Alice Brill

Alice Brill (Cologne, 1920 - Itu, 2013) was a painter, photographer and art critic born in Germany and based in Brazil. Her career, shaped by the exile of a Jewish family fleeing Nazi rule, places her among the notable figures of the mid-twentieth-century art scene in São Paulo.

Born in Cologne into a Jewish family, she left Germany in 1934 with her father, the painter Erich Brill, and her mother, the journalist Martha Brill, who had long been divorced from him. During exile she passed through Spain, Italy and the Netherlands before settling in Brazil in 1935. Her father returned to Germany in 1936 and died in 1942 at the Jungfernhof concentration camp.

At sixteen she studied with the painter Paulo Rossi Osir, whose influence shaped her photographs and her batik paintings. She took part in the Santa Helena Group, an informal association of São Paulo painters, where she came into contact with Mario Zanini and Alfredo Volpi. In 1946 she won a Hillel Foundation scholarship to study at the University of New Mexico and the Art Students League of New York. Back in Brazil in 1948, she worked as a photographer for Habitat magazine, coordinated by Lina Bo Bardi, documenting exhibitions at the MASP and the MAM-SP.

Beyond photography, she painted urban landscapes and abstract compositions in watercolour and batik, and wrote art criticism for the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. Her legacy combines documentary photography, painting and essays, gathered in books such as Da arte e da linguagem.