You get back to Eden by preserving what exists of the original, or by creating new versions of your own. Roberto Burle Marx, the great Brazilian landscape architect, did both. From the 1930s onward, mainly in South America, he designed some of the modern world’s most distinctive parks and gardens, from an immense, jazzy tattoo of a promenade on the Rio de Janeiro beachfront to rooftop plantings in a city carved overnight from jungle, Brasília. In the process, he became deeply invested, heart and mind, in saving the Amazonian paradise that surrounded him; fought to halt its devastation; and turned his home near Rio into a botanical rescue farm, a sanctuary for one of the world’s largest collections of tropical plants. Despite this ecological pioneering, his name, though monumental in Brazil, is not widely known in New York. No surprise. There’s no park or garden by him here to experience firsthand. Landscape design, a fundamentally sensual genre, doesn’t translate easily into museums. For many people, the very connection between gardens and art may be a stretch. The last New York survey of his career was in 1991, at the Museum of Modern Art, and it seems not to have attracted wide notice. I hope “Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist,” now at the Jewish Museum, will. It deserves to. It’s a lovely and eye-opening show. Among other things, this show demonstrates that Burle Marx’s aesthetic contributions went beyond plantings. He created mural-size decorative wall coverings from ceramic tiles; wall reliefs carved in wood and stone; and immense wool tapestries, one of which takes up an entire wall in this exhibition’s main gallery. It also suggests that this artist, who died in 1994, has finally found his proper global context in an environmentally activist moment that he, long ago, helped create. ....You get back to Eden by preserving what exists of the original, or by creating new versions of your own. Roberto Burle Marx, the great Brazilian landscape architect, did both. From the 1930s onward, mainly in South America, he designed some of the modern world’s most distinctive parks and gardens, from an immense, jazzy tattoo of a promenade on the Rio de Janeiro beachfront to rooftop plantings in a city carved overnight from jungle, Brasília. In the process, he became deeply invested, heart and mind, in saving the Amazonian paradise that surrounded him; fought to halt its devastation; and turned his home near Rio into a botanical rescue farm, a sanctuary for one of the world’s largest collections of tropical plants.
Despite this ecological pioneering, his name, though monumental in Brazil, is not widely known in New York. No surprise. There’s no park or garden by him here to experience firsthand. Landscape design, a fundamentally sensual genre, doesn’t translate easily into museums. For many people, the very connection between gardens and art may be a stretch. The last New York survey of his career was in 1991, at the Museum of Modern Art, and it seems not to have attracted wide notice. I hope “Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist,” now at the Jewish Museum, will. It deserves to. It’s a lovely and eye-opening show.
Among other things, this show demonstrates that Burle Marx’s aesthetic contributions went beyond plantings. He created mural-size decorative wall coverings from ceramic tiles; wall reliefs carved in wood and stone; and immense wool tapestries, one of which takes up an entire wall in this exhibition’s main gallery. It also suggests that this artist, who died in 1994, has finally found his proper global context in an environmentally activist moment that he, long ago, helped create.
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The artist embraced modernism in the early 1930s, as the movement was taking hold in Brazil. He revolutionized garden design by using abstraction and grand colorful sweeps of local vegetation, abolishing symmetry and rejecting imported flora and European models. The son of a German Jewish father and a Brazilian Catholic mother, he viewed the role of the landscape architect in ideal terms: to mitigate the loss of the primeval garden and repair the rift between humanity and nature.
Burle Marx’s art inhabits a rare space between the rational and the lyrical. Nature’s variability was for him a liberating force: in a sixty-year career he designed over two thousand gardens worldwide, discovered close to fifty plant species, advocated passionately for the environment, and made paintings and objects of exuberant, rare beauty. The artist who called himself “the poet of his own life,” left the world a poetic legacy.
Burle Marx’s gardens are works of modern art, not only because they make use of flat planes, abstract shapes, and bold color, but because of the way they behave: they prompt awareness of oneself in relation to the built environment. Burle Marx was an early practitioner of a contemporary way of working: crossing genres fluidly, integrating art with political concerns such as ecology, and disregarding the traditional separation of fields of practice. It is therefore no surprise that artists of today find him a fruitful source of inspiration. In this exhibition, seven artists with ties to Latin America, all born after 1950, provide a sampling of his influence. They are: Juan Araujo, Paloma Bosquê, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Luisa Lambri, Arto Lindsay, Nick Mauss, and Beatriz Milhazes.
Jens Hoffmann
Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs
Claudia J. Nahson
Morris & Eva Feld Curator
This exhibition is organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, in collaboration with the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx, Rio de Janeiro.
After its presentation at the Jewish Museum, New York, the exhibition will travel to the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin, Germany, and the Museu de Arte do Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.