Roberto Burle Marx paysagiste : de la peinture à l’écologie by Jacques LEENHARDT – Château de Bénouville

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Roberto Burle Marx paysagiste : de la peinture à l’écologie by Jacques LEENHARDT – Château de Bénouville

Roberto Burle Marx landscaper: from painting to ecology

Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), a Brazilian painter and landscaper, has rightfully earned a reputation as one of the rare members of his generation to have accompanied the modern movement by contributing his utmost on the subject of the garden. Associated, over a number of striking realisations in Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, with Lucio Costa, Aphonso Reidy and Oscar Niemeyer, Burle Marx has created a considerable number of public parks and gardens on the American continent, and more rarely in Europe.  For this very reason, despite a large number of publications including illustrations of his work, he is relatively unknown to us. His work, indeed, belongs to Brazilian culture and urban planning and can be fully grasped when perceived as such. His work will be approached from a modernist aesthetic angle, in keeping with its own assertion in the early 20th century in the very singular form it embraced in Brazil. Burle Marx’s relationships with architecture and sculpture comprise a major chapter in their own right, as does his reflection on synthesis of the arts. Yet it is unquestionably via a botanic and ecological dimension that his contribution to the art of landscaping and garden design now appears essential.

Jacques Leenhardt

Jacques Leenhardt

Jacques Leenhardt is Study Director at the EHESS Graduate School in Social Sciences (Paris). A qualified philosopher and sociologist, he works on art, literature and landscape, in Latin America in particular. Also an art critic (Honorary President of the AICA – International Association of Art Critics), he has organised a large number of exhibitions. Among his publications Les Amériques latines en France (1992), Dans les Jardins de Roberto Burle Marx (1994 et 2011), Villette-Amazone (1996), Wifredo Lam, une monographie (2010), Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil (Firmin-Didot, Paris, 1835-1839) Nouvelle édition, notes et Introduction, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale-Actes-Sud (2014).

Further reading :
Dans les Jardins de Roberto Burle Marx, Actes Sud, 2011