Essay on the legacy of slavery in Brazil
ahmedalk
11. Confronting the World with Art, Beauty, and Axé
Roberto Conduru
Bahia, minha preta ... Persist with what is beautiful And the world will see You return laughing to the place that is yours on the blue globe Queen of the South Atlantic E ô! Bahia, mythical font, enchanted E ô! Expand your axé, don’t hide a thing Your cry of joy echoes far, [in] time and space Queen of the Atlantic.1
The verses above are from “Bahia, minha preta,” a song written by Caetano Veloso in
1993 for fellow Bahian singer Gal Costa (Costa 1993). “Minha preta,” a term of
endearment that can be somewhat patronizing, literally means “my black woman.” In
this context, however, it emphasizes that Bahia is black. Although Bahia has a
multiethnic and mixed-race population, like all Brazilian states, and can therefore be
understood in its multiplicity and presented as multicolored, it has often been simply
identified as black. This is not necessarily because it has the largest population of
Afro-descendants in Brazil and is the city with the largest black population outside of
Africa. It is a mistake to restrict Brazil’s blackness to Bahia, but unquestionably, it is
in Bahia that blackness is cultivated in a singular fashion and has achieved
prominence in the cultural imaginary. In this regard, Bahia is unique within Brazil.
This symbolic status, however, rarely leads to substantial changes in the social
situation of peoples of African descent and is often profitable for those who exploit it
through tourism and entertainments, including Carnaval, music and dance
performances, and gastronomic events.
Not all works of art produced in Bahia in recent years, however, are based on
blackness,2 and artists in other parts of Brazil have tackled sociocultural issues
surrounding race.3 In Bahia, nonetheless, a chain of at least five generations of artists
has focused on experiencing, examining, and showcasing black cultures—peoples,
their locales, and their daily lives. From Carybé’s drawings and paintings and Pierre
Verger’s photographs of the 1940s to the recent performances by Tiago Sant’Ana,
interventions by Àlex Ìgbó, murals by Pedro Marighella, and photographs by Tacun
Lecy, artists have reiterated some topics, set others aside, moved in new directions,
reviewed approaches, and broadened the field of representations. The dialogues about
black culture that Bahian artists have initiated for over seven decades have, however,
consciously formed a tradition. Composed of a few different strands, it is an important
feature in Brazil’s cultural field, and it may have emerged as a result of the
discontinuity and weak institutionalization of Brazil’s fine arts or as a form of
resistance to the strategy of disparaging and marginalizing peoples and cultures of
African descent—not to mention the genocide of these peoples in the past.
Given the significance Bahia has attained in issues of blackness, it must be
acknowledged that some decisive agents in the formulation of this tradition, among
them Carybé, Verger, and Cravo Neto, are not people of African descent. This is an
important factor in the consolidation of the idea of Afro-Brazilian art based not only
on the theme of the work but also on the artist’s ethnic and racial origins (Conduru
2015, 77–90). The demand that African descent be a priority, if not a determining
factor, for being active in that realm, which is currently being propagated in other
Brazilian contexts, especially São Paulo, is less evident in Bahia.
Also unique to the work of Bahian artists is the appreciation and maintenance
of ties with Africa. This is seen to a much lesser extent in the rest of the country.4
Although capoeira, Carnaval, and Afro-Brazilian religions are not cultural expressions
that originated from or are exclusive to Bahia, due to the intensity and quality of their
local inflections and the way they are connected to Africa, they have become the
pillars of a culture that is not infrequently called Afro-Bahian. It is no coincidence
that Bahia is considered the African capital of Brazil by peoples on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Many artists active in Bahia have visited Africa at some point their careers.5
This travel has stimulated or resulted in works that played a role in the lengthy
process of cultural (re)Africanization of Bahia in the second half of the twentieth
century6: the sacred sculptural works of Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos Santos, better
known as Mestre Didi, the photographs and writings of Verger,7 the woodcut series
Suíte Afríquia by Emanoel Araújo, the textile prints José Antônio Cunha designed for
Ilê Aiyê, and the pair of performance works titled Sacudimentos (Cleansings) by
Ayrson Heráclito. Both the cultivation of ties with Africa and this range of artistic
achievements have helped Bahia garner a special place in the cultural geo-history of
the African diaspora. Like Havana and Harlem, New Orleans and Port-au-Prince,
Salvador is one of the brightest stars in the constellation of metropolises that cultivate
Afro-American art in the Americas.
