Sotheby’s to sell art belonging to Brazil’s Lady of the Resistance – The Art Newspaper

The journalist and artwork collector Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt (1916-2003) was a lady of braveness and tenacity.

Born in Salvador, Brazil, in 1916, by simply 15 she was writing the Ladies’s Points part of the Brazilian newspaper Correio da Manhã. Coincidentally, she would later personal the newspaper—within the early Forties she married her second husband, Paulo Bittencourt, who owned Correio da Manhã and, after Paulo’s demise in 1963, Niomar fearlessly led the newspaper in opposition to the navy dictatorship that ruled Brazil for over 20 years following the 1964 coup.

Sodré Bittencourt championed resistance and freedom of speech by Correio da Manhã within the face of maximum intimidation. After a bomb was set off outdoors the newspaper’s workplaces, the “Woman of the Resistance” (as she turned identified) wrote a scathing editorial, titled No to Terrorism, attacking the authoritarian regime. Following years of threats, Sodré Bittencourt was imprisoned in 1969 then compelled into exile in Paris the place she continued to marketing campaign for freedom of speech and of the press.

However Sodré Bittencourt was not only a fearless journalist. She believed artwork was very important to free considering and progress, and to that finish, she undertook the gargantuan activity of creating Brazil’s first up to date artwork museum, the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro, with barely any funds and within the face of resistance from the church, authorities and conservative naysayers. Because of worldwide assist and funding—aided by Nelson Rockefeller, the then director of MoMa—a Brutalist development in entrance of Sugarloaf mountain, designed by Affonso Eduardo Reidy, was opened in 1958.

“Niomar’s ardour for artwork and her conviction that Rio de Janeiro wanted a everlasting residence for the Museum of Fashionable Artwork have been so nice that she was not afraid to confront the Brazilian Catholic Church within the dispute over the enduring plot of land,” Sodré Bittencourt’s grandson, Mauro Moniz Sodré, tells The Artwork Newspaper. “It was a real David and Goliath battle – the episode turned generally known as the ‘battle of the skirts’. Ultimately, Niomar’s dream prevailed, in the end with the assent and acknowledgement of her capability by Archbishop D. Helder himself, who informed her, ‘Niomar, what I most admire in an individual is tenacity’.”

In constructing the museum’s assortment of Fashionable artwork, Sodré Bittencourt was deliberate and prescient, usually shopping for direct from the artists (Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brancusi amongst them.) Usually, she would purchase a piece for her private assortment too. Sadly, in 1978, virtually all of MAM’s assortment was destroyed by a fireplace, and the identical destiny claimed a lot of Sodré Bittencourt’s private assortment in Rio de Janeiro within the mid-Eighties.

However not all of her assortment was misplaced. Subsequent month, on 10 April, Sotheby’s Paris will promote round 70 works from Sodré Bittencourt’s modest Paris house in a sale titled La Liberté pour Dogme (Freedom as Dogma). The gathering, acquired between the Nineteen Fifties and Seventies, encompasses European family names (Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst) in addition to Brazilian pioneers comparable to Antonio Segui, Jesús Rafael Soto and Maria Martins. It’s anticipated to promote for between €7m and €10m.

“I keep in mind my grandmother, even 20 years after her demise, as a dynamic, decided, self-confident particular person with an important sense of braveness” says Sodré, who’s promoting the gathering. “She believed that freedom discovered its best expression by artwork, with none bias or prejudice in opposition to any creative manufacturing.”

He provides that, regardless of bitterness relating to Brazil’s dictatorship, “Niomar felt very pleased with the position she had performed as one of the crucial brave and fearless voices of resistance. She by no means considered rewriting her historical past. The oppressive political local weather that settled in Brazil after her imprisonment was decisive for her departure from the nation.”

Niomar’s assortment has remained in the identical Trocadéro house because the Nineteen Fifties, hidden from public view. Sodré is promoting it now as a result of he feels “it was virtually egocentric to have stored all of it this time”.

Sodré remembers his grandmother was notably hooked up to Femme debout (Standing Girl), a 1952 bronze by Giacometti that she purchased direct from the artist within the yr it was made. It’s anticipated to be the highest lot of the public sale, estimated at €2.5m to €4m. One other favorite was En Plein Soleil (1960, est €200,000-€300,000) by the Cobra Group artist Karel Appel, and Etude pour Le Parc des Princes (1952, est €300,000-€500,000), a small portray by Nicholas de Stael, who Sodré says was “very moved by her [Niomar’s] story when he first met her.”

Different European works embody Picasso’s Femme nue à la guitar (est €1.2m-€1.8m), an early 1909 work that reveals Picasso experimenting with what would change into Cubism, which was beforehand owned by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, André Breton and Pierre Matisse. One other is Max Ernst’s Les Fiancés (1930, est €200,000-€300,000), a Surrealist depiction of emotional distance between a female and male determine, which displays Ernst’s tough relationships on the time.

Latin American Modernism is a cornerstone of the gathering too, comparable to a sculpture by the Brazilian artist Maria Martins, who helped discovered MAM and was closely concerned within the Surrealist motion in New York and Paris. Martins launched Sodré Bittencourt to characters like Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim, and her sculpture Guerreiro (1949) is estimated at €80,000 to €120,000 within the Sotheby’s public sale. The sale additionally contains works by Almir Mavignier and Jesus Rafael Soto, amongst others.

In an announcement, Stefano Moreni, senior worldwide specialist at Sotheby’s Paris, says Sodré Bittencourt “fought with the quiet, unwavering conviction of those that search no recognition”. Moreni tells TAN: “Her capability to learn the twentieth century and to know which artists have been internationally necessary and presenting them within the museum (MAM) was outstanding.”