Paris as Periphery: Vicente do Rego Monteiro and Brazil's Discrepant Cosmopolitanism
2014; College Art Association; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00043079.2014.877307
ISSN1559-6478
Autores Tópico(s)Travel Writing and Literature
ResumoAbstractAbstractCompeting constructions of modernity emerged in Brazil in the 1920s, accompanied by artistic and ideological debates over the significance of the Indian. Long revered as a symbol of Brazilian republicanism, in the twentieth century this Brazilian “noble savage” became subject to modernist parody and derision. Vicente do Rego Monteiro's modernist reworking of the Indian challenged Parisian avant-garde primitivism and Brazilian academic aesthetics. Rego Monteiro's participation in transatlantic aesthetic dialogues and his emphasis on the circular networks of influence and meaning underpinning the imagined Indian reflect a specifically Brazilian cosmopolitanism at the core of an avant-garde counternarrative of national modernity. Notes1. Mauricio Tenorio‐Trillio, Mexico at the World's Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 201, describes the International Exposition as an “Island of harmony and consensus surrounded by political turmoil.” Following presidential elections marred by corruption, 1922 witnessed the founding of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and the Centro Dom Vitale, the political organ of a growing Catholic revitalization movement, and the Tenente Revolt by midlevel military officers against the state.2. Vicente do Rego Monteiro, “Depoimento do pintor e poeta Vicente do Rego Monteiro,” in Vicente do Rego Monteiro: Pintor e poeta (Rio de Janeiro: 5a Cor Editores, 1994), 249. The checklist for Rego Monteiro's 1920 exhibition at the Livraria Jacinto, São Paulo, includes Scandal in the Court of Catherine (Paraguaçu Models Her Indigenous Garb). Walter Zanini, Vicente do Rego Monteiro: Artista e poeta (São Paulo: Empresa das Artes : Marigo Editora, 1997), 66.3. Ironically, the Indian had entered Republican discourse through the language of critique to attack Emperor Dom Pedro II and the Second Empire (1840–89). An ardent nativist, Pedro consolidated the Indian as a symbol of Brazil, commissioning many of the epic poems that inspired Indianist painting. On the Indianist iconography of the Second Empire, see Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, As barbas do imperador: D. Pedro II, um monarca nos trópicos (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998). On the Indian as Republican critique, see Tracy Devine Guzmán, Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 78–81; and Mônica Pimenta Velloso, ed., Do Guarani ao Guaraná: História, humor e nacionalidade (Brazil: Ministério da Cultura, Casa de Rui Barbosa, 2001).4. Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Époque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn‐of‐the‐Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).5. The policy reflected anxieties over 1.5 million free people of African descent entering society, fears influenced by French and English predictions of racial “degeneration.” Social Darwinists sought to reverse “darkening” through hygiene, education, and miscegenation. See Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 124–45; Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 154–61; Teresa A. Meade, “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889–1930 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); and George Reid Andrews, Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 54–89. On the mutually constituting nature of art and science, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 30.6. “Exposição Geral de Belas Artes: Fantasio na Exposição I, Moema,” Gazeta de Noticias (Rio de Janeiro), September 4, 1895, 1. Although native themes would never regain the popularity in the academy they enjoyed at the height of the Second Empire, they continued to appear regularly in the General Exhibitions and increased in anticipation of the centennial. Preferred themes included Marabá, Iracema, Moema, and Lindóia, exemplified by Rodolfo Bernadelli's Iracema (1895), Antonio Parreiras's Iracema (1909) and The Emerald Hunter (1910), and Augusto Bracet's Lindóia (ca. 1918). Oscar Pereira da Silva's Pedro Álvares Cabral Landing in Porto Seguro, 1500 (1922) bridges Indianism and the more dominant history painting, a genre that drew stylistically and iconographically on the earlier Romanticism. See Cláudia Valladão