Brazil celebrates a visionary who painted with plants.

RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazil teems with jungles, forests and all sorts of exotic plants, flowers and trees. But until the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx came along to tame and shape his country’s exuberant flora, his countrymen had mostly disdained the natural riches that, often literally, flourished in their own backyards.


“Burle Marx created tropical landscaping as we know it today, but in doing so he also did something even greater,”said Lauro Cavalcanti, the curator of an exhibition devoted to the work of Burle Marx that runs through March at the Paco Imperial museum here. “By organizing native plants in accordance with the aesthetic principles of the artistic vanguard, especially Cubism and abstractionism, he created a new and modern grammar for international landscape design.”


Burle Marx was born in 1909, and to mark that centenary the museum set out to show the full extent of his creativity. (The show travels next to Sao Paulo.) In addition to scale models and drawings of his most celebrated landscape design projects, the exhibition includes nearly 100 of his paintings, as well as drawings, sculptures, tapestries, jewelry, and sets and costumes he designed for theatrical productions.


“He was truly a polymath,”said William Howard Adams, the chief curator of a Burle Marx exhibition presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1991.“But the thing about him that really stands out is that he regarded landscape design as an equal partner with architecture, not as a backdrop or decoration .”


Burle Marx always thought of himself first and foremost as a painter. Landscape design, he once wrote,“was merely the method I found to organize and compose my drawing and painting, using less conventional materials.”It was while studying painting in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as he would later tell it, that Burle Marx realized that the vegetation Brazilians then dismissed as scrub and brush, preferring imported pine trees and gladioli for their gardens, was extraordinary. Visiting the Botanical Garden in Berlin, he was startled to find many Brazilian plants in the collection and quickly came to see the untapped artistic potential in their varied shapes, sizes and hues.


Burle Marx was of German descent on his father’s side and French on his mother’s side. He was born in Sao Paulo, but moved at a young age to Rio de Janeiro, where one of his neighbors was the Modernist architect Lucio Costa, the future designer of Brasilia, who gave Burle Marx his first commissions.


Burle Marx is especially known among Brazilians for his many ambitious projects here in Rio.“The face of this city bears his imprint,”Mr.Cavalcanti said.


Rio’s largest park, the bayside Aterro do Flamengo, built on reclaimed seafront just southwest of downtown, is an early example of one of Burle Marx’s signature projects. But for sheer sweep, nothing surpasses the sidewalks of Copacabana, with colorful abstract stone mosaics extending unbroken the entire length of that beach. From the upper floors of the buildings that line Avenida Atlantica, Burle Marx appears to have painted a single canvas nearly five kilometers long.


“While he enjoyed designing gardens for friends, what gave him the most satisfaction was to work with public spaces,”said Haruyoshi Ono, a Brazilian landscape architect who began working with him in 1965 and today directs the landscaping company that Burle Marx founded in the 1950s.


Burle Marx was almost as much a botanist as a landscape architect, although largely self-taught. More than 50 plant species have been named for him .


“Burle Marx was prescient in his reverence for plants and his stewardship of the whole nursery, for his ability to see the garden both as an aesthetic experiment and also as part of the ecology,”said Karen Van Lengen, dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia.“That’s the challenge for today’s landscape architects, to bring those energies together.”


By working with native flora, Roberto Burle Marx transformed the way Brazilians see their surroundings. Clockwise from right, sidewalks along Copacabana Beach, a tapestry, an early park project and a terrace garden.








PHOTOGRAPHS BY LALO DE ALMEIDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By LARRY ROHTER