Favorite Son

Brazil takes for granted the eminence of such of its artists as Painter Candido Portinari and Architect Oscar Niemeyer, but reserves its affection and worried concern for someone else. At 64, Alberto da Veiga Guignard is Brazil's most cherished artist. Poets write about him, collectors pay more for his canvases than for those of any other Brazilian, and Painter Portinari himself has called him "my master." Guignard must be watched every minute of the day: he is the kind of man who has happily traded a $2,500 painting for one bottle of cheap cane alcohol.

Guignard's newest work, on display in Rio de Janeiro last week, is a series of paintings of the Stations of the Cross for a starkly modern Roman Catholic chapel designed by Communist Architect Niemeyer. Rationed to two beers and a teaspoon of whisky a day, Guignard finished the brightly colored childlike paintings in 17 days while a record player blared Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Debussy's The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. The critics were ecstatic. Diario Carioca called the paintings too good for the chapel.

Mirth & Misery. Ever since his father died when he was ten, Guignard's life has been a mixture of mirth and misery. His mother, who was rich in her own right, took him off to Germany and married a Munich baron. Guignard himself fell hopelessly in love with a boardinghouse keeper's daughter and married her at 18, but his young wife soon ran away.

Guignard plunged into art studies in Munich, Florence, Padua, Venice, Paris. He built up a small, solid reputation--and a big, solid thirst.

Back in Brazil, he became enchanted with his native land. With a brush dipped in fantasy, he painted its tangled forests, soaring mountains and garish carnivals. In 1940 President Juscelino Kubitschek, who was then mayor of Belo Horizonte, set up an art school and made him a star instructor. But Guignard, bubbling over and chattering through his harelip, either drank up or gave away everything he made. He once traded a painting for a necktie, recently gave another for a pair of long-toed shoes. The transaction, he said, was "completely fair: they're like the shoes Charlie Chaplin used to wear." "A Beheaded Mule." Guignard owes his life--and much of his present success --to a dedicated physician named Santiago Americano Freire, who nursed him back to health from a nearly fatal case of the DTs. Dr. Americano got his patient a state pension of $100 a month, arranged most of his exhibitions, which in one year alone sold more than 100 paintings.

Guignard's Stations of the Cross paintings had to pass a difficult test, approval by Padre Guilherme Schubert, censor of sacred art for the Catholic Church in Rio. The artist and some of his friends fed the good father an excellent lunch of antipasto and steak, and followed him, wringing their hands, as he walked past the pictures. Schubert, who believes that it is necessary to "police modernists," disapproved of Guignard's skyscraper cross, spear-bearing soldiers ("creatures from Mars") and the bloodied imprint of Christ's visage on Veronica's cloth ("a beheaded mule"). Then he delivered his decision: "I will tell the cardinal that these paintings can be consecrated."

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