Joaquim Tenreiro (Melo Guarda, Portugal 1906 - Itapira SP 1992)
Designer, sculptor, painter, printmaker and draftsman.
Joaquim Albuquerque Tenreiro, the son and grandson of cabinetmakers, moves to Brazil with his family at the age of two, settling in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. He returns to Portugal in 1914, where he helps his father with woodwork and begins painting lessons. He lives in Brazil again between 1925 and 1927. In 1928, he moves permanently to Rio de Janeiro, where he attends the drawing course at the Liceu Literário Português and takes courses at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios. In 1931, he joins the Núcleo Bernardelli, a group formed in opposition to the academic teaching of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes - Enba. In the 1940s, he devotes himself to portrait, landscape and still-life painting. Between 1933 and 1943, he works as a furniture designer for the firms Laubisch & Hirth, Leandro Martins and Francisco Gomes. In 1942, he makes his first piece of modern furniture, for the residence of Francisco Inácio Peixoto. In 1943, he sets up his first workshop, Langenbach & Tenreiro, and a few years later opens two furniture stores, first in Rio de Janeiro and later in São Paulo. In the late 1960s, Joaquim Tenreiro ends his activities in furniture design and manufacture to devote himself, for another 20 years, exclusively to the visual arts, mainly sculpture. In 1969, he makes a panel for the Templo Sidon synagogue and, in 1974, two panels for the Senai auditorium, both in Tijuca.
Critical Commentary
Joaquim Tenreiro is born in Melo, a small village in Portugal, and settles in Rio de Janeiro in 1928. The son and grandson of cabinetmakers, he learns to work with wood as a child. In 1929, he studies drawing at the Liceu Literário Português while also studying at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios. In 1931 he takes part in the Núcleo Bernardelli, where his fellow members include the painters José Pancetti (1902 - 1958) and Milton Dacosta (1915 - 1988), among others. Between 1933 and 1943, he works as a designer for the firms Laubisch & Hirth, Leandro Martins and Francisco Gomes, which specialize in French, Italian and Portuguese style furniture - "Louis of every number and Renaissances 400 years late", as Tenreiro ironically puts it. In 1943 he founds the company Langenbach & Tenreiro, putting into practice his concept of modern furniture.
He becomes known as a designer in 1942, when he receives his first furniture commission, for the residence of Francisco Inácio Peixoto in Cataguases, in the interior of Minas Gerais, designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer (1907 - 2012). These are the first pieces conceived, designed and made by him, and they stand out for the sobriety and beauty of their forms and the skillful use of Brazilian woods. They also engage with the purity of Niemeyer's architectural forms.
The Poltrona Leve [Light Armchair] (ca. 1942) - made in a light version, in pau-marfim, and a dark one, in imbuia, with fabric printed by Fayga Ostrower (1920 - 2001) - is one of his best-known pieces, conceived according to the idea that Brazilian furniture should be formally lighter. In Tenreiro's words, a lightness that has nothing to do with weight itself, but with grace and functionality. Attesting to the modernity of furniture made in Brazil, Tenreiro's design is guided by the principles of fitness for purpose and simplicity.
In the Cadeira de Três Pés [Three-Legged Chair] (ca. 1947), he breaks new ground by combining geometry with a very particular use of the colors of Brazilian woods. Made from combinations of woods of different hues (imbuia, roxinho, jacarandá, pau-marfim and cabreúva), this chair displays a refined play of color. The use of color, previously limited to the finishing of furniture, becomes a central concept in his creation. In the Cadeira de Balanço [Rocking Chair] (ca. 1948), he uses cane - a tradition of Brazilian colonial furniture revived by the artist - and jacarandá. Like other Tenreiro pieces from this period, it has a light, luminous appearance, in contrast with the solid, sober furniture he had previously created for the firm Laubisch & Hirth.