The Art of Axé
In the song that opens this essay, Caetano Veloso turns to religion, reiterating that
Bahia is a “mythical font, enchanted,” and in the context of the persecution of Afro-
Brazilian religions, particularly by followers of Neo-Pentecostal sects, he exhorts,
“Expand your axé.” Like Caetano, many others, before and after him, have been
seduced by the power of the orixás, voduns, inquices, and encantados and have
devoted themselves to the artistic celebration of those divinities. This explains the
omnipresence of Afro-Brazilian religions in the arts related to blackness, which is not
unique to Bahia.8
In the late nineteenth century, in writings that were certainly not devoid of
racial prejudice, the physician and amateur ethnologist Raimundo Nina Rodrigues
qualified some artifacts used by followers of Candomblé as “black art” (Rodrigues
[1896] 2006) and even “fine art”9 (see Romo, this volume). This, however, did not
mean that they were accepted within the elite system of art in Brazil. On the contrary,
such ceremonial objects were still randomly seized by the police in their efforts to
suppress those religious practices, since the penal code enacted in Brazil in 1890
criminalized “the practice of Spiritism, magic and its spells.”10 That process led to the
formation of collections that are currently housed in a varied range of institutions but
still lack attention, visibility, and public access (see Sansi, this volume).11 Despite
critical and curatorial efforts to rethink objects made and used in terreiros,12 it was
only in 1964 that this type of artifact began to migrate from religious spheres to arts
institutions.
That year, Mestre Didi began exhibiting the xaxarás and ibiris (ceremonial
scepters) that he made for the worship of Obaluaê and Nanã, respectively, in galleries
and cultural centers in Brazil and abroad. The inclusion of his work in the Magiciens
de la Terre exhibition, held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, and in other
exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, can be viewed as an important stage in the artistic
valorization of such works. The positioning of his works in exhibitions as a
counterpoint to the other works of art and the presentation of their creator as a “priest-
artist” (Juana Elbein dos Santos 2000), however, made Mestre Didi’s work the
exception that confirmed the rule of the exclusion of the arts of Candomblé from
erudite and vanguard art circles in Brazil. Produced for the use of religious
communities that appreciate them for their symbolic and aesthetic value, portrayals of
divinities, like the dolls created by Valdete Ribeiro dos Santos, known as Detinha de
Xangô (see Machado, this volume), and the iron sculptures forged by José Adário dos
Santos, known as Zé Diabo (see Marques, this volume), still confront resistance from
art critics, curators, and historians who often make judgments based on the prejudices
of their fields and their own sociocultural status.
Less problematic was the acceptance of figurations of deities and Afro-
Brazilian religious practices that, having previously appeared sporadically in Rio de
Janeiro,13 became more and more common as an artistic theme in Brazil, especially in
Bahia from the 1940s onward.14 The negative public responses to Candomblé
initiation rites in Bahia, photographed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and by José
Medeiros and published in the magazines Paris Match and O Cruzeiro, respectively,
in 1951 (Tacca 2009), however, traumatized the Afro-Brazilian religious milieu. As a
result the photographing of rites and ceremonies remains controversial and non-
consensual to this day. This has not prevented photographers—including Verger,
Cravo Neto, Gondim, and Lecy, among others—from finding ways of getting around
restrictions. Religious communities are less strict about controlling portrayals that are
not as committed to realism.
