The Pinacoteca São Paulo is one of Brazil’s leading cultural institutions. It was founded in 1905 and its building was conceived by the São Paulo architect-engineer Ramos de Azevedo and the Italian-Brazilian Domiziano Rossi. The neoclassical structure was significantly remodelled in the 1990s by modernist architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who was also in charge of the designs for Lisbon’s Museu dos Coches and Casa Quelhas.

This Brazilian institution, which has been run since 2017 by the experienced German curator Jochen Volz, will be presenting, until 13 April 2025, the exhibition Caipiras: das derrubadas à saudade, which looks at the figure of the ‘caipira’ who, in Portugal, is akin to the figure of the ‘saloio’ – or, in English, the yokel, the country bumpkin.

This sertanejo figure is representative of the region that anthropologist and sociologist Darcy Ribeiro describes as ‘paulistânea caipira’, whose social ethos is the rural life of the Brazilian regions of the state of São Paulo, a significant stretch of Minas Gerais and Mato Grosso, Goiás, the north of Paraná and parts of Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo.

This character, depicted in the exhibition’s illustrated imagination, was born from the miscegenation of a Portuguese man and an indigenous woman. They are also known as ‘caboclo’, ‘roceiro’, ‘matuto’ or ‘sem trato na cidade (people who have no dealings in the city)’. Caipira derives from the Tupi-Guarani word ‘caipiâbiguâra’. ‘Cai’ translates as ‘monkey gesture concealing the face’. ‘Capipiara’ means ‘that which is from the wild’. ‘Capiã’, ‘from inside the woods’. ‘Capiau’, “caapiária” and “caapi”: all these words refer to the idea of “farmer”.

The stereotypes chosen in the past to portray the figure of the sertanejo in other regions were more feisty and vigorous: in Brazil, for example, gaudérios trotting around on their horses in southern parts of the country and northeastern cangaceiros with their rifles were conceptualised; the United States constructed the image of cowboys fighting with their pistols in the Wild West; in Mexico, hard-hitting mariachis, singers and revolutionaries. In contrast, the representation of the so-called caipira is peaceful, calm, passive, strumming his guitar or tending to his tobacco.

This may be why, unconsciously or not, MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, when purchasing works by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera – an artist widely renowned for the political and revolutionary nature of the characters he painted – chose to add to its collection two works in which the painter does not depict battles or social struggles, but the routine of rural labour: the works in MASP’s collection Os semeadores (1947) and O carregador (1944) offer a glimpse of the Mexican artist’s work which, set against the backdrop of São Paulo, give his characters a country bumpkin appeal.

José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, an academicist and realist painter from the second half of the nineteenth century and a native of the São Paulo city of Itu, was in charge of developing this representation of the caipira as the idealised image to personify the spirit of the São Paulo’s caipira.

Almeida Júnior graduated from Escola Imperial de Belas Artes – a Francophile academy that was founded when King John VI welcomed the renowned French Mission to Rio de Janeiro – and later fell in love with Pedro II of Brazil, who funded his trip to Paris, where he was a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel at the École Superieure de Beaux-arts.

Two paintings by this artist – Caipira picando fumo (1893) and Amolação interrompida (1894) -, plus a collection of 18 other paintings from Museu do Ipiranga, gave rise to the collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 1905.

Against this background, we can see that the Pinacoteca, for more than a century, has worked continuously with the character of the caipira as a narrative star. This peasant figure was belittled during the twentieth century by the writer Monteiro Lobato with his character Jeca Tatu and his chronicles in the book Urupês (1918) and, simultaneously, praised by TV presenters such as Rolando Boldrin, in his show Sr. Brasil (2007-2022) and Inezita Barroso in Viola, minha viola (2007-2015). In cinema, director and actor Amácio Mazzaropi promoted the idea of the caipira throughout Brazil. In the exhibition field, Museu do Ipiranga – another cultural centre with well-known works by Almeida Júnior and other Brazilian scholars and realists – was only reopened in 2022, after being closed for nine years.

Pinacoteca, for its part, has kept playing with the objects in its collection and casting its representations of caipiras in different spheres over the course of numerous exhibitions.

For instance, in 2007 it held the exhibition Almeida Júnior, criador de imaginários. In 2024, seventeen years later, it shifted its narrative perspective and, rather than talking about the ‘creation of imaginations’, adopted a discourse of ‘social metaphors’. On that occasion, it brought the work Caipira picando fumo (1893) before Jonathas Andrade’s Museu do Homem do Nordeste (2013).

This was not the first time that Almeida Júnior had entered into dialogue with a Northeastern imaginary – a few years earlier, his work was shown before Baiana quitandeira (1931) by Guiomar Fagundes. It was also not the first time that the caipira interacted with contemporaneity, since, in 2000, under the leadership of Emanoel Araújo, the Pinacoteca held the exhibition Almeida Júnior, um artista revisitado, full of reinterpretations and dialogues with contemporary artists and contextualised with writings by Aracy Amaral and Maria Cecília França Lourenço.

