LITERATURE AND THE
VISUAL ARTS: THE BRAZILIAN
ROARING TWENTIES
By Jorge Schwartz
Universidade
de São Paulo
(NOTE: To
view images cited in text, see Appendix.)
The dialogue between literature and the visual arts in Brazil in the
1920s has as its key moment the Week of Modern Art, or Week of '22, and as its
main names Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral--through the interrelation
between their works as well as joint productions. The approach of several
artists of the time to blackness, prostitution, and the portrayal of Mangue in
poetry and painting also seems to me very significant and emblematic in presenting
the Horatian theme UT PICTURA POESIS (poetry is like painting). These are the
axes around which revolves the text I will present.
THE MODERNIST REVOLUTION: THE
WEEK OF '22
The interdisciplinary character
of the Week of '22 reflects the double movement of artistic production in
Brazil at a time when, while seeking to bring up to date national elements,
it's drawn to the Medusa of the European vanguard while trying not to fall into
the mere imitation of foreign models or to lose its national character with the
adoption of new languages.
This phenomenon of multiartistic
character consisted of a sequence of lectures, poetry readings and concerts
which took place in the Teatro Municipal of São Paulo over three days and to
this day is remembered as frenzied: February 13, 15 and 17, 1922. The
"official" entry of Brazil into modernity was not limited, therefore,
to a rhetorical show; an exhibition of architecture and visual arts accompanied
it.
The movement of '22 was not born
of spontaneous generation; rather, the establishment of modernity in Brazil had
anticipatory moments and, inevitably, polemic ones. Evidence of both statements
was the vehement rejection of the esprit nouveau disseminated by writer Monteiro Lobato's
radical brand of nationalism, which contrasted with the echoes of Marinetti's
Futurist Manifesto, imported early on to Brazil, by way of Bahia, by Almacchio
Diniz and, in person, by Oswald de Andrade in 1912, on his way back from his
first trip to Europe. [1. Marinetti in Rio de
Janeiro's Favela, 1926] Other trailblazers of the movement were the
two individual exhibitions Lasar Segall put on in 1913 in São Paulo and
Campinas, which were practically ignored by local critics at the time. For its
part, Anita Malfatti's exhibition in 1917 had arrived accompanied by the echoes
of the war in Europe and the clamor of the first large workers' strike in the
country. [2. Anita Malfatti, Man of the Seven
Colours, 1916] Her painting bore the intense mark of
expressionism, with which she had had contacts during her studies in Berlin and
at the Independent School of Art in New York. But the artist paid a high price
for her pioneering work: her exhibit was the object of polemic and scandal.
Nevertheless, critics were and are unanimous in recognizing her exhibit as the
first modern look at the visual arts; her work doubtlessly represented a point
of departure for Brazil's historical vanguards and made it possible for the
later manifestations of the new spirit to be received with less intolerance as
the meaning of the irreversible trajectory toward modernity was recognized
little by little.
We can say that the Week of '22
is colored by the commemorations of the first centennial of Brazil's
independence and is concurrent with the funding of the Communist Party of
Brazil. For its part, the event marks the overcoming of the rigid models of the
nineteenth century, the exhaustion of a literature too influenced by the
European canons of the end of the century, the entry of Brazil into modernity,
and the birth of a national literature, amalgamated with a strong affirmation
of Brazilianness.
TARSIWALD'S GAZE
Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do
Amaral--or "Tarsiwald," in Mário de Andrade's felicitous
expression--constitute today true emblems of the Week of Modern Art. The joining
of their names represents the fusion of body and mind united by the
productivity of the ideology of Pau-Brasil and Anthropophagy. They met in São
Paulo, in the celebrated year of 1922, when Tarsila returned to Brazil after
studying in Paris for a two-year period. It' is with this "couple mad with
life" that the history of modernism in Brazil, begun with the 1917
Malfatti exhibit, enters its heroic phase. The following year the Tarsila and
Oswald duo is in Paris, making contact with the most important artistic trends
of the time. In addition to Tarsila's apprenticeship in the studios of Andre'
Lhote, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger, the friendship with Blaise Cendrars
opened even more for them the doors of the international vanguard whose
headquarters were then in Paris: Brancusi, Picasso, Cocteau, Modigliani, Marie
Laurencin and others. They also associated with the writers who had
always shown an interest in Latin America: Jules Supervielle, Valery Larbaud
and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
[3. Tarsila's picture
& 4. Oswald's picture] There
is a sort of mutual bedazzlement in the couple which, at this moment, looks at
itself, at one another and, together, at Europe and Brazil. From this crossing
of gazes, that is, from this whole of reciprocal influences, will come the most
important part of the production of both, especially the one focused on the
period from 1923 to 1925. In Oswald's poetry we perceive Tarsila's visual mark,
and in her painting Oswald's unmistakable poetic presence. A sort of revolution
for four hands of rare intensity.
[5. Oswald by Tarsila,
1923] The countless portraits of
Oswald that Tarsila painted at the time concentrate mainly on his face, with
the exception of a pencil drawing in which the model's body is shown nude and
in its entirety. The largest part of this production dates to the years 1922
and 1923, when the poet and the artist were still true apprentices of modernism
and the fundamental moment of the phase named Pau-Brasil was germinating in
them.
In addition to the
several drawings of Oswald done by Tarsila, it's worth highlighting three
portraits of the writer. Two of them date from the annus mirabilis of 1922.
These
portraits take up most of the surface of the paper and the canvases and present
a frontal vision, in the color pencil and pastel picture dated 1922, or
show Oswald's face slightly inclined, in the oil versions of 1922 and 1923. In
all three versions a serial element stands out: the representation of Oswald in
a coat and tie, in the center of the picture, and with his head occupying the
top part of the canvas. In all three works the vertical orientation of the bust
also prevails.
In 1924 Oswald published his
"Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry." The metaphoric use of Pau-Brasil
[Brazil wood], the wood which was the first Brazilian export, already contains
the embryo of the movement in its subversion of the traditional relationship
between metropolis and colony: "Let's separate: Imported poetry. And
Pau-Brasil poetry, for exporting," Oswald de Andrade states in the
manifesto. For the value of its reddish pigment, the brazil wood, difficult to
obtain, was much sought after and valued, from the fifteenth century on, for
European court fashions and Church authorities' habits.
It's the radicalization of a naïf poetry and painting, in which the indigenous
theme is recycled according to the methods of the international vanguard.