The problem is in fact nearly the opposite: the excess and banalization in the
iconic portrayal of the world of Candomblé, particularly the orixás, even though the
proliferation of this imagery can be seen as a political response to persecution of
Afro-Brazilian faiths. It is also undeniable, however, that noteworthy innovations
arise from time to time, such as the still lifes Hélio de Oliveira composed from objects
used in the terreiros or more sculptural or pictorial portrayals in the images Mário
Cravo Neto produced inside and outside the studio. It is nonetheless hard to avoid the
abundant and uncreative elaborations on the imaginary shaped by Carybé, Verger, and
others in works of art, decorative objects, tourist souvenirs, graffiti murals, and other
media. These precedents are, however, sometimes taken up in intelligent dialogues
that revere and expand on strands of the local artistic tradition. Lecy and Sant’Ana,
for example, have openly expressed their affiliations with the works of Verger and
Heráclito, respectively.
There is, therefore, no lack of major artistic achievement focused on
Candomblé: Verger’s monumental dedication, on both sides of the Atlantic; the
ethnographic detail of Carybé’s graphic-sculptural orixás; the artistic updating of
myths in the work of Mestre Didi; Rubem Valentim and his constructive translation of
the Afro-Brazilian religious-artistic aesthetic; Laroyé, the explicit and metaphorical,
critical and reverent book by Mário Cravo Neto; Códices, the mural in which Cunha
pictorially reconciles hagiographic and historical meanings; the enlightening and
memorial series Opô, by Oscar Dourado; the pair of Sacudimentos in which Ayrson
Heráclito connects architecture and performance, history and religion, Brazil and
Africa in a decolonial key.
In his Opô series, Dourado embodies the emotional states experienced during
initiation through color photographs of filtered patterns of light on worn ceramic tiles
(fig. 11.1a-d). He explores the possibilities of peering inside without disrespecting the
limits established in the religious sphere on the reproducing of rituals. Cravo Neto
challenges the ban in flickering portrayals of embodied orixás, as well as in other
images. He follows the path opened by Verger in showing public ceremonies as well
as environments and artifacts configured in ritual. Although the work of Dourado and
Cravo Neto is different (see interleaf J, this volume), both artists keep their distance
from ethnography, which has and continues to dominate the photography of Afro-
Brazilian religions. They also share the linking of artistic and religious experience,
another peculiarity of Bahia. Just as it has been perceptible in the past, in the
trajectories and works of Carybé, Cravo Neto, Detinha de Xangô, Mestre Didi,
Valentim, and Verger, so it is now, with Marco Aurélio Damasceno, Heráclito, Lecy,
Sant’Ana, and Zé Diabo, among others. Running the risk of slipping into the
sensationalizing of Candomblé, which has contributed to the hypertrophy of Afro-
Brazilian religions, these artists have publicly disseminated aesthetic values
experienced in the daily life of the terreiros, relying on axé, the power of the orixás,
as a means of reactivating the artistic sphere. Whether they are images, materials,
objects, or performances, artistic representations can be seen as indications of the
slow process of unrestricted inclusion of Candomblé in Brazil’s sociocultural
dynamics.
Street Art
Life experience is an issue that goes beyond each artist’s individual religious
affiliation. Insufficiencies and discontinuities in the local art scene (Almandrade
2001, 9–10) result in lack of recognition of the breadth of the visual arts in Bahia,
their dissemination throughout the city, and the variety of media employed. If
dialogue and collaborations with other fields such as literature, music, architecture,
the dramatic arts, and cinema are common—following modern forms of artistic
integration, as well as the more compromising dependency on the governmental and
economic spheres—other connections and exchanges also stand out. These involve
institutions from other social spheres, such as religious communities and popular
festivals like Carnaval.
The diversity that characterizes this volume corresponds to the fluidity with
which the black imaginary pervades a variety of social sectors, including a wide range
of subjects, institutions, and spaces in the city. These range from tattoos to clothing
and other forms of corporal reinvention, from art galleries and museums to temples
and shops, from decorative objects and buildings to street furniture and monuments,
from graffiti to souvenirs, from social activism to public- and private-sector
marketing campaigns. From the artistic institutionalization of Afro-Bahian culture to
the reverberation of cultural and artistic repertoires in commercial artifacts, an intense
and little-studied15 exchange has arisen among the arts, material culture, corporeity,
and imaginary in Bahia, constituting a unique public role for the arts without parallel
in other Brazilian contexts.
