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An Overview of Brazilian Art
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
I find it hard to understand what can be meant by ‘mestiço (mixed-race) art’.
No one disputes that the Brazilian people are of mixed race, but even if this is the case, the idea that their artistic creations should also be ‘mestiço’ seems to be an argument that may be logical but is unverifiable in practice.
The first difficulty is that I can see no causal relationship between an individual's racial make-up and the character of the object he or she produces or creates. In my view human individuals are essentially cultural. So it is on the cultural level that they are defined and their creations described. From this it can be concluded that if a mulatto transmits something of his mulatice (‘mulatto-ness’) to his art, this has nothing to do with the type of blood flowing in his veins, but is related to the influence that his position as a mulatto has on his world view, if indeed he has one. Personally I can see no sign of it in the work of Machado de Assis, for example. Should writers' social and racial position influence their work? Of course. But not to the extent that it becomes visible and less still so that it determines the quality or meaning of the work.
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Notes
1. Cariocas are the people from Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the state of Rio de Janeiro. (Translator's note.)
2. Aleijadinho is the affectionate diminutive form of aleijado, crippled. (Translator's note.)
3. The Carajá are a group living on the banks of the Araguaia river in west central Brazil. (Translator's note.)
4. Mineiro relates to the state of Minas Gerais. (Translator's note.)
5. The author is referring to twelve statues of prophets by Aleijadinho which stand in front of the church of Dom Jesus de Matosinhos in Congonhas do Campo, Minas Gerais. In the remarkably perceptive pages on Aleijadinho he has recently published, the philosopher Henri Maldiney says: "the pedestals of Abdias and Habakuk lean towards the centre. These apparently slight variations are in fact crucial, for here Abdias and Habakuk organize the space. In the foreground, on the highest part of the wall, one on each side, almost at the edge of the terrace, they reach towards the heavens more than any of the others. Their bodies are inclined towards the centre and the inclination of the pedestals make them lean still more, whereas, on the outer side, one of their arms, which is raised away from their bodies, appeals to heaven in a gesture of consecration. Thus they delineate the space in which the other prophets' figures rise up in a wavy vertical line." See Henri Maldiney (2000), Ouvrir le rien, l'art nu (encre marine), p. 399. See also Germain Bazin (1956), L'architecture religieuse baroque au Brésil (Plon). (Editor's note.)
6. After an outing in Chicago and New York, an exhibition entitled ‘Lasar Segall "New Worlds" was put on in Paris from 3 February to 14 May 2000 at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaïsme. (See the catalogue Lasar Segall Nouveaux Mondes (2000), under the direction of Stéphanie d'Alessandro, Paris: Adam Biro.) (Editor's note.)
7. In French in the original. (Translator's note.)
8. The exhibition entitled ‘A Mostra do Redescubrimento', organized by the Associação Brasil 500 anos Artes Visuais, in fact devotes one of its modules to ‘Imagens do Inconsciente'. (Editor's note.)