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Despite being the federal capital and home to institutions of major historical weight representing nationality in the arts – the National Historical Museum and the National School of Fine Arts –, Rio de Janeiro spent much of the 1920s and 1930s being seen as a place whose academicist traditions meant that the avant-garde practices of the modernist group of São Paulo still left the city of São Paulo as the epicenter of the artistic practices that were transforming the country. Starting with the creation of the Institute of Arts, located at the University of the Federal District, this picture would change.

Image description: This is a black-and-white photograph of a group of people gathered indoors, possibly in a classroom or an office. At the top of the image, three women are standing, followed by two men who are also standing. Below them, two more women are standing, and finally, at the bottom of the photo, five people are seated on the floor. Everyone appears to be smiling and looking at the camera. The spatial arrangement is linear, with the individuals organized in ascending order from back to front.

UDF, as it became known, was an achievement of Mayor Pedro Ernesto, an active collaborator in Getúlio Vargas's rise to power in 1930 and in the resistance to attempts to remove him from power during the first five years of his term. The idea for the institution came from educator Anísio Teixeira, who worked in Ernesto's government overseeing Rio de Janeiro's General Directorate of Instruction. Facing strong resistance from the Catholic wing of the government and from the powerful Minister of Education Gustavo Capanema, Teixeira's initiative suffered repeated attacks during its brief three years of operation.

Despite this, one of its institutes was dedicated to the visual arts and enjoyed immense success in its time, placing Rio de Janeiro at the center of the national artistic scene and giving voice to professionals who had already grown distant from the models of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. The Institute had three higher-education courses: urbanism, architecture and landscaping; mural painting; and monumental sculpture. Its first director was Celso Kelly, an activist since the 1920s for the professionalization of Rio's artistic circles, who was responsible in 1929 for Portinari's first solo exhibition at the Palace Hotel. The painter, incidentally, was one of the teachers of mural and easel painting, alongside other professionals such as Georgina Albuquerque (decorative arts), Celso Antônio de Menezes (monumental and salon sculpture), Guignard (drawing), or Lúcio Costa and Carlos Leão (architecture).

Image description: The image shows a stone statue in a park. The statue depicts a reclining female figure on a circular pedestal. The woman is dressed in a robe that covers her body, leaving only her arms and part of her legs exposed. She is leaning on one arm, with the other arm crossed over her chest. The pedestal is located on a green lawn, with trees and cars in the background.

With an immediate impact among the new generations who were able to attend the Institute, we see the presence – as students or auditors of classes and seminars – of past and future brilliant artists such as Roberto Burle Marx, Santa Rosa, Lota Macedo Soares, Edith Behring, Murilo Mendes, Manuel Bandeira, Oswald de Andrade, and many other anonymous figures. In 1938, the chair of History of Art would be taught by Mário de Andrade. This number of names important to Brazilian art, combined with the commitment to “promote, encourage, and assist initiatives aimed at the improvement of the arts, the technical refinement, and the integration of Brazilian sentiment into national creations” (a phrase taken from the UDF statute), made the Institute of Arts, during its years of existence, the epicenter of cutting-edge artistic reflection and creation of that time.

It was at UDF that Portinari — already known nationally, with major exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro, awards, and a two-year trip to Paris — consolidated his reputation as master of an entire generation. In the same year he began his work as a teacher, the painter received an honorable mention from the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh for the painting Café, and started his public work on large-scale panels, creating four of them for the Highway Monument, on the Washington Luís Highway. The group of students who studied with Portinari at UDF gradually began working with him on other public initiatives, the main one being the twelve fresco murals he created for the lobby of the Ministry of Education, a fundamental building of Brazilian modern architecture.

Image description: This is a painting depicting a scene of intense agricultural labor. The image is divided into several sections, with human figures engaged in different activities. On the left side, we see people carrying heavy sacks, while on the right there are individuals holding containers. In the center, a man is seated on the ground, apparently resting or working. In the background, there is a structure that appears to be a palm tree, and above it, several figures are scattered across a hill. The colors are predominantly somber, with tones of gray and brown, suggesting an arid, hot environment.

These murals and panels were, in a way, an outlet for Portinari to continue his classes after the political crises at the UDF. Accused by the totalitarian wave sweeping the country's intellectual circles of being a “den of communists,” the institution, its professors, its founder, and even the mayor suffered severe persecution, leading to the initial plan for the university being abandoned in 1936 in favor of a conservative direction. The studios of Portinari's course were transferred to Colégio Amaro Cavalcanti, in Largo do Machado. One of the ways to escape these new, restricted and precarious working conditions was, precisely, to take his students with him to carry out the MEC murals. Curiously, despite this fruitful work among “the communists” of the UDF, Portinari would become, in the following decade, a kind of “official artist” of the Estado Novo, making Rio de Janeiro the birthplace of a national and popular art.