Geography and Art: an Analysis of the Production of Favela Representation in the Works of Cândido Portinari

Abstract

The first decades of the twentieth century are marked by the search for authentic elements of Brazilian culture that made up our national identity. One of the elements recurrently appropriated by the artists was the favela. Therefore, the present work focuses on a painter of the Brazilian modernist movement who has appropriated the favela several times to present Brazil to the world: Cândido Portinari. The main objective of this paper is to study the changes in his representations of the carioca favela. It was concluded that Portinari’s paintings, when analyzed together, show the evolution and the denseness of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, as well as crystallized elements that remain in the favela’s’ imagination to this days.

Keywords

• Geography
• image
• favela
• Art representation