The special dialogue between agents of the arts and other fields in Bahia goes
beyond the reverberation of street life in the art world. It is not restricted to breaking
through traditional barriers and taking it to the streets to make art accessible to a
broader swath of people. It could reside in modernist strategies of popularization,
such as book illustrations, print series, murals, and sculptures erected in public places,
in which Carybé explored his talent like no other. It may lurk in the contemporary
domestication of what first emerged as transgression—the movement in which Eder
Muniz uses graffiti art to express a notion of Bahia shaped more in the association of
nature with the black self-image than by history and culture (see introduction, this
volume). It could also exist in the reverberation of a repertoire already
institutionalized in social programs, such as the use of paintings by Gil Abelha in
posters for public health campaigns (see fig. 3.13). On a smaller scale, this art would
correlate with “the music of Bahia’s Carnaval, particularly the most commercial,
which has become known as axé music,”16 which Caetano defends directly in the
song with which this essay begins.
Artistic portrayals of characters and cultural practices that have shaped the
predominant Bahian cultural identity, such as Baianas, capoeira, and Candomblé have
contributed to another sociocultural valuation of historically excluded social groups,
institutions, and cultural expressions. We should not, however, ignore the presence of
portrayals of Afro-Bahian culture in public settings in a society that systematically
marginalizes and makes the black population and cultures socially invisible. It does
present the risk of reinforcing stereotypes conducive to various kinds of exploitation.
In this regard, one of the factors that distinguishes the visual arts in Bahia is
their integration with street practices that link hedonism, reflection, and activism.
Aurelino dos Santos’s colorful cityscapes are a case in point (figs. 11.2, 11.3). Other
instances include the ceremonies that overflow from the terreiros into street festivals
and culminate in Carnaval. This is a domain in which the performance of Cunha as
artistic director of the Carnaval group Ilê Aiyê is particularly noteworthy (see
interleaf H, this volume). Between 1979 and 2005, he created prints for fabrics,
costumes, and the stage sets for that group, conceiving a visual identity in keeping
with the struggle for the preservation of cultural values and the promotion of social
equality for Afro-descendants (fig. 11.4). In this case, lived experience implies an
exceptional moment, a celebration in which people, objects, and the senses merge into
playful and combative ecstasy. Furthermore, after the celebrations are done, the
fabrics are adapted to a range of uses as everything from curtains to blouses and are
incorporated into all walks of life in the city.
This is a phenomenon that the concept of fine art cannot circumscribe,
whether due to the fact that Cunha is almost completely self-taught,17 or to the way
multiple artistic and cultural references are combined with the Carnaval group as their
origin and driving force (see Miguez, this volume). Since Carnaval has become one of
the dynamos of Bahia’s cultural and economic life, the scale and scope of production
is not surprising. Furthermore, the power of religious celebrations and Carnaval
festivities greatly surpasses the dynamics of the art galleries and museums in
Salvador. A revised and broader view of the art world is required in this context.
In the intervention De lama lâmina (From Mud, A Blade), Matthew Barney
evoked the primordial orixá Nanã Buruku with a Carnaval float featuring an
enormous logging truck carrying at its front an entire uprooted tree. The float was
followed by Arto Lindsay’s band performing on an attached logging trailer, flanked
by drummers and dancers of the Cortejo Afro group, during Carnaval in Bahia of
2004. Barney interwove complex themes of Afro-Brazilian religion, sexuality, and
ecology in this rare attempt to respond artistically to the festivities in Salvador, with
their multiplicity of languages and scale.
