Andy Warhol and Brazilian Pop Art Converse in São Paulo

Pop art enthusiasts can take the opportunity to jump to São Paulo, where by apparent chance, two extensive complementary exhibitions coincide for several weeks. One is dedicated to Andy Warhol (1928-1987), a global star and one of the most influential artists of the 20th century due to a work that seems tailor-made for these times of Instagram and fleeting fame. Visitors can see in person the originals of central works in popular imagery, such as Marilyn, Mao, or Pelé, The King of football. The other is a collective exhibition, an immersion into what Brazilian pop art was like in the sixties and seventies, during the height of the dictatorship, through the works created by about a hundred artists. Here, political critique is an essential ingredient, featuring icons like Che, Roberto Carlos, and yes, also Pelé.

The organizers attribute the mere coincidence of both exhibitions in the large Brazilian metropolis to chance. Pop Brazil: Vanguard and New Figuration, 1960-70 is the title of the major exhibition of the season at the Pinacoteca, a public museum. The exhibition, which was just inaugurated, brings together 250 pieces from around 100 artists, including a significant number of female creators who the curators have rescued to place them in the forefront alongside their male contemporaries. The exhibition will be open until October and then will travel to Malba in Buenos Aires (Argentina).

Andy Warhol: Pop Art!, which will close at the end of the month at the private FAAP Museum of Brazilian Art, is promoted as the largest exhibition outside the United States dedicated to the irreplaceable artist, the unbeatable self-promoter, and founder of The Factory in New York. It gathers 600 originals from the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, the epicenter of the steel industry and the hometown of Andrew Warhola.

Pop art took its first steps in the UK but reached its peak in the USA. Although the tropicalized pop art of Brazil shares intense colors, humor, irony, images from television or advertising, and industrial reproduction techniques such as screen printing with that of the USA, it has well-defined identities that distinguish it from the American one, explains Pollyana Quintella, one of the curators, in an interview at the Pinacoteca. “While the USA is undergoing full industrialization and creating a consumer society with high-quality mass-produced products, Brazil’s industrialization is more contradictory and delayed, plagued by conflicts. Here, the quality of works is more precarious.”

In the USA, playfulness prevails, and social critique is more cynical, says the specialist. During that time, Brazil was enduring the years of military rule, which closed Congress and intensified censorship. This repressive and somber environment is confronted by creators. “Brazilian artists understand art as a tool for social transformation and take on their political role, intervening in public debate,” emphasizes Quintella.

Some of the works refer to resistance against censorship or the criminalization of poverty. In this context, one of the iconic works of this period in Brazil was born. The print with the slogan Be a Marginal, Be a Hero (Hélio Oiticica, 1968). It shows a man lying dead on the ground, arms in a cross, after shooting himself while being cornered by the police. This was one of the screen-printed banners that featured in the so-called Happening das Bandeiras, in a square near Ipanema beach, in Rio de Janeiro, driven by a group of artists aimed at turning their backs on museums, taking to the streets, and democratizing art. It is ironic that, almost six decades later, those pieces, located one by one with great effort, now solemnly greet visitors at a pinacoteca.

Warhol’s exhibition was bustling with visitors on a recent Sunday. Few passed up the opportunity to take a selfie or pose next to the portraits of Elvis, Liza Minnelli, Blondie, or the unique reinterpretation of the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. Warhol, with an eye for business and another to challenge the limits of art, managed to get rich and powerful people from the USA to buy a painting of comrade Mao for their living rooms in 1973, a year after President Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing and during the height of the Cold War.

The Campbell’s soup cans, which launched him to stardom, reign in one of the rooms of the FAAP museum that showcases other everyday objects that Warhol redefined long before that verb entered the vocabulary. Pieces from his early career as a designer for luxury brands, experimental films, and several series of his famous Polaroids, a hallmark of that artistic factory in New York where aspiring individuals mingled with established personalities from art, rock, and fashion at the mythic parties… In those slightly yellowed portraits parades the who’s who of the moment: Muhammad Ali, Bianca Jagger, Truman Capote, Sonia Rykiel…

Two subway stops away, back at the Pinacoteca, the artwork Adoration (Nelson Leirner, 1966) plays with ambiguity, featuring a neon-illuminated silhouette of Roberto Carlos surrounded by Catholic saints, serving both as praise and criticism. The real Roberto Carlos joined the fun and attended the inauguration. In the same room, astronauts observe, from a painting on the opposite wall, other Brazilian stars such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque, and Elis Regina, who debuted in popular television contests.

Brazilian pop art also explored female desire and the great social ill that has plagued the country for centuries, inequality. Works like Social Elevator and Service Elevator (by Rubens Gerchman, 1966) serve as reminders, exhibited together for the first time. Far from being a relic, the class-based elevators distinguishing between tenants and service staff are common in middle-to-upper-class towers.

These two pop art exhibitions are united by Pelé, a recognition of his figure as the most universal Brazilian of all time. A planetary icon thanks to his art with the ball coinciding with the arrival of television to millions of homes worldwide. Alongside him, other paintings celebrate the national team that elevated Brazil to glory by winning five World Cups. “We’ve made a small selection,” says the curator, “because it would be possible to create an exhibition solely on pop and football.”