the first time in Revista do Brasil, São Paulo, n. 13, v. 2 Jan.1917, p. 33-51.]
"Already in the last monarchical days, the Brazilian plastic intelligence begins to worry about its national functionality, somehow announcing modern times. The influence of the European technique still predominates, and will prevail to this day, but the artists of greater value turn to the expression of the land and of man. Teles Júnior from Pernambuco creates northeastern landscapes of a vigorous and faithful character; And in São Paulo, Almeida Júnior, in an open struggle with the lights of our day and the color of the land that his Parisian palette had not learned, firmly analyzes the customs and type of the redneck. But this was already the Republic, and what they were doing in music echoes, with the same hesitations and intermittent happiness, Alexandre Levi and Alberto Nepomuceno".
Mário de Andrade
ANDRADE, Mário. The plastic arts in Brazil. Magazine of the Academia Paulista de Letras, year VII, n. 26, 12 June 1944, p. 27. Cited in the publication Almeida Júnior: Vida e Obra. São Paulo: Art Editora, 1979, p. 30.
"We can say that he did not have the necessary strength to be impressed by the vanguard movement in Europe, dominated as his sensitivity was found by the academic advisors of both land and France. Almeida Júnior would therefore have lacked a divinatory capacity for the transformation (...). It is hardly possible to speak of an originality, since it, which there is, consists only of an anecdotal facet, a question of the treatment of the human environment, but singularly non-documentary, since there is no document where there is no concern of fidelity, but the beautiful illustration of the subject. Almeida Júnior will, therefore, be the painter, in his caipira phase, of the Brazilian subject in the light not of euphoric conditions of an ambient economy, but of a happy, triumphant temperament, treating the picturesque of the environment with the freedom of those who have no greater concerns than a chromaticism and a material human ethnically unused until then".
Geraldo Ferraz
FERRAZ, Geraldo. Reviews on the painting by Almeida Júnior - in front of the centenary of an artist. Jornal de Noticias, Rio de Janeiro, May 7 1950. Cited in the publication Almeida Júnior: Life and Work. São Paulo: Art Editora, 1979, pp. 37-38.
"It is not possible to understand the Brazilian painting prior to modernism without a reference to its performance, which helped to suppress the monumentality of the works, to renew the subjects and the characters, to organically link the figures to the environment and perhaps reformulate the treatment of light. It is with him that the Brazilian man enters the painting for the first time (...). Criticism is in agreement when it points to it as an indisputable divisive mark of Brazilian painting, but it differs when it comes to locating where, precisely, the innovation would have been processed. That is, the reformulation it caused in the Code took place at the level of the themes, establishing in painting a certain regionalism, or at the level of chromatic and luminous notation, transposing the much-vaunted Brazilian light to the canvas? (...) What did, in the wake of the impressionists not, as has been said, but of secondary academic painters, was an accommodation between two different systems of notation, which coexisted at the same time in Europe, one innovative, another retrograde, adapting them to reality Brazilian".
Gilda de Mello e Souza
SOUZA, Gilda de Mello E. Contemporary Brazilian painting: the precursors. Discourse. São Paulo, Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo, year V, n.5, 1974, p. 119-29. cited in the publication Almeida Júnior: Life and Work. São Paulo: Art Editora, 1979, p. 45.
"In some canvases held in São Paulo cleared the palette, which was an innovation for the environment, although he did not go to Europe, as Gilda de Mello and Souza observed, among others, as many French artists were in the middle of the way, between impressionist innovations and traditional solutions. This statement is opposed, therefore, to 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 received a more vivid and luminous color in contact with the tropical nature of Brazil. Would it, however, be a Brazilian influence, or the use of French lessons, combined with an adaptation to the taste of the people of their land, endorsed in their various manifestations (houses, clothes...)? Almeida Júnior, by portraying the nature of his country, denotes more the application of intellectualized and absorbed theories than an intoxication with the sun and colorful of the swidden, which would make it more emotional and free".
