Dans les jardins de Roberto Burle Marx

As Arnaud Maurières underlines in one of the interviews that make up the work, there exists a begonia burle-marxii and a heliconia burle-marxii. These plants are living tributes to one of the greatest landscape artists of the XXth century, Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) who associated his name to the genesis of Brasilia, as well as to the centre of contemporary art of Inhotim in Belo Horizonte, to the pavement of the beach of Copacabana or the garden del Este in Caracas. Jacques Leenhardt and Gilles Clément tell an anecdote which alone makes us feel attached to the character. In 1928, as a painter in Germany, he was drawing flowers at the botanical garden of Dahlem when he read the labels and realized they were from the same country as he and that he had never noticed them. His vocation was born on that day. How did he mark Brazil, how did it announce the rapprochement between contemporary art and nature, how does it fit in with today’s concerns about biodiversity? These are some of the directions the book explores, written by various authors on a humanist of the landscape.

• Dans les jardins de Roberto Burle Marx, directed by Jacques Leenhardt, Actes Sud, 2011, 184 p., 22 €.