Chronicler of the lives of the Brazilian people, who became a local and international star.

The child of Italian immigrants, Candido Portinari grew up on a coffee plantation in the heart of the Brazilian state of São Paulo. At the age of fifteen, he relocated to Rio de Janeiro, where he undertook classical training at the academy of arts. In 1928, thanks to a travel scholarship, Portinari travelled to Italy and England and spent two years in Paris. When he returned to Rio de Janeiro, he began to explore the prevailing political upheavals and social injustices in his work. Portinari developed his own, realistic visual language and addressed the social problems of Brazil in his paintings, such as the plight of the country’s rural inhabitants, most of whom were previously enslaved people. He became a member of the Communist Party. His paintings depicted the working-class and often ethnically diverse population that constituted the young nation. Beginning in the late 1930s, he was awarded a number of commissions to paint murals in public buildings designed by architects such as Oscar Niemeyer, which propelled him to the status of international poster child for Brazilian modern art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York subsequently held a solo exhibition for him in 1940, and he was commissioned to create the large pair of paintings War and Peace for the United Nations General Assembly Building in New York.