Repairing Humanity and Nature: Roberto Burle Marx’s Environmentalism
“From Nature we can accept with humility its laws and suggestions, always acknowledging it to be the greatest artist of all, with more to teach than one can learn.”
— Roberto Burle Marx
Born to a German-Jewish father and a Brazilian-Catholic mother — and nurtured from an early age by cultural, religious, and artistic influences — Roberto Burle Marx came to view the world’s creator as “a builder” and “an artist creating a landscape universe.” Burle Marx was a spiritual man, in that he recognized the divinity of nature. Civilization, in his eyes, began with the garden and he sought for his gardens to mend the schism between humanity and nature that followed the loss of the Garden of Eden.
Burle Marx left an indelible mark on the practice of landscape architecture. In 1965 the American Institute of Architects awarded him a prize for fine arts, attributing him with the creation of modern garden design. He was highly respected among his professional peers in the United States. However, because many of his renowned projects were executed in his native Brazil, his work remains little known in the United States today simply because they lacked exposure to his work, which flourished best in the tropics.
Notable works include the green spaces of Brazil’s Ministry of Education and Health; the Garden of the Ministry of the Army, created in collaboration with Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in Brasília; the mosaic pavements on the seaside avenue of Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach; and Parque do Flamengo, also in Rio, which recast a stretch of waterfront as a lush oasis within a busy swath of city. His work in merging nature with the man-made world represents only one facet of the artist’s output: Burle Marx drew and painted constantly, made jewelry, designed theatrical sets, and advocated for ecological conservation at a time when environmentalism was a nascent movement. Holland Cotter of the New York Times says Roberto Burle Marx “has finally found his proper global context in an environmentally activist moment that he, long ago, helped create.”
Burle Marx was a self-taught botanist. More than 50 plant species have been named for him and he was one of the foremost experts on the bromeliad species during his lifetime. He traveled far and wide in South America, the Amazon, and Southeast Asia in search of new plants to incorporate into his design and cultivate in his home garden, rescuing rare plants from obscurity and even extinction as deforestation threatened tropical environments. “I believe that my life was not wasted, I prevented the destruction of many plants…And when I look at these plants…I can say: I am a rich man.”
Robero Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist is on view at the Jewish Museum through September 18, 2016. For a deeper understanding of the exhibition, attend gallery talks related to themes including The Abstract Landscape, Spiritual Modernism, and the multidimensionality of Burle Marx’s work in From 2D to 3D and Back Again — free with Museum admission and RSVP at thejewishmuseum.org/calendar.
