From the Beaches to the Barricades
What do you do when your government cracks, and when dreams for the future die? How should your art change?
It is a question with relevance in the turmoil of today’s Brazil. Lygia Pape, the most experimental of Brazil’s great postwar artists, offers one answer. She spent her whole life in Rio de Janeiro, and the upbeat abstract forms of her early paintings and reliefs rhyme with the buoyant mood of a nation on the move, when Brasília, a futuristic capital, was rising in the heartland. But for the bulk of her career, from 1964 to 1985, she lived and worked under a dictatorship. She was briefly imprisoned, and tortured.
“Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms,” a retrospective at the Met Breuer space of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first for Pape in the United States. Though it’s hardly perfect, it features galleries of exquisite beauty and command.
Pape (1927-2004) came of age as World War II ended and a new, democratic Brazil was born; society exploded, the economy boomed and art responded in kind. Pape, who never studied art, joined Grupo Frente — a movement whose members included Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica — and adopted a geometric, methodical style drawing on foreign abstraction.
Pape’s paintings from this first period draw heavily on the example of Soviet Constructivism. More interesting are her reliefs of the mid1950s: blocks fitted with squares or stripes painted red, blue or yellow on different sides. Exacting line drawings from that time, as well as lovely black- and-white prints of oblongs and half-moons, speak to her engage- ment with form as a sign of modernization, much like Oscar Niemeyer, Roberto Burle Marx and the other designers of Brasília.
In 1959 Pape and her colleagues Clark and Oiticica veered into a more experimental mode they called Neo- Concretism, which prioritized participation, sensuality and the integration of art into daily life. Pape started to make unbound books of joyous abstraction.
“Livro da Criação” (“Book of Creation”), from 1959- 60, comprises 16 square boards that translate prehistory into pure form: Red and white triangles suggest the discovery of fire, a folding fan stands for the invention of the wheel.
On April 1, 1964, a coup d’état overthrew the left-wing president João Goulart, prefiguring two decades of military rule. Pape marched against the dictatorship. “Caixa das Bara- tas” (“Box of Cockroaches”), from 1967, is just what it says it is: an entomological graveyard, displayed in a mirrored acrylic box.
The same year, she took a white sheet, sliced at intervals, to one of Rio’s many favelas. Children popped their heads through the slits, laughing and sticking out their tongues. “Divisor” (“Divider”) became one of Pape’s most significant artworks; she restaged it several times in 1968.
Much of the Breuer’s fourth floor was cleared for a ravishing late work, “Ttéia 1,” in which hundreds of golden filaments stretch from the ceiling to a large central platform. It’s dazzling and sultry. But Pape’s more pugnacious work is with the camera, from her Super 8 footage shot in a favela on the sea to her documentary “A Mão do Povo” (“The Hand of the People”), from 1975, which contrasts indigenous Brazilian art and handicraft with consumerist junk in Brazil’s big cities.
The films, more than anything here, offer a model for how to make art when the world outside seems to demand something more urgent. “Brazil is made of perpetual disasters,” Pape said in a 1997 interview. “We build the way Penelope weaves, and then someone undoes it.”