‘Abnormal art is the only good art’: how Flávio de Carvalho sparked a Brazilian revolution

In 1931, as the Corpus Christi parade made its way through central São Paulo, the Catholic faithful found a tall man walking in the opposite direction. As he went, Flávio de Carvalho flirted with the men, and refused all calls for him to cease his disruption.The Dada-inspired Experience N. 2, which ended with De Carvalho bundled into a police station for his own protection, was the first example of performance art inBrazil. Yet its instigator never achieved the international fame his artist peers did, perhaps because of his refusal to make work that chimed with trends. “The performances were very provocative and raised a lot of eyebrows in what was a very conservative Catholic country; he was also so restless, moving from art to architecture, to journalism. It was hard to place him,” says Adrian Locke, chief curator at the Royal Academy. “Abnormal art is the only good art,” De Carvalho himself countered.View image in fullscreenA visitor to Brasil! Brasil! looks at Flávio de Carvalho’s Portrait of Ivone Levi, 1951.Photograph: David Parry/Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. © Flávio de CarvalhoNow the artist, who died in 1973, finds himself with a starring role inBrasil! Brasil! at the Royal Academy, a survey of Brazilian modernist art, alongside more familiar luminaries such asTarsila do AmaralandLasar Segall. While De Carvalho’s half dozen paintings in the exhibition share their interest in cubism and surrealism, his canvases possess an erotic and profane sensibility at odds with the more cerebral work of the other artists on show: “It’s amazing how different his paintings are to what hangs beside them and was made around the same time,” says Locke. “It will be a step change for the viewer, from the realism that ran before him to these pretty far out portraits with their radically different use of colour; the vigorous, aggressive brushwork; their esoteric titles.”The Inferiority of God, painted the year of De Carvalho’s infamous action, shows a giant nude figure striding across a city, downward steps suggesting the direction of travel to hell; the equally sacrilegious Our Lady of Desire (1955) is a highly abstracted female portrait in fleshy pinks and purples. De Carvalho himself explained “For me, it was perfectly natural to find the genesis of things in sex. After all, don’t we owe our own existence to sex?”The artist was born in 1899 to a wealthy family and by his early teens he found himself at boarding school in England, followed by an engineering degree at Durham University. Evening painting classes provided De Carvalho’s only formal art education, but he made contact with some of Britain’s most avant garde figures, includingRoland Penroseand Ben Nicholson. Returning to Brazil in 1922, his father, a coffee grower, guided him into full-time employment in construction, but it bored him. “He had this disruptive spirit; he was omnivorous in his interests,” says Kiki Mazzucchelli, who has curated several exhibitions dedicated to the artist. “When he was in Britain he had devoured books of anthropology, of history, by Freud; he was obsessed with the discovery ofTutankhamunand this led to his deep interest in ancient civilisations, in wanting to understand humanity.”View image in fullscreenFlávio de Carvalho’s portrait of the poet Mário de Andrade, 1939.Photograph: © Flávio de CarvalhoIn 1927, De Carvalho independently submitted a grandiose plan to an open design call for the new state governor’s palace, which he felt would be “first piece of modern architecture in Brazil”. Complete with anti-airstrike defences and searchlights, it served as a wry commentary on the prevailing militarism in the country. It never went beyond sketches, but it brought him into the orbit of the art world. He opened his own arts space in São Paulo, kicking off with “a month of madmen and children”, featuring drawings produced by children and mental health patients; soon attracting the bohemian crowd, eager for his subsequent programme of lectures on Brazilian folklore, Russian ballet and Japanese martial arts. When De Carvalho staged his own theatre production, a play titled Dance of the Dead God, he collaborated with a majority Afro-Brazilian cast. Such was its shocking content, the theatre found itself raided by police and production was closed down.De Carvalho was not anti-religion for the sake of it, and his protests against Catholic doctrine was wrapped up in a much bigger project that sought the creation of a modern, forward-looking Brazil, away from the traditions of Europe, spiritual or otherwise; a country that embraced Black and Indigenous culture as much as its colonial inheritance. “He was the bridge between early modernism and the later period of the 1950s and 1960s, the counterculture stuff during the dictatorship,” explains Mazzucchelli.In 1956, foreshadowing “wearable sculptures” by the likes ofHélio OiticicaandLygia Clark, when the artist paraded again through downtown São Paulo, this time wearing a gender-neutral ensemble, he felt better suited for the tropical weather: a light fabric short skirt, blouse and sandals – fishnet hosiery optional. Instead, De Carvalho told an accompanying TV crew was this was the ideal outfit for the “tropical man”. “It is a hot country, why would you want to wear a shirt and tie?” says Mazzucchelli. It went further, De Carvalho explaining his mission was a “deeper insight into the past and the environment”, an intellectual pursuit, for all its shock value, which might “contribute to increasing sensibility and decreasing the number of superstitions”.Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism is at the Royal Academy, London until 21 April