Ivan Serpa, Lygia Clark, and the Bauhaus in Brazil

The art school of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM RJ) was established in 1952, led by Ivan Serpa, who gave classes for both children and adults—including artists who would go on to form the Grupo Frente (1954–56) and later the neo-concrete movement (1959–61). Writer and critic Mário Pedrosa described the “experimental” character of these classes, but the fact this experimentation was structured through study of color, materials, technique and composition has encouraged art historian Adele Nelson to claim Serpa’s teaching method was substantially based on the Bauhaus preliminary course.

On seeing the recent Brazilian works on view as a juror at the fourth Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo Biennial) in 1957, Alfred H. Barr Jr. notoriously characterized them as “Bauhaus exercises” and mere “diagrams.”^[1] The prominent display at the exhibition of geometric abstract works by Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hermelindo Fiaminghi, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Luiz Sacilotto, Franz Weissmann and others were undoubtedly the target of Barr’s dismissal of Brazilian contemporary art.^[2] Instantly controversial in Brazil, the remark was understood, then as now, as a dismissal of Brazilian abstract art as a latter-day, derivative replay of early-20th-century innovations in European modernism—by none other than the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.^[3] Certainly, he was not wrong to identify the German school and its philosophy of design as an important reference for Brazilian artists—a relationship underscored by the biennial’s special exhibition dedicated to the Bauhaus. What he failed to recognize or value were the ways artists in Brazil were engaged not in a project of imitation but of transformation. Barr’s comments also make clear that the claims on the history of European modernism made by artists working in developing nations were placed in a particular context of contestation. Engagement with Bauhaus ideas at both the institutional and individual levels proved a key forum for Brazilian actors of the 1950s to articulate tactics of citation and adaptation, asserting different non-derivative, radical conceptions of modernism.^[4] 

Two art schools that opened their doors in the early 1950s, at the recently established museums in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, were key interlocutors in this complex negotiation of claims on the German school and its pedagogy made by the emerging Brazilian postwar avant-garde. The first, the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea (Institute of Contemporary Art, IAC) at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Museum of Art of São Paulo, MASP), was inaugurated by MASP director Pietro Maria Bardi in 1951, with architect Jacob Ruchti serving as a key teacher. The second was the art school of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, MAM RJ), which opened in 1952 with the artist Ivan Serpa as lead teacher. Both schools were short-lived in their original configuration, with the IAC lasting less than three years in its original form and Serpa’s courses at MAM RJ suspended upon his departure on an extended visit to Europe in 1958.^[5] What each school originally offered was instruction grounded in nonobjective abstraction and an emphasis on instruction in the history of modern art—alternatives to the training oriented by naturalism, Expressionism, and Cubism at Rio’s Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (National School of Fine Arts, ENBA), São Paulo’s Liceu de Artes e Ofícios (School of Arts and Crafts), and other private schools in both cities. In what follows, I examine the curricula of the school of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, highlighting the important roles of certain thinkers and teachers, including Serpa and Mário Pedrosa, as well as works by artists trained at the school. I conclude with an analysis of the series of paintings by Lygia Clark that were partially the object of Barr’s comments. I argue that far from being “exercises,” the pedagogy and practice these artists and thinkers created reveal how the Bauhaus served as a crucial point of both avowal and disavowal for the emerging Brazilian avant-garde and its supporters, one which they used to establish connections to European modernism, assert a basis of art-making in nonobjective abstraction, and develop an ethos of research and materially grounded experimentation.

Ivan Serpa at the Museu De Arte Moderna do Rio De Janeiro

Just as IAC sought to train designers via drawing, MAM RJ similarly distanced itself from the notion of educating “fine artists.” In the latter’s case, the archetypal student was not the designer of posters and products but a child, paintbrush in hand, dressed in a smock. According to Pedrosa, the considerable attention that Serpa, the museum’s first teacher, devoted to instructing children was a testament to the larger role he believed art education should play in a democratic society.^[6] And in contrast to Bardi and Ruchti’s efforts to position IAC as a Brazilian successor to the Bauhaus, the teachers at MAM RJ did not purport to share a unified approach. Local artists taught a range of courses at the museum, but it was the painting classes for children and adults taught by Serpa which captured the popular and critical imagination of his contemporaries, providing an identity for the new school.^[7] Having won the prize for best painting by a young Brazilian artist at the first Biennial in 1951, Serpa had a reputation as both an emerging abstract artist and a children’s art instructor.^[8] At MAM RJ, he taught a number of ascendant abstract artists, many of whom, including Aluísio Carvão and Helio Oiticica, would soon fill the ranks of the mid-1950s avant-garde group Grupo Frente (Front Group) and, later, the Neo-Concrete movement.^[9] 

