Brazil's Lula

The opening of Lula Cardoso Ayres' one-man show went off like a high-society ball, with all of Rio's granfinos present and newsreel cameras clicking. More important, handsome Lula Ayres was clearly the best Brazilian painter to come along since Candido Portinari. He had the sophistication of Rio's salons and the simplicity of the backwoods.

Rich, young (36) Lula Ayres had come by his knowledge of back-country work, play and superstition the hard way. At home in Recife, capital of Pernambuco, he had grown up like most of the pampered sons of rich sugar growers. He threw around his father's money, traveled in Europe, killed time with other playboys on Copacabana beach. A precocious talent made him a fashionable magazine illustrator before he was 20.

In 1931 the depression dried up the Ayres fortune. Lula went to work on a sugar plantation, lived with Negro and mulatto field hands, learned their games and dances, studied their primitive art and pottery making. He remained with them after his father had rebuilt his fortune. When he came out of the sugar lands in 1944, there were few traces left of the fashionable illustrator. Ayres had acquired artistic size.

The pictures in the Rio show are a documentary gallery of Brazilian plantation life. They also explain the steps by which Ayres is growing up as a painter, identify the bigger men to whom he is still in debt. His cubism comes from early shoulder-rubbing with modernism; having once tried to paint like Mexican Diego Rivera, he has not got over it yet. But much in the pictures is his own. Even more than imagination, the paintings show enormous sympathy for the simple laborers, sure understanding of their lives and myths. The themes of the best of them are primitive, the colors strong. Last week, critics looked long and admiringly at Jagadores de Cartas (Card Players), a Cezanne theme done the South American way.

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