Roberto Burle Marx imagined a modern Brazilian future by bridging 19th- and 20th-century art histories as well as local and global strategies of art making. Influenced by scientific illustrations of Brazilian floral specimens, the geometric postulates of modernist architecture, picturesque painting techniques, and imperial Brazilian landscape design, his gardens challenged outdated interpretations of his medium—nature—as an essential and ahistorical mark of Brazil’s “modified” modernism. Instead, by fusing nature and culture, history and modernity, European and Brazilian art, landscape, and architecture, Burle Marx’s work reminds us of the importance of memory to construct the future of Brazil and the world.
Luisa Valle is a doctoral candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses on Latin American architecture and its implications for art production from the region, with a special interest in the local, national, and global contexts of modernism. She has published articles on Mary Vieira and concretism, Roberto Burle Marx and the synthesis of the arts, and on Thomas Hirschorn’s Gramsci Monument. Currently, she is finishing her dissertation, entitled “The Beehive, the Favela, the Mangrove, and the Castle: Modern Architecture in Rio de Janeiro, 1885–1945.” She has received several fellowships, including an Avery Foundation/The Bronx Museum of the Arts Curatorial Fellowship, and has taught art and architectural history at the City College of New York and Hunter College.