MASP

Candido Portinari is a key name of Brazilian modernism, and his Coffee Agricultural Worker is one of his most emblematic paintings. It portrays a strong black man, with oversized feet and hands, represented here barefoot and wearing loose white pants and red shirt, holding a hoe. The many symbolisms and readings stemming from this representation are ambiguous: while on the one hand the man is linked to the world of manual labor, of physical strength, of soil and agriculture (perversely, to the detriment of intellectual work), he also rises as the power of labor to transform the land. He is the one responsible for the work we see on the horizon of the painting’s background, the coffee plantation, which in the 1930s was the main Brazilian export—even though he does not own it himself. His gigantic hands and fee convey the strength of his power in a dignified, strong and virile masculine figure, becoming an emblem of national identity, even though it is through the prism of modern art, a stereotypical view of blacks made through the hands of a white painter of Italian origin.

— Adriano Pedrosa; Tomás Toledo

Between 1936 and 1944, Portinari created a series of large-format fresco murals destined for a hall at the Gustavo Capanema Palace, the subject matter of which was work in such industries as coffee, rubber, iron extraction, tobacco, placer mining, etc. The painting in the Masp Collection belongs in this context and for this reason should be viewed, together with several of Portinari’s drawings and his canvas A Colona (1935), as result of the artist’s deliberate reflection on themes that yielded one of the most prodigal phases of his career.

— Unknown authorship, 1998