Vicente do Rego Monteiro

Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s Bathers are painted in a simple symmetrical composition. Monteiro depicts five bathers: the three reclining or sitting figures are women; the two swimming figures are probably men. The waves in the background unite the entire picture space, symbolising the water in which the figures swim. Monteiro has painted all the figures in a naive, stylised manner, without any individual features.

The title Bathers immediately brings to mind Paul Cézanne’s famous bathers. In dozens of works, Cézanne painted bathers in his modern pictorial language and in different compositions. One of the influences on Monteiro’s work was indeed European avant-garde painting. Born in 1899, he lived in Paris in the 1910s and 20s and was able to experience all the new trends – from Symbolism and Art Deco, with their symmetrical compositions, to Abstraction and Orientalism. Monteiro once remarked:

“I’m a citizen of nowhere, but I love Paris more than anything.”

Monteiro is one of the few artists to have spent as much time in France as in his native Brazil. In his painting, it is clear that Monteiro created something quite unique under these European influences: he skilfully blended European modernisms with motifs, themes and colours from indigenous Brazilian cultures. This was despite the fact that he probably had no direct contact with indigenous cultures. In the early 1920s, Monteiro began to work closely with the fables and legends of Brazil’s indigenous cultures. In the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, he came across the ceramics of the Marajoara, an ancient, pre-Columbian people from northern Brazil. The colourfulness of these ceramics with their brown tones is reflected in Monteiro’s choice of colours in many of his paintings, including these Bathers.