The Portinari project: IR helps art and culture

ABSTRACT

In May 30, 1983, The New York Times published the article "Brazil Gathers Archive On Its Painter, Portinari". The author, Warren Hoge, narrates: "/The late Candido Portinari is considered here to be the greatest artist Brazil has ever produced, yet all but a few of his 4,000 paintings are out of public view. They have become dispersed in private collections in so many places that his biographer compared their fate to that of Brazil's 18th-century revolutionary hero Tiradentes, whose body was dismembered and strewn along a 300-mile turnpike. The inaccessibility of Portinari's work is particularly vexing to his enthusiasts because his own dedication to producing an epic view of Brazil for his countrymen was such that he continued painting even after doctors warned that exposure to paint was killing him. He died of lead poisoning at the age of 58. Now, in a pioneering effort for Latin America, a team of experts in Rio is busy assembling the far-flung pieces of Portinari's obra into an exhaustive computerized archive. "/We are trying to rescue what is authentically ours'/, said João Candido Portinari, the painter's 44-year-old son, who is the coordinator of the group of researchers who make their headquarters on the leafy campus of Rio's Pontifical Catholic University. A telecommunications engineer with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former chairman of the university's mathematics department, Mr. Portinari has brought exacting technical standards to the task. Now four years into the project, the 14-member team has compiled photographic, technical.

This presentation aims at describing the 26-year effort undertaken by the Portinari Project to locate, document, and record all prints, drawings and paintings created by the Brazilian artist Candido Portinari (1903-1962), as well as all documents.

It is important to highlite the role of science and technology in this endeavour. It was fascinating to watch, over the years, how much, as the Portinari Project evolved, the advances of science and technology, and especially those related to IR, were able to address important challenges encountered in its development. In this presentation, a few examples of this process shall be described, such as the problem of identifying false paintings, the digital preservation of color images, the building of a complex multimedia knowledge database, etc.

We also present the social work of art education developed in making all this material available /in loco/ to a wide audience in Brazil and abroad, including school children, especially children from poverty-stricken families. This social inclusion action stems from the fact that Portinari was deeply concerned to devoting his life, as an artist and also as a political person, to social and human values. In his speech /Art in the United Nations/ at the .Palais des Nations., Geneve, Switzerland, Von Lauestein Massarani observed that.

*/Portinari bequeathed to his native Brazil paintings of great poetical intensity. He grew up on the vast coffee plantations of Brodosqui in the state of Sao Paulo and it is this social setting which provided the inspiration for his work. All its human, cultural and religious aspects, captured by Portinari.s brush, reveal him as a .chronicler. of the concerns of twentieth-century Brazil. A rich plastic quality and variety of expressions are qualitites which give singular appeal to this deeply inspired work. His paintings are the successful achievement of his objective throughout his life: to arouse a feeling of the dignity of man, of fraternity and community spirit/*.

*From these concerns, faithfully reflected in Portinari.s artistic legacy, we have been able to build an exceedingly powerful tool for developing a social acton that has already involved more than 500,000 children for all over Brazil, as shall be demonstrated in our talk.

And finally we present one of the most important results of the project: "Candido Portinari - Catalogue /Raisonné/", published in September 2004, in 5 volumes, containing 4,991 works, with all their images and their technical, bibliographic and historical data. An example of the complexity of this undertaking is the work involved in /dating/ Portinari's oeuvre. Half of the works were undated and, /for each/ of these 2,500 works, it was necessary to cross it with 30,000 documents, to search if in a letter (6,000), in a periodical clipping (12,000), in a historical photograph (1,200), in an oral history recording (74 interviewed, 130-hour total recordings), etc., one could find information that would eventually lead to the date the work was created. The Portinari Project web site (http://www.portinari.org.br) presents all 4,991 paintings, drawing and prints, and all 30,000 entering a word contained in the work's description. The Catalogue /Raisonnß/ also comprises a detailed chrono-biography of the artist's life and times, compiled from the 30,000 documents that form the Portinari Project archives. To complete this 26-year task, the team visited almost all Brazilian states and more than 20 countries in the three Americas, Europe and the Middle Orient.