Art and artists

Djanira: workers, colour and geometry

Look at four paintings by Djanira: a flower seller, a seamstress, a flour mill and sawyers, where work takes shape through colour and geometry.

A man in a red shirt balances on a log, holding a saw almost as long as his body. In another painting, a seated woman holds her hands near her chest as she sews, surrounded by small red flowers. Djanira da Motta e Silva (1914–1979) made work a recurring subject of her painting. People’s gestures and the objects of each trade also helped her organise the painted surface.¹

Born in Avaré, in the interior of São Paulo state, Djanira spent much of her career in Rio de Janeiro. Her travels around Brazil fed into paintings of festivals, religious practices and working life. The four works brought together here, painted between 1947 and 1959, show how she gave everyday subjects a structure of clearly defined colours and shapes.²³

Learning to paint in Santa Teresa

Djanira worked as a seamstress and ran a boarding house in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro. One of her lodgers was Emeric Marcier, who taught her painting techniques, starting with how to prepare a canvas. In his text for the Casa Roberto Marinho exhibition, Lauro Cavalcanti returns to an interview in which she describes Marcier encouraging her to develop a kind of painting different from his own. Technical instruction went hand in hand with this independence.³

The Museu de Arte de Santa Catarina also records her drawing studies at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios and her participation in the Salão Nacional de Belas Artes (National Salon of Fine Arts) in 1942. These encounters and studies were part of her training as a self-taught artist. Djanira learned from other artists and was already exhibiting outside Brazil in the 1940s.⁴

Vendedora de flores, 1947

The flower seller fills almost the entire height of the canvas. Her bouquet rises from her hands to her face, its green stems spreading across her purple clothes. The red skirt forms a large area of colour in the lower half; her bare feet extend across the greyish blue ground. Behind her, dark trees leave gaps for small patches of sky and a row of white buildings.

The differences in size make the scene strange. Children and winged beings surround the central figure, so small that a girl in green fits between the seller’s feet. On the right, near a pale dog, two figures carry a white cloth between them. White wings and petals recur across the green and red areas.

Isabella Rjeille and Rodrigo Moura read the painting through childhood and work. In their MASP text, the angels and luminous figures open an imaginary dimension around child labour. The scale of the central character and the movement of the smaller figures sustain this coexistence of street life and fantasy.²

Costureira, 1951

The seamstress lowers her eyes towards her hands. White fabric gathers in her lap and almost erases the distinction between her clothes and the piece she is sewing. The dark chair outlines her body, while her pale feet stand out against the pink floor. The figure is compressed between the back wall and the front edge.

The flowers have moved. In Vendedora de flores, they formed a bouquet that covered the body. Here, small green stems and red blooms repeat across the wall and floor. The floral pattern follows the change of plane: upright on the wall, tilted and spread out on the floor. A dark wavy line marks out part of the lower area.

On the right, the red curtain forms an almost unbroken block. A small blue opening appears beside it. These two larger fields contrast with the repeated small flowers. There is little empty space in the room, but the hands are still easy to find, where the white fabric meets the dark jacket.

The painting’s date, medium and collection are listed in the records of the 2019 exhibition at MASP and Casa Roberto Marinho. The sewing scene returns to a trade that Djanira herself practised.¹³

Casa de farinha, 1956

A large yellow wheel dominates the foreground. A white horse on the left and a man on the right flank the structure, crossed by wooden beams and dark belts. Behind it, a white band curves from one side of the composition to the other. People work along this bench and at containers spread around the shed.

Their gestures differ. Two figures at opposite ends hold tools over white circular surfaces. Near the centre, two women hold a cloth above a container. Farther back, a man brings his hands to the edge of a long box. Each task has its place, and the curved workbench keeps the figures close together.

Yellow recurs in the central shaft, the roof beams and the outlines of the containers. Pale clothes and white areas of flour break up the brown background. The eye can follow the wheel, rise along the beams and reach the workers at the back. The construction of space depends on these meetings of curves and straight lines, as visible as the stages of work.³

Serradores, 1959

The blue saw descends diagonally across the centre of the painting. The man in the red shirt stands on the log as he works; below, his partner in a green shirt is partly hidden by the timber and the oxen. The tool itself disappears where it passes behind the log, visually connecting the two workers.

The yellow boards on the left lean against one another and form a sequence of angles. The logs cross the painting in horizontal bands. One comes so close to the edges that it seems to fill the entire available width. The red shirt and blue saw stand apart from the brown wood in areas of colour with almost no gradation.

At the top, the houses are small beside the men. Green hills recede towards a narrow strip of blue sky, and a white mill appears on the right. Below, the bodies of two oxen occupy a broad band of the foreground. The work of sawing fits between the animals and the distant landscape.³

The subject invites a comparison with Homens serrando toras (Men sawing logs), painted in 1948 and discussed in the article on José Antônio da Silva. Silva places his workers close to a large mass of timber in a greyish landscape. Djanira arranges the cutting in bands of colour, with yellow boards and a blue blade crossing the centre. Comparing the same task makes their different approaches to scale and composition easier to see.

Djanira and Brazilian modern art

In the 2019 retrospective Djanira: a memória de seu povo (Djanira: the memory of her people), Isabella Rjeille and Rodrigo Moura questioned the classification of her painting as “primitive” or “naïve”. The exhibition brought work and workers together with other subjects from her art, such as religious life and popular festivals.¹

Lauro Cavalcanti observes that attention to subjects from popular culture can push Djanira’s use of form into the background. His reading draws attention to her choice of colours and economy of planes. In Serradores, following the blue blade between the logs is enough to see how a tool of the trade determines the direction of the viewer’s gaze.³

The discussion of these classifications continues in Chico da Silva and Brazilian naïve art. To see more of Djanira’s paintings, the exhibition record at MASP includes reproductions and credits, among them her mining scenes from the 1970s.