It is not difficult, however, to find reflections of the unique ways in which
Bahian Carnaval activates the senses in recent artistic production. Heráclito has
confronted the question of scale in O condor do Atlântico: Moqueca (The Atlantic
Condor: Stew), held at the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia in 2002. Visitors and the
nearby community of Gamboa were invited to cook and eat a stew called moqueca, a
popular local dish, made with an enormous stingray, a cheap and popular fish in
Bahia, which was figuratively linked with the great Andean condor to characterize the
ritual as a metaphor for the liberation of the Americas. Marepe (Marcos Reis Peixoto)
also performed a symbolic public act when he poured thirteen thousand freshwater
pearls into the Tietê River in São Paulo in 2006, both as an offering to Oxum18 and a
protest against pollution and environmental degradation, stressing the environmental
aspects of Candomblé. Damasceno went out into the streets and returned with Troca
de passagem: Encruzilhada (Change of Passage: Crossroads), a video-performance in
which, opposed to the acrobatic showmanship typical of capoeira, he engages without
an opponent within the self-imposed boundaries of a manhole cover inscribed with a
Kongo cosmogram (see figs. 5.10a,b). This suggests how this martial art evokes
myths and tales of the diasporic streams that connect Africa, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia,
and beyond. Pedro Marighella focuses on masses of people in his murals and
paintings (fig. 11.5). Using somewhat abstract and decorative patterns generated from
photographs, he portrays groups at play and sometimes in conflict to graphically
condense the energy that the crowd can produce in festive events and other settings.
The Art of Struggle
For a long time, the political dimension of Bahian arts linked to Africanness resided
primarily in the visual presentation of that which was socially marginalized. Increased
appreciation of these arts aided the struggle for inclusion of Afro-descendants and
their cultural practices. While this artistic visibility led to some integration, it was not
immune from exploitation, nor did it guarantee equality. The preference for pandering
to the taste for cultural exoticism to the detriment of explicitly presenting people’s
real living conditions often won out. This, in addition to poor critical response,
bolstered representations of Afro-Bahian culture as visual expressions of the myth of
the harmonious racial mixture alleged to constitute Brazilian society.
We must carefully sift through Carybé’s output to find any scathing social
content.19 The nature of photography makes Verger’s images more realistic, but it
does not transform them into involuntary denunciations of social malaise. One
exception is Hansen Bahia, in whose work social issues carry a different weight, as in
the series of prints that illustrate Castro Alves’s poem O navio negreiro (The Slave
Ship) with dramatic scenes of men and women enduring the Middle Passage (see
interleaf A, this volume). Another exception is the photography of Cravo Neto, whose
images are both indicative and allegorical, addressing topics such as colonialism,
slavery, and racism.20
As usual in Bahia, religion is fertile ground for politics. In Divisor (Divider),
Heráclito explores the symbolism of red palm oil (dênde) in Afro-Brazilian religions
to speak of the blood spilled during the transatlantic slave trade (see fig. K.1). If in
this work the materials recall that sacrifice and expose its present-day ramifications,
in Heráclito’s Sacudimentos, carried out in two important sites of the slave trade,
enslavement, and colonialism, located in Brazil and Africa, the duo of performance
and religious ritual aims to free those places from persistent aftereffects (see figs.
K.5a,b). While Heráclito uses religious procedures to heal historical wounds, Àlex
Ìgbó turns to the tactics of present-day urban culture to intervene in the religious war
underway in Salvador and throughout Brazil. With his rough-hewn graffiti and lambe-
lambe posters, he provocatively connects the Christian and Yoruba messengers Jesus
and Exu in Jexus (see. figs. 3.3, 3.4).
The artistic production of the last three decades has confronted tensions from
the past and present, whether latent or explicit in the social arena, with various
degrees of engagement and mediation. It would be a mistake to include in the plots of
the constructive tradition, harking back to the works of Valentim and Araújo, the
installation A fragilidade dos negócios humanos pode ser um limite espacial
incontestável (The Fragility of Human Affairs Can Be an Incontestable Spatial
Boundary) by Rommulo Vieira Conceição, whose work critically avoids the
exaltation of Afro-Bahian culture (figs. 11.6a,b). Although one can accept a reading
associated with constructivism, as well as an interpretation regarding intersubjectivity,
this work brings together in a lively and incisive manner the more recent failures of
modern architecture in the long-standing tradition of segregating slaves and the poor,
particularly black people, in Salvador, as in other Brazilian cities.
