It is thanks to a productive collaboration between Art in Translation and Roberto Conduru and Juliana Ribeiro da Silva Bevilacqua that we are able to offer a survey of the Brazilian historiography of Afro-Brazilian art across three issues. The first four texts in this volume complement the special issue dedicated to Afro-Brazilian art, published in 2022 (vol. 14.1) and an earlier issue relating to the reception of African art in various contexts (2017, vol. 9.3). Taken together, vol. 9.3, vol. 14.1, and the present issue provide a comprehensive collection of ten texts, which are representative of eighty years of Brazilian writing from 1904 to 1983, on the arts produced by, or related to, Africans and people of African descent in Brazil.
As Roberto Conduru writes in his illuminating introduction to the 2022 volume, considering that African enslaved people had been brought to Brazil in the sixteenth century and were fundamental in the construction of a Portuguese colony, the critical reception of Afro-Brazilian art in the early twentieth century is a belated phenomenon, which engaged writers from diverse disciplines (medicine, anthropology, journalism, fine art, philosophy, museology, art history).
Racial thinking pervades this historiography. To start with, the collections of traditional Afro-Brazilian religious art—the main focus of these texts—have their origins in the violent police confiscations of Candomblé objects due to Afro-Brazilian rituals being declared illegal in 1891. Sacred objects were used as “criminal evidence” in later hearings of the accused. The critical reception of Candomblé art is also marked by tensions, reflecting empathy on the one hand, and exotisization on the other. Raimundo Nina Rodrigues’s pioneering 1904 essay “The Fine Arts of the Black Settlers of Brazil—Sculpture” was the first serious attempt at explaining the importance of the artistic practices by enslaved Africans and their descendants in Brazil (see vol. 9.3), but he also described the objects as the products of a ‘primitive’ culture in its infancy. Nina Rodrigues died in 1906, but his views were developed and contested in the writings of Manuel Querino (1851–1923), one of the most important Afro-Brazilian intellectuals of the early twentieth century. A teacher, writer and a left-wing activist, he argued against the marginalization of Afro-Brazilian culture (see vol. 14.1). Both Nina Rodrigues and Querino’s texts were put in circulation in edited volumes by the anthropologist Arthur Ramos (1903–1949), a significant figure in advancing knowledge of Afro-Brazilian art and culture in his writings and activities before the middle of the twentieth century (see vol. 9.3). Other writers, such as Mário Barata (curator at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro and later at the Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional), and Odorico Tavares (a collector, journalist and poet) saw Afro-Brazilian sculpture through the lens of European modernism and primitivism (see vol. 14.1).
This volume includes four further texts on Afro-Brazilian art. The first two are by the African-Brazilian scholar, artist, and politician Abdias do Nascimento (Franca, 1914-Rio de Janeiro, 2011), an instrumental figure in the dissemination of knowledge and the recognition of Afro-Brazilian culture as an integral part of Brazil’s identity. He founded the Teatro Experimental do Negro in Rio de Janeiro in 1944, which promoted the creation of Afro-Brazilian theatre, and he was behind many other initiatives, such as the first Congresso do Negro Brasileiro in 1950, which generated discussions about Afro-Brazilian sculpture. They also inspired Nascimento’s thinking about the importance of making this material accessible to the wider public. In the essay included in this issue, dating from 1968, Nascimento introduces his project of the Museu de Arte Negra. The challenges in realizing this project in the fraught contexts of Brazil’s military dictatorship at the time and the engrained racist elitism are explained in detail by Roberto Conduru’s introduction to the essay. In a later text by Nascimento, written towards the end of his exile in the USA, he reflects on the Museu da Arte Negra as a potential vehicle for making visible the connections between Africa and Brazil to the public and, at the same time, he calls for a greater involvement of people of African descent in the study of Afro-Brazilian art, both historical and modern.
The third text in this volume, dating from 1968, by the physician and writer Clarival do Prado Valladares reflects on the (limited) opportunities of Black artists in Brazil from the colonial period up to the 1960s. In the early modern period, he highlights their important contributions to the production of religious art. In the modern period, comparing Brazil to the US, he concludes that Afro-Brazilian artists suffer the same marginalization as Afro-Americans in a pre-dominantly White society. Categorizing the art produced by White and Black artists as different, he associates “communicability” and “shared emotion” with Black art and “hermeticism and privatism” with White art. He feels that modern Black and Mestizo artists have lost their authenticity due to their ambition to join the international circles of modern art. The meaning of the term “Afro-Brazilian” art is also considered in José Mariano Carneiro da Cunha’s discussion of Africanism in Brazil. In the final part of his text, he addresses the emergence of modern Black artists and African themes in modern art from the 1930s onwards, proposing that the term Afro-Brazilian applies not only applies to artists of African descent, but to artists of any ethnicity who produce African-themed artworks.
The last essay in this volume shifts attention away from Brazil to the British reception of the arts from Latin America in general, using the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA) at the University of Essex as a case study. With ca. 750 objects and mostly focusing on twentieth-century art, this is the largest collection of modern Latin American art in Britain, and one of the most significant in Europe. The essay is by Alessandra Simões Paiva (Federal University of Southern Bahia) and a direct outcome of her recent fellowship at the University of Leeds, UK.
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