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The Brazilianness of Brazilian Art

Rafael Cardoso
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 Third Text, Vol. 26, Issue 1, January, 2012, 17– 28

The Brazilianness of Brazilian Art

Discourses on Art and National Identity,
c 1850–1930

Rafael Cardoso
Downloaded by [Rafael Cardoso] at 16:13 16 February 2012

1. For an English-language
A BRAZILIAN SCHOOL DENIED
introduction to the history of
the Imperial Academy, see The question of what constitutes Brazilian art, as distinct from the art of
Rafael Cardoso Denis,
‘Academicism, Imperialism
other cultures and nationalities, was perhaps first posed self-consciously
and National Identity: The in 1855. The poet and painter Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre had then
case of Brazil’s Academia
Imperial de Belas Artes’, in
just been named director of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and
Rafael Cardoso Denis and charged with the mission of reforming that institution, widely perceived
Colin Trodd, eds, Art and the as feeble and out of touch after less than three decades of activity.1
Academy in the Nineteenth
Century, Manchester Among his early initiatives, the new director proposed thirty theses on
University Press and Rutgers topics of art and culture to be debated by members of the Academy.
University Press, Manchester
and New Brunswick, 2000, These were posed as questions, of which number eight enquired:
pp 53– 67.
For Brazil to develop its own school, what principles should the Academy
2. See Alfredo Galvão, ‘Manuel
de Araújo Porto-Alegre – Sua adopt as invariable canons in order to obtain that peculiar character
Influência na Academia deserving the name of a school, without however rushing to adopt a
Imperial das Belas Artes e no mannered style?2
Meio Artı́stico do Rio de
Janeiro’, Revista do
Patrimônio Histórico e
The question proved to be unanswerable, particularly in view of its
Artı́stico Nacional 14, 1959, tenuous presumption that a set of ‘invariable canons’ could somehow
p 58. (‘Para que o Brasil forme
uma escola sua, que princı́pios
shape something as fluid as cultural identity. The main interest in bringing
deverá adotar a Academia it to light in the present context is to point out the distant roots of this
como cânones invariáveis debate and, also, to underscore the fact that the central concern
para obter esse caráter
peculiar que mereça o nome remains largely unaddressed. Though the passage of centuries has see-
de escola, sem contudo mingly naturalised the idea of Brazilian art as self-evident, a nagging
precipitar-se no estilo
amaneirado?’). doubt persists as to its character.
3. This was particularly true in
What exactly, if anything, makes Brazilian art peculiar? The phrasing of
the German context. See Porto-Alegre’s eighth proposition is revealing of the profound ambivalence
William Vaughan, Romantic underlying the question. Clearly, its author viewed the development of a
Art, Thames and Hudson,
London 1978, pp 263– 264; Brazilian school of art as desirable. A ‘national character’ for art was a wide-
and William Vaughan, spread preoccupation in the mid-nineteenth century, when the heirs of
German Romantic Painting,
Yale University Press, New
Romanticism set about the task of using art to underpin national identities.3
Haven, 1994, pp 11– 18. As a former disciple of Jean-Antoine Gros and supporter of José Bonifácio de

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online # Third Text (2012)
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2012.647643
 18

4. See Letı́cia Squeff, O Brasil
nas Letras de um Pintor:
Manuel de Araújo Porto
Alegre (1806 –1879),
Unicamp, Campinas, 2004,
chapter 4.
5. The tone of warning implicit
to this clause makes fuller
sense when read in the context
of the other twenty-nine
theses proposed for debate.
The author’s standpoint is one
of general cultural pessimism,
combined with a somewhat
equivocal belief in the power
of institutions to effect
change.
6. Catálogo das Obras Expostas
na Academia das Bellas Artes
em 15 de Março de 1879, Typ
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Andrada e Silva – ‘patriarch of Brazilian independence’ – Porto-Alegre was
most assuredly aware of the political repercussions of his question.4 The Bra-
zilian Romantic movement of the late 1830s and 1840s, of which he was a
founding member, had openly set itself the task of establishing a national
culture distinct from the colonial past. At the same time, nonetheless, his
manifest concern that the quest for a national school should not degenerate
into a mere ‘mannered style’ is noteworthy.5
Ambivalence towards the idea of national identity was to persist as a
characteristic of Brazilian art. In the 1870s, the issue came to the fore
once again with the Imperial Academy’s quasi-biennial Salon, or General
Exhibition of Fine Arts. Departing from the established norm of simply
exhibiting contemporary works, loosely grouped by medium and genre,
the 1879 Salon attempted something more ambitious. Approximately
eighty works, selected from the Academy’s own collections, were
grouped together and exhibited as a ‘Collection of National Pictures Con-

de Pereira Braga e C, Rio de stituting the Brazilian School’.6 The oldest dated from 1813, before the
Janeiro, 1879, pp 28–39
(‘Coleção de Quadros
founding of the Academy, and the newest were acquisitions as recent as
Nacionais Formando a Escola the previous Salon. The declared intention was to commemorate the
Brasileira’) . passage of fifty years since the first general exhibition. Reactions from
7. Revista Ilustrada 159, 3 May the press were less than enthusiastic. The Revista Ilustrada, perhaps the
1879, p 2. Comendador is an
honorific title bestowed by
most influential periodical of the time, was especially caustic, describing
various civil and religious the notion of a Brazilian school of painting as an invention of Maximiano
orders upon benefactors and
other worthy members. (‘E no
Mafra, the Academy’s long-serving professor of ornamental drawing who
Brasil, onde estão estes was responsible for writing up the catalogue entries. The magazine roared:
artistas de gênio e dedicação
que possam imprimir à arte And in Brazil, where are the artists of genius and dedication capable of
um caráter nacional, que
possam formar escola? Os
imprinting upon art a national character, capable of forming a school?
nossos moços que mais se Those among our young men most devoted to the arts, upon taking
dedicam ás artes, apenas their first steps in the art of drawing, go off to Europe and copy pictures
engatinham no desenho, vão à
Europa copiar quadros na
in Italy, until they are able to reproduce approximately upon the canvas
Itália, até que possam the photographs of our comendadores.7
reproduzir na tela
aproximadamente as Making short shrift of the Academy’s pretences, the article scathingly
fotografias dos nossos
comendadores’).
concluded that any attempt to establish a Brazilian school was simply
laughable.
8. Gonzaga Duque, A Arte
Brasileira, Mercado de Letras, Contemporary opinions tended to reinforce this negative evaluation.
Campinas, 1995, pp 258– Perhaps the weightiest indictment came from Gonzaga Duque, the most
259. (‘A Academia das Belas
Artes tratando de reunir
influential art critic in the country between the 1880s and 1910s. His
algumas obras dos artistas seminal book A Arte Brasileira, first published in 1888, concludes with
desse e de posteriores
perı́odos, catalogou-os sob o
a belated but frontal attack on the Imperial Academy’s claim to coherence
nome genérico e pomposo de as a national school:
Escola Brasileira! Parece
incompreensı́vel semelhante The Academy of Fine Arts, upon bringing together some works of artists of
classificação.’ ‘Se a nossa arte
this or later periods, catalogued them under the generic and pompous
não tem uma estética nem no
seu ensinamento existem name of Brazilian School! Such a classification seems incomprehensible. . .
tradições, como admitir a Since our art has no proper aesthetic nor has its teaching any traditions,
existência de uma Escola how can we admit the existence of a Brazilian School?8
Brasileira?’)

