Negotiating Afro-Brazilian Abstraction: Rubem Valentim in Rio, Rome, and Dakar, 1957–1966 (original) (raw)
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Routledge, 2018), 225-39. 2. Valentim won the prize for foreign travel at the 11th National Salon of Modern Art in Rio in 1962. He postponed his trip because of delays in payment. See "Gente," Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), October 30, 1963, sec. 2, p. 3. 3. While several Brazilian museums, including the Museu Goeldi in Bélem and the Museu Nacional in Rio, held small collections of African art, there were no large-scale collections. Curators presented the objects as anthropological artifacts rather than artworks. The Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio only began collecting African objects in 1961. See Roberto Conduru, Pérolas After spending the day copying objects in the British Museum's African art galleries in early 1964, Afro-Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim (1922-1991) returned to his apartment and began sketching in a vellum notebook. On one page, he drew two vertical arrangements of triangles, circles, semicircles, tridents, and lozenges. Valentim occasionally wrote on his sketches the names of specific colors intended for future paintings; the drawing on the right side of the page includes the word côr (color), the shades yet to be determined. Dominating the composition in the drawing on the left, the word paz (peace) is situated within a double-axe shape composed of a horizontal rectangle with triangular indentations on either side. As the only word on that side of the page, paz brings attention both to the physical shape of the double axe-an allusion to Xangô, the deity of justice in African-derived religions such as Candomblé in Brazil-and to the text-image's potency as a means for political resistance and cultural affirmation. Born in Salvador da Bahia in 1922, Valentim moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1957 to pursue painting. He quickly became active in the city's already-established pro
Paths of the modern African arts in São Paulo: from São Paulo Art Biennials
SPLAS FORUM 2019 (The Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) - University of Nottingham, 2019
Abstract The present article intends to ponder on the presence of modern African arts in the city of São Paulo, putting them into context through the critical and historical assessment of their reception and exhibition. This study approaches art exhibits as discourse creating spaces about modern African art, examining them through artistic, historical and political contexts, considering the reverberations caused across the historiography of art in Brazil. Keywords: African modernisms, Africa, São Paulo Art Biennial, Modern Art. ________________ Resumo Este artigo tem por objetivo refletir sobre a presença das artes modernas Africanas na cidade de São Paulo, contextualizando-as a partir de um ponto de vista histórico e crítico de suas recepções e exibições. O estudo toma as exposições de arte como espaços criadores de discursos sobre as artes modernas Africanas, analisando-as a partir de contextos artísticos, histórico e políticos, considerando as reverberações geradas por essas dentro da historiografia das artes no Brasil. Palavras chaves: Modernismos Africanos, África, Bienal de São Paulo, Arte Moderna.
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have been redefined as territories of Afro-Brazilian culture, semi-public spaces becoming places of mediation through which the axé (power, vital force) is transformed into a 'cultural value'. He insists that objects of cultural value must be known, seen, and reproduced, but in Candomblé you are not allowed to see or depict these objects. The question, therefore, is how to transform secret values into cultural values so that they become public. Sansi defines this process as the outcome of extended interaction between intellectuals and Candomblé leaders during the course of a century. Anthropologists, writers, and painters, some of whom became practitioners (and vice versa), combined the changing attitudes of both those in power and practitioners, including a definite hierarchy in which Candomblé Ketu is the accepted model, emphasizing its 'pure African' cults, while all other manifestations are neglected or even rejected. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 focus on modern art and Afro-Brazilian culture. During the Vargas regime's search for nationalism, 'progress' and an 'authentic' Brazilian culture emerged. The popular became exotic and was given a political role. During the dictatorship, artistic elites were recognized and acknowledged as representing Afro-Brazilian art, corresponding to the accepted Candomblé houses. All others were considered as mere 'popular' artists who created works for tourists. Sansi stresses the contradiction between the innovations of contemporary modern art and the standard, hierarchic, 'traditional' concept of Afro-Brazilian art. The Orixás of Tororó exemplifies the complexity of these changes. This is a public monument, the purpose of which was to glorify African-Brazilian culture but at the same time symbolize the secret world of the orixás and the axé. Pentecostals' recent attacks see the monument and Candomblé as fetishism, the devil's work, and attempt to shake the perception of Candomblé as symbolizing national identity. The concluding chapter, 'Re-appropriations of Afro-Brazilian culture', claims that while Candomblé has now attained official recognition, religious people who once were its practitioners dispute its credibility when they turn to Protestantism. Sansi concludes that the Afro-Brazilian cultural renaissance is characterized by the 'objectification of new, unprecedented cultural values attached to objects' (p. 188). Values have changed and will continue to change, opening a route to new conflicts and transformations of values. Book reviews 175
Racism and Racial Surveillance. Modernity Matters, 2021
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“The Senegalese capital, Dakar, is part of the usual route of impressive transatlantic cruises and jet planes that connect Brazil to Europe. It is a modern city, half European, half African,” reported the Brazilian weekly magazine Manchete, in September 1964. The article celebrated Dakar as an African carrefour and was written on the occasion of the first official visit of Senegalese president Leopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) to the country. At the time, Brazil was living through the first months of the military coup that had ousted the democratically elected president, João Goulart (March 31 st , 1964). Yet, the advent of an authoritarian regime did not prevent Senghor from pursuing his Brazilian tour. A few days after his arrival in the country, Senghor delivered an eloquent speech at the National Chamber of Deputies (September 23 rd , 1964). On this occasion, he not only praised Brazilian miscegenation and the national developmental policies in course, but he also took the opportunity to exalt Négritude ideals as part of African cultural diplomacy: “Be reassured that our Négritude is anti-racist. It is rooted in our ancestral values of civilization, it is open to the pollens of all cultures and, most importantly, of latinité." One of the outcomes of this diplomatic endeavor was a pact of cooperation ratified between Senghor and president Humberto Castelo Branco (1900-1967) encompassing the areas of economy and culture. The Brazilian participation in the Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (First World Festival of Black Arts, FESMAN), which would take place in April 1966, was among the statesman’s main commitments. The interest of the Brazilian government in the African continent emerged at least one decade before the onset of the military regime and the wave of African independencies. It started in the postwar period, and was later advanced by the foreign policies of former president Jânio Quadros (1917-1992). During his brief presidential mandate (January-August, 1961), Quadros fostered strategic cooperation between Africa and Brazil. These political articulations undertaken at the start of the 1960s laid the foundations upon which the Brazilian delegation attended the First World Festival of Black Arts, but have been largely overlooked by most scholarly accounts of the festival. 6 In this chapter, I will focus on the artistic debates that have marked this participation, while pointing to some of the controversies sparked by the different political leanings of Brazilian artists and intellectuals around the event in Dakar. To do so, I will firstly explore the nuances of the terms arts nègres and “contemporary African art” under a Senghorian perspective and in light of the FESMAN. As we shall see, this conceptual contextualization makes a direct reference to the stances assumed by the artistic delegations who took part in the festival. In the case of Brazil, scholars like Clarival do Prado-Valladares (1918-1983) and Abdias do Nascimento (1914-2011) were among the main voices of these debates which ultimately uncovered the racial tensions obscured by the cultural propaganda of Brazilian diplomatic bodies. Secondly, I will underscore unofficial axes of collaboration around the festival in order to retrace some of the diasporic connections that were conducive to the transatlantic mobility of black artists and intellectuals in the 1960s. As part of this, the trajectory of artists like Brazilian Wilson Tiberio (1920-2005) and South African Gerard Sekoto (1913-1993) are particularly relevant and highlight black solidarity in challenging the cultural cooperation agendas that were put in place at the time.
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