Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art: The Making of the Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection

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* New Years Party in Rio de Janeiro at the MAM with WLH Travel, a company that shares our concern for sustainable and responsible tourism.
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Chateaubriand was strolling on a downtown São Paulo sidewalk when an old acquaintance, a close friend of painter José Pancetti's ex-wife, called out from a gallery doorway.

After a quick introduction, the gallery owner quickly sensed the collector’s lack of interest in the current exhibit. She hustled him back into a storage room. As she searched for a batch of drawings to show him something, Chateaubriand distractedly opened another cabinet. There amid dozens of tattered canvasses he spied “Urutu,” a 1928 oil painting by Tarsila do Amaral. "That belongs to a friend of mine. She hates it," remarked the gallery owner. Chateaubriand left with the painting tucked under his arm.

"Later I discovered that Tarsila painted the picture, which is tremendously erotic, after a torrid night with the husband of the woman who couldn't stand it. When her husband passed away, she disposed of it as quickly as possible," chuckled Chateaubriand. Eventually the image adorned the cover of the catalogue for the "Latin American Artists of the 20th Century" show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1993.

A fateful rainstorm gave Chateaubriand the chance to acquire Anita Malfatti's classic works “O Farol (Monhegan),” “A Japonesa,” and “India.” In São Paulo for a meeting with his lawyer, Chateaubriand got caught in one of the city's characteristic downpours. He bought a newspaper to cover his head, but the rain was coming down so hard that he scampered back under cover to let the storm pass. While waiting, he read the paper. "I discovered that there was an exhibition of Anita Malfatti's works. So I called a cab and went," he said. "It was a good excuse to avoid my lawyer" – and add to the collection.

Not just footsteps and fate, but also a penchant for cultivating friendships with artists has helped Chateaubriand mount a collection of nearly 6,000 works that is so comprehensive that critic Roberto Pontual penned an authoritative book on 20th century Brazilian art based exclusively on its contents (see the link at the bottom of this page).

Chateaubriand unwittingly launched his collection in the early 1950s when a mutual friend took him to Pancetti's atelier in the northeastern city of Salvador, Bahia. "After about 10 minutes, we were like boyhood friends," Chateaubriand recalled. Pancetti commemorated the occasion by awarding Chateaubriand his “Paisagem de Itapoã,” a 1953 landscape oil painting of Salvador’s Itapuã beach. After the gift, Chateaubriand became a regular Pancetti customer, over the years accumulating some 30 of the artist’s works.

Whether in person or in spirit, Pancetti would keep making appearances in Chateaubriand’s life. In an attempt to recover from an ill-fated relationship, Pancetti moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro. Despite the new surroundings, the artist remained down in the dumps, unable to get his creative juices flowing. But one Saturday morning he felt inspired and called Chateaubriand: "Can you drive me out somewhere south of town?" They stopped in Gávea, now urbanized but then almost deserted. After Pancetti completed his painting, they returned to where Chateaubriand had parked his car to discover it had been broken into. "He felt so bad that he gave me the painting," recalled the collector. “Once I got an open offer for it. I told the person, 'The day I'm hanged, it is yours.' Pancetti taught me generosity."

After a falling out with his father, a media magnate and one of Brazil's most influential men of the 20th century, Chateaubriand decided that he needed cash to finance a planned move to Europe. To beef up his bank account, he sold four Pancettis. "Pancetti saved me financially," he recalled. "I had to sell, but I cry over it to this day."

Since 1993 just about everything that Chateaubriand accumulated over the years can be found in the care of Rio's Museum of Modern Art (MAM). Chateaubriand's initiative revived the MAM, moribund since the late 1970s after a fire destroyed its collection. A permanent exhibit offers visitors a comprehensive short course dating to modernists like Malfatti who joined leading poets and authors of the day to shock Brazilian society with their 1922 Modern Art Week festival in São Paulo.

Chateaubriand and MAM are also liberal lenders to other museums: modernist classics have shown at the São Paulo Industrial Federation (FIESP) and selections from Chateaubriand's collection have appeared abroad at places like Washington's Art Museum of the Americas.

