The Recurring Subjects of Emiliano Di Cavalcanti
His most recognizable subjects are idealized female figures, often mulatas, shown at half length with heavy-lidded eyes and bare shoulders. Around them recur carnaval scenes, café interiors
Emiliano Di Cavalcanti painted women above all. His most recognizable subjects are idealized female figures, often mulatas, shown at half length with heavy-lidded eyes and bare shoulders. Around them recur carnaval scenes, café interiors, musicians, sailors and the urban street life of Rio de Janeiro, rendered in the rounded, decorative manner of Brazilian modernism.
Women at the Center of Everything
Ask what Emiliano Di Cavalcanti paints most often and the answer is women. Not portraits of named individuals, but types. A woman at a window, a woman with flowers, a woman with folded arms and a level stare. The faces are broad and full-lipped, the eyes heavy, the bodies generous. He returned to this figure across five decades of work, refining it rather than abandoning it.
The figure carries the weight of his whole project. Di Cavalcanti was a central figure in Brazilian modernism, associated with the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, and he wanted a national art drawn from Brazilian faces and Brazilian street life rather than European academic models. The women he painted were his argument for that art. Anyone considering a reproduction should know the figure is the point; a canvas edition of one of these half-length women buy the canvas edition holds the composition better than a small framed version, because the face does the work.
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Carnaval, Cafés and the Rio Street
Ask what Emiliano Di Cavalcanti paints most often and the answer is women.
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