A arte do delegado: Renato Augusto de Lima (1893-1978) e a presença do Impressionismo em Belo Horizonte

Abstract

This research structures itself around the life and work of Renato Augusto de Lima (Ouro Preto, 1893 - Belo Horizonte, 1978), considering his pictorial production as a guiding thread to discuss the presence of Impressionism in Belo Horizonte – that is, the adoption of pictorial procedures identified with the French movement of the 19th century by some local artists associated with the academic period in the regional history of art. Self-taught painter and chief of police of the second district of Belo Horizonte (1931-1957), the son of the politician and writer Antônio Augusto de Lima (1859-1934) and father of the artist Celso Renato de Lima (1912-1992) built a successful artistic career between the 1930s and 1970s in the capital of Minas Gerais, having participated in numerous group exhibitions and held many individual ones. Within the scope of this work, we opted for a reduced scale of observation considering the perspective of microhistory: concentrating on the individual and the specific, we constructed the artist's biography, but with a focus on the products that resulted from his actions, his paintings. Thus, three operations took place concomitantly with the outlining of his artistic trajectory: the analysis of some paintings made by him, limited between the years 1930 and 1976, in which an attempt was made to highlight some of the formal solutions and the themes they covered; the identification of how his work was received along his career; and the approximation of his work to that of the painters Aníbal Mattos (1886-1969) and Genesco Murta (1885-1967) – understanding the need to expand the field of discussion by encompassing names generally identified with the same historical period of the regional artistic production. This movement of placing in parallel the work of the three artists revealed similarities between their pictorial practices regarding the themes covered and certain techniques used, in addition to the way in which their paintings were received in the contexts of their works. This fact served as a stimulus to shift the discussion around the relationship between Impressionism and Brazil, once concentrated in Rio de Janeiro and in the official academic teaching at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, to Belo Horizonte.