Who is the father of the modern garden? Flowery-minded British gardeners might name a mother, Miss Jekyll in her Surrey garden. French gallery-goers might name Monet, master of the lily pond and his painterly flower beds at Giverny. In 1965 the American Institute of Architects named a Brazilian as the “real creator of the modern garden”. I agree with their nomination: Roberto Burle Marx.
It amazes me how Burle Marx is still unfamiliar to most British gardeners. I have been a Marxist for 60 years. I first learnt about Roberto while gardening in Germany in 1965. An earnest fellow gardener used to read up on town planning in the evenings and while we pulled out weeds in the morning, he would list his top cities for elegance: Rio de Janeiro, which he had never visited, came first and Salzburg, which he had, came second. I remedied my ignorance by looking up Rio and its landscaping.
At once I encountered Burle Marx. Even from pictures and his own pronouncements I realised he was a genius. He combined so many skills as an artist. He sang, drew, painted and made jewellery. He laid out his first garden, one for a Brazilian rooftop, in 1932, but he studied contemporary art throughout his long career and brought the curving lines of Modernist painting into his designs for entire landscapes. From the 1950s onwards he incorporated the formal shapes and geometric patterns of abstract Modernism too. It was he who designed the brilliant flow of black and white mosaic which runs for several miles beside Rio’s Copacabana beach.
Burle Marx is one of those maestros whose moment continues to come. Ecology, wilding and conservation, those urgent concerns, can look up to him as a patron saint. From 1943 onwards, he made expeditions into Brazil’s exceptionally varied landscape and studied and collected plants in the wild. He introduced gardeners to 80 new species, 28 of which bear his name.
Like mine, his eyes were opened in Germany. In the 1920s he went to Berlin and took art classes and music lessons, hoping to become an opera singer. He also went to Berlin’s botanical garden. There he was fascinated to find Brazilian tropical plants displayed in the big greenhouses. In Brazilian gardens, flowery plants in the European style were being used instead: why, he wondered?
When he returned and began to design gardens, he used plants from Brazil’s amazingly rich flora. They were admirably suited to the swirls and curves of his artistically Modernist designs. Several survive recognisably and three of them have been declared Unesco world heritage sites, including his own estate, or Sitio, about 30 miles west of Rio. It is maintained as a tribute to his gardening, his arts and his collection of Brazilian folk art. They were interlocking parts of his the unity of his life.
Whenever I see global bedding plants in flower round Mediterranean hotels, I think of Burle Marx’s disapproval. They derive from breeding in California or South Africa, not from the local flora. Disapproval is too weak a word for his reaction to a much greater abuse, the ruin of the Amazon rainforest. In the 1960s and 1970s he agreed to serve on advisory councils during years of military rule in Brazil, reckoning he could make a saving contribution. The fine film I’m Still Here has just won an Oscar for its powerful dramatisation of those tensions and dangers that affected him and others at that time. In the 1970s, official permission for a division of Volkswagen to burn many thousands of hectares of rainforest brought him into open angry protest. He would have been appalled by the clearing of yet more rainforest during Bolsonaro’s recent presidency.
Ever active, he laid out about 3,000 garden projects in 20 different countries before his death in 1994. They include huge public commissions, whether in Miami or Kuala Lumpur. In New York important exhibitions have been devoted to him, one at MoMA in 1991, a subtle one in the Jewish Museum in 2016, honouring his German-Jewish roots, and a notable one at the New York Botanical Garden in 2019 where his close associate Raymond Jungles oversaw a big garden in his style.
In London I have just understood more of his context. Until April 21 the Royal Academy is showing an exhibition on Modernism and Brazil. Like Burle Marx, many of Brazil’s artists were from immigrant families and travelled back to study in Europe from the 1920s onwards. In 1928 the critic Oswald de Andrade wrote an eloquent plea for “cultural cannibalism”, the absorption of foreign styles, their digestion and then their application in new ways to Brazil’s local context. I like the phrase, a riposte to those who try to blur this or that local culture, ancient Greek or English, into a multicultural haze because of its “appropriations” of Middle Eastern or European “elements”. The English garden is distinctively English even though it uses French-bred roses and many Chinese plants. It cannibalises them into a new whole.
Burle Marx’s artistic contemporaries cannibalised European Modernism and reapplied it in their paintings of Brazilian landscapes, indigenous labourers and women and children. In gardens, meanwhile, Burle Marx applied it to local plants and gardens. At a crowded presentation in London, I heard his niece, Andrea, recall the generosity and sociable joy of her uncle, someone who invited hundreds of guests to his 80th birthday and remained an apostle of music, food and drink.
Emphasising the vitality of his legacy, she explained the many initiatives of the Burle Marx Foundation, which she leads. Next year, with its help, the Garden Museum in London will hold a show in his honour. There will be a garden in his style at Chelsea Flower Show then too. In Rio, meanwhile, eight performances of Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos will be staged this May and June with the very costumes and set that Burle Marx designed for it. The charity’s initiatives, ecological and artistic, should resonate with British donors because of his regard for their country: he called Britain “one big garden”.
At the RA, three works by him introduce the exhibition. One is a portrait, one a landscape and one a pen and pencil view of Lapa, a district of Rio, presented in the RA’s evasive caption as “renowned as the nocturnal meeting point for Rio’s artists and other intellectuals”; some of the figures in it are sex workers. Importantly, these three works have been to London before. They were given by Burle Marx to a remarkable touring exhibition in 1944 that followed Brazil’s entry into the war against Germany. He allowed them to be auctioned for the war effort, a coalition of the willing indeed.
In May 1964, he visited England. His biographer Laurence Fleming later recalled shepherding the great man. His English was still elementary but he enjoyed learning two words, “awful” and “marvellous”. In London, museums and shopping were “marvellous”, and in the Cotswolds so was a lady at dinner in Broadway who used a fork to retrieve a pea that had slipped down her cleavage. He called the landscape garden at Rousham in Oxfordshire “marvellous” too, especially for its green simplicity.
Every April I go to sit in this 18th-century masterpiece by William Kent and others. This year I will call it marvellous too, honouring the artist who responded to its simple elegance after fathering modernity in landscape gardens.
“Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism”; Royal Academy, royal academy.org.uk
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