Lorenzato, ‘Rio,40 Graus’, and ‘Orfeu Negro’
;A painting by Lorenzato
About a year ago I came across a book on the artist Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, born in 1900 to Italian parents who had emigrated to Brazil and settled in Belo Horizonte in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He began work as a wall painter's assistant, and in the late 1920s Lorenzato and his family returned to Italy, where he pursued the same career and took time to familiarise himself with the Renaissance and other art movements. Then, after spending a short while at the Reale Accademia delle Arti in Vicenza, he travelled extensively around Europe, looking for employment and determined to learn more about painting. After World War II he went back to Brazil and settled in Rio de Janeiro; he later used savings to pay for the return of his wife and son. In 1950 he moved to Belo Horizonte, where he began to work in building construction, and a few years afterwards, following an injury to his leg, he decided to devote himself solely to painting.
Lorenzato’s parents, grandparents, and many of his neighbours spoke Italian, and it appears that he may have learnt Portuguese on the streets and at school; like many children of immigrant families, he lived simultaneously in two different cultural systems, adapting to them both. This ambiguity would have been exacerbated when he went to live in Italy, and again when he returned to Brazil some years later; in Italy he seems to have missed Brazil, and in Brazil he missed Italy. This sense of marginality was a characteristic of his painting, which has sometimes been described as ‘outsider’ or ‘self-taught’, but this is not altogether true, because Lorenzato also knew and was influenced by many aspects of Modernist art.
His pictures are small and often intense; they generally depict landscapes that are on the verge of turning into abstraction. Some have the naïve simplicity that was often admired by early European Modernists; others are forceful and at times almost visionary. His art reflected everyday life, usually observed on long walks around his home and in the neighbouring countryside, where he made sketches that were later transformed, enhanced by personal feelings and memory, into finished paintings. While they were never celebrated, Lorenzato’s pictures were often exhibited in Brazil, and he had a retrospective in 1995, the year of his death, but it was only after the end of his life that the international art world began to take an interest in him. In 2014 two young Brazilian artists, Alexandre da Cunha and Rivane Neuenschwander, who had both lived and worked in Europe, curated a show of his work in São Paulo, and Lorenzato’s reputation seems to have spread in its wake; his paintings were exhibited by the influential David Zwirner Gallery in 2019 and later included in the 2024 Venice Biennale, which was curated by the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa.
I once worked on a show with Rivane Neuenschwander, whose family is from Belo Horizonte, which is where she may have come to know Lorenzato and his painting. When she returned to Brazil, Rivane sent me a copy of Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. in Portuguese, my introduction to that extraordinary writer, as well as a videotape of Rio, 40 Graus because I had enthused about another Brazilian film of the same period, Orfeu Negro, or Black Orpheus. Sometimes known as Rio, 100 Degrees F, the former is a semi-documentary, inspired by Italian Neorealism, made by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. With the intention of portraying the harsh realities of class struggle and poverty in Brazil in the early 1950s, the director set out to make his first feature film about Rio de Janeiro, using a cast of non-professional actors, and the narrative follows a Sunday in the lives of young Black boys from favela shanty-towns who make a living selling peanuts in different parts of the city. The film's release was suppressed by government officials, who appear to have found Rio, 40 Graus to be an unflattering portrait of the city and a form of Communist propaganda, but following public debates and discussion in the Congress, the decision was overturned. Rio, 40 Graus was the first film that dealt at length with favela life, later a common subject in Brazilian cinema, and one of the first to explore the stratification of class and race in the country’s society.
Rivane and I had talked at some length about Orfeu Negro, which was made not long after Rio, 40 Graus by the French director Marcel Camus. Beloved in the years immediately following its release, it was subsequently maligned (on one occasion, oddly enough, by Barack Obama), but more recently its reputation has been affectionately revived. Also set in Rio favelas and based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orfeu Negro is a story in which the ill-fated lovers meet during Carnaval, Brazil’s pre-Lenten celebration that is famous for its bacchanalean festivities. Featuring wonderful views and predominantly local actors - with the notable exception of Eurydice, who was played by a Franco-American actress - the film became an international hit and one of only four films to win both the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Its soundtrack, including music by Antônio Carlos Jobim, Luiz Bonfá, and João Gilberto, helped to popularise the laidback melodies and syncopated rhythms of bossa nova, which was soon to become another global success, like the Brazilian football team of that era. Orfeu Negro depicted Rio’s carnival as a paradise of happy people, fanciful costumes, boisterous revelry, a ‘frisson’ of danger, and charming melancholy.
Some Brazilians, however, were not altogether impressed with the film, despite its international triumph. Camus had depicted the favelas and their inhabitants with joy and in vibrant colour, which were considered by its critics as ways of romanticising poverty, and as a social document it was perceived as both inaccurate and insensitive. The well-known journalist Ruy Castro has argued that Orfeu Negro, in that respect, was particularly out of touch with Brazil’s own film culture; in the late 1950s, young Brazilian directors were beginning to form the Cinema Novo movement, and their work - including Rio 40 Graus - was tough and unsentimental. Orfeu Negro, in contrast, despite it being one of the forerunners of the later spate of favela films, idealized and exoticised its subject, creating an imaginary ‘locus’ onto which viewers could project whatever they wished.
This account of the film, while accurate enough, is ungenerous. I first watched Orfeu Negro as a teenager at school in England, far from the family home in Rio, and I found it deeply atmospheric and evocative of what I knew and had left behind. Like Lorenzato, I hovered between two cultures. I was fluent - and occasionally dreamt - in Portuguese; I was intimately familiar with the heat, as well as the rawness, of carioca life. I’d run alongside open-sided trams, like those in the film, jumping aboard as they moved so I could travel for free, as youngsters were occasionally allowed to do; I’d bought fireworks in the favelas and attempted to fly colourful paper kites, as the local boys did, that I made myself. I knew the streets and views. I had little direct experience of the Carnaval festivities, but in Brazil, during the season, you couldn’t help being caught up in, or at least affected by, the intense wave of euphoria. Even my father, who was temperamentally distant from the sensuality and excess of Carnaval, found it arresting enough to make it the subject of series of short articles for a British newspaper, his only engagement with journalism. Once, still at boarding school and missing home, I asked my mother to send me copies of the Brazilian magazines, not unlike ‘Life’ or ‘Paris Match’, which produced abundantly illustrated editions after the carnival. They duly arrived, after a long sea voyage, with pages extracted; my mother had thought it wise to remove some of the more extravagant images in case they caused disapproval from my housemaster.
For further exploration:
https://www.laymert.com.br/en/lorenzato/
https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2024/amadeo-luciano-lorenzato
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/inside-the-work-of-outsider-artist-amadeo-luciano-lorenzato
Rio 40 Graus (in Portuguese) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V81QK2SNuIo
Orfeu Negro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d25uWGoWvx4
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2009/feb/02/barack-obama-black-orpheus
‘The Double Life of Black Orpheus’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hgN19rl218
Still from ‘Orfeu Negro’