Finally, the closing of Oswald de Andrade's manifesto summarizes and inverts
the traditional meaning of the concept of "barbarian" and gives us
the multicultural dimension of this revolution: "Barbarian, gullible,
picturesque and tender. Newspaper readers. Pau Brasil. The forest and the
school. The National Museum. Cooking, minerals, and dance. Vegetation. Pau
Brasil."
Shortly after this, the book of
poetry Pau Brasil
emerges--published in Paris in 1925, with illustrations by Tarsila--and
the representative production of Pau-Brasil painting also begins: The
Country Girl (1923), [6. Carnival in Madureira (1924)], Favela
Hill (1924), La gare (1925) and other canvases from the same series.
As Tarsila, beginning in 1922 and
especially 1923, fixes on canvas her passionate gaze, Oswald will also leave
his amorous testament in an emblematic poem about the artist:
"Atelier" [Studio], written and rewritten countless times, and
incorporated in "Light Posts," one of the sections of the book Pau-Brasil,
published in Paris by Sans Pareil in 1925. [7.
Cover poetry book Pau Brasil, 1925 & ills.]The
"Bauhaus" cover with the Brazilian flag bears Tarsila's signature,
like the illustrations inside. None of Oswald's works establishes as intense a
dialogue with Tarsila's aesthetic project as this "Atelier":
ATELIER
Country
girl dressed in Poiret
The
laziness of São Paulo abides in your eyes
Which
have never seen Paris or Piccadilly
Or
the exclamations of the men
In
Seville
At
your passage in earrings
Locomotives and national animals
geometrize the limpid sceneries
Congonhas pales beneath the
canopy
Of the processions of Minas
The
verdure against the klaxon blue
Cut across the red dust
Skyscrapers
Fords
Overpasses
The aroma of coffee
in the framed silence
"Atelier' is one of the
poems most representative of the oscillations between the national and the
cosmopolitan poles, the rural and the urban ones, the European and the Brazilian
which distinguished modernism in Brazil so much. It embodies the Pau-Brasil
style not only for the ideological tension implicit in the solution to the
problems of a dependent culture, like the importation of the European
vanguards' approaches (as exemplified in the poetry of Apollinaire and
Cendrars, for example), but above all for its synthetic, naïf and geometric presentation.
The first verse ("Country
girl dressed in Poiret") points simultaneously in two directions,
reproducing the Oswaldian dialectics of the "here and there"--the
title of a poem appearing in "History of Brazil." The periphery and
the center, pivotal point of the dialectic of the national and of the
cosmopolitan aspects in the Pau-Brasil ideology, take on a concrete character
in this opening verse. It immediately points to the interior of the state of
São Paulo, locale of Tarsila's birth and childhood, and, at the same time, to
the City-of-Lights, represented by Paul Poiret, one of the most famous stylists
in Paris at the time. [8. picture, Tarsila wearing
Poiret] The maison Poiret, which would create Tarsila's dress
for her wedding to Oswald, was one of the couple's favorites for buying
utilitarian designer objects. The magnificent image of this first verse has the
effect of a synthesis, suggested by the clothing, the fashion code, in which
the emblem of the Paulista interior is fused and condensed in the Parisian
metonymy.
Nowhere in the poem does
Tarsila's name appear; on the contrary, her image is constructed always
periphrastically around attributes and geographies. This deliberate omission
was the fruit of various exercises in style, as the manuscripts show.
As a work locale, the studio
situates the poem in the context of painting and colors, defining Tarsila right
from the title by her professional and artistic bias. This clear-cut
delimitation of the poem's ambit, almost a framing device, becomes apparent in
the last line, in the synesthesia of the "framed silence" that
concludes the poem.
Backward Brazil, exemplified by
the Paulista interior of the 20s and rendered concrete by the affectionate
appeal to the "country girl," contrasts in the poem with the
sophisticated European cities frequented by the couple: Paris, London
(Piccadilly) and Seville. By choosing "laziness" as the attribute of
the gaze, Oswald, besides referring to Tarsila's beautiful eyes, revindicates
the importance of the theme of idleness in the characterization of the
"national" pole. This theme had already been employed as reflection
by Mário de Andrade in 1918 in "The divine laziness," leading to the
well-known refrain "ai que preguiça!" [ "I'm feeling so
lazy!"] in the novel Macunaima , and, much later, would be
fundamental to Oswald himself in the elaboration of the anthropophagic
ideology. "The wise solar laziness," present in the Manifesto of
Pau-Brasil Poetry of 1924, rises again powerfully in the Paulista gaze of
Tarsila, who, in turn, takes it up again with the image of the sun in the shape
of orange slices in the anthropophagic phase of "Abaporu" and "Anthropophagy"
(1928 and 1929), and in the reverberating circles in "Setting Sun,"
also from 1929.
The long syntax established by
the free verse of this first stanza dynamizes the movement culminating in the
final verse, which emphasizes a sort of Glorious Tarsila, passing like a
victorious Seville woman among the men's salvos. [9.
TA, Self-portrait, 1924] The "passage in earrings," which
concludes the stanza with a close-up effect, immediately recalls the beautiful
"Self-portrait" (1924), in which the painter's long dangling earrings
adorn and support her head in the air. Besides, in the same way that Tarsila
consigned to posterity an extraordinary Cubist Oswald (the 1923 oil), the poet
doesn't resist the temptation of a profile of Tarsila as a "Cubist country
girl." The dangling earrings suggest to Oswald the ideal format for the
representation of the quality of linearity.
The second stanza shifts the
focus from the woman to the landscape of Brazil. In it, the locomotive (like
the cable car after) transfigures itself as one of the great emblems of
international modernity, mixed with the sign of the autochthonous element,
represented by "national animals" and the baroque and Christian
tradition of the state of Minas Gerais. Modernity is established not only in
the poem's mechanical content and geometrization, but in its very composition,
devoid of punctuation marks, in the "lapidary conciseness" mentioned
by Paulo Prado in the preface to the book Pau Brasil. "He
geometrized reality," João Ribeiro would repeat in 1927. This prismatic
gaze into the Paulista interior opens the "San Martinho" section of Pau
Brasil in the poem
"Nocturne:"
NOCTURNE/NIGHT
TRAIN
Outside the moonlight persists
And the train divides Brazil
Like a meridian
The geometric landscape comes
here to a moment of utmost synthesis, the design of the circle and the straight
line transformed into icons in the middle verse, the meridian which
"divides Brazil," and the poem, down the middle. The ambiguous title
defies the romantic context and announces itself as the possibility of being
also a night train.
