One could chew over the Western canon heavies, the Brazilian cultural critic Oswald de Andrade believed, and still spew out something singularly Brazilian — a sensible enough proposition, you might think at first blush. After all, creativity is a parasitic business. All of us beg, borrow, and steal, and the wider one’s terms of reference surely the better. Yet it must be said that de Andrade’s programme to liberate Brazil from its colonial past proved something of a damp squib.
There was something quixotic about the whole enterprise: the discarding of one culture (imperial Portuguese), deemed alien on decolonial grounds, and the embrace of another (indigenous Brazilian), just as foreign to Brazil’s self-respecting, nationalist elite. Take Tarsila do Amaral, the star of Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, the new show at the Royal Academy (on until 21 April). An accomplished painter as well as an astute theorist, she was no doubt a brilliant mind. De Andrade was her husband, and his Anthropophagic Manifesto of 1928 owed more than a little to her oeuvre. There, in feverish aphorisms, he had worked up much resentment against Portuguese imperialism, a distant memory since decolonisation over a century earlier in 1822 but one which nevertheless exercised a hold on the native imagination through an imperialism of the mind. “Down with Father Vieira… Down with every catechism… Down with all the importers of canned consciousness” is the gist of it.
As it was, even in his defiance to dispose of that distasteful Lusophone inheritance, de Andrade couldn’t help but appropriate its gaze, even if only to turn it on its head. The interwar Brazilian avant-garde called themselves “anthropophagites” — cannibals — only because the Portuguese had insinuated that one of their own, a particularly rotund bishop called Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, had been devoured by the Caeté Indians in 1556. Western modernism was to be relished with equal abandon.
Do Amaral was very much the art cannibal par excellence. A canvas called “Antropofagia” was produced in 1929, a year after the manifesto, depicting a black woman with a single burdensome breast drooping groundward against a background of cacti. At first blush, this is the portrait of a Gauguinesque exotique, a sentimental celebration of the “noble savage” as it were, but there is a lot more going on. Her subject very likely is the same woman in “A Negra” (1923), do Amaral’s Cubist nude of a former slave. There were still many of them about between the wars, as Brazil had only abolished slavery in 1888, two-thirds of a century after independence. The seemingly implausible elasticity of the black woman’s breast, do Amaral later recalled in an interview, was achieved through the manipulation of stones with the objective of slinging it back over her shoulders; a Brazilian custom, apparently, that allowed black women to breastfeed and toil away in farms at the same time.
“The interwar Brazilian avant-garde called themselves ‘anthropophagites’ — cannibals”
On whose farm, you may ask, was this degrading practice imposed upon her? Do Amaral’s own, it turns out. She hailed from São Paulo’s coffee aristocracy, which made a killing at the turn of the century; Amazonian rubber and northeastern sugarcane, both casualties of the abolition of slavery, had released a mammoth wave of manumitted labour into the southeast. For her part, do Amaral showed little awareness of having battened on cheapened labour. More interesting to her were the decolonial aesthetics of national identification: “I feel more and more Brazilian,” she wrote to her family. “I want to be the painter of my homeland. How grateful I am to have spent my entire childhood on the farm.”
The black slave, I would hazard, would have seen less reason to feel grateful for her inclusion in the national sorority of epistemically liberated postcolonials. No doubt do Amaral’s pontificating would have struck her as tone-deaf. The two Brazilians couldn’t have been more different: one was patting herself on the back for emancipating herself from the tyranny of Western modes of representation whereas the other perhaps dreamed of emancipation at a more elemental level. One person’s decolonial emancipation is another’s postcolonial oppression. One person’s languorous nostalgia is another’s living nightmare.
It should come as no surprise that there is something deeply unfeeling about do Amaral’s early art. Her nationalism, properly speaking, was just academicism. She was an alien in her own homeland. A Belgian nanny taught her her first letters. On her grand piano, she played French composers to an audience of French upholstery. French literature dominated her downtime. Like so many Westernised Asian and African nationalists, then, she only discovered her poorer compatriots through an adventitious agency: it was the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars, in Brazil to make a documentary on the local art scene, who convinced her and de Andrade to take Afro-Brazilian and Amerindian culture seriously. He was hot on samba and carnival, both hitherto dismissed by artsy metropolitans as the unformed festivities of benighted primitives, and his enthusiasm proved infectious.
