Lula Cardoso Ayres (Recife PE 1910 - idem 1987)
Lula Cardoso Ayres was a multifaceted Brazilian artist who worked as a painter, photographer, draftsman, illustrator, muralist and set designer. His work stands out for its appreciation of the popular culture of the Brazilian Northeast and for its constant experimentation between figuration and abstraction, establishing Lula Cardoso Ayres as one of the most important names in 20th-century Brazilian art.
Lula Cardoso Ayres began his artistic training studying drawing and painting with Heinrich Moser between 1922 and 1924. In 1925, he traveled to Paris, where he visited the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, frequented museums and studios, came into contact with artists such as Maurice Denis and got to know the main movements of European modern art at first hand. He returned to Brazil in 1926.
In Rio de Janeiro, Lula Cardoso Ayres set up a studio in the Laranjeiras neighborhood, attended the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes and studied life drawing with Rodolfo Amoedo. He also trained in the studio of Carlos Chambelland. During this period, he grew close to Candido Portinari, with whom he formed a friendship. He worked professionally as a set designer and illustrator, contributing to the magazine Para Todos.
In 1932, Lula Cardoso Ayres returned to Pernambuco to manage the family sugar mill, living in the countryside until 1944. During this period, he traveled through villages in the region and recorded customs, festivities and cultural expressions, producing drawings and an extensive photographic series. His interest in popular ceramics directly influenced his painting and watercolors.
In 1934, Lula Cardoso Ayres took part in the Afro-Brazilian Congress in Recife, where he met important intellectuals and artists such as Cícero Dias, Ulysses Pernambucano and Gilberto Freyre, with whom he maintained a strong intellectual bond.
After a crisis in the family business in 1945, Lula Cardoso Ayres moved to Recife and began to live exclusively from his art. During this period, he produced murals and panels in several Brazilian cities, including a notable work at Guararapes Airport. He also illustrated works by authors such as Manuel Bandeira and Ascenso Ferreira. In 1947, he founded a drawing course for children, and he taught at the Federal University of Pernambuco.
In the 1950s, Lula Cardoso Ayres's work moved toward abstraction, and he took part in the first editions of the Bienal de São Paulo. In 1960, he held a retrospective exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, organized by Pietro Maria Bardi and focused on his most recent production.
From the mid-1960s, Lula Cardoso Ayres returned to figuration, exploring themes such as the female universe, animals and fantastic figures. In 1984, he produced panels for the Recife metro. After his death, he was honored by the local art community, consolidating Lula Cardoso Ayres's legacy as one of the leading representatives of the art of Pernambuco and of Brazil.
Critical Commentary
Lula Cardoso Ayres's artistic training began early, at the age of 12, working as an assistant to the German artist Heinrich Moser in Recife, from whom he acquired his first knowledge of artistic techniques.
He traveled to Paris, where he spent a year, and after returning in 1926 he furthered his training by studying with Carlos Chambelland; from that experience he remembered the drawing exercises with plaster casts, which gave him mastery of half-tones in rendering volume.
His professional entry into the art world came initially through illustration, an activity he pursued intensively in the 1930s in Rio de Janeiro and took up again in the 1940s in Recife. His graphic work in Rio, which often portrays the female figure and the new achievements of modernity, shows the influence of Art Deco.
In 1931, he created the setting for the play O Espelho de Próspero [Prospero's Mirror], responsible for designing the panels, choosing the furniture and decorating. The non-realistic, subjective approach of his set design, a daring one by the standards of the time, attracted the interest of theater figures such as Paschoal Carlos Magno and Renato Viana, who published praise of the artist in the press. Another work he carried out in this field was a large panel for the carnival of the Clube Internacional do Recife, in 1941, depicting scenes of maracatu, the procession of kings and other popular festivities.
As part of his artistic research, Ayres began photographing various aspects of the life of rural populations. During the 1930s and 1940s, his anthropological interest in ways of life and rituals intensified, partly stimulated by his friendship with the poet Ascenso Ferreira and the sociologist Gilberto Freyre. He produced a large number of photographs as well as many drawings of popular expressions such as bumba meu boi, maracatu, carnival, candomblé rituals and the rituals of indigenous peoples. Some of these photographs are now in the collection of the Museu do Homem do Nordeste.