The same formal solution occurs
in the third stanza of "Atelier:"
"The verdure against the klaxon blue/cut/on the red dust." A
master of synthesis, OA comes up with a more radical solution than in
"Nocturne" in this stanza of "Atelier," as here the
participle "cut," totally isolated, "cuts" the stanza in
the middle both graphically and literally, like a meridian. The nationalistic
theme of Pau-Brasil, introduced in the previous stanza by the geography,
architecture and tradition of Minas Gerais is complemented by the highly
contrasted coloring: the green, the blue and the red. In these colors we
recognize the palette that Tarsila would also adopt as part of the rhetoric of
the affirmation of national aspects, the colors of Pau-Brasil, which, by
definition, is associated with coloring properties. The red soil in the last
verse, present in many of Tarsila's pictures, is a consequence of the dust
raised by the car arriving at the plantation. Here, again, the Paulista
reminiscences of modernism through the titles of two important journals are
strong: the synesthesia "Klaxon blue" is reminiscent of the most
avant-garde of modernist journals, Klaxon, and the "red dust"
(typical of the Paulista interior and of other Brazilian regions) of verse 13,
of the review Terra roxa....e outras terras
[Red soil....and other soils] of 1926.
Geometry, "national
animals," meridian cuts and other elements pertaining to the Brazilian
tradition are found in a profusion in this stage of Tarsila's work. The flora
and fauna of Brazil appears in the naïf bestiary of her painting; dogs and hens
in 10. "Favela
Hill" (1924); rabbits, armadillos and roosters in 11. "Market"
(1924); 12. The Urutu viper in "The
Egg" (1928); 13. a toad in "The
Toad" (1928); 14. river otters in
"Setting Sun" (1929); 15.
monkeys lounging in tree branches in "Postcard" (1929), etc.
Unlike Douanier Rousseau's
primitivism, in which the animals have the function of representing the oneiric
and exotic vertigo of surrealism, Tarsila's animals, even though always
depicted in a naïf way, have the
obvious function of affirming "Pau-Brazilianness".
[16. EFCB] Oswald de Andrade's naïf sense, always reinforced by the recourse
to a deliberately spare style, is molded on the unidimensionality of a picture
like "E.F.C.B." (Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil) [Central Railway
of Brazil], in which the iron trusses of the bridge and of the railway signals
(metallic echoes of the Eiffel Tower) decorate not an urban landscape but the interior of Brazil: palm
trees, churches, light posts, and the famous "ochre and saffron
shacks" mentioned by Oswald in the Anthropophagic Manifesto.
The last stanza tropicalizes and
"paulistanizes" the urban scenery of the 20s. The enumerative
synthesis situates itself in the limits imposed by the frame of silence; the
viewer contemplates the city of São Paulo as if it were a silent and aromatic
ready-made object, a postcard offered to the tourist's camera-eye. The
futurist-paulista city is the harbinger of a Niemayer about whom Oswald spared
no praise decades later, and still 15 years before the inauguration of Brasilia
("Niemeyer's architectural genius," as he would qualify it).
The images in the poem's final
stanza, in which the cold geometric metal and concrete masses are contraposed
to the hot solar sphere, reappear in the Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry:
"Howitzers of elevators, cubes of skyscrapers and the wise solar
laziness"--the possibility of a cold constructivism abolished by the
tropical idleness that characterizes the São Paulo megalopolis.
From the title to the last stanza
of the poem, a passage from the atelier as an interior space destined for the
artist's production to the rural landscape of the interior of Brazil takes
place--with an intense horizontality suggested by "Locomotives" and
by the "processions of Minas"--, culminating in the vertical opening
of the skyscrapers crossed by the overpasses of the geometrized city. The poem
thus portrays this sort of rite of passage which begins in the studios of
Léger, Lhote and Gleizes and ends up in the open Brazilian space of the
Tarsilian palette.
[17. The Country Girl] We also must not forget the beautiful painting of
1923 which, prior to the composition and publication of Oswald's poem,
coincidentally or not bears the name "The Country Girl" (CI,
il.51). In a letter written the same year from Paris, Tarsila herself
confesses: "I feel more and more Brazilian: I want to be the painter of my
land. I'm so grateful to have spent my entire childhood on the plantation. The
memories of that time are becoming precious to me. In art, I want to be the
country girl from São Bernardo, playing with rustic dolls, as in the last
picture I'm painting." (my emphasis).
Characterized by a markedly cubist approach, the
national/cosmopolitan tension present in "Atelier" translates itself
in the painting by the rural motif molded on the canvas with the aesthetics
imported from Paris. The national tone in the context of a rural calm based on
the unidimensionality of the naïf
perspective. Tarsila's "country girl" isn't dressed in Poiret,
but Léger. The cylindrical forms of the female body--mixed with the angular cut
of the houses, the tree trunks, the stripes of the hands and the facade of the
house on the left, as well as the green oval volumes of the leaf and the
possible pineapples--are intensely reminiscent of the mechanics of Ledger's
design.
When this painting is compared to
Oswald's poetic works, the acute sense of social criticism present in the work
of the Paulista poet, which would only appear in Tarsila's work in the 30s, is
mentioned. One can also speak of the direct style of Tarsila's paintings, of
the tendency toward decorativism lacking the humor or the aggressiveness which
characterize Oswald's works. There is, however, an instance of close
collaboration between the two in which this doesn't happen--on the contrary.
I'm speaking of the book of poetry Pau-Brasil, in which Tarsila's
illustrations have a merit almost equivalent to that of the poems. There is a
real dialogue between illustration and poem which greatly enriches the book,
beginning with the cover depicting the flag of Brazil, in which the positivist
motto "Order and progress" is substituted by the expression which
identifies not only a book, but the aesthetic-ideological program which would
inform the production of both artists until the anthropophagy phase.
Tarsila's ten illustrations which
comprise each part of the book display a simple stroke, synthetic, childish and
full of humor. The idea of croquis, inherent in the sketch of the
tourist, is present in the illustrations. The modernity of these images, which
had already premiered in Feuilles de Routes, by Blaise Cendrars,
obliterates any sense of bombast given to the history of Brazil, as it happens
in the poems. There is a humor inherent in the small illustrations, which
contain a "naive" criticism sketched in their rapid stroke. In the
sequence of drawings we find an anti-epic version of Brazil which goes against
the grain of the narrative of great history to make room for a foundational
discourse in which fragmentariness, provisionality, an unfinished quality and
humor prevail.
