On April 10, Sotheby’s Paris will maintain a sale devoted to Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt, a Brazilian businesswoman and journalist and the founding father of Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro. Bittencourt, who died in 2003, was a prodigious collector of mid-century Modernist masterpieces, together with works by Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Max Ernst, in addition to main Brazilian artists of the period together with Almir Da Silva Mavignier and Franz Krajcberg.
For these unfamiliar with Bittencourt, which will quickly change. Later this 12 months, in response to Sotheby’s, a biography by writer Ricardo Cota might be launched. Titled A Mulher que Enfrentou o Brasil (The Girl Who Confronted Brazil), the e-book will inform how Bittencourt each formed Brazil’s fashionable artwork scene and courageously defied the Brazilian navy dictatorship of the ’60s and ’70s.
Within the Nineteen Forties, whereas Brazil’s cultural institution remained skeptical of modernism, Bittencourt based the MAM with little funding and towards stiff resistance. By sheer drive of will, she was in a position to safe assist from artists and patrons throughout the globe, most prominently Nelson Rockfeller, then president of the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York.
Her ardour for artwork was deeply private but additionally political. By her friendship with the artist Maria Martins, she was launched to figures like Peggy Guggenheim, Marcel Duchamp, and Giacometti. For Bittencourt, fashionable artwork was greater than an aesthetic pursuit—it was a declaration of mental freedom, a problem to conference, and, in the end, a mirrored image of her personal unyielding spirit.
Picasso’s Femme nue à la guitare (1909)
Florian PERLOT pour ArtDigitalSt
Bittencourt’s affect prolonged past the artwork world. Having inherited one in every of Brazil’s main newspapers from her late husband, she remodeled it right into a staunch voice of opposition throughout the navy dictatorship. The regime responded with drive: she was imprisoned in 1969, launched solely after a world outcry, and finally exiled to Paris.
Sadly, a lot of the MAM assortment and her private assortment in Brazil have been each misplaced to fires, in 1978 and the mid-Eighties respectively. What stays is primarily from her modest condo in Paris, which is what the Sotheby’s sale is drawn from.
Highlights embrace Picasso’s Femme nue à la guitare (1909), which is estimated to usher in between €1.2 million and €1.8 million ($1.5 million – 2.3 million) and Giacometti’s alluring sculpture Femme debout (circa 1952), estimated at €2,500,000 – 4,000,000 ($3.2 million – $5.1 million). Additionally notable are Les Fiancés (1930) by Ernst, which comes with an estimate of €200,000 – €300,000 ($2.5 million – $3.8 million); and Jean Dubuffet’s 1965 image Occasion, estimate at € 250,000 – €350,000 ($322,000 – $452,000).
The upcoming sale comes at a second of renewed world curiosity in Brazilian modernism. The Royal Academy in London is currently holding a Brazil exhibition, a celebration of Tarsila do Amaral at the Palais de Luxembourg begins in October, and the movie I’m Still Here, which tells the story of lawyer and activist Eunice Paiva throughout the dictatorship, place Bittencourt’s legacy in sharp aid.