Another emphatic message comes from Caetano Dias in Delírios de Catharina
(The Ravings of Catherine; see fig. 1.1), in which he juxtaposes a table made from
bull’s blood in the King Manuel style of the late fifteenth to early sixteenth century, a
work bench, a vise, and a pile of heads made of brown sugar to confront us with the
oppressive legacy of Bahia’s former primary economy. Clearly, however, it also
addresses the perverse contemporary impacts of colonialism and slavery. Focused on
the present, while also looking to the past with a less allegorical tone, is Cabula, a
video-performance that Sant’Ana has composed with photos of his head, on which the
word cabula is written, referring to the district in Salvador of the same name where
twelve young black men were killed by military police officers on February 6, 2015.
In images that somewhat parody mug shots, the word disappears as his hair grows
back to the sound of drums (figs. 11.7a-c), both as a condemnation of how killings of
young men, especially black men, are forgotten in Brazil and subsumed in statistics,
and as a call to reflection on violence and racism.
The Arts (of Suffering and) of Beauty
In addition to history and culture, religion and art, there is a political vein in the prints
created by Goya Lopes, both for everyday clothing and for installations such as
Sentidos afros baianos (Afro-Bahian Senses). This is clear in the unusual patterns she
has created on the basis of the schematic cross-section of a slave ship and the icon of
Anastácia the slave (see interleaf L, this volume). If it is easy to understand the desire
to pay tribute to a figure who is popular in the folk religion of Brazil, it is harder to
understand who would want to wear a symbol of human barbarity, even if the slave
ship is somewhat imperceptible in the curvilinear pattern created by the linkage of its
design with the figures of ibejis and other graphic elements.21 Along with Cunha’s
creations for Ilê Aiyê and other interventions in Carnaval abadás (costumes), Goya’s
fabrics showcase prints that are engaged with the processes of emancipating the black
community. In Bahia, cultural expression and the struggle for civil rights are taking
place in Carnaval and daily life, mixing religion and politics with beauty, sweetness,
sensitivity, and sensuality.
It is also with considerable delicacy that Cravo Neto alludes to the
imprisonment of women, blackness, beauty, and light in his photograph titled Luciana
(fig. 11.8). This image acts as a metaphor for the condition of the Baiana, or Bahian
woman. On the basis of songs, we are informed that, with charms “like no other,”22
the Baiana comes from “Bahia, land of happiness.”23 This praise of grace and
happiness nourishes the widespread assumption about the sunny lifestyle and culture
of Bahia, which is believed to overcome, or at least attenuate, its social
insufficiencies. As Cravo Neto’s image subtly and charmingly helps its viewers
realize, however, not everything is beauty and joy for Luciana, the Baiana, or for
other people of African descent in Bahia.
Despite past and present hardships, many artists have insisted on preserving
harmonious views, even when dealing with degrading themes. Recently, however,
that artistic equation has been balanced and in rare cases inverted. This is in response
to criticisms regarding previous alienation, the commitment of artistic modernism to
the exaltation of Bahian culture, and the demand for greater engagement from artists
in sociopolitical causes. Furthermore, there is a strong belief in Afro-Bahian axé. It is
not just a matter of celebrating the beautiful power of life. Although Bahian culture
emerged from barbaric processes, its charm can be seen as a special weapon to
overcome adversity. If pain can generate beauty, art can participate in individual and
collective emancipation. Suffering and beauty are balanced in Janiele’s World by
Caetano Dias (fig. 11.9). To the repetitive and banal sound of a music box, a young
girl sways, dances, bobs and gingas while hoola-hooping—rising proudly and
gracefully above the favela and the social ills that surround her. Like Janiele, Bahia
uses the power of beauty, art, and culture to confront the world.
