Modernismo and São Paulo

June 24th
Today it was pouring rain again, not a fun way to start off the day considering that my umbrella unceremoniously quit on me yesterday…Classes went well, it was the subjunctive and reading comprehension in Portuguese today but our afternoon class was dedicated to an excursion to the Museu Lazar Segall who was a modernist painter of German origins who spent most of his life in Brazil. After class we all hurried off to get to the museum (traveling across the city at lunch time does take some time). It was about 40 min to get across town via bus-metro-metro. We lost parts of our group along the way but everyone made it out to the museum. My group was the first there and we had stopped at a Lunchonete (street lunch restaurant) to get pão de queijo (cheesy bread) and then proceeded to eat our packed lunches in the covered lobby/patio of the Casa de Lazar Segall.
After everyone arrived we began our tour. Our guide was Jorge Schwartz,  the museum director and leading expert on the modernists and Vanguard movements in Southern Latin America. He gave us an amazing tour, explaining all of the works of art in the museum and the building itself which was the home of Lazar Segall. Segall was a German born and trained artist (mostly of the expressionist style) who was the leading artist in Brazil during the Modernist movement of the 1900-1930s. The have selection on display in the museum that demonstrates the chronological trends in Segalls work from impressionist to expressionist to abstract. The museum is also very active in the current art culture of São Paulo through their rotating exhibition space and their open art studio and facility spaces as well as their cinema. The tour was amazingly informative, and I really enjoyed how I could relate some of the works to a prior history class that I took on Germany from 1900-1940. One of the paintings featured in the collection was actually located in the German modern art museums under Hitler and was a part of the exhibition of degenerate art!
After the museu Lazar Segall we continued on down the street to visit the Casa Modernista which was the first house designed in modern architectural style in São Paulo. A Russian Jew named Gregori Warchavchik migrated to Brazil with his family prior to the first world war. He was trained in the Bauhaus style and began to build modernist homes in São Paulo. We visited his home which was in the neighborhood of Vila Mariana (where Angelika and I stayed our first night), he also built many other homes in the area. His house is very interesting in that it is an ideal prototype that attempted to meet all the daily necessities of the family though design. The house is rather large and honestly is very well laid out. It had an abundance of storage and natural light. Almost every room had access to a terrace with large glass sliding doors.
On the main, public, floor all of the rooms were linked in an open floor plan that we would see in homes today. The house also had a large grounds and pool with many patios. The bathrooms were all much larger than those typical of the era as was the kitchen and he utilized the kitchen heat source as a way to keep water warm for the indoor plumbing. The house also had some strange quirks that were particular to the owners. Since the architect was a strict Jew there were many special religious conveniences such as sinks for purification in the rooms for his daughter and wife (she had a separate bedroom for her ‘impure’ times of the month…). He also built a separate area for meat storage apart from the other food in the kitchen. He was also a bit particular about the distinction between private and public space in the house and it was designed so that visitors were not immediately let into the intimate family spaces of the house, and no front facing windows on the upper level apart from the watch room (he felt that the home was a space to promote family unity and intimacy). Prior to WWII, Warchavchik had the house retrofitted with security devices due to his fear over the local reaction against Jews, so all the windows on the lower levels have bars built in over them and the lower terrace doors all close and have a retractable, large chain link gate that goes over them. The house was very fascinating in its novel style and in the particularities of the designer himself.
         After the class ended close to five several of us decided to go to the traditional Japanese immigrant neighborhood, Liberdade, which has good sushi and traditional noodle shops. Allison, Aileisha, Angelika, Roxanne, Isaiah, Genevieve and I all took the metro back towards the city center and walked to a specific noodle shop that was recommended by our professor because they still made their own noodles. Even with getting a bit lost (a typical experience even with explicit directions and an iphone map in São Paulo, we arrived at the restaurant at 5:30 and it did not open till 6:00. We decided to go to the corner Lanche/bar to get drinks and an appetizer before dinner. The Lanche actually had very good deals on drinks and food! We ended up staying there for 40 minutes before we walked back to the noodle restaurant (called Asha). When we walked back over (20 min after they opened) there was already a bit of a line! Apparently it is a very popular hole-in-the-wall type place, but even then we only had to wait about 10 min which we passed at the nearby banca (newspaper stand). Giving them our name was actually very interesting because they were not sure how to pronounce them…Mine ended up being the closest one they could get but we were still not exactly sure what they called out for our group when we went in…The menus were a bit hard to decipher because they were in Japanese translated in to Portuguese that we were trying to translate to English. I decided to give up trying to figure out what the food was and just ordered at random. It turned out to be a good idea! I’m not sure exactly what I got but it was good! The noodles were very fresh and had a completely different flavor than normal. Everyone really enjoyed what they got! After our meal (it was a quick in quick out type place) we all walked back to the metro together and it was a quick train ride home and back to homework!

The curator, Jorge Schwartz, explaining one of the paintings

This is the painting that was in the Exhibition of Degenerate Art in Hitler's Germany

This is the backside of the Casa Modernista, it looks better in person but it was getting dark and it was rainy outside... it does show some of the security features that the architect put in during WWII.