de Mattos, “Independência ou morte! O quadro, a academica e o projeto nacionalista do império,” in O brado do Ipiranga, ed. Cecilia Helena de Salles Oliveira and Valladão de Mattos (São Paulo: EDUSP/Museu Paulista da Universidade de São Paulo : Imprensa Oficial, 1999), 107.7. Sommer, Foundational Fictions.8. This trend is reflected in works like Euclides da Cunha's epic examination of the rural interior, Rebellion in the Backlands (1902), and lawyer‐historian Oliveira Vianna's advocation of a system of national authoritarianism that resolved the incompatibility of a liberal, democratic “legal Brazil” and an antidemocratic “real Brazil,” dominated by rural strongmen who obstructed modernization. Jarbas Medeiros, Ideologia autoritaria no Brasil, 1930–1945 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora da Fundacao Getulio Vargas, 1978), 164–75. Physician‐essayist Manoel Bomfim, in his América latina (1906), represents challenges to racist theories of underdevelopment, which he attributed to the Portuguese character, prone to vice and greed, and not blacks, whose quilombos (runaway slave societies) demonstrated an advanced social order. See Skidmore, Black into White, 115–23.9. The phrase “Down with the torch‐bearing Indian” invoked church architecture and the Indian as a national symbol. “The Indian son of Mary, the stepson of Catherine de Medici and the godson of Dom Antonio de Mariz” addresses the spectacle at Rouen and Indianist art and literature. Popular legend held that Paraguaçu, Diogo Álvares Correia's Indian wife (memorialized in Caramuru and Moema and parodied in Rego Monteiro's Scandal in the Court of Catherine), was christened the godchild of Catherine de Médicis. Oswald de Andrade's reference (“Cannibalist Manifesto,” trans. Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review 19, no. 38 [July 1991], 47 n. 27) suggests the pervasiveness of the Indian in the popular imagination.10. The “Cannibalist Manifesto” appeared in the first of twenty‐six issues of the Journal of Anthropophagy (1928–29). All translations from the manifesto are from Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” trans. Bary, 38–47, at 43, 38, 42.11. Two earlier works provide key references for discussing ethnicity as symbolized by Amaral's Cannibalism. The large‐footed figure on the right originated in the 1927 painting Abaporu, which inspired the movement. A gift to Andrade on his birthday, he titled it with the Tupi‐Guaraní word meaning “man who eats.” The single‐breasted figure on the left in turn quotes Amaral's 1923 The Negress. The miscegenated African and Indian icons depicted without color parody the whitening discourse, while invoking works like Mário de Andrade's Macunaima (1928) that engage similar motifs of racial and cultural hybridity.12. Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” trans. Bary, 40, 39, 40.13. Subaltern theory emerging in the 1980s offered a means to transcend what George Yúdice labeled Latin America's “double bind,” which condemned culture “to be Europe's ‘civilization double’ or its ‘civilization other.’” A “peripheral” perspective provided critical insights on local adaptations of avant‐garde tendencies and redressed Latin American modernism's dismissal as inferior mimicry. Derived from the example of the Indian subcontinent, however, postcolonialism presumed the foreign occupation of a subaltern population, proving problematic for Latin America's settler colonialism and reinforcing oppositions scholars aimed to discredit. While the focus on center‐periphery relations by Nelly Richard, Leslie Bary, Mari Carmen Ramírez, and Roberto Schwarz, among others, influenced my thinking, Rego Monteiro inspires a more globally oriented analysis and theoretical decentering along the lines of Yúdice, “Rethinking the Theory of the Avant‐Garde from the Periphery,” in Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, ed. Anthony L. Geist and José Monleón (New York: Garland, 1999), 52–80; Fernando J. Rosenberg, The Avant‐Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); Esther Gabara, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); and Silviano Santiago, The Space In‐Between: Essays on Latin American Culture, trans. Tom Burns and Gareth Williams, ed. Ana Lucia Gazzola (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). See also Richard, “Postmodern Disalignments and Realignments of the Center/Periphery,” Art Journal 51, no. 4 (December 1992): 57–59; Leslie Bary, “The Tropical Modernist as Literary