Central Margin
Following in the steps of the vast musical soundtrack extolling Bahia, Veloso also
refers to grace and happiness in the lyrics that guide this essay. He bases Bahia’s
resumption of her place in the globalized world on the insistence of what is beautiful.
A reconquest based on felicity, because the cry that he says should echo “far, [in] time
and space” is one of joy. He also sees the city of São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os
Santos24 regaining the geopolitical status it enjoyed in the past, particularly between
1549 and 1763, when it was the capital of Brazil and held a privileged position in the
exchanges established across the Atlantic Ocean, inside and outside of the Portuguese
Empire.
Jorge Amado, Dorival Caymmi, João Gilberto, and Glauber Rocha—like
Veloso and Costa—are some of the art-world figures who have garnered a prominent
position in the Brazilian imaginary for themselves and their home state. Not just a
theme for artists born or based there, Bahia has been configured as a special place in a
country that, since the 1910s, has been organized into regions with physical,
economic, and sociocultural characteristics that give rise to contrasting and
complementary identities.25 Seen as an idyllic place whose delights stem from an
amalgam of the tropics and deep-rooted cultural traditions, Bahia is believed to be one
of the necessary counterpoints26 to the configuration of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro
as cosmopolitan cities and capitals of modernity in Brazil.
Unlike in literature and music, and later on filmmaking, however, Bahia
occupied second place in the fine arts. Its peripheral status as a center of artistic
production and debate derived from the persistence of academicism, backwardness,
and the slow modernization of Salvador compared to the primacy and dynamism of
São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.27 Beginning in 1944, according to Walter Zanini,
modernism in Bahia was “extremely attached to the stimuli of the physical and human
world” (Zanini 1983, 638). The unique, opulent, and vivacious imaginary propagated
by the novels of Amado and the songs of Caymmi since the 1930s would only begin
to expand visually in the middle of the following decade through the varied artistic
output of Carybé, and the photographs of Verger (see Johnson, this volume). The
unique artistic research of Valentim, who combined abstract-geometric principles and
shapes with Afro-Brazilian religious symbolism, grew with increased density when he
migrated from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1957. Although he was warmly received
in Bahia’s art world, the predominant portrayal of scenes, people, and local customs
was scorned by Brazilian art critics as a regionalist and somewhat conservative
expression, in contrast with the abstract, constructive, and informal trends that had
spread in that country as vanguard movements after World War II.
Undeniably, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro played a central role in Brazilian
modernism. It is no coincidence that migrating permanently or temporarily to the
southeast of the country has been a factor in the careers of many Bahian artists,
musicians, and writers in the twentieth century. The peripheries are not necessarily
pale shadows of the centers, however, nor are they identical to them. Moreover, they
can have exclusive traits, unique delights.
The permanent or temporary establishment of artists from other parts of Brazil
and abroad in Bahia28 indicates its status as an alternative place in which they saw the
possibility of combining a way of life with artistic experimentation. For many,
Salvador’s somewhat archaistic character was attractive and could serve as a
liberating option, given the provincialism that could often be detected in ostensibly
cosmopolitan intellectual and artistic circles in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. From
the late 1950s until the eruption of the military-civilian dictatorship a decade later, it
became one of the most dynamic vanguard locales in the country.
