A 1960 gift by Annemarie Henle Pope, founding director of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) and a former employee of the Pan American Union during the World War II years, this gouache by Roberto Burle Marx is a design for a handwoven Aubusson Tapestry of a scale of 1:2 or half the actual size. Best known as a landscape architect and a remarkable modernist pioneer with botanical texture and color, Burle Marx’s design nevertheless incorporates biomorphic elements which he widely favored in his tropical private garden and public parks commissions. Set against a neutral beige background, this fluid rectangular composition of intertwining organic shapes and outlines in opaque earthy tones of ochres, burnt sienna, yellow, and black suggest a grouping of figures in space. Yet it can be taken as a dynamic and rhythmic abstract play of colors and organic forms typical of a mid-century aesthetic. Executed the year prior to his first U.S. solo exhibition Landscape Architecture in Brazil: Roberto Burle Marx of 1954 at the OAS, the tapestry design followed in the vein of other artists such as Marc Saint-Saëns, Lucien Coutaud, and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, who were inspired by the postwar rebirth of the Tapisserie d’Aubusson industry in France and had special designs hand-woven in wool by Atelier Pinton Frères. The widely creative range of the artist at the time, and his solution to space as a juxtaposition of color and textures in the integration of art and architecture was evident in his designs for gardens, textiles, and tile panels for buildings. The exhibition traveled throughout the United States in 1954-1955 increasing his reputation and fame as a contributor to the unique modern Brazilian architectural movement and his professional partnership with Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. Roberto Burle Marx was born in São Paulo, the son of Wilhelm Marx and Maria Cecilia Burle. The family relocated to the neighborhood of Leme to the south of Rio de Janeiro in 1913 where a young Burle Marx began his experiments in garden design. In 1928 he enrolled in the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes to study architecture only to relocate to Berlin the following year where he attended the Degner Klemm school. There he visited the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden and was further impressed by the collection of Brazilian plants which soon became the medium of choice for aesthetic expression and creativity. Upon his return to Brazil in 1929, he continued his painting studies under Leo Putz. At age twenty-one, encouraged by architect Lucio Costa, Burle Marx designed a private garden for Alfredo Schwartz. In 1934 he was named director of the Department of Parks and Gardens of Recife while taking classes with Cândido Portinari and Mário de Andrade at the Federal District University. Burle Marx became Portinari’s assistant in the commission of decorative tile murals in the Ministerio da Educacao e Saúde and eventually designed its three gardens including one on a roof. Now part of the modern architecture avant-garde circle, Burle Marx closely collaborated with architects Marcelo and Milton Roberto, Costa and Oscar Niemeyer on various important commissions. Burle Marx held his first painting exhibition in 1941 with the Associação de Artistas Brasileiros in Rio followed by the 1944 Modern Art Group exhibition in Belo Horizonte along with the likes of Anita Malfatti, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Tarsila do Amaral, and Alberto da Veiga Guignard. From this moment on, he continued to exhibit his art at national salons as well as internationally. He was the recipient of a prize in the first International Exhibition of Architecture in the II Bienal de São Paulo in 1953 whose jury included architects Walter Gropius, José Luís Sert, and Alvar Aalto.