Re-Thinking Roberto Burle Marx
My engagement with the art of Roberto Burle Marx (hereafter RBM, Figure 1) started in the mid-1980s in Rio, when I made my first trip to Brazil to work on a never-realized exhibition of Latin American colonial art. I looked at the works of fabled Afro-descendant artist Antônio Francisco Lisboa, called “O Aleijadinho” (The Little Crippled One), throughout the State of Minas Gerais. Especially impressive was his masterpiece, the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, a series of chapels on a hill in the town of Congonhas do Campo, containing scenes from the passion and death of Christ. What most struck me most was the intimate synergy between the placement of the structures with their life-like painted statues, and their setting, on a landscaped hill within this small town. And then, in Rio, I discovered RBM! I was intrigued by his most outstanding achievement in landscape design in this most sensuous of cities: the landscaped mosaic boulevard Avenida Atlântica, facing the mouth of Guanabara Bay in the Copacabana district (Figure 2). From there I literally walked toward Centro, or downtown Rio, and spent long hours in RBM’s Parque do Flemengo and the spectacular (but now much diminished and neglected) gardens of the Museu de Arte Moderna, cheek by jowl with the in-town Santos Dumont airport (for which RBM had also designed a garden early in his career). Only later was I able to visit some of his “signature” gardens for private residences in Rio. These included that for the estate of media magnet Roberto Marinho, one of the earliest tropical gardens for a domestic setting in the then-capital of Brazil. It is now the Casa Roberto Marinho Museum that includes a distinguished collection of the paintings by RBM (Figure 3). For the Walther Moreira Salles family RBM created a water garden combining tropical plants surrounded by one of the artist’s earliest tile walls (Figure 4). The house now serves as headquarters for the Instituto Moreira Salles, an archive and exhibition space dedicated to photography.
Figure 1. Roberto Burle Marx during a botanical expedition in Ecuador (detail), 1974. Photograph by Luiz Knud Correia de Araújo. Archive of Luiz Correia de Araújo. Photograph courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden.
Figure 2. Roberto Burle Marx, Copacabana beach/sidewalk, Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, 1971. Photograph copyright Viard M./HorizonFeatures/Bridgman Images.
RBM’s crowning achievement in garden design was his own estate situated some 31 miles (50 kilometers) southwest of Rio. In 1949 RBM purchased the first parcels of land in the district called Barra de Guaratiba and eventually created what is now the Sítio (estate or farm) Roberto Burle Marx, consisting of over forty acres of planned space. The gardens, various houses and studios, as well as the laboratory-like greenhouses play equally weighty roles in suggesting the multitudinous aesthetic passions of its creator (Figures 5, 6, and 7).
Figure 3. Roberto Burle Marx, Tropical garden for Casa Roberto Marinho, Rio de Janeiro. 1940s. Photograph by Edward J. Sullivan, 2018.
Figure 4. Roberto Burle Marx, Garden for Walther Moreira Salles residence (now Instituto Moreira Salles), Rio de Janeiro, 1951. Photograph by Edward J. Sullivan, 2018.
From 1998 to 2001 I worked, as chief curator (along with a large team of Brazilian, European and American colleagues), for the Guggenheim Museum’s Brazil Body and Soul exhibition, a huge show that took up the entire central core of the museum and constituted a survey of many of the trends in Brazilian art from pre-Lusophone times to the present (an impossible and, in the end, much criticized task; yet it proved to be very popular with the public). The curatorial group had planned to include a Burle Marx-designed garden (the artist had died in 1994 but his practice was and is still very much alive in Rio), but in the end, his work was relegated to films about Oscar Niemeyer and Brasilia, where Burle Marx created some of his signature gardens.[1]
Figure 5. Roberto Burle Marx, Garden for Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, Barra de Guaratiba, Rio de Janeiro, begun 1940s. Photograph by Edward J. Sullivan, 2018.
Figure. 6. Roberto Burle Marx, Loggia Studio at Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, Barra de Guaratiba, Rio de Janeiro. Studio building designed by the artist, incorporating portions of a demolished nineteenth-century building in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Photograph by Edward J. Sullivan, 2018.
