Gift from the Brazilian Government to the UN headquarters, the War and Peace panels were commissioned in late 1952 to Cândido Portinari.
The panels were installed in 1957, at the General Assembly hall in NY, in a maximum security and restricted access area, and can only be seen by UN officials and delegates of member countries.
For that reason, the Portinari Project has always dreamt of exposing the War and Peace panels to the general public.
As per request of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2010, the UN gave custody of the panels to the Portinari Project until 2014.
During this period, several itinerant exhibitions took place, and Estúdio Preto e Branco participated in São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Paris.
Each exhibition had custom made projects for each different site.
In São Paulo, for the exhibition opening, a stage videoscenario was developed for the Simon Bolivar Auditorium, where musicians and artists performed.
For the Latin America Memorial, a monumental 13 meters high projection was developed, creating a large triptych with the War and Peace panels. The narrative, featuring texts from Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Milton Nascimento and Fernando Brant, was complemented by stage lighting synchronized to the video indicating the pictorial universes in the panels itselves.
Video documentaries about the “War & Peace Project” were also exhibited, as well as the “Carousel Raisonné”, a 15 meters wide panoramic video presenting in chronological order the 4.991 Portinari works collected by Portinari Project projected on a concrete wall with a total duration of over 9 uninterrupted hours.
In Belo Horizonte, for the appreciation of the War and Peace panels, the Grand Theatre was transformed into a movie theater, and after the audiovisual show, the panels were revealed to the public. It was also presented exclusive documentaries about the exhibition, the “Carousel Raisonné” and two more interactive pieces: “Timeline”, made of 5 integrated totems, and the “Portinari Time” interactive table, which presented the painter’s relationship with big scholar names.
At the Grand Palais in Paris, the audiovisual War and Peace was displayed in the triptych format, the “Timeline” and the “Carousel Raisonné”.

To learn more, visit our reports:

:: War and Peace, Portinari – Sao Paulo

:: War and Peace, Portinari – Belo Horizonte

:: Guerre et Paix, Portinari – Paris