Emiliano Di Cavalcanti

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1897^[1], he came from a family connected to the abolitionist movement and grew up in an atmosphere of political and literary debate. He studied law in São Paulo without finishing, spent the early 1920s absorbing Cubism and Fauvism in Paris at the Académie Ranson, and met Picasso, Matisse, Léger, and Braque. But where European modernism often pushed toward abstraction, Di Cavalcanti turned inward: mulatto women at carnival, street vendors, tropical light, the densely populated ordinary life of coastal Brazil. The works are warm, formally confident, and deeply specific to their place.

His politics were Communist and not merely theoretical. He joined the Party and was imprisoned twice for his activities. In 1937^[1] he won a Gold medal at the Art Technique Exhibition in Paris for murals at the French-Brazilian^[1] Coffee Company. He showed at both the first and second São Paulo Bienals in 1951 and 1953.

Late in life Di Cavalcanti converted from atheism to Catholicism, a turn that surprised his circle. He died in Rio de Janeiro in 1976^[1], having spent more than fifty years making paintings that looked at Brazilian^[1] society with frankness and visual pleasure in equal measure.