9. Ibid, p 259 (‘. . .não pode
existir uma escola brasileira
porque a feição que
caracteriza a nossa arte é o
cosmopolitismo, e um paı́s
para ter uma escola precisa,
antes de tudo, de uma arte
nacional’).
A school of painting, he goes on to argue, is more than the mere grouping
together of the individual artists and works of a given place or time. Even
if such a loose and imprecise view should be taken:
. . . there can be no Brazilian school because the feature that distinguishes
our art is its cosmopolitanism, and for a country to have a specific school,
it must first of all have a national art.9

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10. Significantly, the research for
this great work was based on
Humboldt’s earlier
expedition to Latin America,
a reference that certainly was
not lost on Gonzaga Duque
who became a frequent
contributor, in later years, to
a luxurious illustrated
magazine entitled, of all
things, Kosmos (1904 –1909).
11. Gonzaga Duque, op cit, pp
260– 261 (‘. . .as profissões
diretamente produtoras
passam às mãos dos
estrangeiros que,
enriquecidos, constituem-se,
conforme os seus interesses
pessoais em força motriz
desta polı́tica’).
19
For someone engaged in writing a book entitled ‘Brazilian art’, Gonzaga
Duque’s objection to the very existence of a national art is intriguing. The
key to understanding this position revolves around the meaning attribu-
ted to the word cosmopolitanism. The term is a modern one for the
time, suited to describing the new breed of citizen of the world, the
well-travelled urbanite equally at home in Paris or Rio de Janeiro, prefer-
ably with passages through the wilder parts of the globe. Its immediate
cultural resonance lies in Alexander von Humboldt’s great scientific
work Kosmos, published in several volumes between 1845 and the
1850s, to worldwide acclaim.10
Gonzaga Duque posits cosmopolitanism as the single most distinctive
feature of Brazilian art. By which he means that the art produced in Brazil
is the result of influences coming from all over, rather than arising from an
innate necessity or deeper elemental force – presumably the sources of a
true ‘national art’. Although such an evaluation of Brazilian art might
strike present-day readers as positive, it did not sit well with the prevail-
ing values of the time. Struggling paradoxically against a cosmopolitan-
ism he openly admired, the critic goes on to assert that Brazil is a new
nation, peopled largely by groups with little attachment to its essence,
such as disenfranchised slaves and parasitical elites. The practice of art
in such a context, he concludes, is relegated to the poor and uneducated
classes, resulting in superficiality and intellectual torpor. Gonzaga Duque
tellingly points a finger of blame at the issue of slavery. Like many intel-
lectuals of his time, he shared the concern that Brazilians of African origin
held no stake in the ideal of nationhood, since their part in society had
been forced upon them against their will. In stark contrast, he depicts
the upper end of Brazilian society as peopled by moneyed families
whose main purpose in life was to obtain sinecures from a corrupt state
by making politicians out of their sons and having their daughters
marry into the local aristocracy. The result of this sorry state of affairs
is that ‘the directly productive professions fall into the hands of foreigners
who, becoming rich, come together, according to their own personal
interests, as the driving force behind this policy’.11 For Gonzaga
Duque, art in Brazil was a luxury import – like so many fruitful branches
grafted onto an essentially unsound tree.
Writing at the close of the Imperial period in Brazilian history –
slavery was abolished in 1888 and the Republic proclaimed in 1889 –
Gonzaga Duque is even more pessimistic than his predecessor Porto-
Alegre, whom he held in high esteem. The main point of intersection
between the two writers is the notion that the art produced in Brazil is,
in a word, inauthentic. That its borrowed forms are the product of
imported practices poorly understood and only superficially assimilated.
This idea was to exercise a lasting influence. In some senses, it is with us to
this day, having undergone a series of conceptual permutations, reversals
and twists. The premise that a work of art can be inauthentic is an inter-
esting one from a historical standpoint. It presupposes that there is such a
thing as an authentic culture, a special category wholly identified with
time and place, collective essence and being. In a multicultural, multira-
cial and socially divided society like Brazil, the ideal of collective exist-
ence has always been a sticking point. Who or what can be cast as the
representatives of cultural authenticity? The indigenous peoples, elected
by Romantic thinkers as symbols of nationhood, have been little inclined
 20
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12. The colonial martyr-hero
Tiradentes and a female
allegory of the Republic were
tried and tested towards this
end, with varying degrees of
success. See José Murilo de
Carvalho, A Formação das
Almas: O Imaginário da
República no Brasil,
Companhia das Letras, São
Paulo, 1990, especially
chapters 3 and 4.
13. See Márcia Regina Capelari
Naxara, Estrangeiro em sua
Própria Terra:
Representações do Brasileiro
1870/1920, Annablume, São
Paulo, 1998; and Aluı́zio
Alves Filho, As Metamorfoses
do Jeca Tatu: A Questão da
Identidade do Brasileiro em
Monteiro Lobato, Inverta,
Rio de Janeiro, 2003.
14. Monteiro Lobato, Idéias de
Jeca Tatu, Globo, São Paulo,
2008, p 23 (‘Jeca Tatu,
coitado, tem poucas idéias
nos miolos. Mas, filho da
terra que é, integrado vive no
meio ambiente, se pensasse,
pensaria assim’).
15. For an introduction to the
wider scope of this topic, see
Lélia Coelho Frota, Pequeno
Dicionário da Arte do Povo
Brasileiro, Aeroplano, Rio de
Janeiro, 2005, pp 15– 34.
to legitimise the hybrid culture that displaced their own; and, simply put,
no other group has been able to lay any sort of tenable claim.
An urgent need was felt, during the early Republican period, to come
up with new tropes of national identity, distinct from previous evocations
of allegorical Indians or the figure of the Emperor, the standard visual
motifs for representing the nation over the preceding half century.12 By
the early twentieth century, as the revolutionary fervour of 1889 fizzled
out, the quest for a symbol of ‘authentic Brazil’ ceased to be a political
propagandistic exercise and took a more collective turn. A new Brazilian
cultural ‘type’ emerged, defined essentially in terms of race and buttressed
by rural values. Around the presidential election of 1919, former minister
and fourth-time candidate Ruy Barbosa stirred public opinion by invok-
ing the literary character Jeca Tatu, created a few years earlier by the
writer and editor Monteiro Lobato as a symbol of Brazil’s backwardness.
A lasting cultural stereotype was born, as Brazilian culture came to be
represented by the figure of the racially mixed caboclo or caipira, of
whom Jeca Tatu was the best-known embodiment, though certainly not
the oldest.13 This typical man of the people was brown-skinned, poor,
ignorant, home-grown in the backwoods and appropriately backward-
thinking. In the book Idéias de Jeca Tatu, his creator justifies the title
as follows:
Jeca Tatu, poor devil, has few ideas in his brains. But, son of the land that
he is, living at one with his environment, were he to think, he would think
like this.14
As a literary trope, the caboclo or caipira has much in common with his
North American counterpart – the hillbilly, hayseed or hick – with the
striking proviso that, in American usage, these are almost exclusively
terms of contempt. No hillbilly character ever achieved the intellectual
prestige of Jeca Tatu. The tenuous aura of authenticity constructed
around the caipira as a mythical figure points to a deeper fissure in Brazi-
lian society’s image of itself. After all, the mindless son of the soil Jeca
Tatu is a literary character written into existence by a clever and polem-
ical son of the landowning elite. This reflects the fact that the trope o povo
(the people) has most often been deployed in Brazilian cultural discourse
as a means of referencing an unspeaking other, quite unlike the formula
‘we the people’ enshrined by the preamble to the United States’ consti-
tution. Usually, the speaker or writer invokes o povo as an abstract
entity legitimising a given stance; but rarely do they posit themselves as
also belonging to that grouping. The result, as regards artistic practice,
is an almost unbridgeable historical divide between popular and
erudite – the former regarded as authentic but lacking originality; the
latter as up-to-date but culturally unspecific.15
BRAZILIAN ART AS ABSENCE
The view of Brazilian national character as something yet unformed but
perverted already by its subservience to foreign influence is one of the pre-
vailing intellectual motifs of the so-called ‘old’ Republic (1889 – 1930).
Whereas the Imperial period had managed largely to skirt the issue
by investing the idea of nationhood in the figure of the Emperor, the