If we recall that relations between centers and peripheries are complementary,
conflicting, complex, and changeable (Ginzburg 1991, 5–7), we can argue that the
centrality of those cities is relative. In addition to depending on the periphery to
affirm their central status, they can be viewed as marginal, backward centers with
less-intense dynamics when compared with other hubs of artistic modernization in
Europe and the Americas. This was accentuated over time. Although Rio and São
Paulo continue to function as artistic centers in the country and on the continent, other
cities—Salvador among them—have recently attained greater power and vitality,
particularly for foreign audiences. Following the restructuring of artistic networks and
hierarchies in the process of globalization, the mediating function of Brazilian centers
has become virtually meaningless. Real and virtual flows of people, objects, and ideas
enable direct contact with places, agents, institutions, and processes that were once
nearly inaccessible.29
Salvador offers enormous attractions in this globalized setting. Its history as
the capital of the largest Portuguese colony and as a key port on the economic and
cultural routes of the first modern era are significant. These factors made the city a
locus where the ideas, techniques, instruments, and forms of artistic systems that were
being brought together by the activities of the Portuguese—including influences from
Africa, the Americas, and Asia—converged, have been re-elaborated and
disseminated (Freyre 2003). This suggests that the artworks produced in the past and
present should be reviewed, questioning the hierarchies established by interpretative
matrices imbued with colonial and nationalist forms of logic without naively relying
on the relativism propagated by globalization or overlooking the idiosyncrasies of
Bahia’s cultural world.
It is important to stress the factors that have tinged obdurate provincial
conservatism, instilling cosmopolitanism in the arts of Bahia: the comings and goings
of the Bahians who migrated, the foreign training of some artists in different
contexts,30 and more extensive or merely occasional stimuli from outsiders who
sought creative alternatives and challenges there.31 These are precedents that help us
understand the increasingly free transit of Bahia’s artists in the international art world,
who, to paraphrase Caetano Veloso, purchased “the equipment and know how to use
it, selling talent, and know how to cash in, profit.”32
Two cases are exemplary here. The first is that of Emanoel Araújo, whose
student activism in the 1960s led to interventions in museums beginning in the 1980s
in Bahia and São Paulo. These culminated in the establishment of the Museu Afro
Brasil, created in 2004, which he conceived and directs to this day. It is based on the
outstanding collection of artworks and other objects related to Afro-Brazilian and
African cultures that Araújo has assembled over his lifetime. In that institution, Bahia,
its culture, and arts occupy a central, predominant place. The other example is
Heráclito’s work as one of the curators of the Third Bahia Biennial in 2014, which
sought to reaffirm the ex-centric, alternative, and anti-hegemonic view of Bahia based
on its location in the Brazilian northeast.
It is also important to rethink the backwardness of modernism in Bahia in the
light of the current situation of the arts. Paradoxically, its slow development and
position in the rear-guard would have helped some of its artists become current with
contemporary artistic flows. The persistence of past and local values, which meant
being out of step with the dynamics in the artistic centers, their vogues and rhythms,
has taken on a less-negative aspect in the face of recent disenchantment with the
prospects and universalist aims of modernism. Previously scorned, the compromise
solutions that reconciled new and old, international and regional elements, began to
serve as valuable precedents when taking on the solution that now recommends, when
it does not require, linking the global to the local. The prominence of that theme, of
cultural specificity and even of exoticism, which was previously paternalistic, has also
gained a different kind of power through increasingly blurred boundaries between art
and culture, history and anthropology.
In this sense, artistic production in the last decades has minimized Salvador’s
peripheral status, not because artists have broken with previously dominant choices,
but precisely because they insist on some of them, unfolding them reflexively;
because they maintain the attachment criticized by Zanini, although less to the stimuli
of the physical environment and more to those of the human environment, to social
types and customs, to the culture that, for some time, has been commonly identified as
Bahian. Whether artists have heeded Caetano Veloso’s recommendation or whether
he has voiced what so many have expressed in many languages, it is a fact that
recently artists have kept to the trail blazed by Amado and Caymmi, corroborated by
Carybé and Verger, and reiterated by Valentim, Araújo, and Cravo Neto: extolling
Bahia and particularly its blackness, its Africanness. The prominent position in artistic
relations with Africa and other diasporic contexts is a good example of how Bahia not
only unfolds artistic propositions generated elsewhere but also spreads ideals and
ideas of its own, regionally, nationally, and internationally. When it comes to being
black and wanting to be black in Brazil, a country where racism is entrenched in
institutions and daily life, Bahia is indeed the center, not the periphery—the Afro-
Brazilian metropolis.