Before packing up and sending his collection to the MAM, Chateaubriand had for 12 years been unable to receive visitors in his spacious apartment in the fashionable Rio de Janeiro district of Leblon because all but one room was overrun by artwork.

Since MAM helped Chateaubriand clean out his apartment, guests have been treated to some excavated furnishings: a velvet chair where his father sat during Queen Elizabeth's 1952 coronation; a custom-built antique turn-of-the-century English bar; nineteenth century candle holders, adapted as lamps, from a demolished French church (the priests made Chateaubriand and fellow bidders sit through mass before the auction). Chateaubriand purchased most of the furniture during his diplomatic stints in London and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s.

When I visited the apartment in 1993, the walls exhibited what Chateaubriand said would become his permanent home exhibit. The dinning room was a mini-museum of Glauco Rodrigues' irreverent paintings that satirized Brazil's 1964-85 dictatorship. These are full of Native American figures, juxtaposed with beach bums, tourists and others from Rio's central casting. Chateaubriand, a close friend of the artist, explained that many of Rodrigues' paintings recall Tarsila's conscious habit of cannibalization - the consumption of European influences to produce distinctly Brazilian works. "These don't leave here," said Chateaubriand. "I have an affective relationship with them. They are also nostalgic reminders of my diplomatic career. The foreign ministry was full of paintings of Indians."

In fact, affection ranks high among Chateaubriand's selection criteria when buying art. "One of the great pleasures of a collection is to put it together according to with your feelings, preferences, taste and attraction. The main law of collecting is attraction," he said.

Pancetti had his place on the wall, as did Rubens Gerchman, Manabu Mabe, and José Roberto Aguilar. But despite their rich adornment, the walls exhibited the eerie surgical stains of missing works by Brazilian masters like Vicente Rego Monteiro and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti that had been transplanted to the MAM. Chateaubriand had also parted with Candido Portinari's “Paisagem de Brodosqui,” a painting he loved as a boy when it was owned by his father, Assis Chateaubriand. It left the family as a gift to a Canadian businessman, who eventually took it home when he departed from Brazil. Years after Gilberto Chateaubriand gave the painting up for lost, he received a frantic call from a Rio gallery owner: "Get here quick." When he arrived, there it was - the long lost painting.

Besides “Brodosqui,” the only prominent legacy from his father’s collection is another Portinari, the 1959 “Cavalho,” a gift that the elder Chateaubriand tried to take back after one of their frequent fallings out. The painting was prominently displayed in the Rio apartment the day I visited: "It isn't a great Portinari, but it has great symbolic value. My trophy from my battles with my father. One of the few victories I had over him."

Even some Brazilian critics mistakenly believe that Chateaubriand inherited at least the core of the collection from his father. In fact, a bitter fight over his father's inheritance left Gilberto with a smaller financial and artistic legacy than some might expect. Gilberto has funded his collecting habit from profits garnered from his orange and sugarcane farm in São Paulo state. "What determines my buying power is the price of oranges," he said. "I buy about three or four a month."

When I visited Chateaubriand's relatively modest rural farmhouse in 1993, the walls of his living room were given over to works by Gervane de Paula, born in 1961. De Paula's paintings depict regional themes (alligators are sometimes prominent) in the wetlands of his native Mato Grosso state. "It is amazing how a youngster so many kilometers from Rio de Janeiro is so well informed," Chateaubriand remarked.

Chateaubriand cultivates the friendship of emerging artists, just as he once did with Pancetti and Glauco Rodrigues and Di Cavalcanti. He will often scour the output of an artist in search of works that diverge from the norm. "Sometimes I prefer 'marginal' works - marginal in the sense that they differ in terms of the materials or themes they usually use," he said.

A self-confessed "gallery rat," Chateaubriand admits to once having attended four or five openings a week. But he prefers to track artists down in their ateliers.

Like when he acquired that first Pancetti.

Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art (MAM Rio)
Avenida Infante Dom Henrique, 85
Parque do Flamengo
20021-140 Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Telephone: +(55-21) 2240-4944
Fax: +(55-21) 2240-4899
www.MamRio.com.br
E-mail

Order Entre dois séculos: Arte brasileira do século XX na Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand by Roberto Pontual (in Portuguese) from Amazon.com.