16. See Ricardo Salles, Nostalgia
Imperial: A Formação da
Identidade Nacional no Brasil
do Segundo Reinado,
Topbooks, Rio de Janeiro,
1996, especially chapter 3.
17. Translated into English as
Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion
in the Backlands, Picador,
London, 1995; and Graça
Aranha, Canaan, Luso-
Brazilian Books, New York,
2007.
18. Two very different outlooks
on this theme are available in
Francisco Foot Hardman,
Trem Fantasma: A
Modernidade na Selva,
Companhia das Letras, São
Paulo, 1988; and Nicolau
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Sevcenko, Literatura como
missão: Tensões Sociais e
Criação Cultural na Primeira
República [1983],
Companhia das Letras, São
Paulo, 2003.
19. Both books have gone
through several editions and
are currently available online:
http://www.ebooksbrasil.org/
eLibris/torresb.html and
http://www.ebooksbrasil.org/
eLibris/torresc.html
20. See Ricardo Luiz de Souza,
‘Nacionalismo e
Autoritarismo em Alberto
Torres’, Sociologias, vol 7, no
13, 2005, pp 302 –323,
available at: http://www.
scielo.br/pdf/soc/n13/23565.
pdf
21. Alberto Torres, O Problema
Nacional Brasileiro,
Companhia Editora
Nacional, São Paulo, 1978,
pp 23, 65 (‘obra de
arquitetura polı́tica’; ‘O povo
brasileiro precisa, como os
estrangeiros que aqui
aportam, antes mesmo destes,
ser ‘imigrado’ à posse da sua
terra e ao gozo de seus bens’).
22. Torres, op cit, pp 9, 65.
Torres makes a point of
explicitly denying his use of
‘Canaan’ is a reference to
Graça Aranha, thereby
confirming that
contemporary readers might
have made a connection.
23. Ibid, pp 29, 106 (‘A
inspiração reflexa da arte
européia e o pensamento de
empréstimo tiram aos que
falam à nossa sociedade todo
o prestı́gio eficaz: sente-se em
quase toda obra espiritual dos
nossos homens de letras e de
ciência, a tendência
21
Republican movement of the 1870s and 1880s was forced to seek a fresh
footing.16 The fact that its political ideals and institutions were clearly
based on French and American models only complicated the issue
further. As waves of state-supported immigration – German, Italian,
Japanese, Lebanese, Polish, among others – poured into the country
between the 1890s and 1920s, swelling urban centres and introducing
whole new ethnic communities into the countryside, the question
became ever more convoluted. Literary works like Euclides da Cunha’s
Os Sertões and José Pereira da Graça Aranha’s Canaã, both published
in 1902, deal in differing ways with the conflict between traditional
and modern, native and imported, barbarity and civilisation.17 As the
twentieth century roared into gear, change seemed inevitable; but, in
Brazil, the mood was far from buoyant. No one seemed quite sure
how to reconcile the promises of progress with the perceived burdens
of the past.18
A key author in popularising the debate on national culture was
Alberto Torres, active as a journalist and politician in the early Republi-
can period. Disillusioned with his experience in politics, Torres went on
to publish two influential works, O Problema Nacional Brasileiro (The
Brazilian National Problem) and A Organização Social (Social Organis-
ation), both appearing in the periodical press in the early 1910s and
achieving book form in 1914.19 The vital ‘problem’ (as he labelled it)
facing his generation was the task of organising Brazilian society, by
which Torres understood the building of a strong state based on politi-
cally determined notions of national character.20 This ‘work of political
architecture’ involved a new recognition of Brazil’s racial admixture as
something positive and a coming to terms with the supposed real
essence of the nation. In an important passage of the former book,
Torres argues that:
. . . the Brazilian people need, like the foreigners who set ashore here, even
before these, to be ‘immigrated’ into possession of their own land and
enjoyment of what is rightfully theirs.21
Like Graça Aranha before him, Torres’s argument invokes the name of
Canaan, the mythical Promised Land, stressing the juxtaposition
between those who claim their heritage by divine right and those
expelled from the land of milk and honey for not being able to cultivate
and defend it.22
Torres was not a thinker on art, but it is revealing to see how cul-
tural production works into his discourse on national character. At
several points in his analysis of ‘the Brazilian national problem’, art
plays an important role as evidence of the lack of real national vitality
or collective will. Brazil’s art is portrayed by him as ‘reflexive of Euro-
pean art’ and its thinking in literature and science as ‘borrowed’ and
‘subaltern’.23 He describes the typical mindset of Brazilians as no less
than a ‘national infirmity’, deriving from a misguided upbringing and
servile copying of French models.24 Such ideas had subsequent impact
on artistic circles – particularly in then provincial São Paulo – finding
their way into the hugely popular writings of Monteiro Lobato as
well as those of Oswald de Andrade, principal early spokesman for
the paulista modernism of 1922.25 As regards their strident appeals to
nationalism in art, at least, Lobato had a great deal more in common
 22
subalterna de espı́ritos não
educados para compreender e
para aplicar: cérebros
oberados de idéias, de
fórmulas e de imagens, senão