Then, in 2019, I was invited to be the guest curator for the exhibition Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx at the New York Botanical Garden.[2] Burle Marx was by no means unknown to North American or specifically New York audiences. His work had been included in the 1943 MoMA exhibition Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old 1652-1942 organized by Philip L. Goodwin, and referenced in the catalogue that served for decades as a guide to the panorama of the Brazilian built environment. In 1954 RBM’s first solo U.S. exhibition was held at the galleries of the Organization of American States in Washington D.C. RBM was a regular visitor to the U.S., starting in the early 1950s, when he gave a talk at the 1952 International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado. He subsequently lectured at MoMA starting in 1957, and continued to speak at a number of other U.S. institutions over the decades. He developed a close relationship with the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Scottish-born, Philadelphia-based landscape architect and urban planner Ian McHarg (on the faculty of Penn) was a close friend as was the Swiss-American Conrad Hamerman, who had worked with RBM in Brazil and who became his North American representative.
Figure 7. Roberto Burle Marx, Greenhouse and plant laboratory, Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, Barra de Guaratiba, Rio de Janeiro. Photograph by Edward J. Sullivan, 2018.
The 1991 MoMA exhibition, curated by William Howard Adams, entitled RBM: The Unnatural Art of the Garden and the 2016 Jewish Museum show RBM Brazilian Modernist brought his work to the fore again.[3] It was in this spirit that the NYBG conceived an exhibition that would feature not only his garden designs (mainly through photographs) but also his innovative two-dimensional works including tapestries and paintings on canvas, paper and industrial cloth (Figure 8). RBM’s significance as a source of inspiration for other architects was an integral part of this exhibition. The Miami-based garden designer and student of the Brazilian master, Raymond Jungles, created an ambitiously evocative tropical environment, following in the spirit of his teacher with whom he had worked in Florida and Brazil beginning in the early 1980s (Figures 9 and 10).
“RBM was by no means unknown to North American or specifically New York audiences.”
Figure 8. Installation view, Brazilian Modern. The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx New York Botanical Garden, 2019. “Untitled Tapestry,” 1971, Art Institute of Chicago, is featured in the background. Photograph courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden.
Among the questions provoked in my mind by this exhibition and such other projects that have focused on RBM, including the splendid monograph by Catherine Seavitt Nordenson (who also wrote for the NYBG catalogue) was why did he execute so few works in the U.S.? In addition, why is he almost exclusively known as a garden architect while his contemporaries and fellow abstract artists such as his pupil Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica and many others have been given such prominent places in the exhibition itineraries of big-name American institutions in recent years? Although certainly recognized for his excellence in garden architecture, RBM was also a distinguished painter, print maker, and tapestry and jewelry designer.
Figure 9. Raymond Jungles, Modernist garden designed in 2018 for the 2019 exhibition Brazilian Modern. The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx. Photograph courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden.
Figure 10. Raymond Jungles, Aerial view of modernist garden designed in 2018 for the 2019 exhibition, Brazilian Modern. The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx. Photograph courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden.
RBM did indeed work in the U.S., but on a fairly modest scale. His 1948 plans for the garden of the house of art collectors Emily Hall and Burton G. Tremaine (Figure 11) in Santa Barbara, California, were not executed (nor was the house, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, RBM’s sometime collaborator). The Organization of American States commissioned him to design a garden for its headquarters in Washington, D.C., in 1979 yet this plays a very minor role in the literature on his work. The Cascade Garden in Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, is an RBM project but visitors must search the premises for any evidence of his name. And the 1988 commission for Biscayne Boulevard in Miami (sidewalks and medians vaguely reminiscent of Avenida Atlântica) was only partially realized, and then only twenty years after the artist’s death.
Figure 11. Roberto Burle Marx, Garden Design for Emily Hall and Burton G. Tremaine residence, Santa Barbara, California (unbuilt), 1948. New York, The Museum of Modern Art. Photograph copyright Viard M./HorizonFeatures/Bridgeman Images.
