Art: Brazil's Best

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Brazil's year-old Museu de Arte was jammed with granfinos (upper-crusters). Outside in the warm spring rain, hundreds more art lovers queued up, patiently awaiting their turn. It was the opening day of Cândido Portinari's first exhibition in Sāo Paulo in 14 years.

Portinari (TIME, July 28, 1947) had long been Brazil's No. 1 painter, and so recognized abroad; he is also an energetic Communist. Before Communism was outlawed in Brazil, Portinari once ran for Senator, almost made it with 300,000 votes. Nowadays Portinari lives with his wife and son in a comfortable house on the hillside overlooking Rio de Janeiro, but he has never allowed himself to forget or to lose touch with the back-country poverty he grew up in (he was one of twelve children in an immigrant Italian family of coffee workers).

A hot-eyed, hothearted little man of 45, Portinari was hard at work last week on a mural celebrating the life of Tiradentes ("the Tooth-Puller"), a Brazilian dentist who used to carry a copy of the Constitution of the U.S. in his pocket and read it to all who would listen. Tiradentes was hanged and quartered by Portuguese colonial authorities in 1792, and parts of his body were exhibited in the various provinces of Brazil as a bloody lesson.

The paintings in Portinari's show in São Paulo told of more enduring evils. Many were staring close-ups of the poor—which he sells for fat sums to the rich. Lately Portinari has abandoned the sad grey plains and squat, nubble-knuckled figures of his earlier years in favor of a tropically brilliant, anatomically believable world that blazes with sunshiny yellows and royal-purple shadows. But though he has changed the colors of his palette, he has not changed his political colors. The clear new light in Portinari's newest murals—including that of the Tooth-Puller—does more than please the eye; it makes Portinari, who says he paints "to teach my people what is wrong," an increasingly vivid teacher.