de todo alheias, de inspiração
e de feitio alheios’).
24. Ibid, p 125 (‘. . . a tendência
retórica da nossa mentalidade
– decorativa na arte,
mnemônica no saber,
farisaica na aceitação, na
cópia, na interpretação e na
aplicação de idéias e de
sistemas; bizantina, no culto
material da forma; quase
supersticiosa, no amor a
conceitos e a fórmulas.’).
25. The adjective paulista refers
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to anyone from the state of
São Paulo. The more specific
reference here is to the
Semana de Arte Moderna, or
‘modern art week’, an event
staged in São Paulo in
February 1922 encompassing
art, literature and music,
which brought together a
coalition of younger artists
loosely aligned in the public
mind with Futurism.
Although it had relatively
little impact at the time, it was
later enshrined, by the
generation of artists and
critics who held greatest sway
between the 1930s and 1970s,
as the departure point for
modernism in Brazil. A
general account can be found
in the fiftieth-anniversary
exhibition catalogue, Semana
de 22: Antecedentes e
Conseqüências, Museu de
Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo,
1972. More recent
perspectives are available in
Annateresa Fabris, ed,
Modernidade e Modernismo
no Brasil, Mercado de Letras,
Campinas, 1994.
26. For more on Lobato as art
critic, see Tadeu Chiarelli,
Um Jeca nos Vernissages:
Monteiro Lobato e o Desejo
de uma Arte Nacional no
Brasil, Edusp, São Paulo,
1996.
27. Andrade, ‘Em Prol de uma
Pintura Nacional’, in Estética
e Polı́tica: Obras Completas
de Oswald de Andrade,
Organizadas por Maria
Eugenia Boaventura, Globo,
São Paulo, 1992, pp 141– 143
(‘Agita-se em São Paulo um
movimento desusado de
artistas pintores. São os
nossos pensionistas do Estado
que a guerra obrigou a deixar
a vida pitoresca dos ateliers e
with de Andrade than is allowed by the crude opposition into which
they are usually cast.26
A general perception came to prevail, around the First World War,
that the Francophile intellectualism so highly prized by Brazil’s cosmopo-
litan elites was artificial and a countervailing influence to the develop-
ment of a truly national culture. An early text by Oswald de Andrade,
published in the magazine O Pirralho in 1915, denounces the money
wasted on sending young painters to study in France at public expense.
With characteristic sarcasm, he decries ‘the decayed vision of the long-
haired artist’, forced by the war to ‘leave the picturesque life of the ateliers
and quartiers’, and positively shocked by the prospect of having to paint a
Brazilian landscape as opposed to the cultivated French countryside.27 A
few years later Monteiro Lobato was to echo similar sentiments in Idéias
de Jeca Tatu. The preface to the first edition claims that one central thread
ties together the disparate texts that make up the book: ‘a war cry’ for
originality and against the ‘apish’ copying of ‘the things of Paris’.28
In counterpoint to the artificial imports he deplores, Oswald singles
out José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior as the one painter who solved ‘the
issue of the possibility of a national painting’. Despite holding the
opinion, he hastens to add, that the artist’s work by no means bears the
mark of genius or greatness.29 This half-hearted espousal, over a
decade after the painter’s death in 1899, is suggestive of Oswald’s uneasi-
ness with the art actually produced in Brazil. Although the title of his
article boldly calls for a national style of painting, the lone example he
champions is couched in less than triumphant terms: ‘the issue of the
possibility’. Faint praise indeed, but understandable, considering the
shaky conceptual ground he was treading. Almeida Júnior had been a
pupil of the Imperial Academy, trained in France under Alexandre
Cabanel. He was certainly not an undisputed paragon of Brazilian auth-
enticity, despite notorious pride in his paulista identity and a predilection
for caipira subjects in the 1890s.30
Two years later, in 1917, Monteiro Lobato devoted a longer article to
Almeida Júnior, published in the influential Revista do Brasil. Unlike
Oswald, Lobato displays no aesthetic qualms towards the work. In his
mind, the artist’s ‘naturalism’ was ‘something new and truthful’:
He exercised among us the same mission as Courbet in France. He painted
not man, but a man – a son of the land, and thus created a national style of
painting in contrast to the dominant international one.31
The use of the phrase ‘son of the land’ with regard to Almeida Júnior is
striking, in so far as this is precisely the same term the author would
later employ to describe Jeca Tatu. The reference to Gustave Courbet
suggests that Lobato likely had a specific painting in mind when he
wrote this sentence – a work painted in 1879 and originally exhibited
in the Paris Salon with the title Le Défricheur brésilien .32 For Monteiro
Lobato, the Brazilianness of Almeida Júnior’s work lay in its choice of
subject matter and direct, naturalist, approach to local appearances and
themes of everyday life.
Monteiro Lobato was not alone in thinking that the substitute for
imported models of art was a newer import. The confusing stance of
noisily proclaiming the importance of a national art and, meanwhile,
failing to identify its acceptable practice would remain a feature of
 23