Maria Cecília França Lourenço
LOURENÇO, Maria Cecília França. Resolding Almeida Júnior. 1980. 427 F. Dissertation (Master's) - School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo - ECA/USP, 1980.
"In Almeida Júnior we feel, in his last works, laziness, dengue, sleepy delivery in the face of the punishment of the sun - an irresistible suggestion of cornfields burning in the afternoons of summer, bambois leaning over the soft water of the lakes and a melancholy song of cicada (...) there is an unequivocal Brazilian spirit in its paintings, something of an unconsciously barbaric and profound, a fatality of a young land - that no great foreigner would achieve translate. It is the first classic of our painting. This influence of the Earth, certainly unconscious, manifested itself in a characteristic circumstance to which I have already mentioned: after his return to Brazil, Almeida Júnior completely changed his color, making it lighter, brighter, more solar". Martins
MARTINS, Luís. Almeida Júnior. Revista do Arquivo Municipal. São Paulo, Department of Culture, Year VI, V. LXVI, 1940, p. 5-22. Cited in the publication Almeida Júnior. São Paulo: Círculo do Livro, 1985, p. 9.
"If we divide Almeida Júnior's production between certain 'European' compositions (atelier interiors, for example), those of concern for light, carried out in Europe or right here, (...), The portrait, and the entire regionalist series that marked his contribution so much, we will see that the artist, in addition to presenting this empathy with his surroundings and wishing to project it, also offers us on some canvases an escape from conventionalism, which makes him so attractive to this day: it is the case of Reading, an environment built to welcome this figure of a woman placidly sitting and retained, in space and time, under the same solarization mentioned before. In addition, he attracts in Almeida Júnior his work as a document of a moment of transition experienced by his generation in São Paulo (...). The Academy's artists lived on ordering from the government and the bourgeoisie, and Almeida Júnior was no exception: the countless portraits there are witnessing their insertion in the system. However, by fixing as an image his region, his customs, on so many screens, putting them on the market, he is witnessing the opening of a new society that assumes its own reality, buying these works, simultaneously with the desire for Europeanization that was the most striking data of time, only Broken as a fad by the influence of the romanticism that projected indigenism through literature, a great influence on Brazilian painting of the 19th century. (...) How can you just see sentimentality and empathy with your surroundings and not recognize that this motivation made you original as a work? It doesn't matter that others came later, imitating him with mediocrity in a regionalist academy. Almeida Júnior remains sensitive to the local light, manipulating it with rare mastery by taking it from the formal point of view. (...) but it also seems to visually project a swallowing of Impressionism from the Brazilian culture and sensitivity of a time when Almeida Júnior was, without a doubt, the most expressive spokesperson".
Aracy Amaral
AMARAL, Aracy. A Luz de Almeida Júnior. Revista USP. São Paulo, n. 5, p. 57-60, Mar. /Apr. /Maio, 1990.
"I believe that the question of possibility From a national painting it was in São Paulo, even resolved by Almeida Júnior, who can very well adopt as a precursor, referrer and model. Its paintings, although they do not carry the mark of a genius personality, stupendous, out of criticism, are still what we can present of our most as an example of used culture and rehearsed art".