Cannibal: Cultural Identity in Oswald de Andrade,” Chasqui 20, no. 2 (1991): 10–19; Schwarz, “As Idéias for de Lugar,” in Ao vencedor as batatas: Forma literária e processo social nos inícios do romance brasileiro (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1992), 9–31; and Ramírez and Héctor Olea, eds., Inverted Utopias: Avant‐Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).14. Rego Monteiro, “Depoimento do pintor e poeta,” 252.15. Rego Monteiro (ibid., 249, 252–53 ) claimed to have introduced cannibalism as an artistic theme with his 1920 Livraria Jacinto exhibition, an assertion his sketch Cannibalism (1920) would seem to support. The sketch is reproduced on the title page of Jorge Schwartz, ed., Brasil, 1920–1950: De la antropofagia a Brasilia (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González, 2000). Antonio Bento, “Apresentação em 1920 no Recife,” in Rego Monteiro: Pintor e poeta, 70, notes “public declarations … stressing his pioneering of this theme.”16. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Routes: Travels and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17–46.17. Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Rego Monteiro: Pintor e poeta, 17.18. Edith Angelica Gibson Wolfe, “Melancholy Encounter: Lasar Segall and Brazilian Modernism, 1924–1933” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2006); and Marta Rossetti Batista, “Os artistas brasileiros na escola de Paris, anos vinte” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 1987).19. Amaral was the norm for Paris‐based, Brazilian expatriates of the 1920s. Born into the affluence of the southern coffee boom, she kept a posh Montmartre studio that had once belonged to Paul Cézanne. In contrast, Gilberto Freyre wrote, Rego Monteiro “cooked his own spaghetti. And sometimes didn't have spaghetti to cook.” Freyre, Tempo morto e outros tempos: Trechos de um diario de adolescencia e primeira mocidade, 1915–1930 (Rio de Janeiro: J. Olympio, 1975), 120; and idem, introduction to Rego Monteiro: Pintor e poeta, 32, 40. For her memories of Paris, see Amaral, “Recordaçoes de Paris,” Habitat 6 (1952): 17–18.20. Rego Monteiro recalled his time in Paris in an interview of 1969 with the Museum of Image and Sound, Rio de Janeiro, transcribed in “Depoimento do pintor e poeta.” For critical studies of his experiences in Paris, see Zanini, Rego Monteiro: Artista e poeta, 117–81; Maria Luiza Guarnieri Atik, Vicente do Rego Monteiro: Um Brasileiro de França (São Paulo: Editora Mackenzie, 2003); and Natalie Henderson Lee, “Vicente Do Rego Monteiro,” in Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection, ed. Richard Robson Brettell and Paul Hayes Tucker (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009).21. Bento, “Apresentação,” 72.22. These discoveries corresponded with unprecedented touristic and ethnographic interest in the northeast, inspired by the emergence of a leisure class and the interwar search for roots. Marojoara influenced a Brazilian Art Deco exotic style in the 1920s. Marcio Alves Roiter, “A influencia Marajoara no Art Deco brasileiro,” Revista UFG 13 (July 2010): 21–27.23. Rego Monteiro (“Depoimento do pintor e poeta,” 254–55) referred to this as his “first truly cannibalist theme,” describing it as a “battle between the robot Indians and a fabulous, Marajoaran‐inspired animal.” 24. José Bittencourt, “Fenícios, Sambaqui e Marajó: Os primordios da arqeologia no Brasil e a formação do imaginário nacional,” Tempos Históricos 3, no. 1 (August 2001): 63–64.25. Jens Andermann, “The Museu Nacional at Rio de Janeiro,” Relics and Selves: Iconographies of the National in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, 1880–1890, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ibamuseum/texts/Andermann01.htm (accessed May 31, 2013).26. Recent theorists challenge “modernity” as a European concept transported to the Americas, identifying the intrinsically modern social, structural, and epistemological features of pre‐ and noncontact societies. They examine the “discovery,” exploration, and colonialism of the Americas—which produced Eurocentrism and the West's unilateral claims to modernity—as mutually constituting of Europe and America. The theorization of “alternative modernities,” or what Enrique Dussel calls “transmodernity,” decenters modernity and liberates Latin American culture from the critical restrictions of postcolonial theory and influenced my thinking on Rego Monterio. See Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” trans. Michael