In some chairs and armchairs, the artist explores the plastic effects of woven cane and other materials that evoke indigenous weaving and basketry. The use of wood and natural fibers is linked to the need to adapt furniture to the tropical climate. Alongside these organic compositions, other Tenreiro pieces, such as the Cadeira Estrutural [Structural Chair], feature straight lines and regular geometric elements, using structures of both wood (1957) and metal (1961). His deep knowledge of wood allows Tenreiro to achieve the poetic quality of his works.
In the late 1960s, for personal as well as market reasons, he ends his work as a designer and devotes himself mainly to sculpture. He produces reliefs, lattices and columns in polychrome wood, which stand out for combining artistic creation with a broad knowledge of craftsmanship. Some solutions found in the functionality of his furniture are used more freely in sculpture. The color composition techniques used, for example, in the Cadeira de Três Pés, are later taken up in some reliefs, in which the artist explores differences in color, texture and wood grain, as in Círculos [Circles] (1979). Tenreiro's output thus combines the modern qualities of restraint and simplicity with the use of Brazilian materials. It gives his pieces an artistically refined quality, thereby renewing Brazilian furniture design.
Critiques
"By using tacks, nails, veneers, plywood or laminated wood, Tenreiro opens up a vocabulary able to cover a good part of three-dimensional Constructivism, without forcing the limitation of a pictorial composition. The third dimension in his 'plastic constructions' is the bridge giving access to the 'space-time' dimension (proper to sculpture as a thesis), and it is in this highest attribute of a visual proposition that Joaquim Tenreiro's current work acquires spontaneity and fullness and fulfills itself.
Since it demands of the viewer neither biographical connotation nor cabalistic translation to be understood, its communicability rests more firmly on the immediate perception of the rhythm and harmony that emerge from the cutouts, the openings and the reliefs. In the sense of research, Tenreiro identifies with contemporary constructivists; yet, in the character of his craftsmanship, he belongs among those who have come down through the ages, now and then needing someone to help them decipher the date they carry in their soul."
Clarival do Prado Valladares
VALLADARES, Clarival do Prado. Tenreiro. Jornal do Commércio, Rio de Janeiro, 13 jun. 1971.
"Tenreiro, Portuguese by birth and creator of the modern line of Brazilian furniture, merged the tools of his trade as a furniture craftsman with the technical knowledge of an artist who has already produced the most authentic and sensitive painting, usually of the Rio landscape. The composition of his reliefs obeys the basic principles of order, chiaroscuro and the optical fascination that allows illusion and works magic with perspectives. Using wood and cardboard, he explored variations of geometric structures, creating organic undulations, cells that suggest the uninterrupted tissue of the raw material in which nature's figures take shape. The labyrinth, the shadow, the pierced planes, the virtual movement are physical data of this rational and organicist art, which is rooted in tradition and finds strength and justification there. Because nothing stands without the breath of the past, however much future it may hold."
Walmir Ayala
AYALA, Walmir. Esculturas de parede. Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 21 jul. 1972.
"(...) I love his love of materies-matter-wood: I love his love of texture, fiber, tactility, thermicity, ponderability, flexibility, organicity, the goodness of this most noble living life even when felled, but transfigured in its intimate negentropic vocation. I love, in Tenreiro's love for this material, the sense that organizes, strips away and seeks the vocation of this raw material itself, primeval, first, in giving it, in its supremely handcrafted final form, this serene essence of timber, lignum, lumber, legname.
And I love, in his love of wood, its implicit proposals of magnifications, minifications, extensions, continuations, like friezes, like arabesques, like Greek frets, like mottoes - sketched in their radicality, 'finished' suspensively in opere aperte whose continuity lets our reveries wander in multiples, springing from his sculpictorial morphemes or whatever other fine name they may have."
Antônio Houaiss
HOUAISS, Antônio, citado por L. M. Gonzalez. In: GONZALEZ, L. M. Tenreiro na Bonino e Paoli na Studio. Jornal do Commércio, Rio de Janeiro, 23 maio 1975.