From his experience in the interior of Pernambuco, what interested him above all was popular ceramics. On encountering this production, he sought to transfer the colors and forms of the clay sculptures to drawing and painting. His first drawings seeking to represent the form and structure of the clay figurines date from 1940. For the critic Clarival do Prado Valladares, author of a careful study of the artist, the discovery of popular ceramics greatly guided Ayres's production and was the path by which he approached synthetic cubism. This reference to ceramics can be seen in the massive forms of the human figure, the rounded volumes of the vegetation and the stillness of the animals in works such as the oils on canvas Representação do Bumba-Meu-Boi [Representation of Bumba-Meu-Boi] and Noivado no Copiar [Engagement on the Porch] and the watercolors Bolo de Noiva [Wedding Cake] and Passeio a Cavalo [Horseback Ride], all from 1943.
In a group of works produced between 1945 and 1946, Ayres explores phantasmagoria and hauntings. This universe, which refers to the popular tales and beliefs of Recife, appears in works such as Capela Mal Assombrada [Haunted Chapel], Sofá Mal-Assombrado [Haunted Sofa], Vestindo a Noiva [Dressing the Bride] and Enterro [Burial], among others.
His painting from the mid- to late 1940s is marked by canvases with social themes, depicting regional figures and landscapes, such as Retirantes [Migrants], Meninas Pedindo Esmola [Girls Begging] and Cego Violeiro [Blind Guitar Player], all from 1947, shown in the Itamaraty retrospective held in the 1970s, which highlighted this facet of the artist. Figures of the Recife carnival, frevo, maracatu and bumba meu boi, as well as sugarcane cutters, are frequently portrayed in his paintings.
In the early 1950s, his production moved toward abstraction, though without entirely giving up figuration. This change of language is partly explained by the impact, acknowledged by the artist, of the first editions of the Bienal de São Paulo. The canvases Ex-Votos and Três Ex-Votos [Three Ex-Votos], made in 1951, are examples of the particular solution the artist explored in this phase, working on the figure with the aim of arriving at its synthesis. In tempera works such as Dançarinas [Dancers] and Pássaro Vermelho [Red Bird], both from 1952, color gains prominence over drawing. In canvases such as Rei e Rainha do Maracatu [King and Queen of Maracatu], from 1959, the artist achieves the synthesis of the figures through geometric schematization. Ayres returned to the theme in Rainha do Maracatu [Queen of Maracatu], from 1972, an oil on canvas in the collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand - Masp, with a more figurative treatment.
During the following decade, Ayres again painted mysterious female figures, in canvases such as Vulto na Porta [Figure in the Doorway] and Mulheres com Manto [Women with Cloaks], produced in 1964. In the 1970s, he devoted himself mainly to painting the female figure of the mulata and the morena, in canvases such as Cabeça de Mulata [Head of a Mulata], from 1970, in which the woman is portrayed with hollow eyes and voluminous long hair.
From the mid-1970s, he produced a number of paintings in acrylic featuring imaginary animals. In these works, he uses strong, contrasting colors and broad black outlines that give shape to creatures such as birds, rheas, oxen and other invented beings.
Most of his works can be seen at the Instituto Cultural Lula Cardoso Ayres in Jaboatão dos Guararapes, Pernambuco. Created in 1993 on the family's initiative, the institute holds more than 300 works by the artist, including paintings, drawings, photographs, illustrations and graphic works, as well as studies and designs for his sets and murals.
Critiques
"In little more than forty years, Lula Cardoso Ayres's work has traveled the path that led him from drawing on the nearest popular source to the experience of a disinterested abstraction of absolute purity, and, in recent years, back into figuration with lyrically surrealist atmospheres. However, these phases should not be seen as sudden and successive events, but as manifestations present simultaneously, to different degrees, at every moment of his drawing and painting. Only in the initial phase, resulting from his life in the interior of Pernambuco and his research into the genuine popular ceramics produced there, would it be possible to find just one of the three directions on its own; Lula then wished to transfer to his work, in a recreation at once realistic and transfiguring, certain colors, volumes and scenes typical of those rough clay sculptures, adapting them to the plane of paper or canvas. But soon afterward two new stylistic elements would be added to that starting point: on the one hand, the use of the fantastic, which belongs to so many areas of popular religious expression; on the other, the move toward analogical abstraction, at times approaching the childlike lyrical devices characteristic of Miró. Both tendencies served him, for example, to depict the northeastern bumba-meu-boi in different ways and at not very distant times, dramatizing it in strange luminosities in the first case and reducing it to almost graphic syntheses in the second".
Roberto Pontual
PONTUAL, Roberto. In: ______. Arte/Brasil/hoje: 50 anos depois. São Paulo: Collectio, 1973.
