/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/ ART-BRAZIL: Book Series Shows Off 500 Years of Art

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 27 2000 (IPS) - The Rediscovery Exhibition, which celebrated the 500 years since the Portuguese arrived in Brazil, allowed the country to take in the historic panorama of its plastic arts and led to the publication of a 13-book set that provides ongoing access to the rich collection of artworks.

The gigantic art exhibit enthralled the 1.9 million people who visited it during its April-September run in Sao Paulo. It is now touring the country, though in parts, divided among the 13 modules of the original show.

An international tour, initiated in Lisbon, is slated for future stops in Santiago, several museums in Buenos Aires and some cities in the United States, France, Great Britain, Spain, Germany, Mexico, Russia and Sweden.

The collection of 13 “catalogues”, all bilingual editions in Portuguese and English, were published with art aficionados in mind who are willing to spend the over 800 dollars for the set, or 65 dollars for each book.

The longest and shortest of the set, however, are the two exceptions to the pricing rule. ‘Black Body and Soul’, at 559 pages, costs 75 dollars, while the section on the historic roots of art in the world and the Americas, 103 pages, goes for just 30 dollars.

The collection celebrates Brazil’s history, but it is fundamentally “an exercise in critique” that has long been a challenge for Brazilian art-lovers, said Edemar Cid Ferreira, president of the Brazil 500 Years Association, which was created to execute the far-reaching project.

The show, which provides an “integral and non-exclusive vision of Brazilian culture”, as Cid Ferreira stated at the official presentation of the catalogues, covers archaeological works, from 12,000 years prior to the arrival of the Portuguese, and installations and other contemporary approaches to art.

The scope of the collection includes indigenous, Baroque, modern and Afro-Brazilian artworks.

Through 260 artworks, the module titled ‘Distant Gaze’ shows the vision of foreign artists who have drawn, painted and photographed the country since the 17th century.

On the more disturbing side are ‘Images of the Unconscious’, a selection of art by patients at psychiatric hospitals, and ‘Black Body and Soul’, a study of the African contribution to Brazilian culture, which reveals the impacts on the black population of slavery, prejudice and repression in all dimensions.

So deep was that repression that many leading black or mestizo (mixed race) artists were unable to represent their own people in their artworks. Even “looking at themselves” had to wait a long time for blacks, who were often portrayed through European eyes that limited them to a stereotype.

But the most arduous task, also subject to ideological difficulties, was probably selecting among hundreds of works for the ‘Popular Art’ module of the exhibition, a vast and complex universe that is impossible to fully represent in just one show, said its curator Emanoel Araujo.

Popular artistic creation has its roots in the community, but it must be evaluated using criteria similar to those applied to so-called “high” art, says Araujo.

The show was organised based on three aspects: ancestral continuity, “archaisms” and permanence. The first identifies the popular artist, who intuitively focuses on a cultural heritage that connects with the collective unconscious of his or her community.

This section of the collection was largely comprised of sculptures that represent prehistoric monsters or religious images, whether of Catholic, indigenous or African origin.

“Archaisms” refer to an old religious perspective, to the ‘carrancas,’ or faces sculpted in wood, which were common on the boats navigating the Sao Francisco River, in Brazil’s central northeast.

Permanence, meanwhile, is manifest in objects linked to celebrations, rituals and cultural expressions that form part of a community’s popular tradition.

Religion and the rural environment have a strong presence in Brazilian popular art, though urban life is evident in a small part of this section of the art show, through the innocent perception of some machines and spectacles, such as the circus or popular dances, found in the cities.

The northeast, the source of the majority of migrants who built Brazil’s major cities, occupies a large space in the 500-year scope of the exhibition, with its own division and a section dedicated to the “cangazo,” an armed social movement that spread throughout the extensive drought-riddled, poverty-stricken region.

Clothing, weapons and photos of the severed heads of “cangaceiros” make up the section on “The aesthetics of the ‘cangazo’ as an expression of Brazilian lack of redemption”.

This is a dramatic part of the show on 500 years of Brazilian art that is now permanently recorded in the 13 tomes that summarise the nation’s history and culture in its broad and rich themes.