The last and most important stage
of this joint work is the creation of Anthropophagy, which can't be separated
from its genesis in the Pau-Brasil Movement. In the same way Oswald's two
manifestos--"Pau-Brasil" (1924) and "Anthropophagic"
(1928)--must be analyzed together and in a diachronic fashion, Tarsila's three
most important paintings--"The Black Woman" (1923),
"Abaporu" (1928) and "Anthropophagy" (1929)--must be seen
as a triptych or one set. "The Black Woman," created in Paris, is
explosive, monumental, raw in its extraordinary beauty, and is a forerunner by
at least five years of the anthropophagy themes.
[18. The Black Woman.
1923] Even though many have
pointed out its analogies with Constantin Brancusi's "La Negresse
Blanche" (ironically sculpted in white marble), whose studio Tarsila
frequented in the same period, and with the black theme which was then the rage
among the Parisian vanguard, Tarsila's "The Black Woman" explodes
with force from the depths of Afro-Brazilianness. I'd call it "barbaric
and our own," to borrow Oswald de Andrade's words. The solidity of
blackness is amplified by means of the monumental and cylindrical volumes of
the neck, arms and legs, as well as the disproportionate and single gigantic
breast hanging at forefront of the canvas. The "polished" and
"lustrous" head, in apparent disproportion to the rest of the body,
suggests an asymmetry reminiscent of Henry Moore's sculptures which will grow
stronger in "Abaporu" and "Anthropophagy." The turgid lips,
drooping and exaggerated, contrast with the smallness of an oblique gaze
oscillating between sensuality and impenetrability. The brute force of the
image resides also in the largeness of the surface of the painting, which it
occupies entirely, almost spilling out of it.
In contrast with the rounded
shapes and the brown color of the body, the background of the painting reveals
a cubist approach, with the white, blue and black stripes crossing the canvas horizontally.
The geometry intensifies: the rationalism of the horizontal lines is compounded
by the tropical metaphor in the diagonal of the banana leaf, also behind the
black woman. These contrasts somehow impose a certain perspective, relieving
the picture of its own grandiosity and the telluric mass represented by the
huge body.
[19. Abaporu, 1928] With a picture given to Oswald for his thirty-eighth birthday, in 1928,
Tarsila christens the movement through the title she gives it:
"Abaporu," that is, "eater of human flesh", in the
definition from Montoya's dictionary. The disproportion is accentuated in the
seated figure in profile, whose leg and foot take up a large part of the
forefront. The miniaturized head almost disappears at the top of the canvas.
The brutality of "The Black Woman" acquires, in this new version, a
blue sky and a bright sun placed right in the middle and at the top of the
picture, separating the cactus from the primitive representation of the
Brazilian--as well as indigenous--being. Deformation as a stylistic trait
reveals an oneiric sense which already comes close to surrealism.
The tenets of the movement,
presented by Oswald de Andrade in the Anthropophagic Manifesto (published in
the Revista de Antropofagia in
May 1929), would be inspired by this painting. [20.
Anthropophagy, 1929] And, the same year, Tarsila paints
"Anthropophagy," the third picture in the trilogy, a surprising
synthesis-montage of the previous works. Two figures: the one in front, whose
bared breast in the middle of the picture recalls directly "The Black
Woman" and, juxtaposed, the inverted profile of "Aboporu." Together they point to the synthesis that
Pau-Basil/Anthropophagy present in these paintings. The Brazilian character is
indicated by the landscape in the background, in which a solar section of
orange, suspended in the air, shines on the tropical forest, or the matriarchy
of Pindorama, highlighted by the banana leaf rising behind the figure in the
foreground.
Thus the formidable couple,
Tarsiwald, takes part in one of the most creative and intense phases of the
Brazilian historical vanguards: from the aggressive Revista de Antropofagia,
of 1928, Oswald attacks the Brazilian cultural and artistic establishment,
while Tarsila creates the most fecund and radical works of her career.
Anthropophagy becomes one of the
most original theses among those that were formulated in Latin America with the
purpose of solving the tensions and contradictions typical of a country that,
on the one hand, wanted to cut loose from its patriarchal and colonized roots
and, on the other, was trying to keep up with the revolutionary artistic and
cultural manifestations of the European historical vanguards. A hinge between
the national and the cosmopolitan sides, the anthropophagic metaphor privileged
the devouring Indian as a symbol. Mário de Andrade, faced with the seeming
contradiction of having to survive in the sad tropics and feed on the
inevitable European tradition, states in the first book that opens up modern
poetry in Brazil, Hallucinated City (1922): "I'm a Tupi Indian playing
a lute." Even though the Indian was already present in colonial painting
and literature, a presence that culminated in the nineteenth century with the
romantic vision of José de Alencar's Indianist novel, the anthropophagic
rereading in the 20s gives him a revolutionary, messianic, and utopian
function.
In the "Manifesto of
Pau-Brasil Poetry," Oswald de Andrade anticipates several of the
postulates which will culminate in the anthropophagic ideology developed in the
1928 manifesto. In the 50s he takes up again this ideology in the form of a
thesis in The crisis of Messianic
Philosophy and The March of
Utopias. Having gone beyond the "isms" of the historical
vanguards and having digested Hans Staden, the Montaigne of Des Cannibales,
Rousseau's good savage, Marx, Freud and Breton, Oswald de Andrade proposes the
anthropophagic movement as the last of revolutions. A revolution which, as a
last resort, would abolish the capitalistic patriarchal system to restore
though technological advances a new era of sacred idleness--the native idleness
that had been destroyed by the Europeans with the introduction of slavery and
the production system--in a new space: the Matriarchy of Pindorama, the name of
the land of Brazil in nheengatú, the indigenous "common
language." In this valorization of the indigenous aspects we see that,
while the Parisian vanguard sought the primitive substratum in Africa and
Polynesia to delineate the principles of cubism, Brazil discovered it in its
own land. Because of this, in the lecture given at the Sorbonne in 1923 Oswald
de Andrade affirmed that in Brazil "Blacks are a realist element."