dos quartiers, a
despreocupada existência de
estudantes ricos, a quem não
falta o socorro mensal do que
faria a alegria e o consolo de
duas famı́lias inteiras. A gente
os vê por aı́, diferentes dos
outros, alguns
escandalosamente diferentes
procurando recompor a
decaı́da visão do artista
cabeludo’).

28. Monteiro Lobato, op cit, p 23

(‘Essa idéia é um grito de
guerra em prol da nossa
personalidade. . . A corrente
contrária propugna a vitória
do macaco.’; ‘Quem plagia
não imita, macaqueia. E o que
os paredros do “dernier cri”
fazem não passa de caretas,
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guinchos, pinotes de monos

glabros em face dos homens e
das coisas de Paris’). An essay
later appended to the 1946
edition of the book,
suggestively titled ‘Brazilian
Art’, blares angrily: ‘Our ruin
is the French! We are
obsessed with the French!’,
p 186.

29. Andrade, op cit, p 141 (‘a

questão da possibilidade de
uma pintura nacional’).

30. Born in the town of Itu, state

of São Paulo, Almeida Júnior
was one of the first artists to
take explicit pride in his
regional identity at a time
when it was usual for young
artists arriving in Rio de
Janeiro to forsake their
provincial roots and blend
into the capital’s
cosmopolitan scene. See
Maria Cecı́lia França
Loureiro, ‘Almeida Júnior: José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, O Derrubador Brasileiro (The Brazilian Lumberjack),
Um Criador de
Imaginários’, in Almeida
1879, oil on canvas, 225 x 185cm, collection of the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes/
Júnior: Um Criador de IBRAM/Min C, photo: Jaime Acioli
Imaginários, Pinacoteca do
Estado, São Paulo, 2007,
pp 43– 215.

31. Monteiro Lobato, op cit, pp Oswald de Andrade’s pronouncements on the subject for many years. In a
86– 95 (‘A madrugada do dia
seguinte raia com Almeida lecture delivered at the Sorbonne in 1923, and originally published in the
Júnior, que conduz pelas Revue de l’Amérique latine, he demotes the work of Almeida Júnior to the
mãos uma coisa nova e
verdadeira – o naturalismo. status of ‘mere nationalist decomposition’ and, lumping it together with
Exerce entre nós a missão de the ‘official painting’ of past and present, casts it into the outer reaches of
Courbet em França. Pinta,
não o homem, mas um
the ‘imitative art of the museums’. The new artists linked to the Semana
homem – o filho da terra, e de Arte Moderna were ‘setting the bases for a truly Brazilian and current
cria com isso a pintura
nacional em contraposição à
painting’. How? Oswald de Andrade explains: by ‘adopting the modern
internacional dominante’). processes deriving from the Cubist movement in Europe’.33 Presumably
32. Upon its arrival in Brazil, the
carried away in the heat of public speaking, the author apparently
painting gained currency failed to notice the logical contradiction inherent to the argument that
under the title Caboclo em
Descanso, making it one of
importing Cubism would somehow give rise to a Brazilian style of paint-
the earliest visual depictions ing. The wish to be both emphatically nationalist and absolutely current
 24

