José Bernardo Cardoso Junior [ Cardosinho ]
1861, Coimbra - Portugal | 1947, Rio de Janeiro - RJ - Brazil
José Bernardo Cardoso Júnior, known as Cardosinho, was born in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1861. He arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the age of three, aboard a ship that sank during the journey, resulting in the deaths of his mother and two of his siblings. Cardosinho began painting around the age of 70, encouraged by Portinari and Fujita, after retiring from a career of over four decades in education.
Between the ages of 14 and 16, Cardosinho studied at the Seminário São José, a traditional institution for theological and philosophical training in Rio de Janeiro. His studies continued at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Italy, where he likely studied between 1877 and the middle of the following decade, eventually earning a degree in philosophy. Upon returning to Brazil, and having distanced himself from ecclesiastical activities, Cardosinho began teaching Latin, Portuguese, and French at the Ateneu Mineiro in Juiz de Fora. In 1888, he became the inspector of the State Primary Education Headquarters of Rio de Janeiro, a position he held for 30 years. Later he also taught at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios in Rio de Janeiro, among other institutions.
Cardosinho was, therefore, a man of great culture, also the author of three novels (including Almas Satânicas) and a book of poetry (Ideias e Telas). When he took up painting, his approach was self-taught, driven by a desire to practice constructing images based on engravings and photographs from books, newspapers, magazines, and postcards. As a result, some of his works exhibit a collage-like quality, where figures, objects, and spaces are combined in a seemingly disjointed manner, with variations in scale, source material, or execution. For example, in one painting, the figure of a bather, apparently drawn from an almanac illustration, is depicted seated on a rock in a landscape rendered with a strikingly realistic objectivity.
Cardosinho’s painting career spanned from 1931 to 1947. Though long classified as naïve, his work garnered enthusiastic recognition from numerous artists and intellectuals within Brazil’s modernist circles, including art critics Celso Kelly and Rubem Navarra, painter Candido Portinari, and writers Mário de Andrade and Rubem Braga. The Argentine art critic Jorge Romero Brest also commented on Cardosinho’s work, particularly on the blend of “childlike innocence” and eroticism in his paintings, as part of a broader analysis of Brazilian art in the first half of the 20th century. This analysis was published in the catalog for the 20 Artistas Brasileños exhibition at the La Plata Museum of Fine Arts in Argentina in 1945.
One of Cardosinho's paintings, titled Elas se Divertem (c. 1935-40), became part of the Tate Modern collection in England after being featured in a 1944 charity exhibition of "Brazilian Modern Painting" in London, organized by the British Royal Air Force during World War II (1939-1945). Additionally, his works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio), which houses the Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, and the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo (IEB-USP), home to the Mário de Andrade Collection