Ennis, Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80; Walter Mignolo, Local Histories / Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities, 2nd ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); and Dussel, “World‐System and ‘Trans’‐Modernity,” trans. Alessandro Fornazzari, Nepantla: Views from the South 3, no. 2 (2002): 221–44.27. Zanini, Rego Monteiro: Artista e poeta, 88. See also Walmir Ayala, “Vicente do Rego Monteiro: Cubismo e muralismo,” in Rego Monteiro: Pintor e poeta, 139–48.28. The artist explained, “The dark hues that one notes in these figures don't happen by pure and simple accident. It results from my project to give them the skin pigmentation the color of our Indians,” which he compares to Asians, explaining, “Brazil's sun darkened their bodies.” Bento, “Apresentação,” 72.29. Bahia is the state in which Porto Seguro is located, the site of the Portuguese landing depicted in Meirelles's First Mass in Brazil. Pará is the state in which the Marajó archipelago is located.30. Joaquim Inojosa, O movimento modernista em Pernambuco (Rio de Janeiro: Graf. Tupy, 1968), 208–9.31. Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Júnior and Laurence Hallewell, “Weaving Tradition: The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast,” Latin American Perspectives 31, no. 2 (March 2004): 46–48.32. Gilberto Freyre's theory constituted the ideological foundation of regionalism, introducing a competing foundational fiction that privileged the sugar plantation in the genesis of a culturally egalitarian, miscegenated Brazil, or “racial democracy.” Freyre, Casa grande e senzala: Edição crítica (Madrid: Allca XX, 2002).33. Freyre, introduction to Rego Monteiro: Pintor e poeta, 24. For an analysis of Freyre's aesthetic views, see Maria Lúcia G. Pallares‐Burke, Gilberto Freyre: Um vitoriano dos trópicos (São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2005), 201–48.34. “M. de Rego Monteiro,” Paris Times, February 22, 1925, 7.35. Rego Monteiro was profoundly influenced by Foujita, to the extent that he feared the depth of the Japanese artist's influence. He recalled “sensing the danger of that artistic kinship,” to which he responded by immersing himelf in Brazilian styles. “I accentuated my line and my inspiration from the ceramic works of Marajó, sculpturally accentuating my painting through modeling, crossing Cubism with colonial baroque.” Rego Monteiro, quoted in Zanini, Rego Monteiro: Artista e poeta, 127.36. Freyre, Tempo morto e outros tempos, 120.37. Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Quelques visages de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie Juan Dura, 1925). A facsimile of the portfolio was published in Jorge Schwartz and Regina Salgado Campos, eds., Do Amazonas a Paris: As lendas Indígenas de Vicente do Rego Monteiro (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2005).38. Jorge Schwartz, introduction to Schwartz and Campos, Do Amazonas a Paris, n.p.39. Ledo Ivo, “Vicente do Rego Monteiro, um estranho na paisagem,” in Rego Monteiro: Pintor e poeta, 104.40. Mignolo, Local Histories / Global Designs, 95. He theorizes that the resulting position of “exteriority” (which defined modernity through a dialectical antinomy) engendered “critical cosmopolitanisms” that “challenge the hierarchical and assimilative forces of colonialism, both secular and religious, by proposing alternative versions of universalisms that arise from the shortcomings and interstices of both.” 41. Atik, Rego Monteiro: Um Brasileiro de França, 95.42. The compositional similarities of Rego Monteiro's Arc de Triomphe with Delauney's sketches of the Eiffel Tower from a bird's‐eye view, marked with radiating rings of motion, are more striking. Delauney's drawings from aerial photographs underscored technological achievement. As will be discussed, this would have significance for Rego Monteiro relative to Brazil's role in the Parisian discovery of flight. Delauney's sketches are discussed and reproduced in David Travis, “In and of the Eiffel Tower,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 13, no. 1 (January 1987): 5–23, at 13.43. Tarsila do Amaral owned Red Tower, which she proudly displayed in her Montmartre apartment.44. His Orphist works are exemplified by A flautist (The Flautist, 1924) and O guitarrista (The Guitarist, 1924), reproduced in Zanini, Rego Monteiro: Artista e poeta, 284.45. Schwartz, introduction to Do Amazonas a Paris.46. Daryle Williams