Brazilian Modern the Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx

Aeriform view of Modernist Garden Path, Brazilian Mod: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx at the New York Botanical Garden (paradigm courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden)

Landscape design is a living fine art. "Ane may retrieve of a institute every bit a brush stroke, every bit a unmarried sew together of embroidery; merely one must never forget that it is a living matter," reads a small, white-and-greenish placard sheltered below the fronds of an Everglades palm. The quote is from a 1962 lecture given past the artist Roberto Burle Marx. Burle Marx painted on canvas, wove tapestries, and crafted jewelry, but he is inscribed in Brazil'southward history as the country's most influential landscape designer. The work of Burle Marx is the subject of the New York Botanical Garden'due south (NYBG) current exhibition, Brazilian Modernistic: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx.

Every summertime, the NYBG showcases the intersections between horticulture and fine arts in a major exhibition. Consider the floral folds depicted in a Georgia O'Keeffe, the meticulous foliage rendered past Frida Kahlo, or the ethereal atmospheres of Monet's gardens — 3 artists featured in past NYBG exhibits. This year, the NYBG has flipped the script with the work of a landscape designer who married the formal innovations of European modernism with the bursting palette of plants native to his home state.

Roberto Burle Marx, Interior Wall, Banco Safra headquarters, São Paulo, built 1983 (image credit, Leonardo Finotti)

Roberto Burle Marx, "Blueprint for Rooftop Garden, Banco Safra headquarters, São Paulo" (1983), gouache on paper
31 3⁄4 x 39 i⁄4 in. (Burle Marx & Cia., Rio de Janeiro)

At the beginning of the 20th century, many garden designs in Brazil followed the European fashion, with imported European species. Native plants were seen every bit weeds by the wealthier, and whiter, classes, laying bare broader issues of variety and race within a divided culture grappling with the social realities of indigeneity. As a painting pupil in Berlin in the 1920s, Burle Marx further encountered European fine art and design traditions, just modernism brought him downwardly a different path. Cubism and modernist compages led him to consider infinite in new means while his visits to the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden re-introduced him to the horticulture of his dwelling house. Encased in greenhouses, Brazil'south native plants received special care from this German institution. It was inside those drinking glass walls that Burle Marx saw Brazil'due south flora as a potential medium for his fine art.

Roberto Burle Marx during a botanical expedition in Ecuador, 1974 (photograph by Luiz Knud Correia de Araújo, Annal of Luiz Antonio Correia de Araújo)

"I hate formulas and repetition but I believe in principles. All experience is of import simply not all expression is the same," Burle Marx declared in a 1989 interview, five years before his death. Appropriately, none of the gardens in the exhibition are modeled direct on his plans. Instead, the blueprint was overseen past his (aptly named) protégé, the Miami-based landscape architect Raymond Jungles. Adhering to the principles of Burle Marx's designs, Jungles created what the NYBG calls a "horticultural tribute."

In the outdoor Modernist Garden, beds of coleus, alternating between red and yellow, provide a loftier-dissimilarity background for ground-dwelling Imperial Bromeliads. Colocasia boast huge leaves, in colors ranging from greenish to deep majestic. A large, paved path weaves like a sine wave through the garden, resembling the undulations of the oceanside Copacabana sidewalk Burle Marx designed in Rio de Janeiro, which is perhaps his most recognized work in public space.

Evoking the tropical greenhouses in Berlin, many of the species Burle Marx discovered or cultivated himself are found in the NYBG greenhouse's Explorer'southward Garden. The Philodendron "Burle Marx," appearing throughout the exhibition, was propagated from a plant at his estate in Brazil by Jungles. Despite being a weekday, the gardens buzzed with activity when I visited. In the courtyard'due south Water Garden, a water lily-filled pool, people rested on benches, chatting and taking sun-kissed selfies. Burle Marx's designs highlight the wealth of the rainforest while creating places for people to be together. In his words: "The communal garden, square, or park will have increasing importance with fourth dimension, as we search for an acceptable equilibrium inside the instability of our current system." His piece of work shows that mural design is not just about creating beauty, but likewise forging community and, on a larger scale, shaping a national identity.