Solo Exhibitions
1946 - Recife PE - Exhibition, at Faculdade de Direito do Recife
1946 - São Paulo SP - Exhibition, at Galeria Itapetininga
1946 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Exhibition, at MEC
1952 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at MAM/RJ
1960 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Masp
1961 - Salvador BA - Solo, at MAM/BA
1962 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Bonino
1966 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria Oca
1968 - Recife PE - Retrospective, at Palácio do Governo
1968 - Salvador BA - Solo, at MAM/BA
1968 - Salvador BA - Solo, at Teatro Castro Alves
Group Exhibitions
1928 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 35th General Exhibition of Fine Arts, at Enba
1934 - Recife PE - 1st Afro-Brazilian Congress, organized by Gilberto Freyre
1951 - São Paulo SP - 1st Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Pavilhão do Trianon
1952 - Paris (France) - Salon de Mai
1952 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Exhibition of Brazilian Artists, at MAM/RJ
1953 - São Paulo SP - 2nd Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Pavilhão dos Estados
1955 - São Paulo SP - 3rd Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Pavilhão das Nações
1960 - Recife PE - Contemporary Pernambuco Painters, at Centro de Artes e Comunicação da Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
1960 - São Paulo SP - Leirner Collection, at Galeria de Arte das Folhas
1961 - São Paulo SP - 6th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Pavilhão Ciccilo Matarazzo Sobrinho
1962 - São Paulo SP - Selection of Brazilian Artworks from the Ernesto Wolf Collection, at MAM/SP
1962 - Washington (United States) - Group show, at União Pan-Americana
1969 - São Paulo SP - Inaugural group show of the Paço das Artes
1972 - Brasília DF - Retrospective of 50 Years of Work, at Palácio do Itamaraty
1972 - São Paulo SP - Art/Brazil/Today: 50 Years Later, at Galeria da Collectio
1972 - São Paulo SP - The Week of '22: Antecedents and Consequences, at Masp
1974 - São Paulo SP - Time of the Modernists, at Masp
1976 - São Paulo SP - Drawing in Pernambuco, at Galeria Nara Roesler
1982 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Brazil 60 Years of Modern Art: Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, at Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão
1982 - London (England) - Brazil 60 Years of Modern Art: Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, at Barbican Art Gallery
1982 - Penápolis SP - 5th Noroeste Visual Arts Salon, at Fundação Educacional de Penápolis. Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Penápolis
1982 - São Paulo SP - From Modernism to the Bienal, at MAM/SP
1983 - Recife PE - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves], at Fundação Joaquim Nabuco
1984 - Aracaju SE - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves]
1984 - Brasília DF - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves]
1984 - Lisbon (Portugal) - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves], at Museu Gulbenkian da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
1984 - Salvador BA - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves]
1984 - São Paulo SP - Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection: Portrait and Self-Portrait of Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: A Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, at Fundação Bienal
1984 - Vitória ES - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves]
1986 - Brasília DF - Pernambuco Artists in Brasília, at Galeria de Arte da ECT
1986 - São Paulo SP - Time of Maturity, at Ranulpho Galeria de Arte
1987 - São Paulo SP - The Craft of Art: Painting, at Sesc
1999 - São Paulo SP - Everyday/Art. Consumption - Metamorphosis of Consumption, at Itaú Cultural
Posthumous Exhibitions
1989 - São Paulo SP - Color of Pernambuco, at Ranulpho Galeria de Arte
1989 - Recife PE - Solo, at Artefacto Nordeste
1991 - Recife PE - Reviving Lula Cardoso Ayres Retrospective, at Galeria Vicente do Rego Monteiro da Fundação Joaquim Nabuco
1991 - Recife PE - Reviving Lula Cardoso Ayres, at Galeria Vicente do Rego Monteiro/Fundação Joaquim Nabuco
1993 - Recife PE - Solo, at Ranulpho Galeria de Arte
1994 - Recife PE - Tribute to the artist on Visual Artist's Day, at Associação dos Artistas Plásticos Profissionais
1999 - São Paulo SP - Everyday/Art. Consumption, at Itaú Cultural
2000 - Recife PE - Ateliê Pernambuco: Tribute to Bajado and the Mamam Collection, at Mamam
2001 - Brasília DF - Collections of Brazil, at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
2003 - Recife PE - See Again/See the New, at Mamam
2003 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Caixa Treasures: Brazilian Modern Art in the Caixa Collection, at Conjunto Cultural da Caixa
Source: Itaú Cultural
