The canvas The Last Bastion – Mothers’ Wrath is the first of eight large-format paintings that constitute the Religious Series which Assis Chateaubriand commissioned to Portinari for the São Paulo headquarters of Rádio Tupi. This canvas particularly evinces the strong impact of Picasso’s Guernica (1937) on Portinari’s work. The Brazilian painter possibly viewed Picasso’s masterpiece in New York when he visited the city to portray Nelson Rockefeller’s mother, on his way back from Washington, D.C., where he painted four murals for the Hispanic Foundation at the Library of Congress. It was to no avail, despite the vigorous distinction, that coeval critics strived to link Portinari’s exciting series to the image of par excellence “Brazilian” painter that had been auspiciously attributed to him. Mário de Andrade did not hesitate to point out in this series a continuous mental process of assimilation of the Other, a process of transformation of someone else’s solutions into a proprietary, original painting within a scope ranging from Mothers’ Wrath to The Trumpets of Jericho. To Sérgio Milliet, the difference between Picasso and Portinari is the same that distinguishes “pure intelligence” from “heart-searching intelligence”... Seemingly the differentiation stated by both Mário de Andrade and Sérgio Milliet could not hide an ill-natured intellectual and ideological disposition before the national hero changed into an evil spirit and hypnotized by the chef-de-file of the School of Paris. Even more interesting, though not entirely satisfactory, is the hypothesis recently brought forward by Fabris (1996, p. 103), that transfers this ill-natured disposition to the artist himself. To the scholar, indeed Portinari would have “plunged into the war drama, in a crisis brought forth by his image of ‘official artist’, (...) and tried to solve, through an approximation with Picasso, the uneasy feeling that had taken over his life”. Fabris’s hypothesis probably derived from the following statement by Portinari, which the author herself emphasized in her book: “Picasso overwhelms me... I just had to create Mothers’ Wrath. Otherwise I would have been rather baffied. I had a need to do it and wait for its consequences. It was a matter of submerging or successfully taking a leap”. The “leap” Portinari took with the phase in question actually represented the pinnacle of a process of artistic ripening that for the first time revealed his full comprehension of Picasso’s ingenious creativity and secured him a prominent place in 20th century art in Brazil.

— Unknown authorship, 1998