Impressionists Revisited

What will most likely be the third biggest city in the world 20 years from now? Wrong. Not London, not Los Angeles, not Peking--but Sao Paulo, topped only by Tokyo and New York. Gaining some 300,000 new settlers every year, Brazil's Sao Paulo is the world s fastest-growing city and, with 5,430,000 inhabitants, is now the world's eighth largest. This week at long last, Sao Paulo could display an art museum worthy of its growing stature.

The museum and the rich collection it houses are the almost single-handed achievements of one man--Sao Paulo's Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand ("Chato") Bandeira de Mello, a short stout press lord with a considerable resemblance to New York's late Fiorello

La Guardia in both appearance and personality. In 1947, noting that Sao Paulo (and indeed all Brazil) was sadly deficient in art, he proclaimed, "A nation without art is backward and barbaric," and set out to remedy this defect.

Quick Swoop. He hired Italian-born Pietro Maria Bardi as his artistic guide and installed him also as director of the Sao Paulo Art Museum--then a museum in name only, except in Chato's imagination. As chief of some 30-odd newspapers, 19 magazines, 22 radio and 15 TV stations. Chato had plenty of money of his own. But not even that kind of tycoon can command enough millions to assemble an art collection of the scope Chato had in mind. So Chato did not scruple to use his press facilities to extract a little something extra. A businessman, bank or civic organization that coughed up the cash for a work he had his eye on, could count on being eulogized in his publications. Anyone who balked might find himself attacked (as was one industrialist) as "a bandit, pachyderm, hippopotamus, Berber filibuster, Barbary pirate."

Chato himself was more pirate than pachyderm. He loved to swoop down on an Old Master for sale on the New York art market and carry it off before slow-moving U.S. museums could get their boards of trustees to approve its purchase. He liked to boast that he once snapped up 33 pictures at the Wildenstein Gallery before lunch, then talked the Brazilian government into giving him a $3,000,000 loan to finance his purchases. As the "museum" grew, it was moved from one makeshift quarters to another. In recent years, it has been housed in Chateaubriand's office building in downtown Sao Paulo. But the city fathers were finally stirred into action, put up the millions to build the collection a home of its own. Its official opening on March 12 will come just a year after Chateaubriand's death.

Designed by Architect Lina Bo (who is Director Bardi's ex-wife), the building is in effect a box suspended from four giant concrete piles spanned by huge concrete beams. This construction allows for column-free interiors where the paintings are supported in airy space on what amounts to a series of transparent plastic easels.

Spots and Peaks. Since Chateaubriand, like his country, was a latecomer to art collecting, the classical, medieval and Renaissance periods are only spottily--though sometimes handsomely--represented. There are two Titians, a Raphael Resurrection of Christ, a Mantegna St. Jerome, a commanding Velasquez portrait. There are also some diverting minor works, such as Quentin Metsys' Contract of Marriage, a droll example of genre by a Flemish contemporary of Erasmus, showing a young man dutifully snuggling up to an ugly but rich old wife.

The strength of the collection lies in its vast variety of impressionists and post-impressionists--a variety so rich that it provides offbeat works of artists whose characteristic style has become almost too familiar. Sao Paulo has, for instance, several Renoir nudes in his well-known manner. But the eye-opener is the full-length Bather with Griffon, painted in 1870 when Renoir was still seeing through the eyes of his mentor Courbet. It depicts Renoir's first mistress, Lise Trehot. No later Renoir nude was more lushly sensuous.

Manet's The Artist, though painted only eight years before his death, is a provocative contrast to the broadly stroked, flatly patterned pictures that any gallerygoer can identify across the room as a Manet. Marcellin Desboutin was a witty, talented engraver, and one of Manet's close friends. The uncharacteristically detailed features, the brooding eyes, perhaps reflect Manet's special affection for his model.

Lovers and Exceptions. Other pictures illuminate little-known aspects of the painters' careers. Besides a solid selection of Cezanne's familiar landscapes, Sao Paulo also has an early study of a Negro model painted in 1866 that shows the young Cezanne was working even then at the plastic shapes, low-keyed values, and flat planes that would eventually supplant the impressionists. Paul Gauguin's stark Self-Portrait: Near to Golgotha illustrates the anguish that the artist felt when he arrived in Tahiti for his final sojourn--ill, unable to sell his canvases, and forced to subsist on borrowed money. Vuillard's fame as a painter rests on his domestic scenes, but he also enjoyed Paris' gay night life, as may be seen from his decorative vignette of Actors Yvonne Printemps and Sacha Guitry.

Paul Viaud as an Admiral is the last canvas that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec ever worked on--and it is a far cry from his usual coquettes and dancing girls. Viaud was a family friend hired by the Countess de Toulouse-Lautrec to look after her deformed son and keep him away from the bottle. It proved an impossible task. But Lautrec seems to have appreciated Viaud's efforts, and slaved away at his portrait until too weak to stand upright on his maimed legs. It was still unfinished when Lautrec died at the age of 36.

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