From Richmond to São Paulo: International Art Collaboration on the Eve of World War II

On January 17, 1939, American businessman Donald McKenzie Blair arrived in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil, on board the Normandie. His arrival was enthusiastically announced in the culture sections of local newspapers, as the “Marvellous City” was hosting him as the U. S. representative of the “Abstractionist Group.” Blair had brought the said “Yankee abstractionist representation” in his luggage as part of the 3rd Salão de Maio, an exhibition of modern art organized in São Paulo, some 440 km (about 270 miles) from Rio by rail.¹

What was the relationship between the president of the Virginia Paper Company and abstract art that made him travel all the way to Brazil? Despite the constraints imposed by a particularly turbulent period in world politics, the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe; the persecution of so-called “cultural Bolshevism,” the stigmatization of modern art as “degenerate art”; and the increasingly pressing threat of a military conflict on a global scale – international collaboration was still possible. Works by artists based in Europe and the United States were being featured in one of the main international exhibitions of modern art held in Brazil during the interwar period. The American branch of that transnational network of collaboration resulted in Donald M. Blair’s trip to Brazil as well as the participation of Alexander Calder, Carl Holty, Eileen Holding, Jean Xceron, Werner Drewes, Josef Albers and Jean Hélion. The main, though not the only, organizer of that network was the Brazilian architect, writer, and artist Flávio de Carvalho.

Born in 1899 in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, into a wealthy family, Flávio de Carvalho completed the Lyceum (or upper secondary school), in Paris and London. His father was a Brazilian alumnus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and had urged him to study engineering.² In 1922, he graduated as a civil engineer from Durham University in Newcastle, UK. He also attended Fine Arts courses at the King Edward VII School of Art. After graduating, he returned to Brazil and began working in architectural offices in São Paulo. Finding the work boring, De Carvalho put more energy into creating audacious designs for public building competitions, though he did not win any.

In the late 1920s, he became close to Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral, and the group around the Revista de Antropofagia, an avant-garde magazine published between 1928 and 1929, which called for greater autonomy from Eurocentric models of thought, drawing inspiration from the philosophy and warrior ethics of the ancient Tupinambás indigenous peoples who inhabited the territory of Brazil in the 16th century. In the Fourth Pan-American Congress of Architects, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1930, De Carvalho participated as an “anthropophagic delegate” to the event, where he presented the controversial presentation, “A cidade do homem nu” [The City of the Naked Man], a conceptual city based on his interest in desire, the anthropophagic movement, and psychoanalysis.

In September 1934, he travelled to Prague, capital of what was then Czechoslovakia, to take part in the Congresses of Philosophy and Psychotechnics, where he presented his research crossing anthropological and psychoanalytical approaches to human creativity, as well as modern artistic ways of exploring it. It was on this trip that he first starting making his transnational connections.

After presenting at the congresses in Prague, De Carvalho extended his stay in Europe, traveling to different countries and visiting museums, historical sites, and small villages. His main objective was to collect observations on the life and history of European peoples to write a travel book once he returned to Brazil. De Carvalho’s travels also enabled him to establish contact with researchers, writers, and artists who shared his interests.³ When he returned to Brazil at the beginning of 1935, in addition to working on the travel book, he began publishing a series of newspaper articles about the trip, including interviews with the people he had met. One of them was the French painter Jean Hélion.

By reading the article in which De Carvalho introduces Hélion’s ideas on abstract painting, it is possible to imagine that the meeting took place in a private setting, perhaps the artist’s own home in Paris. This is not explicitly stated in the text, but it is suggested when De Carvalho mentions the painter’s wife bringing them tea. Without mentioning her name, De Carvalho describes her in his wry style as “an American woman speaking perfectly American French.”⁴

The American woman was Jean Blair Hélion (formerly Jean Feild Blair), half-sister of businessman Donald McKenzie Blair, both children of Lewis Harvie Blair, a noted businessman and writer from Richmond. The Blair family lived and had several businesses in Richmond, including the Virginia Paper Company, which was chaired by Donald.⁵ Jean Blair had met Hélion in France in 1928, perhaps introduced by her brother-in-law Pierre Daura.⁶ The French Hélion, then living in Paris, had left his chemistry studies in Lille in the early 1920s to try a career as a painter in the French capital. He was beginning to take an interest in modern painting, to which he had been introduced by the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-Garcia.

