Candido Portinari

Candido Portinari grew up near Brodowski in an Italian immigrant family connected with the world of coffee plantations. He studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro before travelling to Europe on a scholarship. Returning to Brazil in 1931, he focused on the country's people, landscapes and social tensions. His figurative language combines academic training with modern experimentation.

Agricultural workers, children and displaced people populate his paintings, drawings and murals. Harvest scenes and figures marked by poverty make collective experiences visible. Commissions for public buildings extended this ambition into a relationship with architecture. War and Peace, the pair of paintings made for the United Nations headquarters in New York, gives monumental form to his sustained investigation of violence and the possibilities of human community.