Where I grew up, in Brazil, the blue sky of the summer holidays was always sprinkled with kites. For as long as the sun was out, they were everywhere. One day, I remember finding my six-year-old cousin and his friend, both too young to be out on the streets on their own, flying kites from their respective backyards. They moved back and forth across the limited space available to them with their hands and their eyes fixed upwards. Following each other’s manoeuvres, they were cheering in a way that I was used to hearing from the older kids on the street. Only one thing was amiss: the kites, which so captured their attention, were imaginary. Their ability to imagine, to dream, moved me.
Standing in front of Flying a Kite (1950) by Djanira in London this February offered the shortest route I have ever taken back to that scene on the other side of the Atlantic. Djanira is among nine other artists at the Royal Academy of Arts’s latest exhibition, Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, featuring 130 paintings from the 1910s through to the 1970s. The exhibition, in itself significant, harks back to another historic feat, when the same institution last showed works of Brazilian modernism, in 1944. Djanira is one of the few from that first showing to return.
When Djanira’s work first entered Burlington House 80 years ago, people were dreaming of peace. The exhibition then was a symbolic gesture of solidarity, initiated by the Brazilian government to raise money in support of the Allies during the Second World War. There are so many ways in which those times sound similar to our times now, you could argue that things have not changed all that much. Be it the hope for wars ending; the state of the world requiring us to imagine—and believe in—a better future; or Brazil being forever doomed to dream of greater relevance on the global stage.
Yet the familiarity I sensed from Djanira’s painting more likely comes from the urban landscape it portrays, a densely populated skyline just like my old neighbourhood in São Paulo’s east side, over which my cousin’s imaginary kite used to fly. Djanira was from Avaré, in the hinterland of the state of São Paulo, a region she called home until the late 1930s and where she made her start as a painter in her twenties.
Djanira was a self-taught artist and I can’t help but think that this, too, is another powerful way to dream: an act of faith in her potential, despite the lack of a predetermined path ahead of her. Distinct from her peers in Brazil, her style is closer to so-called “popular” or “naive” art: it features simplified shapes (especially in human figures), flattened surfaces, vibrant colours and black contours. Yet Flying a Kite is the perfect example of why Djanira’s paintings are anything but naive. Look closely, and the painting reveals a sophisticated composition.
By first appearances flat and saturated with colour, this painting is in fact rigorously structured and in places even three dimensional. In the centre is a cross-shaped kite. The kite’s horizontal axis sits on the horizon line, where behind we find a layer of buildings, their windows grid-like and assertive; the vertical axis splits the scene perfectly in half. At the back, a red round sun and, opposite, on the ground, a yellow ball of flying line lead the eye diagonally across the image. The kite is surrounded by people, the lines that contour their bodies continuing from one to the next. Standing in the foreground, one person holds the kite’s bridle and flying line. Head turned upwards and body sloped, their plain white clothes interrupt the kite’s colourful blocks: they cross over the diagonal formed by the sun and the ball of line. Having been taken in by this animated character, our attention becomes drawn to the kite’s tail, which appears to be lassoing the person by the leg in one sinuous, fluid movement, reaching out of the canvas towards us.
Another detail that seems to inject a great deal of movement into the scene is the kite’s fringe. Shaped as a zigzag, its inner section appears cut-out, allowing all the other layers of the image—the buildings, the people, the sky, the kite itself—to blend together within this small but energetic border. My eyes begin to dance across this picture that before seemed rigid—blocks of colour on top of building blocks—and it becomes possible to imagine the fringe flickering as the kite soars.
I catch myself taking for granted that this kite will, in fact, take flight. Perhaps it is the heads looking up that tell me it will; perhaps it is the spectators leaning out of the windows of the buildings, as if in anticipation. We don’t seem to need even the title of the painting to know that this kite is going to fly—if not by the collective force of this crowd surrounding it, then most certainly by the force of our imagination. A collective imagination not far from a child’s capacity for dream and play, deemed by some to be naive or groundless, yet which holds the power to move us.
The buoyancy of Djanira’s scene takes us there—our heads held upwards, we can just about see it: this kite against the bright blue sky that we all dream about, hope for and believe in.
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism is on display at the Royal Academy of Arts until 21st April