Brazil doesn't resist the
European vanguardist resonance in the well-known search for the primitive
already present in Picasso, Paul Klee, Gauguin, the Douanier Rousseau and Paul Morand, among the main
ones, and in journals such as Cannibale (1920), by Francis Picabia. The
advantage in relation to Europe is that in Brazil the primitive emanates like an
autochthonous internal force, without need to resort to the artifice of
importation. That's why all Tarsila needed to paint The Black Woman in 1923 was her childhood memories of an
Afro-Brazilian daily experience. And that's why the tales of the anthropophagic
Tupinambá Indians, molded by Hans Staden's narrative (Zwei reisen nach
brasilien, Marburg, 1557), began to circulate again in large runs thanks to
Monteiro Lobato's efforts in the Brazil
of the 20s. The inaugural date of the new anthropophagic era, established by
Oswald in his manifesto, is the year 374, when the Caeté Indians from the
Northeast of Brazil devour Bishop Sardinha [when the deglutition of Bishop
Sardinha by the Caeté Indians from the Northeast of Brazil takes place]. Far
from satisfying hunger, the act of devouring (a "Marxillary" act, as
Oswald de Andrade would ironically say to highlight its dialectic meaning) has
a ritual value of incorporation of the "other's" attributes, a tribal
gesture which, by assimilating the enemy's qualities, aim at overcoming the
limitations of the "self." "The anthropophagic reason," as
Haroldo de Campos calls it, is, finally, the ideological gesture that Oswald de
Andrade comes up with to solve the dilemma of the cultural dependence on the
European centers (Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Milan, Florence, Lisbon), without
falling into the mere imitation of foreign models or having to take refuge in
the worn local themes advocated by the nationalistic tendencies.
In the prodigious year of 1922
(the year of Ulysses, The Waste Land, César Vallejo's Trilce and the Week of Modern Art), when Oswald and
Tarsila meet, neither of the two is exactly a modernist. Oswald, who came from
a frenchified symbolist heritage, during the events of the Week of 1922 will
limit himself to reading passages from his first novel Os condenados
[The condemned]. In Paris, Tarsila was still a student at the Julien
Academy, and would only return to São Paulo in June 1922. The encounter of the
two awakens the passion of the gazes that leads Tarsila to paint the countless
portraits of Oswald in the same way that he would create the countless versions
of "Atelier." The discovery of the vanguards in Paris brought the
couple to a rediscovery of Brazil: the history, the culture, the flora, the
fauna, the geography, the anthropology, the ethnicity, the religion, the
cuisine, the sexuality. A new man, a new color, a new landscape and a new
language discovered beginning with the colonial legacy. From this explosive
re-reading will arise the Pau-Brasil ideology, which would reach its climax at
the end of the decade with Anthropophagy, the most original
aesthetic-ideological revolution of the Latin-American vanguards of that time.
The period from 1922 to 1929,
marked in the beginning by the Week of 22 and at the end by the crash of the
stock market, the resulting coffee crisis and the revolution of 1930, closes
the most intense experimental phase of Brazilian culture. These are the very
years that frame the encounter, the reciprocal influence and the separation of
this extraordinary couple.
BLACKNESS, EXOTICISM AND THE
DEPICTION OF MANGUE
The Black theme anticipated by
Tarsila do Amaral in the "The Black Woman" of 1923, and the exoticism
which dominates Anthropophagy of 1928--one of the premier moments in the work
of the modernist pair--culminated in the work of Lasar Segall and have their
highest point in the portrayal of Mangue
evoked in poems by Manuel Bandeira, Vinícius de Moraes, Oswald de
Andrade and Hélio Oiticica, as well as in the visual work of the Russian
artist.
[21. Picasso, Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907] The
Parisian vanguard gave blacks the status of modernity beginning with the
Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) --in which the faces of at
least three of the five prostitutes are African masks--represented for the
arts.
The countries of Latin America,
peripheral in relation to the Berlin and Paris vanguards, didn't take long to
realize that the primitive could have much more to do with an American
tradition than with a European one. This interiorizing approach originating
from the national aspect reveals an art that makes it possible to import
certain plastic formulas and, at the same time, to turn to its own traditions.
This is what happens in the poetry and painting of the time, with the most
diverse solutions.
It might seem ironic, but we can
say that Brazil, with an extremely high demographic density of Blacks, is
relatively poor in the Afro-Brazilian lyrical production. Approximately 9 to 18
million Africans were taken to the New World. Between 1811 and 1870 there were
3% in North America, 32% in Spanish America and 60% in Brazil. And let's not
forget that in 1922 less than three decades had passed since the abolition of
slavery in Brazil.
The best Black-African poetic
representations are found in Raul Bopp (1898-1984), a writer and diplomat from
the state of Rio Grande do Norte, and in Jorge de Lima (1893-1953), a doctor,
poet and painter from the state of Alagoas.
Urucungo. Black Poems (1932), by Raul Bopp, could be considered the most
representative book of the vanguardist generation with Black themes. Bopp came
from the ranks of the "anthropophagic" generation, and the conception
and composition of Urucungo (the
name of an African musical instrument) go back to the Week of 22. The
vanguardist legacy is still predominant in poems like "Favela
(film)," whose visual metaphors immediately recall Oswald de Andrade's Poesia
Pau-Brasil, or even the ultraísta
camera-eye metaphor of the Oliverio Girondo of the 20s:
The
banana tree pushed out its tits.
The
papaya trees' double-chins are swollen
The
Black woman squatted in a corner of the courtyard.
She
set the hens all acackle.
Down
below
a
suburban train passes blowing smoke.
In
the grocer's door
a
black man yawned like a tunnel.
In 1928 Jorge de Lima publishes
his best known poem, That Black Woman
Fulô ("Fulô" is a
corruption of flor, flower, in Afro-Brazilian speech), in the form of a plaquette.
The following year, he collects his New Poems (1929), in which he
exploits the African landscape ("The Belly Sierra"), Afro-Brazilian
cuisine ("Foods') and the slaves' tales ("Iaiá is drowsy").
Jorge de Lima reminisces over the tales of his childhood, bringing to the
forefront the Black heritage of Brazilians. His language is, in Gilberto
Freyre's definition, the Afro-Northeastern, thus avoiding the facile exoticism
of a white poet who chooses to deal with a Black theme:
Oh
Fulô! Oh Fulô!
(it
was the Missus calling)
come
help me, oh Fulô,
come
fan me,
I'm
all sweaty, Fulô!
come
scratch my itch,
come
pick off my lice,
come
rock my hammock,
come
and tell me a story,
I'm
so sleepy, Fulô!