Divorced from his first wife, Hélion had married Jean Blair in Richmond in September 1932.⁷ By then, he had already become one of the leaders of abstract art in Paris, founding the group and magazine Art Concret in 1930, later expanded under the name Abstraction-Création with Theo van Doesburg, Otto Calsund, Leon Tutundjian, and Marcel Wantz.

After their marriage, the couple settled in Paris, but traveled frequently to the United States, dividing their time between stays in New York, where Hélion played a key role in fostering debates and exhibitions on abstract art, and at the Blair family summer house on the banks of the Maury River in Rockbridge Baths, the “Blairlea” residence. Because of the Blair family’s social relevance in the region, the young international couple’s visits were frequently reported in the local press, as were the occasions on which they received friends from the art world, such as Alexander Calder and Louisa James in December 1933 and Harry Holtzman and Elizabeth McManus in October 1937.⁸ In 1936, Helion built a studio in Rockbridge Baths, perhaps indicating a desire to stay longer.⁹

The letters from Flávio de Carvalho to Jean Hélion regarding American participation in the 1939 Salão de Maio were sent to the “Blairlea” residence at Rockbridge Baths. The two artists had kept in touch after their meeting in Paris. In the first known correspondence between the two, sent from De Carvalho on November 17, 1938, he confirms that he had received a set of reproductions of Hélion’s paintings and claims that he felt increasingly close to his French friend’s work. In return, he sent the catalog of the second edition of the Salão de Maio, which had taken place between June and August 1938, and invited Hélion to take part in the 1939 edition. The exhibition had included woodcuts by Mexican artists Francisco Díaz de León and Leopoldo Méndez, and a significant participation by abstractionists and surrealists from London, giving the show an intercontinental scope.¹⁰

De Carvalho gave Hélion instructions on how to send paintings and drawings so that they would arrive safely in Brazil and asked Hélion to talk to Eileen Holding, G.L.K. Morris, and László Moholy-Nagy about sending works as well. He finished the letter by announcing that the group organizing the exhibition was preparing a manifesto and asked Hélion to prepare a list of artists and works that would be sent from the United States, accompanied by photos and short biographies.

Hélion complied with the request for help and in January 1939, he sent a postcard from Rockbridge Baths to the Greek American painter Jean (or John) Xceron asking if he would like to send works to the Salão de Maio in São Paulo. An undated note from Hélion to the German artist Werner Drewes, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), also mentions the Brazilian show, and possible entries by both Drewes himself and by Carl Holty and G.L.K. Morris, to whom Hélion claimed to have already written. Apart from Morris, all of them sent works to the Brazilian show.¹¹

In the messages to Xceron and Drewes, Hélion emphasized that the invitations come from him. In the postcard to Xceron, for example, after mentioning the address of “his friend” De Carvalho in São Paulo, he wrote: “Write also and say that I invited you. It is a mixed show. Transportation at own expense and risk. Must be there before March [1939].”¹² This suggests that Hélion actually acted as a link between the Salão de Maio and the group of abstract artists in the United States, inviting at least four artists to the show, besides sending his own work. It is also very likely that Hélion coordinated the participation of Alexander Calder and Eileen Holding, artists to whom he was close, although it has not been possible to locate any documentation.

When Hélion received De Carvalho’s invitation to take part in the III Salão de Maio, he and Jean Blair were expecting their first child, so the delivery of the works fell to Donald Blair. Louis Helion Blair was born in Richmond on February 9, 1939, while his uncle Donald was representing the U.S. abstractionist group in Brazil. On March 1, De Carvalho wrote to Hélion to confirm the receipt of his works in excellent condition, as well as those of Calder and Holding. He also congratulated his friend on the birth of his “7 pound baby” and made a new request for a 6-10 page essay for the Revista Anual do Salão de Maio (RASM) [Annual Magazine of the May Salon], a publication that would also include the exhibition’s catalog.¹³

Since the early 1930s, Hélion had dedicated himself to abstract art not only as a painter, but also in the form of theoretical writings. His collaboration with the collector and critic Albert E. Gallatin, creator of the Gallery of Living Art in New York, gave rise, for example, to the essay “The Evolution of Abstract Art as Shown in the Museum of Living Art,” written in 1933 and reproduced in Museum of Living Art, published in 1937. De Carvalho knew of Hélion’s reputation as a theoretical thinker on abstract art. Having Hélion’s essay in the RASM would lend even greater legitimacy to the publication’s international goals.¹⁴