"Tenreiro would only devote himself more fully to painting in the 1940s. His painting from that period - portraits, self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes - is characterized by restraint in color and formal simplicity. In the portraits one senses a possible influence of Guignard, an artist Tenreiro always admired. Like his colleagues, he painted the neighborhoods that reached into the Rio landscape: Glória, Santa Teresa, Laranjeiras and Morro do Querosene. Almost dark greens prevail in the landscapes that open onto wide spaces where the houses are lost in the vegetation, or ochers and grays, the half-tones, on the slopes and terraces. Almost without exception, the critics of the 1940s - Flávio de Aquino, Antônio Bento, Mário Barata, Silvia Chalreo, among others - praised these landscapes and others painted in the historic towns of Minas Gerais, such as those of São João del Rei. In the Minas landscapes, critics noted 'the harmonious coloring and accuracy of tones'; in those of Rio, 'his ability to tackle them with ease, capturing well the calm sadness of some hills and outskirts'. Rubem Navarra speaks of his landscapes 'so well composed, with their greens so well described, so poetic, so introverted', and of the 'forced asceticism of his means'. Quirino Campofiorito says nothing different when he observes that in his painting 'there are no cries that can be heard from afar'. Indeed, this restraint, serenity and emotional balance seem to be the artist's main hallmark. In fact, nothing in him shouts, and for that very reason his work neither repels nor shocks the viewer."
Frederico Morais
MORAIS, Frederico. Núcleo Bernardelli: arte brasileira nos anos 30 e 40. Rio de Janeiro: Pinakotheke, 1982.
Testimonials
Ascânio: When did your interest in painting begin?
Tenreiro: I was at the Liceu Literário Português. There were many drawing students, but they weren't only Portuguese. I entered that milieu and then met the Brazilian young men who studied there. All of a sudden I began to have contact with people who drew and were interested in art. I began to get in touch with people who were thinking about the Núcleo Bernardelli: Edson Motta, Bustamante Sá and other young men my age. As I met these people, first through furniture, then at the Liceu Literário Português and later at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios, I became excited about the idea of painting. I would meet the people who would later form the Núcleo; we talked and talked. We were already at the stage of founding the Núcleo. I followed its founding from 1930 to 1931.
Ascânio: Why did the Núcleo come to an end? Was there a problem, a quarrel, or was it just time?
Tenreiro: It wasn't quite that. Modern awareness was asserting itself more and more. Le Corbusier's visit, the construction of the Ministry of Education, the creation of the Modern Salon and other things strengthened modernist awareness. The Núcleo was just an anti-academic reaction, sometimes not even that. By then we had three poles: the academic (represented by the Escola de Belas Artes), the anti-academic and the modern. This made the Núcleo gradually empty out. Within the Núcleo itself, some became academic and others were overtaken by even more modern positions. Some people opened their eyes more to modern things. Pancetti and Milton Dacosta, who was much younger, were perhaps among those who most emphasized the modern approach.
Pedral: Did modern ideas have any influence on the design of your first piece of furniture? What do you consider essential in designing a piece of furniture?
Tenreiro: As for modern ideas, I think there are very modern things that were taken from the Middle Ages. You read Gropius and see that kind of thing. For example, wood, the way of sawing it, is also something linked to the past. He advises the moderns, the artists, the architects to study all this. Certain things from the past have to be shown so that what was done at certain points can be addressed. And it isn't a problem of form, it's a problem of construction. In short, it's the way of making.
