In the 1940s, Candido Portinari created works that aimed to denounce the human suffering produced by social injustice in Brazil. The artist was influenced by Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) war paintings, in particular, Guernica, from 1937, which he saw in person in New York. Dead Child is part of a series produced in 1944, titled Retirantes [Northeastern Migrants], an epic narrative about lives marked by drought and hunger in the Northeast region of Brazil. It depicts a succession of tragic events: migration, death and funeral. Dead Child shows a family mourning the death of one of its members. In the middle of the composition, we see the mother, whose face is not revealed by the painter. Holding the weight of her son’s corpse in her arms, she bows down. Wearing rags, the figures are barefoot and have thin grayish bodies, resembling skeletons. The way the tears are painted, voluminous and petrified, is striking. On the floor, pebbles are scattered around a vast and arid space that reaches the horizon, against a sultry sky painted in a blue gradient. On the one hand, Portinari uses the genre of monumental portraits, which was historically reserved for the political and economic elites, to represent the underprivileged. On the other hand, his painting reduces the subjects to generic and vulnerable characters, with no identity or agency, which has contributed to a certain view of people from the Northeast, constructed from a distanced position.
— Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator, MASP, 2020
Between 1944 and 1945, Portinari created a five-canvas series nearly as an offshoot of his Religious Series. When shown in Paris, in 1946, the paintings Dead Child, Dead Child, Migrants, Northeastern Migrants, and Burial in a Hammock were met with a praiseful review by Germain Bazin. At present three of these works are conserved in the Masp Collection, and a version of Dead Child, in the Musée d’Art Moderne, of Paris. Although less daring than the Religious Series, the series in question brings opposing formal solutions spanning from an intimate dialogue with Siqueiros in Burial in a Hammock, to personal solutions as in Dead Child, the series’s masterpiece, in which the child figure features the ultimate expressiveness of Cosme Tura.
— Unknown authorship, 1998