of the caboclo type. For more would remain elusively beyond the grasp of the modernist generation of
on this painting, see my article
‘O Derrubador Brasileiro’, which he was a part.
Nossa História 8, June 2004;
and also Almeida Júnior, um
Criador de Imaginários, pp
100– 101, p 255. BRASILIDADE, NATION AND RACE
33. Andrade, op cit, p 38
(‘Protestamos então contra os The First World War exacerbated the ugliest aspects of nationalist dis-
processos, quer fossem de
Pedro Américo, quer do casal
course everywhere and, more specifically in Brazil, made clear that the
Albuquerque, quer da mera European model of civilisation was no longer the undisputed model.
decomposição nacionalista de The rise of the United States as a dominant world power was inspiring,
Almeida Júnior. Os novos
artistas, precedidos por as proof that an American nation could surpass Europe in wealth and
Navarro da Costa, might, and depressing at the same time, in so far as it made all too
começaram a reação
adotando os processos clear the immense gap separating North America from the rest of the
modernos, oriundos do Americas. A growing cult of ‘yankeeism’ was the visible face of profound
movimento cubista na
Europa.’; ‘Di Cavalcanti,
changes sweeping through the cultural landscape.34 As the landmark date
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Anita Malfatti, Zina Aita,
Rego Monteiro, Tarsila do
Amaral e Yan de Almeida
Prado lançam as bases de uma
pintura totalmente brasileira
e atual’).
34. The ever caustic Lima Barreto
denounced this tendency in a
1919 article entitled ‘O Nosso
Ianquismo’. See Lima Barreto,
Toda Crônica, vol 1, Beatriz
Rezende and Rachel Valença,
eds, Agir, Rio de Janeiro,
2004, pp 480– 485.
35. José Pereira da Graça Aranha,
A Esthetica da Vida, Garnier,
Rio de Janeiro, [1921], pp
116– 118 (‘Esse
“formalismo” da nossa poesia
se propaga por toda a
literatura.’; ‘E no entanto
aqueles elementos bárbaros
da nossa formação espiritual e
da nossa nacionalidade
reclamam, antes do seu
desaparecimento total, os seus
vates e os seus escritores. O
que há de grandioso, de
descomunal, de monstruoso,
de amorfo, de infantil, de
caduco mesmo, na natureza e
nas gentes, exige a sua
epopéia. Alguns tentaram ser
o poeta, o épico dessa
selvageria’).
36. Eduardo Jardim (de Moraes),
A Brasilidade Modernista:
Sua Dimensão Filosófica,
Graal, Rio de Janeiro, 1978,
pp 36– 37 (‘o sentimento da
realidade’; ‘objetivismo
dinâmico’).
37. See Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, O
Espetáculo das Raças:
Cientistas, Instituições e
Questão Racial no Brasil,
1870-1930, Companhia das
Letras, São Paulo, 1993,
especially pp 150–155; see
also Marcos Chor Maio and
of 1922 loomed into view, marking the Centennial of Brazilian indepen-
dence, what did the country have to show for itself? Alberto Torres’s
notion of a ‘real Brazil’ waiting to be discovered by the nation’s cultural
elites brought to a boiling point debates that had been simmering for
decades. The task of looking inwards and facing the harsh realities of
the country seemed increasingly urgent.
It was none other than Graça Aranha who brought this urgency
directly to bear upon the arena of art and aesthetics. His 1921 book, A
Esthetica da Vida (The Aesthetics of Life), posits notions suggestively
close to those of Torres, condemning the ‘formalism’ of Brazilian literary
culture and propounding the need to seek out a new, robust aesthetic in
the ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarous’ elements of the nation’s ‘spiritual for-
mation’.35 He was immediately enlisted by the young paulista modernists
to deliver the inaugural address for the Semana da Arte Moderna, in 1922
– appropriately entitled ‘The Aesthetic Emotion in Modern Art’, a refer-
ence to the ideas developed in his book of the preceding year – and came
to be widely (though, mistakenly) perceived as the movement’s leader.
For Graça Aranha, Brazilian art was still more of an absence than an
entity. The main reason for this was a general lack of understanding of
nature and society, what he called a ‘feeling for reality’. Brazilianness
in art would spring from the same source as modernity: a conscious
move away from the claims of inner subjectivism towards the ‘dynamic
objectivism’ of life, nature and external reality.36
The backdrop to Graça Aranha’s quasi-Nietzschean appeals to
dynamic nature and barbarian vigour were the ongoing debates about
race that had dominated Brazilian intellectual circles since the 1880s,
popularised by the writings of Sylvio Romero.37 Despite the explicit
racialist slant of the times, a consensus slowly began to build that misce-
genation had its virtues. Romero had argued that Europeans, being
poorly adapted to the tropical climate, needed to mix with African and
indigenous blood in order to survive. Eventually, in his view, the
‘superior’ race would win out through natural selection, as the Brazilian
population became stable and ever whiter.38 By the early twentieth
century, this notion of branqueamento, or ‘whitening’, was beginning
to lose some of its widespread credence. As early as 1905, the little
known physician and psychologist, Manoel Bomfim, published A
América Latina: Males de Origem, in which he argued against ideas of
 25

Ricardo Ventura Santos, eds,
Raça, Ciencia e Sociedade,
Fiocruz/CCBB, Rio de
Janeiro, 1996. A brief
English-language account is
available in Sueann Caulfield,
In Defense of Honor: Sexual
Morality, Modernity and
Nation in Early-twentieth-
century Brazil, Duke
University Press, Chapel Hill,
1999, chapter 5.
38. Celia Maria Marinho de
Azevedo, Onda Negra, Medo
Branco: O Negro no
Imaginário das Elites –
Século XIX, Paz e Terra, Rio
de Janeiro, 1987), pp 70– 72
39. Manoel Bomfim, A América
Latina: Males de Origem,
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racial superiority and pointed to the social and political causes of Latin
America’s supposed ‘degeneracy’.39
By the mid-1920s, this new thinking on race was making greater
inroads into the arena of art. Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto da
Poesia Pau-Brasil’ (‘Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry’), published in the
Rio de Janeiro newspaper Correio da Manhã, in 1924, is rightly con-
sidered the rallying cry of Brazilian modernism. Together with the ‘Mani-
festo Antropófago’ (‘Anthropophagic Manifesto’) of 1928, it sets out
poetically the aims of the movement – essentially, an amalgam of
avant-garde contrariness (against tradition, against erudition, against
logic) and neo-Romantic nativism. The intellectual undercurrent of the
text is the progressive discourse on race developed over the preceding
decades, emphasising the virtues of Brazil’s African and indigenous
roots. This is perhaps the main reason for its continued appeal, eighty-
plus years on. It is worth quoting the opening paragraph at length:

Topbooks, Rio de Janeiro,

2005, especially pp 41– 46,
pp 65– 74. Published in Paris,
Poetry exists in facts. The saffron and ochre shanties on the green slopes of
the book might have attracted Favela, under the Cabralian blue, are aesthetic facts. Carnival in Rio is
little attention were it not for the religious happening of the race. Pau-Brasil. Wagner submerges under
the vitriolic attacks it drew
from the renowned Romero.
the ranks of revelers in Botafogo. Barbarian and ours. The rich ethnic
Alberto Torres’s positive formation. Vegetable wealth. The minerals. The cooking. Vatapá, gold
outlook on miscegenation and dance.40
probably owes much to the
currency achieved by Favela and carnival, nature and race, food and dance: these are the endur-
Bomfim’s writings.
ing tropes Oswald de Andrade opposes to colonial history and elite
40. Oswald de Andrade, ‘Do Pau-
Brasil à Antropofagia e às culture, castigated in the subsequent paragraphs of the manifesto. The
Utopias’, Estética e Polı́tica, colourful image evoked in the second sentence is practically a description
op cit, p 5 (‘A poesia existe
nos fatos. Os casebres de
of works the painter Tarsila do Amaral, then married to Oswald, would
açafrão e de ocre nos verdes produce in the years between 1924 and 1929 .41 For the happy couple, at
da Favela, sob o céu
cabralino, são fatos estéticos.
least, the problem of a national art had apparently been solved. The pur-
O Carnaval do Rio é o ported triumph of their respective poetic and pictorial solutions was to
acontecimento religioso da prove short-lived, however.
raça. Pau-Brasil. Wagner
submerge ante os cordões de As subsequent events were to bear out, denying the past is not really an
Botafogo. Bárbaro e nosso. A effective strategy for escaping the grasp of history. With the intensifica-
formação étnica rica. Riqueza
vegetal. O minério. A cozinha. tion of nationalism in the 1930s, the old problem of what makes Brazilian
O vatapá, o ouro e a dança’). art distinctly Brazilian crept stealthily back to the fore. An early and dis-
Favela is the name of the hill
in Rio de Janeiro upon which
turbing example of how quickly Oswald de Andrade’s allegorical union
the first favela – or of brasilidade (Brazilianness) and modernismo could metamorphose
shantytown – was into something quite distinct is provided by Joaquim Inojosa’s 1925
constructed in 1897. Cabral is
the Portuguese explorer pamphlet, O Brasil brasileiro. Originally delivered as a lecture, intended
reputed to have discovered to stir the youth of Pernambuco into support of the modernist cause, ‘The
Brazil in 1500. Pau-brasil is
Brazilwood, the original Brazilian Brazil’ is a hodgepodge of circular rhetoric, stitched together
object of economic with quotations from Graça Aranha. Pared down to bare bones, its
exploitation of the newly
discovered territory. Vatapá is
central tenets are that the spirit of Brazilianness simply does not exist
a Bahian dish, of African and, contradictorily, that the task of youth is to impose it forcibly upon
origin, made with bread,
coconut milk, cashew nuts,
their elders by whatever means necessary, including organised sports,
peanuts, ginger, dried prawns civic education, rejection of imported ideas, domination of nature
and palm oil, blended into a through industry and joyous celebration of modern civilisation. Any simi-
creamy and fluffy paste.
larity to nascent Italian fascism – the ‘advantages’ and ‘opportunity’ of
41. Despite distant roots in the
nineteenth century, the idea
which are explicitly referenced by the author – is far from coincidental.42
that Brazilianness in painting What Inojosa makes no effort to explain, at any point in his text, is
was the result of a peculiar just what is meant by brasilidade and how his enthusiastic audience is
rendering of colour and light
supposed to recognise it.
 26
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Tarsila do Amaral, Morro da Favela (Favela Hill), 1924, oil on canvas, 64.5 x 76cm, Sérgio Fadel Collection, photo: Rômulo
Fialdini, # Tarsila do Amaral Empreendimentos

came to be taken for granted

only later. This viewpoint
became prevalent in the 1940s
and continues to hold sway in
many critical evaluations to
this day. See, for example,
Sérgio Milliet, ‘Luz –
Paisagem – Arte Nacional’,
Pintura Quase Sempre,
Livraria do Globo, Porto
Alegre, 1944, pp 72– 80; and
Gilda de Mello e Souza,
‘Pintura Brasileira
Contemporânea: Os
Precursores’, Discurso 5,
1974, pp 119 –130. This
pioneering article was
recently republished in the
catalogue Almeida Júnior, um
Criador de Imaginários, op
cit, pp 255– 262.
The quest for a national style was not restricted to the modernist
movement. The topic comes to the fore at several points in Angyone
Costa’s book, A Inquietação das Abelhas (The Restlessness of Bees), pub-
lished in 1927 as an account of the opinions of the nation’s leading pain-
ters, sculptors, architects and printmakers on the subject of art, based on
interviews conducted by the author. The chapter devoted to painter
Marques Júnior contains a section titled ‘The possibilities of a national
art’, which begins as follows:
Our artistic milieu begins to become impressed by the need to establish a
Brazilian art. This is a necessary movement, towards which – let it be said,
incidentally – our older painters contributed nothing. There is a need to
create a Brazilian technique, for only then will we personalize our
art. As long as Brazilian landscapes or figures are painted with a French
technique, the painting will not be truly Brazilian. The author is