TENREIRO, Joaquim. In: Joaquim Tenreiro: o mestre da madeira. Coordenação Ricardo Sardenberg; apresentação Marcos Mendonça, Quirino Campofiorito, Janete Costa. São Paulo: Pinacoteca, 2000. 131 p., il. color. p. 23, 27
[The text is part of an interview held at MAM/RJ and published in the book Joaquim Tenreiro-Madeira Arte Design, Galeria de Arte do Centro Empresarial, Rio, 1985. Ascânio MMM and Antônio José Pedral took part in the excerpt above]
Solo Exhibitions
1946 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - First solo exhibition, at IAB/RJ
1949 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria Domus
1967 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Copacabana
1970 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Bonino
1971 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria Documenta
1973 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at MAM/SP
1975 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Bonino
1978 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at MAM/SP
1983 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Paulo Klabin
1985 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Centro Empresarial do Rio de Janeiro
1988 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Tríade Galeria
1989 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria Millan
Group Exhibitions
1941 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - National Salon of Fine Arts/Modern Division - bronze medal
1944 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 50th National Salon of Fine Arts, at MNBA
1945 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - National Salon of Fine Arts/Modern Division - silver medal
1946 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Painters Go to the People's School, at Enba
1954 - Goiânia GO - Exhibition of the National Congress of Intellectuals
1960 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 9th National Salon of Modern Art, at MAM/RJ - jury mention in drawing
1965 - São Paulo SP - 8th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Fundação Bienal
1967 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 3rd The Face and the Work, at Galeria Ibeu Copacabana
1971 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 9th JB Art Summary, at MAM/RJ
1972 - São Paulo SP - 4th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1972 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Multiplied Art, at Múltipla de Arte
1973 - São Paulo SP - 5th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1974 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The Sea, at Galeria Ibeu Copacabana
1975 - São Paulo SP - 7th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1977 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Retrospective, at MAM/RJ
1978 - São Paulo SP - 10th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1979 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian Sculptors, at Galeria Aktuell
1981 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Retrospective, at IAB/RJ
1982 - São Paulo SP - Núcleo Bernardelli Exhibition: Brazilian Art in the 1930s and 1940s, at Acervo Galeria de Arte
1983 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 4 Sculptor-Painters, 4 Painter-Sculptors, at Galeria Aktuell
1983 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian Self-Portraits, at Galeria de Arte Banerj
1984 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Wood, the Stuff of Art, at MAM/RJ
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: A Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, at Fundação Bienal
1988 - São Paulo SP - 19th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1991 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Retrospective, at Rio Design Center
Posthumous Exhibitions
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 1st On the Way to Niterói: João Sattamini Collection, at Paço Imperial
1993 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil: 100 Years of Modern Art, at MNBA
1993 - São Paulo SP - Modern Drawing in Brazil: Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, at Galeria de Arte do Sesi
1994 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Modern Drawing in Brazil: Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, at MAM/RJ
1994 - São Paulo SP - Bienal Brasil Século XX, at Fundação Bienal
1996 - Niterói RJ - Brazilian Contemporary Art in the João Sattamini Collection, at MAC/Niterói
1997 - Niterói RJ - Between Sculptures and Objects, at MAC/Niterói
1997 - São Paulo SP - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Itaú Cultural
1998 - Belo Horizonte MG - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Itaú Cultural
1998 - Brasília DF - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Galeria Itaú Cultural
1998 - Niterói RJ - Mirror of the Biennial, at MAC/Niterói
1998 - Niterói RJ - Solo, at MAC/Niterói
1998 - Penápolis SP - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Galeria Itaú Cultural
1998 - São Paulo SP - Constructive Art in Brazil: Adolpho Leirner Collection, at MAM/SP
1998 - São Paulo SP - Multiples, at Valu Oria Galeria de Arte
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Constructive Art in Brazil: Adolpho Leirner Collection, at MAM/RJ
1999 - São Paulo SP - The 1950s and Their Involvements, at Jô Slaviero Galeria de Arte
2000 - Niterói RJ - Sattamini Collection: From Materials to Internal Differences, at MAC/Niterói
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - When Brazil Was Modern: Visual Arts in Rio de Janeiro from 1905 to 1960, at Paço Imperial
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brasil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition, at Fundação Bienal
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Sculpture: From the Pinacoteca to the Jardim da Luz, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2002 - Brasília DF - JK - An Aesthetic Adventure, at Conjunto Cultural da Caixa
2003 - São Paulo SP - The Art Behind Art: Where Artworks Are Kept and How They Travel, at MAM/SP
2003 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria de Arte Jô Slaviero
2004 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 30 Artists, at Mercedes Viegas Escritório de Arte
Source: Itaú Cultural
