Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Unlike the baroque or churrigueresque of Spanish America, the buildings are fundamentally simple and solid, even severe, and over-laid with decoration that grows thicker through the 18th century, with more twisted volutes, more delicate bell towers, and more fanciful windows. The slaves built churches of their own and since the Rosary was always an object of their special devotion the church of “Our Lady of the Rosary” is the high church — often the largest and most magnificent of all, — an odd side-light on the institution of slavery in Brazil.

Most of the art and architecture of this period is as anonymous as that of the middle ages, but two master-sculptors, both mulattoes, are known by name. Master Valentim da Fonseca studied in Europe, and when he returned he was employed by the Viceroy in Rio. He helped lay out the old Passeio Público (now adjoining a section of the city called, for obvious reasons, Cinelândia ). Most of his work has vanished and the park is sadly diminished, but the pair of wonderful bronze alligators still there are by “Mestre Valentim.” The other sculptor is known, even outside Brazil, as Aleijadinho, “The Little Cripple,” Antônio Francisco Lisboa (1730–1814), the son of an architect and a Negro woman. It is believed that he was a leper, at least he lost the use of his hands; but he continued to work with tools strapped to his wrists. At the same time the Inconfidentes were dreaming of independence and producing their imitative Arcadian poetry in Ouro Prêto, Aleijadinho was producing his much greater and more original, although also belated, art. Designs for churches, wood-carving, stone-carving, — so many works are attributed to Aleijadinho that one becomes sceptical, — nevertheless, his distinctive style can be traced all through Minas. His favorite material was the gray-green soapstone of the region, soft to cut but turning harder with exposure. (It is still much used for pots and pans. According to the Mineiros, nothing is as good as a soapstone pot for cooking the daily rice.) His last and most famous work is at Congonhas do Campo, the Twelve Prophets in front of the church of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos. Crude, but powerful and dramatic, they gesticulate against the white church with its bright blue doors, and against the sweep of bare ore-filled hills.

As in Portugal, the azulejos, blue and white tiles, played a great part in the decoration of churches, and sometimes in the houses of the rich. Not always confined to blue and white, sometimes in browns, yellows, and pinks, whole house-fronts were covered with them, particularly in the northern towns. This material has been revised in contemporary Brazilian architecture, and although it is not always used very tastefully, it is one solution for the serious problem of weathering in a tropical climate.

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Brazil’s appreciation of its architectural heritage came late. Many churches were lost, beginning with those abandoned after the raids of the bandeirantes, and again after the expulsion of the Jesuits. Later, churches were sometimes deliberately torn down for their materials or to make way for wider streets. 1936 when the “modern” building boom began, was a year of drastic demolition, but it was also the year in which SPHAN was set up, the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artistico Nacional, to try to save as many as possible of the historical buildings of Brazil. This service has been directed by one man ever since, Dr. Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, and his modesty and scholarship, and his absolute devotion to an almost hopeless task, have been courageous and admirable. There is little money available for such projects, and the people are indifferent, ignorant, and, as everywhere, resentful of interference with property. It is only too natural for the inhabitants of a remote village to prefer a new filling station to an 18th-century fountain.

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There was one good architect in the French Commission invited to Brazil by João I, Grandjean de Montigny, the first professor of architecture at the Imperial Academy. Most of his buildings, in French neo-classical style, have been destroyed, but his influence can be seen in many 19th-century buildings. The large dignified early 19th-century French-style houses have sunk through the pension level to that of slums; picturesque and wretched, sheltering innumerable families, they are known as “pigs’ heads,”—living quarters one step higher than the shacks of the favelas.

From de Montigny’s delicately-balanced and well-proportioned style, Brazil went almost directly into the hideous neo-baroque public-building style so common everywhere in the world that it goes almost unnoticed. Art Nouveau also hit Brazil, but a rather glancing blow. And then around the early part of the 20th century the very rich started leaving their fazendas and building themselves town houses to please their always independent fancies, from Norman Chateau to Gothic Cathedral to Turkish Bath, often adorned with copies of Roman copies of Greek statues. One famous dark and crenellated Gothic mansion in Rio is fondly known as “the rotten tooth.” It is to be hoped that some of these interesting monstrosities will be allowed to survive and not all quite cleared away in the eagerness for “Order and Progress.”

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Until the present century there is not much to be said about painting in Brazil. Mauritzstad had its Frans Post, who did fresh and still familiar-looking landscapes while in Brazil, then spent long years in Europe painting imitations of them. With the French Comissions the illustrators of genre scenes began to arrive: Debret, Rugendas, Ribeirolles, later Ender, who have given us volumes of fascinating detailed studies of slaves, costumes, street scenes, and buildings of the 19th century. Some of the church-painting that has survived is a fairly high quality, but of interest only to the specialist. But 19th-century easel painting is a dreary waste of realistic-romantic bandeirantes, slave-girls, court functions, and landscapes that look more like France or England than Brazil. It is not until the appearance of painters such as Emiliano di Cavalcanti and Candido Portinari that Brazilian painting can be said to have any life of its own.

On first arriving in Brazil, a stranger — if he is at all familiar with them — is struck by how true to Brazilian scenery are Portinari’s early pictures: the round, almost conical green hills, the Negro women carrying white bundles on their heads, like ants with their eggs, the children playing futebol, the dry, broken graveyards — even details like kites, balloons, and the way the ever-present umbrella is worn hanging from the back of the collar — all are in Portinari’s early work.

At present the abstract movement is triumphant, along with a depressingly out-of-date importation called “Concretismo.” (This has also been taken up by some of the younger poets, who produce poems reminiscent of Eugene Jolas and transition magazine of the ’20s in Paris. The Japanese, notably Manabu Mabe, have made contributions to the abstract movement, but more in their traditional calligraphic style than in that of “action” painters of the west.) The best Brazilian work at the moment seems to be in black-and-white. There are at least half a dozen good engravers, wood-cutters, and lithographers; Feyga Ostrawer, Roberto Delamonica, Edith Berhing, Anna Lyticia; typographers and painters like Aloisio Magalhães.

The São Paulo Biennial, started in 1951 by Francisco Matarazzo, has become an institution like the Biennial of Venice. Although one may have one’s doubts about the desirability of bringing together over four thousand works of art at one time, it has undoubtedly greatly stimulated Brazilian painting with its many prizes, travelling scholarships, and opportunities for those who have to stay at home to see at first hand, for the first time, what is being done in the rest of the world. There is a real painting “boom” in Brazil at present; prices are soaring, collectors collecting, and new galleries are opening up every few weeks, it seems, in all the larger cities.