Vicente do Rego Monteiro began his art training at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro. After living in Paris between 1911 in 1914, he returned to Rio, fleeing from World War I (1914-18). During his stay in Europe he had absorbed references to cubist art, with its interest in synthesizing shapes and articulating figuration with geometry. Back in Brazil, Monteiro found a correspondence to this interest in Marajoaran art — i.e., the art of the precolonial indigenous inhabitants of Marajó Island, at the mouth of the Amazon River. To this end, he thoroughly researched the collections of the Museu Nacional of Rio de Janeiro. These studies were also essential for his work outside of the visual arts: the artist wrote Lendas, crenças e talismãs dos índios do Amazonas (1921) [Legends, Beliefs and Talismans of the Amazon Indians] and made the masks and costumes for the ballet Legendes indiennes de l’Amazonie [Indigenous Legends of Amazonia] (1923). In the painting Nude Boy and Turtle (1923), the stylized drawing of the faces of the two characters recalls a piece of pottery with details in high relief. Likewise, the brown tones correspond to the various tones of clay. In some parts of the painting, Monteiro transformed shadow into light, to maintain the lines marked by the contrast between light and dark. The blending of European avant-garde elements with indigenous Brazilian art made Monteiro a prelude of the anthropophagic movement in Brazil, while also imparting to the history of modernism a poetics inspired in the culture of Amazonia.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017
The exhibition Zanini dedicated to Vicente do Rêgo Monteiro at the MAM/Se in 1997 revealed the existence of another, virtually identical, version of Nude Boy and Tortoise, the painting at Masp. The second version is conserved in a private collection in São Paulo and dates one year later (1924).
— Unknown authorship, 1998
