The Gardens of Roberto Burle Marx Make a Powerful Argument for the Protection of Our Planet

Designing a garden isn’t the obvious way to make a political statement. But the swirling, biomorphic gardens of the late Brazilian artist and landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx, who is the subject of a new exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum, make a powerful argument for not only the protection of the natural world, but also the celebration of our biodiverse, and culturally diverse, planet.

Burle Marx is best known for creating the curvy paving stone design that snakes along the sidewalk of Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. But he also designed thousands of public and private gardens in his lifetime, many located in Brasília at a time when the artist was collaborating regularly with the architect Oscar Niemeyer. (The multitalented Burle Marx was also a painter, sculptor, jeweler, and creator of tapestries, wall mosaics, and stained-glass windows.) His gardens, the living, organic counterpart to the abstract, curvilinear paintings he also produced (and the foil to Niemeyer’s Brutalist hard edges), express the modernist principles he and other 20th-century Latin American artists imported from Europe and made their own by fusing them with native content and influences—what is sometimes known as “Tropical Modernism.”

The artist’s gardens operate not only on an aesthetic level, expressing the arced contours, bends, and cellular forms that recur in post-war, mid-20th-century utopian design movements. They also serve as a rebuttal to the influence of manicured French garden designs in Brazil—the result of European colonizers importing not only their visual culture, but also their own native plants. The gardens Burle Marx encountered as a child in São Paulo and Rio were populated with roses and gladioli. Cactuses, mangroves, and pineapple plants—species native to tropical climates and so considered to be too wild and “uncivilized,” according to the exhibition’s curators, Jens Hoffmann and Claudia J. Nahson—were markedly absent.

So it was these indigenous plants, many of which he first laid eyes on during trips into the Amazon (he officially discovered some 50 species of plant, several of which now bear his name), became the raw material for his unabashedly sensuous gardens. “His gardens were in many ways the continuation of his work as a painter, using the landscape as a canvas and the plants and flowers as the brush and the color,” says Hoffmann. “But he was very aware of what he was doing, adding two dimensions to his paintings—the dimension of depth and, fundamentally, the dimension of time. In my opinion this is why his work is so relevant today; the idea of time. The idea that you create something but then you think about how will this look in 10 years.”