Contemporary commentators, historians and also Serpa himself often discussed his pedagogy in terms of its openness to experimentation and freedom of expression.^[10] While this is not inaccurate—a hallmark of Serpa’s teaching was his mentoring of both figurative and abstract artists—such a rhetorical focus has overshadowed a more nuanced account of his approach. Moreover, the vision of Serpa’s classroom as a self-directed, unstructured space does not account for the rigorous study of geometry, color, and materials clearly evident in the work of students enrolled in his painting class for adults, nor for the degree to which Serpa’s instruction was informed by Bauhaus pedagogy. If the IAC’s relationship to the Bauhaus was overdetermined, Serpa’s incorporation of Bauhaus techniques within his teaching at MAM RJ is a conspicuous blind spot in both contemporaneous and historical accounts.

Mário Pedrosa, Serpa’s most vocal advocate and interpreter, largely set the parameters for our understanding of the artist’s teaching through texts penned from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s. In Crescimento e criação (Growth and Creation), the book-length publication he produced together with Serpa in 1954, Pedrosa emphasized that the artist combined a focus on experimentation with instruction in technical and compositional know-how, arguing that Serpa countered “academic preconceptions” while at the same time improving his students’ ability to manipulate materials and organize forms and marks within a composition.^[11] When addressing Serpa’s instruction of children, Pedrosa cast the teacher as an educator-cum-social reformer participating in an international reimagining of youth education.^[12] At the international level, the intellectual context for this valorization of the creativity of children included the development-oriented discourse of organizations like the United Nations and UNESCO, and conceptions of “visual thinking” put forward by early and mid-twentieth-century pedagogues and psychologists, including Rudolf Arnheim, who Pedrosa discussed at length in Crescimento e criação. In Brazil and, specifically, within Serpa and Pedrosa’s milieu, Serpa’s classroom was understood to stand alongside the studio that the artist Almir Mavignier established in 1946 for psychiatrist Nise da Silveira’s psychiatric patients at the Centro Psiquiátrico Nacional Pedro II (commonly referred to as Engenho de Dentro, for the neighborhood in which it was located) as a model for re-orientating a received understanding of creativity. According to Pedrosa, art and creativity were, “universal acquisitions” rather than the exclusive domain of artists.^[13] 

It is noteworthy that Pedrosa elected to understand Serpa’s pedagogical approach in relation to Arnheim and theories of visual perception rather than suggesting parallels with the interests in the creativity of children, the mentally ill and outsiders evinced by Surrealists, members of the Bauhaus, or the likes of Jean Dubuffet. This was not for lack of knowledge or contact—in fact, he was related to Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret by marriage and participated in art-critical circles in France, Germany and the United States, residing in the latter two countries intermittently in the late 1920s through the mid-1940s.^[14] Pedrosa’s larger intellectual project, one devoted to an inclusive conception of modernism oriented around the art of non-artists and the need to provide a place for “autochthonous resistance to international taste,” as well as his skepticism toward what he saw as a misconstrual of Bauhaus principles (Klee’s ideas in particular) as a basis for “solipsistic self-absorption” among gestural abstract artists and their champions, made it unlikely that he would assert a one-to-one lineage between Serpa’s teaching and the Bauhaus.^[15] 

