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At present the abstract movement is triumphant, along with a depressingly out-of-date importation called “Concretismo.”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.
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Brazilian “formal” or “sophisticated” music — it is hard to know exactly what term to use — is a complex subject in spite of its comparatively small body of work. There are Indian, African (and several different African), and Portuguese influences at work directly, and indirectly in the amazing variety of the folk-music. The music-loving Braganzas had their court composers and performers; the Jesuits their sacred operas and processional music from which many of the still-living folk-forms were derived. Quite recently a large body of late-baroque church-music has been discovered in Minas and is being transcribed and recorded, and undoubtedly much more material remains to be discovered and will help to fill in the long silences in Brazilian musical history.
The one big name in 19th-century music is Carlos Gomes, who was befriended all his life by Dom Pedro II. Unfortunately, his European training is now thought to have spoiled whatever native gifts he had. His most famous opera, The Guarani, based on the highly romantic novel by José de Alencar about a noble Guarani Indian, had a considerable success in 1870, although it has since been cruelly called “Meyerbeer’s best work.” The ballroom of the great semi-abandoned Manaos Opera House is decorated with scenes from The Guarani, and bife-stek Carlos Gomes still figures on the menus of Manaos restaurants.
The best contemporary composer is Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959). He was melodic, prolific, and fluent, if not over-fluent, and made full use of the richness of Brazilian sources (Portuguese, African, Indian, and popular music); his Bachianas and Ciclo Brasileiro are well-known outside Brazil. Villa-Lobos also put together a musical textbook for use in schools (using as examples old songs and singing games), the Guia Practica, which is considered a model of what such books should be.
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The “poet” is a special figure in Brazil, not at all like the unkown, unread figure of the same name in the United States. There has long been a tradition in Latin countries, old world and new, of poets in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, vice-consuls, consuls, or ambassadors. In Brazil the word “poet” is actually a term of endearment. A man will fondly address a friend who may be an engineer or a politician as “my poet.” Perhaps this is a relic of the days when all educated men wrote poetry; certainly writing poetry is still commoner here than with us. But in spite of this fondness for the idea of the poet as a man of special charm and privilege, unless employed in Foreign Affairs, he has, professionally, an even harder time of it than in the United States. Writing is very poorly paid and there are none of the fellowships and prizes, and a mere handful, compared to the thousands, of academic jobs that make life possible for both poets and prose writers in the United States. The writer has to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or professional journalist; journalism takes the place that teaching does in the United States, and with often just as deadening effect. There is a lack of good magazines and reviews. Every newspaper has its literary page, weekly, sometimes even daily, and it is there that one has to search for the good new poem, the original short story or article, half-lost among the endless warmed-over discussions of Baudelaire or Valéry, of Thomas Aquinas or G. K. Chesterton, and translations of Graham Greene or Mauriac.
The Portuguese language itself is a barrier between Brazilian writers and the public they deserve. For most Americans who study Spanish rarely study Portuguese. More translation can remedy this situation for prose, but poetry is fairly impervious to translations and it is a pity that we remain almost totally ignorant of such fine contemporary poets as Manuel Bandeira (the father-figure of Brazilian poetry), Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Cecilia Meireles, Jorge de Lima, Vinicius de Moraes (who wrote the libretto for the opera that was made into the succesful movie BLACK ORPHEUS), João Cabral de Melo Neto — probably the best of the generation after Bandeira, who has written poems of great feeling about the “flagellados” (“beaten ones”) of the north-east.