My thoughts on this rather paltry North American representation of RBM, who is, of course, a defining personality within the arts of Brazil as well as in Venezuela (where he had an office for about ten years) and, further afield, in Paris (UNESCO headquarters) and, in Asia, Kuala Lumpur (Central Park of the Kuala Lumpur City Center), include questioning whether or not his art was “too tropical” for American audiences. Clichés of Brazil (and, for that matter, the Caribbean and so many other parts of Latin America) are difficult to overcome. U.S. audiences long connected Brazil with samba music, the celebrated actress Carmen Miranda, and other stereotypes of Brazilian popular culture, especially as seen in the movies from the 1930s onward. Perhaps those North Americans in the position to commission a Burle Marx garden might have wished for something less linked to “exoticism” in the popular imagination.
Another question revolves around the perceived closeness of RBM to Niemeyer with whom he worked since their early association at the pioneering Ministry of Health headquarters in Rio (1937), a project spearheaded by Lúcio Costa but often connected with the early success of Niemeyer. This relationship continued in the late 1940s in the Pampulha complex near Belo Horizonte and culminated in the 1970s with what Seavitt Nordenson calls RBM’s “military gardens” in Brasília. They were created for some of the most prominent Niemeyer-designed official buildings of the new capital, built during the early phases of the military dictatorship.[4]
We might question whether cloudy politics and possible (although probably spurious) associations with the military government linking RBM with the regime did not have an effect here.[5] Even though he worked for the dictatorship in Brasilia, Niemeyer had been a member of the Brazilian Communist Party in 1945 and his affiliation with it lasted until his death in 2012. RBM, by contrast, professed to being apolitical. But in the Cold War McCarthy era of American politics after World War II, even guilt by association would possibly have made some potential U.S. patrons wary of hiring him.
“Although certainly recognized for his excellence in landscape architecture, RBM was also a distinguished painter, print maker, and tapestry and jewelry designer.”
As for his fame principally resting on his work as a garden architect, I believe that it is a matter of stereotyping and attempts by architectural and art historians to neatly categorize artists into convenient compartments. The 2016 Jewish Museum show was successful in showcasing such facets of his prodigious career as his jewelry designs as well as his impressive output as a painter and print maker. Yet aside from a splendid drawing for the Tremain House garden, MoMA, for instance, has acquired none of his paintings or tapestries (even though it does have a number of other architectural drawings). The Art Institute of Chicago purchased two splendid 1971 tapestries in 2017 that attest to RBM’s unique blending of biomorphic with geometric forms characteristic of his art from the late 1960s onward, but they have rarely been shown and the museum has no other works by him (Figure 12; see Figure 8).
Figure 12. Roberto Burle Marx painting in his loggia studio with blue tile walls designed by the artist, Sítio Roberto Burle Marx. c.1980s. Photo Claus Meyer/Tyba. Courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden.
The preceding series of observations and questions seem to indicate that the multi-faceted career of RBM has yet to be properly researched in its entirety, and his intriguing relationship to the art world of the U.S., as artist, mentor, lecturer, and pedagogue, will only become clear through a careful unpacking of his relationships with American patrons, institutions, friends, and colleagues. Much remains to be understood about this foundational figure of Brazilian and global modernism.
NOTES
[1] For the catalogue, please see, Edward J. Sullivan, ed., Brazil: Body & Soul (New York: Guggenheim Museum and Harry N. Abrams, 2001).
[2] For the catalogue, please see, Edward J. Sullivan and Joanna L. Groarke, ed., Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx (New York: New York Botanical Garden, 2019).
[3] For the catalogue, please see, William Howard Adams, Roberto Burle Marx: The Unnatural Art of the Garden (New York: Museum of Modern Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1991); Jens Hoffman and Claudia J. Nahson, Roberto Burle Marx Brazilian Modernist (New York: The Jewish Museum and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). Among the most significant surveys of RBM’s career are Lauro Cavalcanti et al. Roberto Burle Marx and the Modernity of Landscape Exh. Cat. (Paris: Cité d’Architecture & du Patrimoine/Institut Français d’Architecture, 2011) and Guillerme Mazza Dourado. Modernidade verde: Jardins de Burle Marx (São Paulo: Editora Senac, 2009).
[4] Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscape Under Dictatorship (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 243-261.
[5] See Seavitt Nordenson for an extensive analysis of RBM and politics.