In addition to Pedrosa’s resistance to situating Serpa’s pedagogical philosophy in relation to the Bauhaus or other European modernist reference points, Max Bill’s presence in Brazilian artistic discussions of the early 1950s—dating back to the retrospective dedicated to the artist with which MASP opened its doors in March of 1951 and, in particular, the debates around his controversial visit to Brazil in May and June of 1953—was an additional reason Pedrosa found claiming a Bauhaus lineage for Serpa’s pedagogy a decidedly unattractive option. Bill’s lectures at MAM RJ in 1953 are best known for the scandal his critique of Brazilian architecture caused in the local artistic and architectural communities.^[16] Yet, he also spoke at length about his plans for the new Bauhaus in Ulm, Germany (Hochschule für Gestaltung—Institute of Design, HfG), which would teach its first classes in August of that year.^[17] Bill acknowledged the significance of early Bauhaus instruction, particularly the teachings of Kandinsky and Klee, but in his remarks he was more critical of that early pedagogy than in contemporaneous publications (where he emphasized Ulm’s direct descent from the historical Bauhaus).^[18] In Rio, Bill made clear that he understood the approach at HfG to represent an advancement over what he viewed as Kandinsky’s and Klee’s more rudimentary, less scientific theories. The interpretation of the Bauhaus that Bill put forward thus differed significantly from the interests of Serpa, Pedrosa and their cohort of artists and thinkers, for whom consideration of the mathematically oriented practices of a mid-century artist like Bill in no way offered a rationale for no longer thinking about the work of Kandinsky, Klee, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and other early twentieth-century figures, as well as the artistic work of children, untrained artists, and the mentally ill.

Although it does not appear that Serpa followed a structured curriculum comparable to that of IAC or even some of his fellow teachers at MAM RJ, Paulo Herkenhoff, Mari Carmen Ramírez and Irene V. Small have demonstrated that he led his adult students in explorations of nonobjective abstraction, focusing on color theory, the application of materials and modern art history—requiring his pupils to complete an extensive number of works, often involving the serial investigation of form and color.^[19] The experimental and abstract studies of color, material and form taught in various iterations of the Bauhaus preliminary course were, undoubtedly, the source of many if not all of the exercises Serpa employed. Ramírez has noted, for example, that albums containing material and texture experiments displayed at the Grupo Frente exhibition of 1955 (the second of four the group organized during its existence) were likely an outgrowth of Serpa’s classroom,^[20] while Pedrosa described the albums as “containing the most varied experiments with textures, with every sort of material from bobbin lace and typewriter letter keys to cheap wrapping paper”—an account that distinctly recalls the texture and material studies that made up part of the Bauhaus preliminary course.^[21] 

Grupo Frente’s material experimentation was not confined to the collectively executed notebooks, a fact on display at the group’s 1955 exhibition. Hélio Oiticica and his brother César Oiticica, who studied with Serpa in 1954 and possibly in early 1955, exhibited mixed media works, including experimental prints by Hélio composed of carbon paper impressions and gouache on cardboard, which involved the artist running an iron over elements of the composition.^[22] Carvão, who commenced studying with Serpa in 1953, included a medium-format suspended sculpture constructed of thin, painted slats of wood that resembled a mass of stacked matchboxes in various states of disassembly.^[23] Members of the group who had not studied with Serpa also contributed to the panoply of materials on display. Abraham Palatnik showed furniture and Pape and Clark, in addition to woodcuts and paintings, exhibited, respectively, jewelry and architectural maquettes.^[24] 

Pedrosa interpreted the Grupo Frente notebooks, as well as the new material study evident in the individual artists’ practice, as being foundational for the creation of an enlightened form of design and art suitable to an industrialized society while being on a par with medieval handicraft.^[25] The analogy between the modern and the medieval is reminiscent of Gropius’s conception of the Bauhaus as a “new guild of craftsmen” in the mode of medieval stone mason lodges.^[26] Pedrosa’s larger proposal that the group share not a style but an ethos of disciplined and ethical experimentation, described as “the freedom of creation,” was grounded in his observation of Serpa’s classroom.^[27] Without evoking the Bauhaus, the vision Pedrosa proposed of an ethical, experimental postwar avant-garde nevertheless corresponded with elements of the Cold War reinterpretation of the German school: both share an understanding of creativity as a wellspring of humanism and an optimistic enthusiasm for the social efficacy of a non-objective, abstract artistic training linked to industrial production. Where the two depart is that Pedrosa, as a Trotskyite and committed political activist, believed art must engage society: he viewed the materially grounded conception of art forged by Grupo Frente as revolutionary.

