In the summer of 2025, the France-Brazil Year will unveil some of the most overlooked aspects of the historical relationship between our two countries. At the Maison d'Amérique latine, curator Jacques Leenhardt, in association with Gabriela Longman, presents Le Brésil illustré - l'héritage postcolonial by Jean-Baptiste Debret. Jean-Baptiste Debret was a French Jacobin artist who spent 16 years as an official painter at the Portuguese court, and was the author of Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, an exceptional anthropological pictorial work on 19th-century Portuguese society. Virtually unknown in France, he was censored in Brazil as early as 1840 for the crudity of his depictions of slavery, but gradually infused the Brazilian imagination. Fourteen contemporary artists find in it the material for the history of miscegenation obscured by the national narrative.

Pascale Lismonde

exhibition's website