discusses the origins and significance of the prize in Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–1945 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 30. São Paulo began to issue its own travel prize, the Pensionato Artístico do Estado de São Paulo, in conjunction with the Pinacoteca (State Museum) for the study of modern art in the 1910s, awarding it to modern artists such as Anita Malfatti, Vitor Brecheret, and Túlio Mugnaini. See Marcia Camargos, Villa Kyrial: Crônica da Belle Époque Paulistana (São Paulo: Editora SENAC, 2000), 159–72.47. Tarsilia do Amaral, letter, April 19, 1923, quoted in Aracy Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo (São Paulo: Tenenge, 1986), 84.48. Raymond Cogniat, “La vie artistique: Abela,” Revue de l’Amérique Latine 85 (January 1929): 73–74.49. Maurice Raynal, “Exposição de V. do Rego Monteiro” (1925), reprinted in Rego Monteiro: Pintor e poeta, 200–201.50. Maurice Raynal, Picasso (Paris: G. Cres, 1922).51. On the reaction of Picasso's contemporaries, see John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907–1916 (reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 24–26; on his apprehension in the Trocadero, see Jean‐Louis Paudrat, “From Africa,” in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin, vol. 1 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 141.52. On the collection's origins and the ideological construction of Western civilization promoted by the institution into the 1910s and 1920s, see Alice L. Conklin, “Civil Society, Science, and Empire in Late Republican France: The Foundation of Paris's Museum of Man,” Osiris 17 (January 1, 2002): 255–90.53. Brazilian artifacts were collected during French efforts to establish Antarctic France in Brazil (1550–60) and Equinoxial France (1612–15). It is significant that artists like Rego Monteiro and Amaral were both collectors of indigenous art and representative of these colonized peoples—in the Parisian imagination and in their own bourgeois imaginings. A survey of the contemporary Quai Branly Museum holdings (where the majority of the Musée de l’Homme's ethnographic collection—the modern descendant of the Trocadero—is now housed) reveals objects donated by Amaral and other Paris‐based Brazilians. On the dominant representation of the Americas in the Trocadero, which generally focused on the more complex Andean and Mesoamerican societies at the expense of Brazil, see Elizabeth A. Williams, “Art and Artifact at the Trocadero: Ars Americana and the Primitivist Revolution,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 146–66.54. Rego Monteiro, “Depoimento do pintor e poeta,” 247. Significantly, Rego Monteiro had no misgivings about his own appropriation of the Ballets Russes’ Orientalizing forms or the influence of Japanese prints, perhaps because, as discussed above, by a paradoxically essentializing, cosmopolitan logic, he considered the Asian related to indigenous Brazilians. See Bento, “Apresentação,” 72.55. In 1920 French critic André Salmon called Les demoiselles d’Avignon “the ever‐glowing crater from which the fire of contemporary art erupted,” trans. Marilyn McCully, ed., A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 140.56. Serialized in four issues of the journal, the work was published in its entirety in 1921. Theo van Doesburg, Classique‐Baroque‐Moderne (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1921).57. The Brazilian Academy, originally the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes, was established before the Portuguese academy in Lisbon (founded in 1836), a fact that generated significant anti–French Mission resentment among Portuguese nationals. See Afonso de E. Taunay, A missão artística de 1816 (Brasília: Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1983), 22–29. On the ideological foundations and historical inception of the academy, see José Carlos Durand, Arte, privilégio e distinção: Artes plásticas, arquitetura e classe dirigente no Brasil, 1855–1985 (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva/EdUSP, 1989), chaps. 