That
Black woman Fulô!
Of major importance is the book Black
Poems (1947), which includes no fewer than 13 illustrations by Segall. The
images of Blackness are realistic and faithful to the poems, since they
function as an iconographic support to the poetic texts. Two of the images
stand out. The first is the one that illustrates the poem "Night fell on
the quay."
In order to introduce the theme
in Segall's work we have to ask ourselves some questions: is the black element
in Segall's iconography a typical gesture of adaptation to the European
primitivist vogue, and therefore a vision of exotic otherness on the part of
the Russian painter, who spends most of his life in Brazil? Or is it an
individual feature in an artist who
identified himself with and absorbed the landscape and the human element of the
tropics as visual discourse of what is Brazilian?
But is Blackness in Segall a
discovery or a rediscovery? And in what fashion does the Russian Jewish painter
represent it in his painting? The theme of Blackness couldn't have been unknown
to him, even though there is no specific representation of it in his paintings
produced in Europe or preceding his arrival in Brazil. German Expressionism, as
well as French Cubism, not only fed on but were the product of primitive
artistic and cultural references. At the same time Picasso paints Les
demoiselles d'Avignon, Kandinsky also discovers Black art. The ethnographic
museums of Dresden and Berlin --the latter being the most important in Europe
at the time--were much frequented by the group of expressionist painters of Die
Brücke. Primitivism was a password for vanguards, and Blackness was,
perhaps, its best expression. In Latin America few were the painters who didn't
make obligatory stops in Paris and Berlin and didn't integrate the primitive
theme in their repertoires.
The same year he settles in
Brazil Lasar Segall begins to produce painting with a Black theme. But Segall's
commitment isn't to a national project, but to an aesthetic and ideological
content which, surprisingly, had already germinated during his Expressionist
period, and which finds in the Brazilian themes a sort of locus amenus to translate the preoccupations that marked
all of his artistic production.
Within this context, how does one define the work of Lasar Segall,
a European immigrant from the early 20s, a well-known artist belonging to the
ranks of German Expressionism who makes the Black theme one of the leit-motifs
of his work? The discovery in 1924, the same year of his arrival, of the
red-light district of Rio de Janeiro, known as Mangue, awakens the
Afro-Brazilian themes in his work.
Segall will remain faithful to this theme during the next three decades (he
dies in 1957).
[22. Lasar Segall, Encounter,
1924] An oil like
"Encounter," created, in fact, in 1924, shows Segall's degree of
awareness (or problematicization) in relation to this issue. Not one of his
various self-portraits reveals in such an evident manner his own process of
transculturation. As if his accentuated "cinnamon-colored skin"
weren't enough for the Slavic painter, the contrast with the whiteness of
Margarete Quarck, then his wife, with whom he had emigrated to Brazil, cries out.
The painting is intense in its ambiguities: even though the pair are holding
hands, it may in fact signify the painter's leave-taking from his German wife,
a separation which indeed occurred this same year. A temporal analysis of the
painting would then mean a forewarning of Margarete's return to Berlin and an
affirmation of Segall's choice of Brasil as his definitive country. Federico
Morais gives a perspicacious interpretation of this scene, which he perceives
more as a "desencuentro," a failure to meet, than the "encounter"
announced by the title. But the encounter could be of a geographic order, with
Brazil, and not with Margarete, the marriage to whom was already coming to an
end. A psychological approach reveals a woman with a tense, stiff countenance.
Her frozen stare contrasts with Segall's candid expression and thick lips.
Margarete's whiteness is a clear refraction index for the new colors of the
tropics : not only as a counterpoint to the brown of Segall's skin and clothes
(the browns and ochres that will accompany him throughout his entire pictoric
work), but also the green vegetation of the tropics in the reduced landscape in
the figures' background. In this process of Segall's
"mulattoization", the European aspects are maintained in his clothing:
suit, shirt, tie and hat. The space is also ambiguous: on the one hand the
shrunken palm trees; on the other, the geometry of the buildings (already
present in pictures produced in Germany, as The Street, of 1922) on a
paved surface, which maintains a dialogue with the rationalism of Margarete's
static pose, extreme representation of everything European.
In 1924, the year of Segall's
"mulattoization," his production of Black themes is prolific. It is
the year in which he also paints, besides other works with an Afro-Brazilian
theme, 23. LS, "Mulatto
I," 24. LS, "Mulatta with child,"
and 25. "Boy with lizards" 26.
(there's no way one can separate "Banana
grove" from this series). In the latter oil, the syntagm
"mulatto" + "lizard" + "banana leaves" fuses and
flattens in one dimension the concepts of culture and nature. This canvas
offers an edenic, ahistorical, primitive and most enlightened vision of a
Brazil that has just been discovered by the Jewish-Slavic gaze. Two years
later, Segall shows his Brazilian production of the period in Berlin and
Dresden. The enthusiastic analysis of "the solar culture of the
south," published in a Berlin newspaper of the time, is not surprising in
the birthplace of Expressionism:
How powerful this work is,
the evolution that took place under the sign of Brazil shows clearly. It is the
blossoming of a new and fertile vital era. The coloristic fascination with the
south produces paintings that aim to be a remembrance, a sincere remembrance.
The burning yellow of the sun, the light violet in which he paints the
houses--like the clear reflection of fantastic plants--the deep green of the
cactus and the palm trees and the coffee-colored people--all come together in a
unique, clear intoxication of colors. He gave himself over to primitive nature
with the same intensity as he did before to the demonic and spiritual hypnosis
of the Ghetto and its musical
melancholy. The colors--generally a mystical dirty-green, gray, black,
ash-green and a ghostly violet before--become altogether lighter in the
miraculous solar culture of the south.
We know that this period of
intense chromatism in Segall will not last, and that the 20s weren't
exclusively devoted to Black themes either, but without doubt this is Segall's
most fruitful period in the paintings, engravings and drawings devoted to this
theme. Within the Black theme of the work, particularly noteworthy is the
series devoted to the "Mangue." [27. LS,
Head behind shutters] Afther black women, the shutters are the most
important semantic matrix present in a large number of illustrations of Mangue,
will signify a mysterious division: a border between private and public space?
An understanding split between culture (external) and primitive mentality
(internal)? A barrier between a male universe, desiring, and the female
counterpart, mysterious and hidden by the shutters? In this sketch, as in the
entire Mangue series, social
identity becomes superimposed to individual identity.