42. Joaquim Inojosa, A Arte
Moderna & O Brasil
Brasileiro (edição
comemorativa do
cinqüentenário), Editora
Meio-Dia, Rio de Janeiro,
1977, pp 119 –135 (‘Na
Itália, onde a juventude prima
pela arrogância, nasceu o
fascismo, cujas vantagens não
sei se resultam do caráter de
transitoriedade que aparenta
ou da oportunidade de sua
criação’, p 126). For further
considerations on links
between the Semana de Arte
Moderna and fascism in
Brazil, see Antonio Arnoni
Prado, 1922 – Itinerário de
uma Falsa Vanguarda: Os
Dissidentes, a Semana e o
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Integralismo, Brasiliense, São
Paulo, 1983, especially pp
90– 104; and Franklin de
Oliveira, A Semana de Arte
Moderna na contramão da
História, e Outros Ensaios,
Topbooks, Rio de Janeiro,
1993, pp 15– 38.
43. Angyone Costa, A
Inquietação das Abelhas,
Pimenta de Mello, Rio de
Janeiro, 1927, p 171 (‘Os
nossos meios artı́sticos
começam a se impressionar
com a necessidade de
estabelecer uma arte
brasileira. É um movimento
necessário, para o qual –
diga-se de passagem – nada
os nossos velhos pintores
produziram. Há necessidade
de criar uma técnica
brasileira, porque só assim
conseguiremos personalizar a
nossa arte. Enquanto a
paisagem ou a figura
brasileira forem pintadas com
a técnica francesa não será
verdadeiramente arte
brasileira. O autor é
brasileiro, o assunto também
o é, mas a maneira de tratá-lo
é de outro. . .’).
44. Mário de Andrade, Aspectos
das Artes Plásticas no Brasil,
Itatiaia, Belo Horizonte,
1984, pp 13– 18 (‘Mas a
prova mais importante de que
havia um surto coletivo de
racialidade brasileira, está na
imposição do mulato’).
45. Ibid, pp 40– 42
46. The noun desvairo, alternate
form of desvario, means folly,
extravagance, derangement,
deviance. The term
desvairismo was coined by
Mário de Andrade in the
‘Prefácio Interessantı́ssimo’ of
Paulicéia desvairada, which is
27
Brazilian, the subject matter too, but the manner of rendering it is someone
else’s. . .43
The idea that Brazilian art might need to seek a basis in new technical
procedures is novel, eliciting an interesting parallel with Oswald de
Andrade’s near contemporary appeal to the ‘modern processes’ of
Cubism. Undoubtedly, what Angyone Costa and Marques Junior (it is
unclear who is speaking in the text) mean by ‘technique’ is quite distinct
from what Oswald de Andrade had in mind. The proof is the example
they cite of an artist who went some way, in their opinion, towards
establishing a distinctive Brazilian style: Baptista da Costa, the leading
landscape painter of the turn of the century, then recently deceased.
What they share with Oswald is a concern that the turn towards a
new Brazilian art should be rooted in formal qualities – processes and
technique – and not in subject matter alone. In this, they part
company with Monteiro Lobato and much of the Romantic tradition
before him.
Devoid of more fertile ground in which to blossom, contemporary dis-
cussions of brasilidade in art would continue to revolve largely around the
issue of race and, more specifically, its conflation with character. The
writer and poet Mário de Andrade – increasingly the recognised spokes-
man for paulista modernism after the Revolution of 1930 – entered the
fray in 1928 with an essay on Aleijadinho, the major exponent of the
Baroque in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais. Its central thesis is that
this artist’s genius is the expression of his ambiguous role as a mulatto
in Brazilian society. Starting from the assumption that ‘the imposition
of the mulatto’ in colonial society is expressive of ‘a collective upsurge
of Brazilian raciality’, the text goes on to develop a tenuous argument
according to which the ambiguity of cultural production in Brazil
derives from the mulatto’s status as a solitary individual, positioned
outside either of the established racial groupings, neither black nor
white, but always a misfit.44
The genius of Aleijadinho, according to Mário de Andrade, was to
reinvent the prevailing system by systematically deforming its values
from the inside, by freely reinterpreting the forms of Portuguese art
and architecture in a subversive, almost deviant, sense.45 For Mário
de Andrade, brasilidade is the freedom to be one’s self – a deviant
self – a sentiment not too far removed from his earlier espousal of des-
vairismo in the infamous preface to his book of poems, Paulicéia des-
vairada (1922).46 This daring and controversial interpretation of
Brazilian character as lack of character runs parallel, of course, to the
theme of Macunaı́ma: O Herói sem Nenhum Caráter, his novel also
of 1928, the protagonist of which is ‘the hero with no character’ of its
subtitle.
Thinly disguised as historical study, the essay on Aleijadinho can more
reliably be read as a key to understanding the author’s contradictory
evaluation of his own place in the national scenario. Resentful of the
establishment, the young Mário de Andrade positioned himself as an out-
sider, lashing out strategically at what he perceived to be his competitors
and oppressors.47 The essay begins with an aggressive attack on the
nation’s then capital city as symbol of a misguided Brazilian identity
the author wishes to supplant: ‘Rio de Janeiro is the greatest testament
 28
available at: http://www.mac.
usp.br/mac/templates/
projetos/jogo/pauliceia.asp
47. The biographical element in
Mário de Andrade’s work is a
subject too far removed from
the discussion here. For a
penetrating account of the
dynamics of his relationship
with the other paulista
modernists, see Sérgio Miceli,
Nacional Estrangeiro:
História Social e Cultural do
Modernismo Artistico em São
Paulo, Companhia das
Letras, São Paulo, 2003, pp
112– 123, and also Miceli,
Intelectuais à Brasileira,
Companhia das Letras, São
Paulo, 2001, pp 103– 105. A
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sensitive reading of the sexual
undercurrents in his thinking
is available in Eduardo
Jardim, Mário de Andrade: A
Morte do Poeta, Civilização
Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro,
2005.
48. Mário de Andrade, op cit,
1984, pp 11– 12, pp 22–25,
pp 41– 42 (‘O Rio de Janeiro é
a maior homenagem que
oferecemos ao tropical
instinto burocrático da
nacionalidade.’; ‘É um
mestiço, mais que um
nacional! Só é brasileiro
porque, meu Deus!,
aconteceu no Brasil’).
we offer to the bureaucratic tropical instinct of our nationhood.’ Aleija-
dinho, cast as the unrecognised and uncelebrated genius of his day,
exposes the artificiality and affectedness of the false civilisation that sur-
rounds him. For Mário de Andrade, the artist’s brasilidade derives from
his opposition to time and, paradoxically, place. The peculiarity of his
character and work is that he does not belong in Brazil: he is ‘more a
mestiço than a national’. Aleijadinho, writes the author, ‘is only Brazilian
because, my God!, he happened in Brazil’.48 He is, above all, a deviant by-
product of a defective system; and, being the negative of the negative, he
achieves greatness.
Mário de Andrade’s scheme of brasilidade as a subversive quality is,
of course, pointedly modernist in its oppositional logic. Dubious to start
with, purposefully confusing the affirmation of identity with the trans-
gression of origins, it was rendered even more problematic by the
increasing institutionalisation of modernism during the Vargas regime.
In its translation to a nationalist idiom, the ideal of dissident character
seems to have got lost or at least metamorphosed into a more pragmatic
political agenda. A curious amalgam of race, nation and ideology came
to prevail in the 1930s, couched in the deeply conservative formalism of
the retour à l’ordre. A painting like Cândido Portinari’s O Mestiço, of
1934, summarises all that is worst in discussions of brasilidade in art.
An uneasy equilibrium between the timeless racial stereotype of the
figure and the pseudo-contemporary manner of the background congeals
the idea of national character into a rigid caricature, poised halfway
between the archaism of ethnographic verisimilitude and the garishness
of stage-set modernity. In the end, it reduces complex issues of culture
and identity to simplistic formulas of style and representation, conflating
race with colour and equating social structure with pictorial
composition. It heralds a whole new era in which national identity
was no longer an absence to be debated but a doctrine that needed to
be enforced.