Unique Brazilian Modernism art exhibition takes over Swiss capital

An unprecedented exhibition of 130 key works of art at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern seeks to insert Brazilian artistic production from the first half of the 20th century into the grand narrative of “global modernism”. Switzerland's participation in the Brazilian modernist adventure was first as a guide, and now as a host. The guide was the writer Blaise Cendrars, who was born Swiss (in 1887) but preferred to die French (in 1961), when he convinced a group of Brazilian artists – Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade and Mario de Andrade, among others – to get to know their own country. The worldview of this small clique of São Paulo elite at the time was restricted, on the one hand to coffee plantations in the countryside and palaces in the capital, and on the other hand to Europe and Paris. In 1924, Cendrars took them not only to Rio de Janeiro, but to the favelas and the carnival. They then set off to explore the neighbouring state of Minas Gerais, where they discovered the local ...