Alice Brill was a German-born Brazilian photographer, painter, and art critic.
Life and career
Alice Brill Czapski was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1920. She was Jewish, the daughter of the painter Erich Brill and the journalist Marta Brill, and moved to Brazil with her exiled family in Germany, escaping from the Nazi. Influenced by a schoolteacher, she recorded in a diary the trips made during exile, with a photographic camera given by her father. She passed through Spain, Italy and the Netherlands before landing in Brazil in 1934. His father would die in the Jungfernhof concentration camp in 1942. At age 16 she studied with the painter Paulo Rossi Osir, who influenced hernproduction of photographs and batik paintings. She participated in the Santa Helena Group, an informal association of painters from São Paulo, maintaining contact with artists such as Mario Zanini and Alfredo Volpi. In 1946, she won a Hillel Foundation scholarship to study at the University of New Mexico and the Art Students League of New York where she studied photography, painting, sculpture, engraving, art history, philosophy and literature. After returning to Brazil in 1948, she worked as a photographer for Habitat magazine, coordinated by architect Lina Bo Bardi. She documented architecture, fine arts and made portraits of artists, as well as recording works and exhibitions of the São Paulo Art Museum and Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art He also participated in an expedition in Corumbá organized by the Central Brazil Foundation, photographing the Carajás people. In 1950, she performed the essay at the Psychiatric Hospital of Juqueri at the invitation of the plastic artist Maria Leontina da Costa, registering the wing of the Free Art Workshop. In the same year, Pietro Maria Bardi commissioned an essay on São Paulo for the city's fourth centennial. It portrayed the process of modernization of the city between 1953 and 1954, but the publication project was not completed. In addition to being a photographer, she worked as a painter, participating in the I and IX Bienal de São Paulo, as well as several individual and collective exhibitions. Her subjects involved urban landscapes and abstractionism, performing watercolors and batik paintings. She graduated in philosophy from PUC-SP in 1976, graduating in 1982 and a doctorate in 1994 and worked as an art critic, writing articles for the culture section of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, which were later collected in the book "Da arte e da linguagem".