1, 2.58. “Jesuit churches are flagrant proof of the bad taste and lack of intelligence that dominates the formation of their works. The monasteries and convents were built during the dominion of the Baroque style, its brutality invented by the creators of the Inquisition”; Luís Gonzaga Duque Estrada, A arte brasileira (Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 1995), 32. See also Guilherme Simões Gomes Júnior, Palavra peregrina: O Barroco e o pensamento sobre artes e letras no Brasil (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1998).59. Alexandre Eulalio, A aventura brasileira de Blaise Cendrars: Ensaio, cronologia, filme, depoimentos, antologia (São Paulo: Edições Quiron, 1978).60. Rego Monteiro, “Depoimento do pintor e poeta,” 250.61. Guzmán, Native and National in Brazil, 81.62. Greatly embellished European accounts of Botocudo cannibalism influenced elite public opinion toward the Just Wars, which lasted until 1831. Hal Langfur, “Uncertain Refuge: Frontier Formation and the Origins of the Botocudo War in Late Colonial Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 2 (May 2002): 215–56.63. Mario Carelli asserts that Debret “could not have encountered more than two or three Botocudos during his entire stay between 1816 and 1831. But, drawing on ethnographic documents from the Museu Imperial, he managed to construct an image of diverse types in which morphology of faces are respected, even if the bodies conform to neoclassical models.” Carelli, “Visão por alto das imagens do Brasil ma França: Uma herança ambígua,” in Images réciproques du Brésil et de la France: Actes du Colloque organisé dans le cadre du Projet France‐Brésil, ed. Solange Parvaux and Jean Revel‐Mouroz (Paris: IHEAL, 1991), 111.64. Carlos Sampaio, quoted in Marly Silva da Motta, A nação faz 100 anos: A questão nacional no centenário da independência (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV‐CPDOC, 1992), 208.65. Ibid.66. The dearth of academic representations of Afro‐Brazilian themes is evident in the absence of allegorical themes in recent surveys of Brazilian representations of blackness, including Carlos Eugênio Marcondes de Moura Moura, A travessia da Calunga grande: Três séculos de imagens sobre o negro no Brasil (1637–1899) (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2000); Negro de corpo e alma (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo : Associação Brasil 500 Anos Artes Visuais, 2000); and Emanoel Araujo, A mão Afro‐Brasileira: Significado da contribuição artística e histórica (São Paulo: Tenenge, 1998). Although there is a rich tradition of costumbrista paintings of rural genre themes of everyday life that feature blacks and slaves, “elite” production is limited to portraiture, generally self‐commissioned by members of the black elite.67. Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).68. Particularly influential to my thinking are Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); and Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991).69. Here Debret's work invokes Linda Nochlin's discussion of Orientalist painter Jean‐Léon Gérôme. Elaborating on Roland Barthes's concept of the effet de réel (reality effect), Nochlin argues that the artist's insistence on pseudoscientific accuracy functions as a strategy of concealment that obscures colonizing ideologies of racial and cultural superiority within naturalist objectivity. The same kind of process charges Debret's work with imperialist overtones and contributes to the neocolonial significance of the academic painters who borrowed from Debret. See Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth‐Century Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); and Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).70. Referring to colonial mimesis in India, Homi Bhabha concludes, “To be Anglicized is to be emphatically not English”; Bhabha, “Postmodernism and Periphery,” in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 357. Similarly, Mary Louise Pratt explores the “European” and “Europeanizing” through Creole reinventions of America in art and literature aimed at earning legitimacy in Europe. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 175.71. Joaquín Torres García, “The Southern School,” reproduced in Dawn Adès, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 320–22.72. Mário de Andrade, “Regionalismo,” Diário Nacional, February 14, 1928.Additional informationNotes on contributorsEdith WolfeEdith Wolfe has a PhD in art history from the University of Texas, Austin, with a focus on modern Latin America. Currently at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University, she is finishing a book on Lithuanian artist Lasar Segall and Brazilian modernism in the 1920s [Stone Center for Latin American Studies, Tulane University, 100 Jones Hall, New Orleans, La. 70118, ewolfe@tulane.edu].
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