[28. LS, Mangue,
álbum, 1943] In 1943, the year of his
great retrospective at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes of Rio de Janeiro, two
decades after having begun this theme, the album Mangue is published,
with 4 original engravings and 42 reproductions of drawings. These are drawings
produced for the most part between 1925 and 1929, but also a few from 1943, the
year of publication of the album, complete the series. Three important texts
introduce it: "Lasar Segall," by Jorge de Lima; "On
drawing," by Mário de Andrade; and "Mangue," a prose text by Manuel
Bandeira, who in his important book Libertinagem [Libertinism] (1930) had in fact
included a poem by the same title. In his text, Bandeira mentions a few verses
of Vinícius de Moraes' poem, "Ballad of Mangue," composed a few years
earlier. But unlike Vinícius, who describes "whores,"
"blond/mulatto/French//dressed in carnival costumes," Segall only
sees black women and mulattas, and his human landscape lacks any carnival
vision whatsoever. Segall's prostitutes identify the condition of blackness,
added to the social condition of poverty. Contrary to Stephanie D'Alessandro's
interpretation in her excellent study, according to which Mangue for Segall
"represented a realm of unrestrained sexuality and exoticism, and he
fashioned himself its artistic explorer, venturing out into the eroticized
space of the primitive," I believe that the space of poverty, loneliness
and the complete absence of individual identity abolish any possibility of
eroticization of this human landscape. [29., 30.,
31., 32., 33., from Mangue] Without doubt Segall had all the
elements to give it an erotic, exotic and chromatic interpretation; but he
chose instead the pathos and the tone of tragedy already discernible in
his expressionistic work and in the Jewish theme, besides the Black one. What
we perceive in Segall, more than an original Brazilian matrix, is the
immigration of themes that had already matured during his European and
Expressionist period.
What is the expressive form that
Segall brought to Brazil? I'm not going to repeat what's already been said;
that is, the Expressionist postulates that preceded him. But I am going to
describe a few themes that were to become the true molds of Central Europe which Segall would fill
here with the Brazilian substance of expression. First of all,
prostitution as a theme was not anything new in the work of Segall himself; he
had already dealt with it in the eight illustrations he did in 1921 for a novel
that takes place in a red-light district: Bubu de Montparnasse, by
Charles Louis Philippe. And we must not forget that the original title (as well
as the theme) of the seminal painting of the primitivist vanguard, Picasso's Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon, was Le Bordel d'Avignon, and that although
Picasso resisted the change of name a great deal, it was necessary to be able
to show it briefly and for the first time in 1916 in the "Salon
d'Antin", org. by Andre Salmon. The theme of abandon and destitution,
present in Mangue, are the stuff of the great works of Segall's Expressionist
period, such as 34. Interior with indigents (1920) or 35. Interior with poor people (1921). It's also
noteworthy that the theme of Mangue or
of female prostitution was one of Segall's permanent focuses, from the
beginning to practically the end of his artistic production. It's what we see
in late, but no less important, oils, like 36. Interior
of Mangue (1949), or in two works of great similarity painted
one year before his death which could be considered a point of departure-- 37. Street (1922)--and a point of arrival--
38. Street
of The Errant Ones I (1956). This arc, which could also
be drawn for the Jewish theme (the most important paintings of which were
created in Brazil-- 39. Old Age (1924),
40. The Torah Scroll (1933), 41. Pogrom (1937) and 42. Ship of immigrants (1939-40) reveals semantic matrixes that go
beyond aesthetic programs or pictorial nationalisms.
This brings us back to the
initial question: how Brazilian is Segall's painting? Local critics have
already considered this question on a few occasions. There were times when, for
political reasons, and on the occasion of the publication of the special issue
of the Revista Academica in June
1944, Segall was vehemently considered a Brazilian painter par excellence.
But outside this moment of tension and ideological definitions in which it was
fundamental to highlight Brazilianness, the issue was never definitive.
However, there are early perceptions, pellucid and more modulated, such as
Manuel Bandeira's in his introductory text to Mangue (s/p), when he
identifies and superimposes the Jewish theme on the Black one, paradoxical as
it might seem:
Segall, a grave and serious
soul, went [to Mangue] to contemplate the loneliest and most distressed souls
of that world of perdition, as he had already contemplated the loneliest and
most distressed souls of the Jewish world, the pogrom victims, on the
third-class deck of luxury ocean liners (Manuel Bandeira).
I think Segall himself was aware
of these subtle processes. And I'd like to show two revealing moments. The
first one, a letter to his friend Will Gorhmann a little less than two months
before his departure form Germany, which states, in relation to everything his
eyes saw: "We don't change when we see that which is new, that's no longer
possible, but we grow and our horizons widen (...) the memories we have of our
childhood rarely or never leave us." We know that, on the one hand,
"that which is new" was one of the totems of futurist modernolatry,
but not of the Expressionists. And beyond the "isms" I think that
Segall, when he comes to Brazil at 33, absorbs that which is new with a
structure inherited from Expressionism. In an autobiographical text dated circa
1950 in Campos do Jordão and published posthumously, Segall seems to be very clear
on this idea about the origins of the Brazilian subject matter of his pictorial
production:
If someone were to ask me whether
my art renewed itself in Brazil I'd answer that it didn't, if the question
implied that in order to create that which is "New" one has to
renounce "the Old of great legacies." And if someone were to ask me
whether I employ now the same expressive forms as in my Expressionist period I
would answer that those would then be an art formula to which I would have become
enslaved (...) The motif of the "Mangue" for example universal
human destinies (sic), wasn't new for me when I first saw it in Rio de Janeiro.
