Discovering the art of Brazil: with a broad, ambitious program and a surprising installation by the architect Jean Nouvel, the Guggenheim Museum presents a panorama of Brazilian art, from colonial to contemporary - Brazil: Body & Soul

The most ambitious and, by default, most comprehensive survey of Brazilian art to be hosted by a U.S. institution, "Brazil: Body & Soul," currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum, emerged from a matrix of exhibitions that originated principally in Sao Paulo in 2000 and traveled throughout Brazil. They celebrated the "rediscovery" of Brazil on the 500th anniversary of its encounter with Western culture and its colonization by the Portuguese, who occupied it, argued for its borders and remained in power until the 19th century. These anniversary exhibitions examined the heritage of Brazilian visual culture, with special focus on the development of the Baroque style, principally in the form of ecclesiastical furnishings and architecture, over a period of 300 years. Addressing an impressive spectrum--indigenous art forms, colonial art and architecture, the influence of European art practices early in the 20th century, Afro-Brazilian art and a sampling of today's cutting-edge work--the Guggenheim exhibition suggests that Brazil might well be considered, both in its past and present, baroque.

Although the museum, in association with the Brazil-based cultural and funding organization known as BrasilConnects, regarded the exhibition as independently conceived, a show of this dimension would have been unimaginable on such short order without the significant foundation of the earlier shows. And while the ambition vested in "Body & Soul" evolved as part of a broader campaign to promote Brazilian culture, it would seem that such projects also seek a reciprocity of exchange, embodying the unstated hope of adding Brazil's cultural institutions to the A-list of those offered important international traveling exhibitions.

The key object for "Body & Soul" as a tactical instrument is the enormous 18th-century Baroque altar from the church of the Benedictine monastery Sao Bento de Olinda in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Not often has an exhibition staked its curatorial claim to the attention of a relatively uninitiated public on the loan of a work so large and so freighted with problems of condition and risk. The altar's inclusion was justified by the towering grace of its decorative program--the embodiment of the living heritage of colonial architecture in the town of Olinda, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site. Measuring 44 2/3 by 25 3/4 by 14 1/2 feet, the carved and gilded altar (1783-86) was treated to a yearlong restoration by a team of conservators and curators. It was dismantled in the process, and then reassembled last fall in the Guggenheim's rotunda in the midst of much debate over the wisdom of transporting a national treasure in that dark hour of international terrorism.

The curatorial team and the exhibition's architect, Jean Nouvel, planned the installation, centering on the massive altarpiece. Nouvel created a controversial environment for "Body & Soul" in the museum's increasingly deconsecrated precincts by effectively erasing the rotunda and bays, tier by tier, with a coat of dense, light-absorptive black paint, and blocking out the skylight. Light emerges from the imposed darkness through the strategic illumination of polychromed wood, gold leaf and silver liturgical objects, although the problems of the altar's illumination have not been resolved. The museum's top bays, reserved for modern and contemporary art, are painted white (in several instances dimmed by object-specific lighting rather than general illumination), but those tiers are segregated from the exhibition's core by artfully undulating black partitions extending along the rotunda parapets.

In alcoves and on stair landings, video projections and monitors offer educational entertainment on a variety of topics, including Brasilia, the celebration of Carnival, the daily life of the indigenous, and candomble, one of the major African-centered religious practices of Brazil. A monitor at the introduction of the exhibition's Baroque segment plays the 1993 documentary It's All True by Richard Wilson, Myron Meisel and Bill Khron, based in part on footage once thought lost from the unfinished anthology film of the same name by Orson Welles, dated 1942. (A project Nelson Rockefeller and the Brazilian government believed would promote a salutary wartime relationship between the U.S. and Brazil, much of It's All True had been completed when RKO cancelled Welles's budget and ordered his return home. Although Welles remained in Brazil to shoot a documentary-style film in black and white, his career was irrevocably damaged.)

Origins

The exhibition proceeds thematically and chronologically through a representation of colonial and indigenous art. The 17th-century landscapes of Dutch painter Frans Post document the regions of Brazil originally colonized by the Dutch in panoramic, pastoral scenes of settlements and towns figured by native flora, while several cases display body ornaments of feathers from the Amazonian and coastal peoples of Brazil.