Writer and artist who was among the first to engage with the Indigenous cultures of Brazil and tap into these for his own creative purposes.

Vicente do Rego Monteiro was born into a wealthy family in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. At just twelve years of age, he accompanied his older sister to Paris, where he studied at a number of private academies. In 1917, he settled in both Rio de Janeiro and Recife. He developed an early interest in Indigenous cultures, which he studied in newly opened museums that housed ethnographic collections and in books, but he had no direct contact with Brazil’s Indigenous populations. His passion for the ceramics of the pre-Columbian era Marajoara people of the Amazon region had a particularly strong impact on his renderings of his relief-like figures, which are composed of simplified shapes in earthy tones. His participation in the Semana de Arte Moderna brought him recognition as a pioneer of Brazilian modernism. In 1923, he illustrated Légendes, croyances et talismans des Indiens de l’Amazone (Legends, beliefs, and talismans of the Amazon Indians), an anthology of the mythological tales of the Tupi and the Tapuia, two Brazilian Indigenous societies that he believed constituted the cradle of Indigenous thought. Against this backdrop, he began to create abstract paintings that drew upon the formal language of the Tupi and Tapuia. From 1923 until his death, the artist spent an extended period of time in Paris. He remained true to his visual language, although he increasingly employed it in the depiction of Christian and everyday themes.