These are motifs which, as a man, have always stirred me and as an artist
have inspired me to create. I've painted them so many times in my life! Before
I used to call them "The Errant Ones." In Rio, though, I approached
them with a more mature feeling and human understanding, and above all with a
mature artistic perspective." [My emphasis]
REPRESENTATIONS OF MANGUE
Mangue stirred the imagination of
various artists. Segall was the first one to represent it, beginning in 1924,
in a diverse and consistent manner (engravings, watercolors, drawings, wood
engravings, etchings, oils) up to the 50s, turning the famous district into one
of the central themes of his work. But he wasn't the only one. As I've already
mentioned, Di Cavalcanti, too, frequently portrays it in his paintings, and
also talks about the time of his bohemian youth in brothels, especially those
of Lapa, the Rio de Janeiro district, in his autobiography The Journey of My
Life. Even though it's a little long, it's worth quoting this text by
Renato Cordeiro Gomes, who shows us in a very precise fashion the "rise
and fall" of prostitution in Rio de Janeiro. In this cartography of
whorehouses, the Lapa district was frequented by a bohemian elite in Rio de
Janeiro, as opposed to Mangue, characterized by a prostitution that went down
in history for its poverty, its decadence and its working-class patrons:
Some of the cross streets of
Mangue, at the edge of the downtown of Rio, had been designated since the end
of the nineteenth century for the confinement of the prostitutes of the lowest
classes. The control and regulation of prostitution by the state was beginning
then with the purpose of restricting it to areas intended for legal
prostitution. In 1920, the police "cleaned up" the city for the visit
of the King and Queen of Belgium: the prostitutes were put in jail for vagrancy
and later placed in brothels in nine cross streets in Mangue. At that time an
unofficial system was created by which the police registered prostitutes and
intervened in the administration of the brothels. Thus this area of lower-class
prostitution was established, in contrast with the luxury prostitution located
in the Lapa section which, with its night clubs, cabarets and cafés, turned
into the "tropical Montmartre," a place for the city's
bohemian intellectuals, reaching its peak in the 30s. Mangue continued to be
the most popular and poor red-light district, whose decadence, together with
Lapa's, accelerates with the repressive and moralizing policies of Getúlio
Vargas' Estado Novo (the Lapa brothels were closed down in 1943) and the
relocation of night life to Copacabana after WW2. Mangue held on, still
poor and decadent, until 1979, when it was demolished to build the subway and
only the so-called Villa Mimosa, which finally closed down in the 90s, was
left. After the demolition of Mangue the Administrative Center of the City of Rio
de Janeiro was built in the "Cidade Nova," the New City. The
imagistic repertoire of the city, however, lives on, naming the building of the
Secretariat of the Administration of the City "Piranhão" [Hooker],
and the Secretariat of the Treasury "Cafetão" [Pimp]. The Mangue
repertoire of images endures as a trademark of the city.
In Manuel Bandeira's Libertinagem [Libertinism](1930) we find one of the first
poetic records of Mangue. In this book, which inaugurates the 30s, we find some
of the most important poems of the Brazilian lyric poetry of the vanguardist
generation, such as "Poetics," "I'm off to Pasárgada," or
"Evocation of Recife." The title itself, Libertinism, points
directly to eroticism and sexual transgression.
In "Ballad of Mangue,"
by Vinícius de Moraes (1913-1980), the melancholy character typical of
ballads places the problem in immediate sync with Segall's tragic tone. The
Baudelarian vision of a city contaminated by evil, incarnated in the animalized
description of women-prostitutes, appears with extraordinary power in the
poem's 70 octosyllabic verses. There is an implacable succession of images, in
which the female character, associated with venereal diseases, appears
degraded, like poisoned, as well as poisonous, flowers. Vinícius describes a
European (Polish and French women) and Afro-Brazilian ethnic group; unlike
Segall, who, as I have mentioned, only perceived a single human composition, of
Black origin. The maritime image, due to the location of Mangue near the harbor
(a location Segall made the most of), emerges enriched by the vision of this
neighborhood as a ship of fools: "Where is your ship going?" Vinícius
asks rhetorically. Vinícius' Mangue is a city of perdition, doomed and with no
room for redemption.
Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) in O santeiro do Mangue [The
Saint-seller of Mangue], a censored dramatic poem that came out only in 1991,
30 years after its composition and several attempts at publishing, chooses
Mangue as a place of convergence for degraded human relations surrounded by an
urban space, a scenery of subversions where opposites of interchanging value
mix. Unlike all other examples I have referred to so far, O santeiro do
Mangue is a highly ideologized text and an instrument of scathing criticism
of the bourgeois society of the time. It maintains the caustic tone of social
criticism through the parodic attitude that always characterized the author.
And if in Vinícius de Moraes' poem there were reminiscences of a Mangue
portrayed as a ship of fools, in Oswald de Andrade's the naval metaphor--given
the proximity of Mangue to the harbor--links it to the slave ships that put
into port in Brazil: "It's the hot human ship/Mangue's slave trader). O
santeiro do Mangue is the harrowing
voice of a Brazil whose sexuality exposes the contradictions and the suffering
of a degraded system exploiting human relations.
[43. Hélio Oiticica, Bangú
Mangue, 1972] Finally,
as in a sort of synthetic coda, a concrete poem by Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980).
The artist from Rio de Janeiro, author of the memorable "Parangolés"
[Capes] created in the 60s, constructs the poem with the crossing of just two
words. The title of the picture/poem, BANGÚ/MANGUE, refers to two sections of
Rio de Janeiro that are, socially speaking, fairly different. Bangú, a
traditional manufacturing neighborhood, is totally dissociated from the image
of prostitution that characterized Mangue or Lapa. The poem, from 1972, was
written a few years before the demise of Mangue in 1979. Bangú and Mangue,
neighborhoods geographically distant from one another, are here united in the
utopian space of poetry, where the paronomasia that brings together the two
terms of the title reclaims Afro-Brazilian resonances. In actuality Oiticica
doesn't reproduce the two words of the title in their entirety: BANGÚ' is the
verse that crosses the picture diagonally, from right to left and from the top
down: MAE (mother in Portuguese) is the second word, in the opposite direction
and crossing the first one. It's the title of the picture/poem that directs our
reading and anticipates for us the reconstitution of the word Mangue, starting
from the fusion of "Bangú" + "mãe." We have
therefore two words in the title (BANGÚ/MANGUE); two in the poem (BANGÚ/MAE);
and a third term (MANGUE) that is constructed or derived from the reading of
the other two words or verses, as in an anagram. An allegorical reading with a
social undertone would allow us to read it as the crossing of the working class
with the motherland, Brazil, suggesting a sort of inevitable conclusion in
indigence and prostitution, incarnated in Mangue. A peripheral and precarious
Brazil, where the images of the women of Mangue by Segall, Vinícius de Morais
and even Oswald de Andrade oscillate between the Mother-worker of Bangú and the
Mother-whore of Mangue, who, cornered
by the modernity of urban projects (the subway), end up being excluded from
their own neighborhood and exiled from their own existence.
—Translation
by Adria Frizzi
Photographs by Paz Aburto