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Painting

 From 1928, Roberto Burle Marx spends one and a half years with his parents and siblings in Berlin. There, just nineteen, he plunges into the world of art. He sees the abstract works of the European avant-garde in the original for the first time. The works of Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Henri Matisse leave a lasting impression. He is inspired to become an artist. Parallel to singing lessons, he attends drawing classes with Elise Degner Klemm, and studies painting under Karl Hofer. 

On his return to Rio de Janeiro, he is encouraged by the modernist architect Lucio Costa. He begins studying architecture but soon switches to painting. He frequents the studio of Alberto Guignard, an important Brazilian painter. His early artistic production is figurative – portraits and still lifes. In 1937, he becomes an assistant to Candido Portinari, who is producing frescoes and tile murals for the new building of the Ministry of Education and Health. Burle Marx is commissioned to design the garden. The formal language of his design is already one of entire abstraction and features colourful organic forms of the kind he has seen in the paintings of the European avant-garde. Over the next years, Burle Marx spends his mornings in the studio, and works in his landscape architecture office in the afternoon. He develops abstract paintings that allude to natural forms. Painting and landscape architecture interpenetrate in Burle Marx’s oeuvre, without either domain being derivative of the other: “Every artistic sphere requires its own techniques and means of expression.” From the mid-1950s, his work displays the influence of concrete art, which by then has spread to Brazil. The compositions become almost geometrical, while retaining Burle Marx’s distinctive style.