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Condé Nast Traveler
14-05-2025
- Condé Nast Traveler
Where to Eat, Stay, and Play in São Paulo, Brazil's Culture-Rich Metropolis
South America's largest city, São Paulo is often overlooked in favor of its glitzier seaside rival, Rio de Janeiro. But while tourists flock to the cidade maravilhosa for its sun, sea, and samba, the grittier concrete jungle of São Paulo holds a hidden charm. Its beauty may not be as in your fac—on the surface it's a grey sea of skyscrapers often matched by rainy weather—but it rivals the world's truly great metropolises when it comes to culture. Its food, art, and music scenes are among the best in Latin America, its soccer teams are fervently supported (catch a Corinthians game if you can, especially if against fierce rivals Palmeiras), and it boasts a wealth of renowned events, such as the São Paulo Art Biennial set in Ibirapuera Park. São Paulo had just 31,000 residents in the 1870s, but today's nearly 23 million make up a vibrant melting pot of immigrants: Since the late 19th century, people have flocked from throughout Europe—Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, eastern Europe—and the Korean and Japanese communities are numerous, while Peruvians and Bolivians have more recently arrived. There's also been migration from the north of Brazil, where much of the culture has been shaped by formerly enslaved Africans. Today, you can find food representing every community that has left its fingerprints on the city—though their impact extends well beyond the culinary realm. This São Paulo travel guide is designed to help you make sense of the city's beautiful chaos. We cover the best things to do, the places to eat and drink now, and where to get a few hours of shut eye amid all there is to see. The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) just underwent a major expansion, with a second building now full of art. Ilana Bessler/Museu de Arte de São Paulo The collection at MASP boasts work from international big-name painters alongside Brazilian stars like Tarsila do Amaral. Eduardo Ortega/Museu de Arte de São Paulo Getting to and around São Paulo From the United States, several airlines fly to Guarulhos, São Paulo's international airport. LATAM, United Airlines, and others operate direct flights from cities like New York, Houston, Chicago, Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco From the airport it's a 45-minute taxi ride to downtown, although the city's unavoidable traffic means it can take much longer. Consider ditching the roads and taking the train for less than a dollar (Google Maps can help you find your route). São Paulo's central districts are well connected by the metro, but taxis are relatively affordable (and yes, your Uber app works here). Walking in neighborhoods like Pinheiros and neighboring Vila Madalena, a hipster enclave, is easy—though hilly—but transport is ideal between neighborhoods in such a massive and sprawling city. What to do in São Paulo Tap into the art scene The city is a cultural behemoth, with scores of museums, galleries, and markets—though its street art scene is a natural place to start. The graffiti-filled alley of Beco do Batman is, unfortunately, full of tourists now and past its best. Head instead for Minhocão, a city center highway that's pedestrianized on weekends, from where you can look out upon a sea of skyscrapers, many hosting impressively enormous works of street art. For indoor art, check out the Instituto Moreira Salles, which focuses on photography, or the Museu de Arte São Paulo (MASP), both on Avenida Paulista. The latter has a well-stocked permanent exhibition blending all the European big-hitters with Brazil's finest painters, including Tarsila do Amaral. In early 2025, the MASP opened a new site, the Pietro Maria Bardi building, to host even more exhibitions. It has been wildly popular, with lengthy queues on weekends—book tickets online in advance and consider visiting during the week if you can. Admire architecture Architecture lovers know that São Paulo is home to works by Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi. The former designed a string of buildings in Ibirapuera Park, including the Ibirapuera Auditorium, with its giant red tongue signaling the entrance. Bo Bardi, an Italian who arrived in Brazil in 1946, designed the MASP based on her own house in Morumbi, a leafy neighborhood in the west of the city. Her former home, the Glass House, can be visited today, and is an oasis where Bo Bardi planted thousands of trees surrounding a glass house on large concrete stilts. Also worth visiting is Sesc Pompeia, a cultural center in the city's north where Bo Bardi's architecture is put to everyday use, housing a swimming pool, theater, music venue, and café. A few minutes' walk away, grab a pastel, a deep-fried pastry filled with meat or cheese, at Pastelaria Brasileira, an institution celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Italian architect Bo Bardi's Glass House is an oasis within the the beat For live music (and decent Italian food), check out Casa de Francisca, a gorgeously opulent reconstructed townhouse in the city center with a wide program including jazz and most Brazilian genres. To reach Bona Casa de Música, step into the unassuming entrance on a residential road that leads to a cavernous hall where some of Brazil's best contemporary bands play. (Book both in advance.) If it's dancing you're after, try Julinho Club or Ó do Borogodó, which celebrate Brazilian music at its finest. Though the latter focuses on samba, stick around and you'll find a more raucous party atmosphere continueing into the early hours. Where to eat Like most things in this city, São Paulo's food offers something from everyone, whether you're after no-fuss lunch spots or lengthy tasting menus, staunchly Brazilian dishes or food from a notable diaspora. International flavors First things first, you can't visit São Paulo without going for Japanese food, which is as natural to its residents as Mexican food in LA. Liberdade, a hub of the Japanese community, has a wealth of options from cheap all-you-can-eat sushi to Lamen Aska, one of the best ramen spots this side of Tokyo—prepare for long lines accordingly. Equally popular no-reservations joint Izakaya Matsu in Pinheiros is also a gem. Aim for a counter seat and tuck into katsu sandos, fried chicken, soy-and-sake squid, and mouth-watering takoyaki.