Oswald de Andrade
ANDRADE, Oswald. In favor of a national painting. In: ______. Aesthetics and Politics. São Paulo: Globo, 1992. [Text published originally in O Pirralho magazine. São Paulo, 2 Jan. 1915, Magic Lantern Section]
Individual exhibitions
1885 - São Paulo SP - Individual, at Livraria Garraux
1899 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Individual, at Enba
Collective 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) - Colombian International Exhibition - Medal Gold
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 exhibition of the work Departa da Monção, at Rua do Paredão (Current 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 from the Commission of Friends, organized by Dr. José Maurício Sampaio Viana, with 130 canvases. The importance raised is intended for the construction of a monument in memory of the artist
1940 - São Paulo SP - Retrospective Exhibition: Works of the Great Masters of Painting and His Disciples
1946 - São Paulo SP - 12th Salão Paulista de Belas Artes, at the Prestes Maia
1950 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - A century of Brazilian painting: 1850-1950, at MNBA
1950 - Bahia - A century of Brazilian painting: 1850-1950
1950 - Pernambuco - A century of Brazilian painting: 1850-1950
1950 - Paraíba - A century of Brazilian painting: 1850-1950
1950 - São Paulo SP - Centenary of Nascimento de Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the Government of the State of São Paulo
1950 - Itu SP - Centenary of the birth of Almeida Júnior - Commemoration organized by the Government of the State of São Paulo
1950 - Piracicaba SP - Centenary of the birth of Almeida Júnior - Commemoration organized by the Government of the State of São Paulo
1950 - Campinas SP - Centenary of the birth of Almeida Júnior - Commemoration organized by the Government of the State of São Paulo
1950 - Araraquara  SP - Centenary of the birth of Almeida Júnior - Commemoration organized by the Government of the State of São Paulo
1950 - Marília SP - Centenary of the birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the Government of the State of São Paulo
1950 - Guaratinguetá SP - Centenary of the birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the Government of the State of São Paulo
1950 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Centenary of the birth of Almeida Júnior - commemoration organized by the Government of the State of São Paulo
1953 - São Paulo SP - 2nd International Biennial of São Paulo, in the Pavilion of States
1954 - Piracicaba SP - 2nd Salão de Belas Artes de Piracicaba, at the Municipal Department of Culture of Piracicaba - honored
1960 - São Paulo SP - 25th São Paulo Salon of Fine Arts, Prestes Maia Gallery - Honored
1970 - São Paulo SP - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo 1970, at the Pinacoteca do Estado
1976 - Itu SP - 1st Salon of Plastic Arts of Itu, Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters Nossa Senhora do Patrocínio - Honored
1976 - São Paulo SP - The portrait in the Pinacoteca Collection, at the Pinacoteca do Estado
1978 - São Paulo SP - The landscape in the collection of Pinacoteca, at the Pinacoteca do Estado
1980 - São Paulo SP - The Brazilian landscape: 1650-1976, at the 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 Ituano 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 the Bienal Foundation
1986 - São Paulo SP - 19th century: a turn in the century, at the Pinacoteca do Estado
1986 - São Paulo SP - six times: 80 years, at the 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, in Pinacoteca do Estado
1989 - Fortaleza CE - Brazilian art of the 19th and 20th centuries in the Ceará collections: paintings and drawings, at the Unifor Cultural Space
1990 - Santos SP - Almeida Júnior: 140 years old, at the Centro Cultural Patrícia Galvão
1991 - São Paulo SP - Desire at the Academy: 1847-1916, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1992 - Itu SP - Almeida Júnior Week, at the Almeida Júnior Cultural Space 1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Nature: Four centuries of art in Brazil, at the CCBB
1992 - São Paulo SP - Almeida Júnior at the Pinacoteca, at the Pinacoteca do Estado
1994 - São Paulo SP - Um Olhar Critical about the 19th century collection, at the Pinacoteca do Estado
1998 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Negotiated Images: Portraits of the Brazilian Elite, at the CCBB
1998 - São Paulo SP - São Paulo iconography in private collections, in the Brazilian House Museum
2000 - Porto Alegre RS - From Frans Post to Eliseu Visconti: Collection National Museum of Fine Arts - RJ, at Margs
2000 - São Paulo SP - 51st São Paulo Salon of Fine Arts, At the Legislative Assembly of the State of São Paulo - Honored
2000 - São Paulo SP - The human figure in the Itaú Cultural Collection
2000 - São Paulo SP - Almeida Júnior: a revisited artist, at the Pinacoteca do State
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 - 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 the history in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, at the Banco Santos Cultural Institute
Source: Itaú Cultural