Installation view of Modernist Garden, Brazilian Modern: The Living Fine art of Roberto Burle Marx at the New York Botanical Garden (image courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden)

Installation view of Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx at the New York Botanical Garden (image courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden)

"Fifty years of prosperity in v." So went the slogan of Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazil'south president from 1956 to 1961. Brazil had been an contained nation since 1820, just the rippling divisions spurred by colonization, slavery, and the continued repression of Indigenous people, coupled with the sheer size of the country, left big pockets of fearfulness-flung communities isolated from engaged citizenship. The country embarked on a fast-and-loose plan to centralize and modernize through a combination of industry and design. To achieve this, Brazil was to build a new capital for the country, a city completely planned, from the ground to the sky, from public parks to skyscrapers. Brasília's architecture, urban planning, and mural design were spearheaded past Oscar Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa, and Roberto Burle Marx, respectively. The city was built in 41 months. It looked every bit though a new, urban, and distinctly modern Latin America was on the horizon.

In 1964, just 4 years after Brasília, the jewel of a unified and modernistic b rasilidade (or "Brazilianness"), was finished, a fascist regime was installed through a war machine takeover of the government. As like coups took place across the continent, modernity's promises of progress and republic looked to many like a pipe dream. Burle Marx accustomed his appointment to the government's Federal Council of Culture, and used his post to advocate for environmental conservation. His politics were in the plants. He is noted every bit one of the showtime Brazilians to speak out against deforestation.

Roberto Burle Marx, Rooftop Garden, Ministry of Education and Public Health, Rio de Janeiro, built 1938 (epitome credit, Leonardo Finotti)

A tapestry displayed in the NYBG library alongside his other atelier piece of work depicts a highly bathetic profile of a figure with a saw, each shadow and mass of muscle contained in its geometry ("Untitled," 1971). This could be an image celebrating the Brazilian worker, or one exposing the outsized office the lumber industry plays in the land. Either fashion, the vast rainforests of Brazil increasingly inch toward becoming but a memory. Today, fires ravage the Amazon, consuming vast swathes of living, breathing wood, and its unique found and animal species, in their wake. President Jair Bolsonaro'due south rollback of ecology protections has led to an explosion in slash-and-burn agricultural practices. Progress is often used as a euphemism for exploitation. Burle Marx, who was heavily involved in urbanizing Brazil, noted that, "Nature is always destroyed in the name of progress, just it is a bicycle of life you must understand in gild to take liberties with it in expert conscience."

The NYBG's exhibition is a visionary and seemingly impossible installation of a verdant jungle at the edge of New York's concrete jungle. In his 1951 essay on the characteristics of Rio de Janeiro'due south modern architecture, "Testimony of a Carioca Architect: Physical, Lord's day, and Vegetation," Lúcio Costa wrote that the incorporation of gardens into the urban mural results in "a artistic harmony between the buildings of man and the world in which he constructs them." Similar most art exhibitions, these gardens are temporary; the East Coast is not the climate for these works, and the plants will be returned, recycled, and donated after the prove comes down on September 29. The NYBG does what near art institutions cannot: information technology provides the ecosystem for the textile, living legacy of Roberto Burle Marx to flourish.

View of the Explorers Garden, Brazilian Mod: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx at the New York Botanical Garden (image courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden)

View of the Explorers Garden, Brazilian Modernistic: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx at the New York Botanical Garden (prototype courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden)

Garden at the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, 2014 (paradigm credit, Livia Comandini / Getty Images)

Brazilian Modern: The Living Fine art of Roberto Burle Marx continues at the New York Botanical Garden (2900 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, New York) through September 29.

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Source: https://hyperallergic.com/516495/brazilian-modern-the-living-art-of-roberto-burle-marx-new-york-botanical-garden/

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