This time around, in Caipiras: das derrubadas à saudade, with Yuri Quevedo as curator, two major virtues of the proposed narrative can be singled out.

The first is technical. From the very first pages of the exhibition catalogue, we see images of physical-chemical examinations, infrared reflectography and UV-induced fluorescence photography performed for the first time on the painting Amolação interrompida. This technical evidence has supported the curatorial discourse on issues such as the use of plaster in Almeida Júnior’s paintings and, intriguingly, the use of metals that suggest the presence of Prussian blue in his work (when taking down the frame of Amolação interrompida, the conservation team spotted this blue on the wood-protected edge).

I spent a few hours discussing with the artist, professor and restorer Manoel Canada, in his studio in the São Paulo neighbourhood of Aclimação, the evolution of Almeida Júnior’s brushstrokes over the years: the painter had left Brazil as a scholar, studied in France with the neoclassical painter Alexandre Cabanel, so why did he return to Brazil with such shorter, sparser brushstrokes? What did Almeida Júnior see in France that we missed?

The second major virtue of the exhibition’s curatorial approach resides in the fact that it does not focus exclusively on representation of a character. The exhibition also touches on the perspective of the relationship between humans and nature. It reveals a destruction of the land and rivers that started just over five centuries ago. This is illustrated by Henrique Bernardelli’s painting Bandeirante e Índia (1895), in which a Portuguese man encounters an indigenous woman: these will be the parents of the caipira.

This room, containing the work Bandeirante e Índia, is one of the three exhibition sections, called “Derrubadores, desbravadores e degredados”. It is strongly geared towards showing the natural context of an announced deforestation. It includes powerful works by names such as Félix-Marie-Émile Taunay, Benedito Calixto and masterpieces by Almeida Júnior, such as Estudo da Partida da Monção (1987) and Estudo do Caipiras negaceando‘ (1888), which represented Brazil at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where the Eiffel Tower was unveiled.

The way in which the work Derrubador brasileiro (1879), made in France, was exhibited in this section fell short of historical accuracy, as Almeida Júnior’s work was not warmly received by the Brazilian audience. A character with darker skin than the white caipiras who made the painter famous also displays a certain degree of sensuality. Modernist Oswald de Andrade would say, a few decades after its creation, that this painting, with its greenery and coconut palms, was the great forerunner of a genuinely Brazilian aesthetic. The fact that this piece was not universally accepted in Brazil at the time, along with Oswald’s remark, has led to a number of questions. Therefore, why is it so concealed in the exhibition at the Pinacoteca? It is at the back of the room where the eyes of anyone coming through the door cannot reach it. As in the late nineteenth century, it is utterly impossible to hide a work of this size, but it remains hidden from view.

The three versions of Caipira picando fumo, exhibited in the curatorial section ‘A construção dos caipiras,’ did not lack such emphasis. There is a sense of puzzlement here, when you find images of black caipiras painted by artists such as Arthur Timóteo da Costa and Benedito José Tobias alongside the white caipiras – enshrined as the embodiment of the imagination of the structurally racist state of São Paulo.

The third section of the exhibition, ‘Os tempos mudam: a cena e a saudade’ is the most inspirational to be presented at the Pinacoteca. The presence of Antônio Parreiras’ painting Fim do romance (1912) depicts a murdered man that we can easily associate with Almeida Júnior’s story. The latter was the victim of a passionate crime, murdered out of jealousy. I can only imagine how his work The Bride (1886), a portrait of the woman he loved, would reverberate right next to Parreiras’ piece. Faced with its absence from the exhibition, the painting Saudade (1899) somehow fulfils this resonant role in the room.

There are numerous dialogues we can consider based on Almeida Júnior’s work. For instance, his Cozinha caipira could easily be in conversation with Claudia Andujar’s photograph of Yanomami people cooking (Xirixana Xaxanapi thëri desmancha bananas cozidas na panela de alumínio, 1974). Or her Nhá chica (1825), surely echoing with images of labouring women fighting for the right to land. And, naturally, his O violeiro (1899) would look wonderful next to José Malhoa’s painting in Museu do Fado in Lisbon, entitled O fado (1910). As this work could not be brought to Brazil, the presence of a drawing with the same composition as O fado would look wonderful next to ‘violeiro’ on the Pinacoteca wall!

Interestingly, the painting O violeiro was once in the collection of the modernist Tarsila do Amaral, who had a solo exhibition at Museu do Luxemburgo between October 2024 and February 2025. The catalogue for Tarsila’s exhibition featured a shade of blue that, in Brazil, is commonly referred to as ‘caipira blue’. It was lovely to note that, for the exhibition at the Pinacoteca, the walls were painted in precisely this shade of blue. The caipira.

On display until April 13, at Pinacoteca de São Paulo.