Pedro Correia de Araújo (1881–1955) is an artist between two times, two geographies, two schools: between the 19th and 20th centuries, France and Brazil, the academic and the modern. Maybe that’s the reason why he was marginalized by Brazilian art history, a matter that this exhibition tries to roll back.
Although his family was from the northeastern state of Pernambuco, he was born in Paris. There, in the1910s, he studied in an alternative art school, learning to use geometry in his works, as seen in Pureza [Purity] (1938), a painting in which the woman’s body is built upon circles, squares, triangles and hexagons, intentionally left in sight.
It is not by accident that the eroticism in his works is manifested as rational, mathematic. It is not limited to a mere attempt of personal expression—which the artist rejected— but is part of a broad and ambitious plan.
In his works, the eroticism is not concealed in an effort to make the world and the objects more aesthetic—unlike in the work of his fellow artist Di Cavalcanti (1897–1976), with its decorative and prop-like mulatas—but is integrated with a geometric grid that makes up the structure of his figures, as proven by the horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines left in the open in some of his drawings and paintings.
The selection of works focuses on the latent sensuality that runs through the artist’s production in his Brazilian phase, from 1929 to 1955, highlighting the presence of the erotic, which is not limited to his nudes or more sexually explicit drawings, but is also seen in the remaining segments, formed by portraits of caboclas, Indians, black and mulatto women, as well as Brazilian folk dances, as seen in Jongo (undated), the most unique and extraordinary of his works.
In Mulheres na Lapa [Women in Lapa] (undated) the body strength of the feminine figures in the foreground is haunted by the presence of imminent death, embodied by a skeleton that watches them from the window in the background to the left. The idea of finite life and body, present in the history of art, is also revealed in Nu feminino (Mulata e são Sebastião) [Female Nude (Mulatto Woman and Saint Sebastian)] (undated) through a still life represented in the left lower corner of the canvas.
Despite his many nudes and paintings of prostitutes, the artist never yielded to the possibility of trivial voyeurism, and made his women as complex figures, full of character, true representations of strength and confidence, features that can be seen in Moça com flor [Girl with Flower] (1937), Mulata e os arcos [Mulatto Woman and the Arches] (1939), Cabocla (undated) and other works shown in this exhibition.
This exhibition was conceived in the midst of a year dedicated to the histories of sexuality at MASP. It is placed in dialogue with other exhibitions—or in friction, in the case of the collective Guerrilla Girls, whose exhibition opens on 9.22.2017 on the mezzanine. In one of their works, the collective denounces the predominance of female nudes over male ones in museum collections, revealing the perspective of masculine power in art and its histories, an issue which MASP has opened up for debate.
CURATED BY Fernando Oliva, Curator, MASP.
