Agostinho Batista de Freitas was raised on a farm in Paulínia , at the time a district of Campinas , in the interior of São Paulo, where he worked in the fields until he was 11 years old and studied until the third year of primary school. The painter was the children of immigrants from Madeira Island and came to São Paulo in the 1930s, at the age of 11, accompanying his father, after the death of his mother.

In São Paulo, he worked as a bricklayer’s helper, but soon started another job, now as an employee at a toy factory in Mooca , where he was fired for drawing during working hours. After one more job, the artist started working as an electrician’s assistant until specializing in the area. In his spare time, he sold his paintings with urban landscapes on the Viaduto do Chá, in the central region of the city of São Paulo .

Pietro Maria Bardi (1900-1999), founding director of MASP , was the one who brought the self-taught painter of humble origins, Agostinho Batista de Freitas, to the art world, from an encounter with him, while the artist sold his works on the aforementioned city streets in the 1950s .

After that meeting, Pietro Maria Bardi placed an order with the painter. The founding director asked the painter to take a view of the city from the roof of the Banco do Estado de São Paulo, the Banespa , an area at the time with limited and exclusive access. The painting in question was named “Vista de São Paulo”. This canvas was successful and had repercussions before the public and, therefore, Agostinho Batista de Freitas, at the age of 25, won his first individual exhibition, in 1952 , at MASP itself . This exhibition was later taken to other museums in the country, such as the cities of Campinas and Salvador . in 1969, the same painting that brought relative public recognition to the artist, was in another MASP exhibition , “A Mão do Povo Brasileiro”.

The historical context is very important to understand why the artist was included in the MASP , after all, both Pietro Maria Bardi and Lina Bo Bardi sought other narratives for the museum for the art world, in addition to the European vision, that is, a look at the the art of Africa and the Americas. Agostinho Batista de Freitas surely belonged to the second group. Bardi himself when writing the essay “Museum out of bounds” , in 1951 , with tones of manifesto and later, in 1957 , the article “Building a Museaum on Virgin

Soil”in the Art News magazine about the new experiences that art could provide, as Brazilian popular art, which the couple believed so much, makes this new look explicit.

Even with this attempt to emphasize spaces seen as peripheral, the great difficulty of the last MASP curatorship , in 2016 , formed by Adriano Pedrosa, Fernando Oliva, Rodrigo Moura, was to find reports of the artist himself talking about his painting. There are no testimonials or interviews in which Batista de Freitas talks about his paintings clearly. What has been preserved of the painter are stories and legends told by others and only small accounts of the artist, with the exception of an autobiographical summary.

The fact that the works of Agostinho Batista de Freitas only returned to the public, 20 years after his death, with the 2016 exhibition at MASP , brings to the public debate a questioning about what is popular and erudite art. After all, the painter was generally considered a primitive, naive and popular artist due to his self-taught training. Until 2015

There were no paintings by the artist in the MASP collection , regardless of the artist’s career being intrinsically linked to the Institution. However, the opposite has always been well accepted, the case of artists with certain social recognition who approached popular themes and sources to establish their own language, such as the modernists.Tarsila do Amaral , Di Cavalcanti and Portinari .

Agostinho Batista de Freitas was also known as “Utrillo de São Paulo” , in reference to the French-born painter Maurice Utrillo , famous for painting what was considered to be urban primitive and the bohemian neighborhood of Montmarte , in Paris . In this context, the term primitive designates an artist without academic training and who paints from his intuition, without great artistic intentions.