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This story has been described as the artist's awakening time and time again. However, it is more likely that in Berlin Burle Marx found the missing confirmation he needed to take his own extraordinary path. It was here that he came into contact with the ideas of the European avant-garde that in the course of the next decades would make him Brazil's most important landscape architect. Yet, like many of the operas that Roberto loved so much, his artistic thought was also informed by the ideals of German Romanticism and the Enlightenment. The idea of reconciling civilization and nature, people and the soil, the rejection of "artificiality," the return to traditional and national roots were just as enshrined in Romanticism as the striving for a union of art and life. Hence for Burle Marx painting was not only an additional means of expression on an equal footing, but was also influenced by his architectural work. In his work, a painting can become landscape architecture, and a sketch of a garden a piece of jewelry or a sculpture. "I hate the idea that a landscape architect should only know about plants," he said decades later. "He also has to know what a Piero della Francesca is, what constitutes a Miró, a Michelangelo, a Picasso, a Braque, a Léger."
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