Yet the results of this belated recognition were oddly sterile. Do Amaral’s subjects aren’t so much people as placeholders, standing in for grander themes. It is no accident that the face of the woman in “Antropofagia” is featureless. Likewise, there’s not much more to the woman in “A Negra” than her “huge, pendulous lips”, as do Amaral put it.
As in painting, so in fiction. Macunaíma, the novel associated with this scene, is heavy going. Its biracial, bisexual novelist Mário de Andrade — no relation to Oswald — set out explicitly to cast away its Lusophone past. Accordingly, after immersing himself in a five-volume work by the German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, he dashed off a draft in six days of self-imposed immurement. The upshot was a hurried, self-published affair. Its hero is a concupiscent, shapeshifting Lothario, a kind of Brazilian Michael Jackson, born black but then turned white. Over the course of this bizarre novel, he sleeps his way across the rainforest, conversing with loquacious worms and slurping on wine, only to be dismembered by a river monster and then transformed into Ursa Major. Like so many postcolonial novels, this one only works at the level of national allegory — though it doesn’t work for me.
Part of the problem is stylistic. These are well-meaning works, of course, but, as Flaubert had it, “you don’t make art out of good intentions”. The other defect is more structural: the self-defeating exercise of consciously fashioning a national culture. To be sure, national cultures do exist. They are, all the same, easier to define historically than to create artificially. For instance, it was easy enough for Nikolaus Pevsner to identify a set of characteristically English qualities — compromise, understatement, empiricism — running from Reynolds to Blake and beyond in The Englishness of English Art. But it was an altogether harder proposition for a set of interwar practitioners, not theoreticians, to construct a distinctively Brazilian style from scratch.
Cobbling together a national signature out of the dissenting currents of Continental modernism was easier said than done. All too often, the source material was plainly visible, jutting out like a bone from an anthropophagite’s mouth. The Lithuanian-born and Berlin-trained Lasar Segall’s paintings on display here, for example, are of obvious Cubist derivation. The failed liquor baron turned painter Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s work, similarly, is unquestionably Art Deco. Anita Malfatti’s pictures are, by turns, Fauvist, Cubist, and Expressionist.
Decolonial aims notwithstanding, the foreignness showed — especially to their nationalist compatriots. The leading critic of the period taxed Malfatti with the “diplopic influence of rebellious schools” and “ephemeral theories”. Her uncle’s verdict was much of a muchness, only more demotic: “This is not painting. These are Dantesque things!” The São Paolo press was savage when her exhibition opened in 1917. Thereafter, she retreated into an anchoritic life, altogether giving up exhibiting a decade later.
The more convincing paintings here are the ones with no obvious nation-building “decolonial” agenda. The former dentist and autodidact Rubem Valentim, for one, knew what he was about. An Afro-Brazilian who had witnessed Candomblé religious ceremonies first-hand, he achieved a satisfactory synthesis of cultures. So it is with the half-indigenous Djanira da Motta e Silva, also self-taught, who deployed her knowledge of local art and custom to brilliant effect. They weren’t cosplaying. They were the real deal.
Their art is a far cry from Monteiro’s, whose grand theme, too, was the life of indigenous people — only he had had no contact with indigenous people himself. He had learned a trick or two from Rio’s Museu Nacional, but that was it. Like an old colonial, he divided his time between Paris and Recife, setting great store by his eclecticism and cosmopolitanism: “I’m a citizen of nowhere, but I love Paris above all.”
Sensibly, if belatedly, do Amaral came to the conclusion that cannibalism wasn’t for her. The Depression radicalised her against such decolonial doctrines. It instantly destroyed Brazil’s coffee business, ruining her family in the process. The Revolution of 1930 followed in short order. The oligarchy was overthrown and replaced with Getúlio Vargas’s regime, welding autocratic nationalism and social reformism in an heteroclite alliance of organised labour, the gentry and military. Fired by these events, do Amaral travelled to Moscow the following year, and was briefly arrested on her return. By then, she had long since abandoned cultural nationalism for socialist realism. Some of the best pictures in the exhibition belong to the latter tradition — not only do Amaral’s “Second Class” (1933), a moving depiction of discalced peasants, but also Candido Portinari’s “Coffee Agricultural Worker” (1934), a muscular fellow in contrapposto.
The artists, and indeed activists and academics, of our time who go doolally over decoloniality would do well to follow in do Amaral’s footsteps. Banging on about a supposedly pristine indigenous past lost to the sands of time, she realised, achieves precious little. Better, then, to swap the sentimental appeal of cultural nostrums for the hard-nosed allure of proper class politics.
