Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, February 17, 2025: Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, a Brazilian painter (#2220)

Monday, February 17, 2025

Artist of the Day, February 17, 2025: Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, a Brazilian painter (#2220)

Emiliano Augusto Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Melo (1897 – 1976), known as Di Cavalcanti, was a Brazilian painter who sought to produce a form of Brazilian art free of any noticeable European influences. His wife was the painter Noêmia Mourão, who would be an inspiration in his works in the later 1930s.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1897, Di Cavalcanti was influenced by the intellectuals he met at his home of his maternal uncle, a figure of the abolitionist movement. This would provide the basis for a lifelong politically driven artistic career, which would start by the production of a drawing published by the magazine fon-fon. He engaged in a pursuit for a Law degree in São Paulo but did not manage to complete this pursuit.

In 1918, Di Cavalcanti would become part of a group of intellectuals and artists in São Paulo which would contain artist like Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, Guilherme de Almeida, etc. This group would be the direct cause for bringing the Semana de Arte (week of modern art) in life in 1922. This movement along with the Group of Five wished to revive the artistic environment in São Paulo at the time and had as its main interest to free Brazilian art from the European influences found within it.

Di Cavalcanti lived in Paris and Montparnasse from 1923 until 1925. During this time he was employed as a correspondent for the newspaper Correio da Manhã and attended classes at the Académie Ranson in Paris, which led him to meet European modernists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger.

After returning from Europe and having experienced the modernist movement in Europe Di Cavalcanti would start working on a more Brazilian art, which Di Cavalcanti and the group who held the Semana de Arte already advocated in 1922. During this time he joined the Brazilian Communist Party due to the heightened nationalistic feelings he experienced during three years abroad. Di Cavalcanti embodies the problematic tendency of Brazilian modernists to be pulled into one of two different directions: his subject matter consists of particularly Brazilian themes (mostly mulatto women), but his chief artistic influences are the European modernists and Pablo Picasso most of all.

In 1929, Di Cavalcanti also started to work on interior design, as seen in the two panels produced for the Teatro João Caetano (João Caetano Theatre) in Rio de Janeiro. In 1930 he was involved in an exhibition of Brazilian art at the International Art Center at the Roerich Museum in New York City.

Di Cavalcanti would be jailed twice for his communistic beliefs and ties he undertook in prior years. He met his wife-to-be, painter Noêmia Mourão after his first incarceration in 1932 for supporting Revolução Paulista. They married the following year and she became his traveling partner for the years to come until they were both incarcerated in 1936.

In 1937, Di Cavalcanti and his wife Noêmia Mourão would set sail to Paris to stay there until the outbreak of World War II in the start of 1940. During this three-year stay abroad he was awarded a Gold medal in the Art Technique Exhibition in Paris for his murals in the French-Brazilian Coffee Company. After this Di Cavalcanti would produce around 40 works, only to be left behind when he and his wife fled the country on the eve of the German Nazi invasion.

After his return to Brazil his nationalistic feelings became even stronger, as seen in his representations of mulatto women, carnivals, Negroes, deserted alleys, and tropical landscapes, subjects to be found in Brazilian everyday life and social settings and not in European settings. He lectured about these things in 1948 in the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, providing a lecture on modernism, expressing nationalism, and opposing abstraction. In 1951 the first of the Bienals, held at the Museu de Arte Moderna at São Paulo, featured Di Cavalcanti’s works, along with other artists from the South American continent who were seeking for a true national art.

Di Cavalcanti was obviously obsessed with the female body, since very many representations are to be found within the works he produced. The street scenes depicted by Cavalcanti are cheerful, characterized by a palette of bright colors and the depictions of everyday life in a normal, non-romanticized way. They evoke no strong political undercurrent, as do the works of such Mexican muralists of the 1930s and 1940s as Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros. The works produced by these artists were part of the revolutionary movement in opposition of the new revolutionary government who came to power in Mexico. Di Cavalcanti on the other hand refrained from overt political representations, although he himself was in a pursuit of perfecting a pure Brazilian art which had a clear break with European influences.

He tried through the creation of the Semana de Arte in 1922 and the Bienals in 1951 and 1953 to push for a true Brazilian art which was to be seen as separated from European stylistic influences. This was a dream and philosophy which can be seen as an ideal for Di Cavalcanti which was never found as one can see stylistic influences from the Italian Renaissance, Muralism, and the European Modernists.
© 2025. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Emiliano Di Cavalcanti or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only