New European
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Brazilian blend: The birth of modernism
Early 20th-century movements, especially Cubism, cast a long shadow across the largest country in South America, as an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts illustrates in its celebration of 10 artists little known outside their own land. While the title of Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism may be bold to the point of exaggeration, the show itself unfurls engagingly enough, while unwittingly throwing the light back on to Europe over and over again. They studied or lived in Berlin, Dresden, and Paris, travelled through Italy and Spain, and rubbed shoulders with European artists visiting New York. Almost without exception, the artists who have come to represent modernism in Brazil, however immersed they were in their own culture, were profoundly influenced too by what was happening on this continent. Where the Brazilian artists really scored was with their unique insight into a time of massive social and political change such as few European countries have experienced. A colony of Portugal from 1500 to 1815, it was only in 1888 that slavery was finally abolished, too late for the four million West Africans brought forcibly to Brazil. Djanira, Flying a Kite, 1950, Banco Itaú Collection. Photo: Humberto Pimentel/Itaú Cultural/Instituto Pintora Djanira Lasar Segall, Banana Plantation, 1927, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo Collection. Photo: Royal Academy of Arts/David Parry/Geraldo de Barros Tarsila do Amaral, Lake, 1928, Collection of Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel. Photo: Tarsila do Amaral/Jaime Acioli After 75 years of imperial rule, it became a republic from 1889 onwards and was neutral during the second world war – until the sinking by Germany and Italy of dozens of trading vessels in 1942 killed 1,600 mariners. Thereafter, Brazil declared war on the axis powers and committed considerable industrial resources and military assistance to the allies, sending warships to take part in the Battle of the Atlantic and deploying more than 27,000 troops to fight in the Italian campaign, the only South American country to send soldiers overseas. By the end of the war, Brazil emerged as a significant power, at the cost of 31 merchant vessels, three warships, and 22 fighter aircraft. This was the country's recent history when artists such as Candido Portinari painted his Migrants (1944), memorialising the gruelling trek of three generations of starving, displaced people, bleached of life. The malnourished, pot-bellied child and desolate father sport cruelly jaunty garments, the mother carries all their worldly goods on her head, the skeletal grandfather with his staff echoes the Grim Reaper as a distant vulture's outspread wings turn his staff into a scythe. Portinari (1903-62) is typical of those artists who absorbed European influences and blended them with the culture in which they were raised. The son of poor Italian immigrants, he was brought up on a coffee plantation but went as a free student to the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes before winning a travel scholarship that took him across Europe. There he studied the old masters and modern movements, combining elements of both practices in his own painting. He was considered an important painter of religious art, and his hard-hitting social realism confronted racism in particular. In the 1950s he created his War and Peace mural for the United Nations headquarters in New York and, recognised internationally, was considered Brazil's most important artist. The trajectory of Lasar Segall (1889-1957) was completely different. Growing up in the large family of an affluent merchant in Vilnius, Lithuania, he studied in Berlin and Dresden before setting out to São Paulo to visit a sister and stage a successful exhibition, his European credentials his calling card. Shuttling between Germany and Brazil, he settled for good in São Paulo in 1924, marrying a wealthy heiress. But even protected from the poverty experienced by many of his new countrymen, his observations of hard lives and his own memories of losing his mother in his teens made his work acutely sympathetic. His sepia-toned Pogrom (1937), recording antisemitism in Stalinist Russia, is as distressing as Portinari's Migrants, bodies piled high like litter, blameless babies robbed of life. In later years, Segall found solace in forests, and in the deep, earthy colours of their vertical lines and slivers of light. This geometry, cut and rearrranged, is found in the wooden shacks of the shanty town that sprang up after the war as destitute rural families headed for the city. The human figures in Favela (1954-55) are stacked in their tiny boxes, a single palm tree breaking through the man-made thicket. A woman bearing a baby, a bundle, or both, has no place to go. Not surprisingly, Brazilian female artists in the early 20th century had to work hard to be noticed or valued. Two who stood out were more or less contemporaries: Anita Malfatti (1889-1964) and Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973). Both were born into comfortable homes, but Malfatti's family hit hard times with the death of her father, and she began painting for a living, aided by an uncle who arranged her studies in Berlin. A major exhibition in Cologne in 1912 exposed her to the work of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Bonnard, Matisse and other trailblazers. 