Sotheby's to sell art belonging to Brazil's Lady of the Resistance

The journalist and art collector Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt (1916-2003) was a woman of courage and tenacity.

Born in Salvador, Brazil, in 1916, by just 15 she was writing the Women’s Issues section of the Brazilian newspaper Correio da Manhã. Coincidentally, she would later own the newspaper—in the early 1940s she married her second husband, Paulo Bittencourt, who owned Correio da Manhã and, after Paulo’s death in 1963, Niomar fearlessly led the newspaper in opposition to the military dictatorship that governed Brazil for over 20 years following the 1964 coup.

Sodré Bittencourt championed resistance and freedom of speech through Correio da Manhã in the face of extreme intimidation. After a bomb was set off outside the newspaper’s offices, the “Lady of the Resistance” (as she became known) wrote a scathing editorial, titled No to Terrorism, attacking the authoritarian regime. Following years of threats, Sodré Bittencourt was imprisoned in 1969 then forced into exile in Paris where she continued to campaign for freedom of speech and of the press.

But Sodré Bittencourt was not just a fearless journalist. She believed art was vital to free thinking and progress, and to that end, she undertook the gargantuan task of establishing Brazil’s first contemporary art museum, the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro, with barely any funds and in the face of resistance from the church, government and conservative naysayers. Thanks to international support and funding—aided by Nelson Rockefeller, the then director of MoMa—a Brutalist construction in front of Sugarloaf mountain, designed by Affonso Eduardo Reidy, was opened in 1958.

“Niomar’s passion for art and her conviction that Rio de Janeiro needed a permanent home for the Museum of Modern Art were so great that she was not afraid to confront the Brazilian Catholic Church in the dispute over the iconic plot of land,” Sodré Bittencourt’s grandson, Mauro Moniz Sodré, tells The Art Newspaper. “It was a true David and Goliath battle – the episode became known as the ‘battle of the skirts’. In the end, Niomar’s dream prevailed, ultimately with the assent and acknowledgement of her capacity by Archbishop D. Helder himself, who told her, ‘Niomar, what I most admire in a person is tenacity’.”

In building the museum’s collection of Modern art, Sodré Bittencourt was deliberate and prescient, often buying direct from the artists (Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brancusi among them.) Often, she would buy a work for her personal collection too. Sadly, in 1978, almost all of MAM’s collection was destroyed by a fire, and the same fate claimed much of Sodré Bittencourt’s personal collection in Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1980s.

But not all of her collection was lost. Next month, on 10 April, Sotheby’s Paris will sell around 70 works from Sodré Bittencourt’s modest Paris apartment in a sale titled La Liberté pour Dogme (Freedom as Dogma). The collection, acquired between the 1950s and 1970s, encompasses European household names (Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst) as well as Brazilian pioneers such as Antonio Segui, Jesús Rafael Soto and Maria Martins. It is expected to sell for between €7m and €10m.

“I remember my grandmother, even 20 years after her death, as a dynamic, determined, self-confident person with a great sense of courage” says Sodré, who is selling the collection. “She believed that freedom found its greatest expression through art, without any bias or prejudice against any artistic production.”

He adds that, despite bitterness regarding Brazil’s dictatorship, “Niomar felt very proud of the role she had played as one of the most courageous and fearless voices of resistance. She never thought of rewriting her history. The oppressive political climate that settled in Brazil after her imprisonment was decisive for her departure from the country.”

Niomar’s collection has remained in the same Trocadéro apartment since the 1950s, hidden from public view. Sodré is selling it now because he feels "it was almost selfish to have kept it all this time".

Sodré remembers his grandmother was particularly attached to Femme debout (Standing Woman), a 1952 bronze by Giacometti that she bought direct from the artist in the year it was made. It is expected to be the top lot of the auction, estimated at €2.5m to €4m. Another favourite was En Plein Soleil (1960, est €200,000-€300,000) by the Cobra Group artist Karel Appel, and Etude pour Le Parc des Princes (1952, est €300,000-€500,000), a small painting by Nicholas de Stael, who Sodré says was “very moved by her [Niomar’s] story when he first met her.”

Other European works include Picasso’s Femme nue à la guitar (est €1.2m-€1.8m), an early 1909 work that shows Picasso experimenting with what would become Cubism, which was previously owned by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, André Breton and Pierre Matisse. Another is Max Ernst’s Les Fiancés (1930, est €200,000-€300,000), a Surrealist depiction of emotional distance between a male and female figure, which reflects Ernst’s difficult relationships at the time.

Latin American Modernism is a cornerstone of the collection too, such as a sculpture by the Brazilian artist Maria Martins, who helped found MAM and was heavily involved in the Surrealist movement in New York and Paris. Martins introduced Sodré Bittencourt to characters like Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim, and her sculpture Guerreiro (1949) is estimated at €80,000 to €120,000 in the Sotheby’s auction. The sale also includes works by Almir Mavignier and Jesus Rafael Soto, among others.

In a statement, Stefano Moreni, senior international specialist at Sotheby’s Paris, says Sodré Bittencourt "fought with the quiet, unwavering conviction of those who seek no recognition". Moreni tells TAN: “Her capacity to read the 20th century and to understand which artists were internationally important and presenting them in the museum (MAM) was remarkable.”