Lygia Clark and the Fourth São Paulo Biennial

Among the works on display at the fourth São Paulo Biennial (1957) were a selection of low-relief paintings from Clark’s Planos em superfície modulada (Planes in Modulated Surface), a series of preparatory drawings and paintings Clark produced between 1954 and 1958. Clark employed materials and methods that were, at first glance, easily understood: industrial paint, plywood and airbrush. Upon closer examination, however, the work’s unusual construction comes into focus—namely actual gaps introduced between the different elements of the painting. What first appear to be hand-drawn, ruler-aided compositions—equivalents to Josef Albers’s crisply rendered and incised engravings on laminated plastic from 1949–58, entitled Structural Constellations—are, in fact, assemblages that retain the jigsaw puzzle character of their preparatory collages and foretell the articulation of three-dimensional space found in Clark’s hinged sculptures of a few years later.

The relationship between Clark’s own work and Albers’s was widely commented on at the time by both artist and critics. Pedrosa, in particular, contested critics who viewed Clark’s works as indistinguishable from that of Albers. While noting the importance of “the old Bauhaus master” to the Brazilian artist’s recent series, Pedrosa underscored the innovation of the Planos em superfície modulada, writing, “Lygia’s current painting reveals space to us as composed of vectors that allow us to have a phenomenologically affective rather than a purely sensorial awareness of it.”^[28] Whereas space in Albers’s works and the consequent viewing experience remained solely optical, Clark integrated real space via the grooves within her paintings, thereby creating a tangible experience of space.^[29] Clark emphasized her interest in both the ambiguous multidimensional space Albers created in his Structural Constellations, as well as her own integration of “external space” in the Planos em superfície modulada.^[30] Clark and critic Ferreira Gullar would later understand the phenomenological orientation expressed in this series as foundational to the conception of Neo-Concretism.^[31] 

An equally radical component of Clark’s series, however, is how the artist points to the sequential variation of geometric forms—a key operation of Bauhaus pedagogy as practiced by Albers and others—only to then undermine the expectation of a mappable sequence or formal evolution.^[32] In early texts, Clark criticized work, including her earlier production, that depended on “serial form,” arguing that the pieces she began in 1957 operated differently.^[33] Clark assembled differently scaled geometric shapes of sundry types (triangles, trapezoids, rectangles, squares, parallelograms) into medium to large format compositions of largely black, white and gray. The result is a group of pieces ranging from sparse near monochromes to dense, multifaceted geometric patterns. She also produced pairs of works that share identical compositions yet differed in dimension or palette. For example, she created slightly smaller but otherwise indistinguishable versions of several works, as in Planos em superfície modulada no. 5. As signaled by a myriad of seemingly simple, readily legible formal alterations in the series, Clark built the operation of repetition into her practice, marking repetition as an act not of imitation but transformation.

Leah Dickerman has argued that “experience, not knowledge, was the Bauhaus watchword,” and Eva Díaz has traced how “the rhetoric of experiment” was central to the reception of the Bauhaus by artists in the context of the United States.^[34] Pedrosa articulated a nexus of terms—freedom and creation, ethics and discipline—for pedagogical and artistic activities of the 1950s that point to the high societal stakes of art-making at midcentury in Brazil. Pedrosa’s best-known slogan for the Brazilian avant-garde—“the experimental exercise of freedom”—belies an unspoken relationship in Brazilian interpretations of Bauhaus ideas.^[35] The expression dates to 1967, but its origins lie in what Pedrosa saw as the productive tension between instruction and experimentation in Serpa’s pedagogy. Upon the continuum of experience, experiment and experimentation, Brazilian thinkers and artists positioned themselves as inheritors and usurpers of European modernism. By 1959 the Neo-Concrete movement would declare that artists operating in a developing nation more completely fulfilled the ideas and praxis of the historical avant-garde than did earlier European artists. In the early and mid-1950s, by contrast, Clark and other Brazilian abstract artists maintained an active tension between inheritance and usurpation in their works. The potential for misrecognition-as-derivation implicit in series like Planos em superfície modulada was, and is, a vital entry point into midcentury Brazilian artists’ tactics of citation and adaptation as well as their critical relationship with modernism.