'I saw painting for the first time only when I arrived in Europe,' she later said. 'When I visited museums, I was made dizzy by what I saw.' Her freely coloured nudes, angular portraits and rugged coastlines show the impact of that experience. But returning to Brazil in her late 20s, Malfatti was stung by criticism of work that was avant-garde for the time. Even the sympathetic uncle turned against her, denouncing her bold canvases as 'Dantesque' and banning them from his house. At first, she soldiered on, but a damning review in 1917 stopped her in her tracks. Nevertheless, she won a scholarship to study further in Europe, spending five years in Paris, learning from Maurice Denis, and returning with a variety of styles that, taken together, make her a difficult artist who cannot be pigeonholed. Like Portinari, Tarsila do Amaral grew up among coffee plantations, but her family were not labourers, they were landowners, and her affluent upbringing afforded private art tuition in São Paulo before a move to Paris and the Académie Julian. On returning to São Paulo she, Malfatti, Menotti Del Picchia, Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade (the two were not related) – formed the Grupo dos Cinco. She and Oswald set up home in Paris a year later, but like Malfatti she saw her fortune slip away, this time in the economic crash of 1929, and her work became more socially aware. In Segunda Classe (Second Class, 1933) exhausted adults and children with meagre possessions line up, barefoot, by the carriage that labels their low status. Today, however, she is more recognised for her decorative paintings in fondant pinks and blues. Whatever class they travelled, the 300,000 citizens of São Paulo had few cultural outlets to enjoy. In 1916, at the time of Malfatti's much-criticised exhibition, there was only one museum in the city, showing a few outmoded and unchallenging pictures, and no permanent gallery. Exhibitions were staged, explains Giancarlo Hannud in the exhibition's catalogue, in hotels, offices and shops. But thanks to those who experimented with modern art, and the growing numbers and influence of their enlightened collectors and supporters, a time of rapid change lay ahead. In 1944, Brazilian artists were showcased in a landmark exhibition of more than 150 works at the Royal Academy in London, organised by Brazil's then-foreign minister, Oswaldo Aranha. Artists were encouraged to donate their work to raise money for the RAF Benevolent Fund. Furthermore, more than 20 artworks were secured and allocated across British collections by the British Council. This was the first-ever exhibition of Brazilian art in Britain and highlighted the considerable role Brazil was playing in the war effort. The British royal family were among the 100,000 people who turned out to see the exhibition before it toured Scotland and Paris – partnered with a second exhibition showing three centuries of Brazilian architecture. The current Royal Academy show marks 80 years since that groundbreaking exhibition, and reunites work shown by artists including Portinari and Do Amaral. But curiously, little mention is made in Brasil! Brasil! of another big step for Brazilian art – the launch in 1951 of the Bienal de São Paulo, the second longest-established biennial in the world after Venice. One artist who did exhibit most successfully in the second such event, in 1953, was Italian-born Alfredo Volpi (1906-88), who was named joint winner, apparently after an intervention by the visiting British art historian Herbert Read. Volpi's family had emigrated to São Paulo when he was only two, and he left school at 12, becoming a painter and decorator to help the family finances, and experimenting with the materials of his trade as a self-taught artist. His initially naturalistic style became more and more abstracted into pure geometry, untitled compositions from the 1950s onwards enjoying the rhythm of well-balanced forms dominated by rich blues. Another biennial exhibitor was dentist-turned-artist Rubem Valentim (1922-91). He was influenced by the West African culture around him as a child in Salvador de Bahia and many of his motifs and vibrant colours are inspired by what he defined as Afro-Amerindian-Northeastern-Brazilian iconology. This exhibition's modernist credentials may be in question, but it holds up a brightly framed mirror to multiculturalism. Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until April 21. The 36th Bienal de São Paulo, entitled Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice and curated by Bonaventura Soh Bejeng Ndikung, opens in September
