Candido Portinari

Candido Portinari (December 29, 1903 – February 6, 1962) was a Brazilian painter. He is considered one of the most important Brazilian painters as well as a prominent and influential practitioner of the neo-realism style in painting. Portinari painted more than five thousand canvases, from small sketches to monumental works such as the Guerra e Paz panels, which were donated to the United Nations Headquarters in 1956. Portinari developed a social preoccupation throughout his oeuvre and maintained an active life in the Brazilian cultural and political worlds. Born to Giovan Battista Portinari and Domenica Torquato, Italian immigrants from Chiampo Vicenza, Veneto, in a coffee plantation near Brodowski, in São Paulo. Growing up on a coffee plantation of dark soil and blue sky, Portinari gained his inspiration from the homeland he loved. In the majority of his later paintings, murals and frescoes, he used the colour blue and many browns and reds because this was the color of his home. One of Portinari's beginner jobs was drawing photographs where he closely captured the exact image using paints and then enlarging the photos. These sold successfully because the resemblance was astounding. Portinari then studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (National School of Fine Arts) in Rio de Janeiro. In 1923, 1925 and 1927 Portinari won prizes at the Salon, and in 1928 he got a scholarship offered by the Brazilian government to study in Europe for three years. During his time in Europe Portinari did little painting, but studied the works of various European artists, visited museums, and met his future wife, Maria Martinelli. He came back to Brazil fully set on conveying the true Brazilian lifestyle and capturing the pain and struggles of his people through his art. After his return, Portinari began portraying the reality of Brazil, from its natural beauties to the harsh lives of the country's most impoverished populations, pursuing an amalgamation of his academic formation with the modernist avant-gardes.