The known correspondence between De Carvalho and Hélion ends with the letter proposing this essay, which the painter never sent. By August 1939, the deadline suggested by De Carvalho, Hélion had presented himself at the French Consulate in Philadelphia to enlist with the French army. On September 7, 1939, the Rockbridge County News reported that Hélion was waiting for the call from his country’s army, making the local community feel closer to the tragic historical event that at that time could still be called the “war in Europe.”¹⁵ In January 1940, Hélion joined the French army, was captured by the Germans in June 1940, only to escape imprisonment 21 months later.¹⁶

The III Salão de Maio opened on June 30, 1939, with a speech from the Consul General of the United States in São Paulo, Carol H. Forster. Certainly, this was in recognition of the participation of artists from the U.S. In the weeks following the opening, the exhibition was enlivened by a program of conferences and activities. The most unusual was certainly an art-pun-filled dinner menu served in the exhibition space and followed by a performance of traditional Japanese dances.

The RASM magazine was also launched during the exhibition. Organized and designed by Flávio de Carvalho, its bold design featured a shiny and dangerous cover made of aluminum plates (some people reportedly cut their fingers while handling it) held together by screws. When browsing through the magazine, readers would soon find another unusual link to the United States. On its title page was a quote by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In a radio broadcast from the White House on May 10, 1939, Roosevelt had given a speech celebrating the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in its new building in New York. Delivered less than two months after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Nazi army, the speech outlines the relationship between art, peace, and freedom.¹⁷

Under the headline “Art can only flourish where men are free,” excerpts from Roosevelt’s speech were translated into Portuguese and published the following day in the newspaper to which De Carvalho contributed, the Diário de S. Paulo. The translation of the phrase “only where men are free can the arts flourish and the civilization of national culture reach full flower” was also chosen for the RASM title page.

By printing Roosevelt’s quote on the title page of the magazine, Flávio de Carvalho was taking a stand against the aggressions suffered by modern art, both internationally and in Brazil. For his activities as an artist and cultural agitator in the 1930s, he had been registered and monitored by agents of the Social Order Police Station.¹⁸  A Brazilian newspaper referred to the first edition of the Salão de Maio in the following terms:

In São Paulo, there is a group of communist and Jewish ‘artists’ [who] have already caused tremendous devastation in the realms of good taste and decency… What these ‘artists’ are looking for in their productions is not beauty, but generally the reproduction of vile models, of depraved types…¹⁹

Another article compared the Salon to an ephemeral “Museum of Psychopathic Curiosities,” providing at least good case studies for psychiatrists.²⁰

The “Manifesto of the III Salão de Maio,” published in Portuguese and English in the RASM, was written to refute such an obtuse and repressive view of art, which reproduced arguments aligned with the ideology behind the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Germany. It stated:

The Salão de Maio, by acquiring an international character, hopes that a higher intellectual interchange may advantageously replace the lower sentiments of man. It aspires to be a shelter for and a support to the ideas of those who, through inescapable vocation, have battered out their existence against the surrounding prison walls, in the development of that aesthetics and that plastic attainment which bid fair to lead the world of today and reveal themselves as the substratum of tomorrow.²¹

The main aim of the show was to be a “shelter” for any kind of aesthetic research that triggered what the manifesto called “mental turbulence.” It was possible that this openness allowed the Salão de Maio and its manifesto to consider abstract art and surrealism – movements with many conceptual, aesthetic and political differences – as complementary, referring to both as forces “necessary to the very conception of struggle and movement, and to the moulding of plastic art to be, because both appear on the scene of the struggle as a consequence of the same anxiety.”²²

This anxiety can be summarized as an unconditional desire for freedom of research, thought, and artistic expression, which led to an unexpected collaboration of Virginian family connections and the art courier services of businessman Donald M. Blair. The Salão de Maio had the potential to lead to greater international artistic collaboration but was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Nevertheless, the spirit of mutual collaboration and the belief in the power of art to provoke “mental turbulence” remains necessary and timely.