After focusing on prominent figures of the modernist period, such as Ismael Nery, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, José Pancetti, Alberto da Veiga Guignard and Alfredo Volpi, the pair then began collecting works by artists of the 1960s and ’70s, such as José Resende, Antonio Dias, Waltercio Caldas, Cildo Meirelles, Mira Schendel and Amílcar de Castro. A turning point for the collection however, came in the middle of the 1990s – the international boom years for Brazilian art, led by the globetrotting gallery owner Marcantônio Vilaça (who died in 2000 at the age of 37) and his gallery in the Pinheiros neighbourhood of São Paulo. It was Vilaça who helped establish the likes of Ernesto Neto, Adriana Varejão, Iran do Espírito Santo and Beatriz Milhazes internationally, all present today in the José Olympio collection. ‘We quickly understood that Brazilian art was going through its most fertile period yet, and that we had to start buying before prices went up so much that we wouldn’t be able to acquire the best works of each artist,’ Olympio says. ‘We went to Marcantônio and said: show us contemporary art.’
Olympio is an investment banker and grandson of one of the most famous names of Brazilian culture in the 20th century, the São Paulo publisher José Olympio (1902–90). Between 1997 and 2004 he was Director and Vice President of the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. Since 2002 Pereira has been coordinator of the same museum’s Centre for Contemporary Art. Since 2001 the couple have been members of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the United States, comprised of collectors and other art experts from around the world.
Over the past decade the collection has grown so much that Olympio and Pereira have transformed a 300 square metre apartment on Avenida São Luiz, in the centre of São Paulo, into a dedicated exhibition space for 350 or so works by artists who have emerged since the 1980s. Works by modern and contemporary artists since the 1970s are kept at their private residence in the neighbourhood of Morumbi.
The collection has quickly become a reference point for contemporary Brazilian art, somewhere young artists want to be. But it also reflects the relatively underdeveloped state of Brazil’s art market, simply because it has so few competitors (although there are a few, such as the collections of Bernardo Paz, Gilberto Chateaubriand, Susana Steinbruch, Ricardo Akagawa and João Satamini). Most Brazilian collections – and most of the money that is invested in art – concentrate on Brazilian Modernism, the highlights being Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfatti, Di Cavalcanti, Candido Portinari and Guignard, among others. For the most part, collectors remain wary and sceptical in their approach to contemporary art. In a developing nation such as Brazil, where public spending on culture is small and restricted mostly to cinema, private collections end up taking on the role that in other countries would be reserved for museums and other public institutions. A major problem for the history of Brazilian art lies in the vast gaps in public collections caused by the lack of money for acquisitions, to the detriment of systematic critical study. Worse still, given the lack of a stable market for specialised art books and magazines, the memory of an entire period runs the constant risk of being wiped out. The 1970s and ’80s have been the worst affected: many artists have been forgotten altogether, not to mention the number of works that have disappeared, often leaving no record of their existence.
Fifty or one hundred years from now, any art historian wanting to look back over the history of Brazilian art will be forced to turn not to public galleries but to private collections. The José Olympio collection, without a doubt, will be unmissable. It already contains works by such well-established figures as Iran do Espírito Santo, Rosangela Rennó, Jac Leirner, Beatriz Milhazes, Vik Muniz, Ernesto Neto and Adriana Varejão, as well as artists now making names for themselves such as Rodrigo Matheus, José Damasceno, Marepe, Edgard de Souza, Rubens Mano, Sandra Cinto, Albano Afonso, Felipe Barbosa, Vania Mignone, Rafael Assef, Rivane Neuenschwander, Alexandre da Cunha, Lucia Koch, Lia Chaia, Nicolás Robio, Eli Sudbrack, Franklin Cassaro, Marco Paulo Rolla, Rogério Canela, Mauro Piva, Marcos Chaves and Giuliano Montijo. Although Olympio and Pereira never hesitate to lend their works to touring exhibitions – at present they have 20 works out on loan, some of them to heavyweight shows such as ‘Tropicália’ in London, and the ‘Bienal do Mercosul’ in Porto Alegre – they have no plans at present to open their collection to the public. To avoid publicity (probably because of the uncertainty of life in a city as violent as São Paulo), they do not even plan at present to publish a book of their works. ‘The collection still needs to become more mature. It’s still in its adolescence,’ says Olympio. However, while collectors such as Chateaubriand and Satamini have ceded the bulk of their collections through free loans to museums in Rio de Janeiro, and the Nemirovskys, who, as well as establishing a non-profit foundation, organised an exhibition of their collection at the Pinacoteca (the state-owned public gallery in São Paulo) which was seen by thousands of visitors last year, the hope of critics, historians, artists and Olympio and Pereira’s Brazilian audience, must be that the couple will follow in this example.
FERNANDO OLIVA IS AN ART CRITIC AND JOURNALIST BASED IN SÃO PAULO TRANSLATED FROM PORTOGUESE BY JONATHAN WHEATLEY