Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present

Chapter 5. Modernist Brazil

Machado de Assis’s ironic observations about a Greek bearing a sword do not obscure his point that a major demographic change was taking place in Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1870, the majority of the estimated 10 million Brazilians were of African descent; by 1900, more than 1 million immigrants from Europe had helped to raise the nation’s population to approximately 17.5 million. An illustration from an 1876 issue of the Revista ilustrada shows immigrants drawn to Brazil by promises of a rich, fertile land, on the order of the sixteenth-century Edenic descriptions created to stimulate New World settlement. As historian Marshall C. Eakin and others have pointed out, this wave of European immigration, which began in the mid-nineteenth century, was looked upon favorably by certain members of the intelligentsia, who supported the idea of a whitening of Brazil’s population and culture (Eakin 1997, 119).1 Although the early photographer Marc Ferrez regularly included black Brazilians in his works, images of the predominantly black Brazil like José Correa de Lima’s Intrépido marinheiro Simão (Intrepid Sailor Simon), circa 1857, and the anonymous Mulher da Bahia (Woman from Bahia), circa 1850, were rare in paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The predominant style was conservative, showing the continuing influence of the French Cultural Mission. Vítor Meirelles was among the best-known Brazilian painters of the mid- to late nineteenth century; in addition to his sweeping Cariocan landscapes, his most important works were paintings of key historical events, such as his Primeira missa no Brasil (First mass in Brazil )2 and his equally renowned Batalha de Guararapes (Battle of Guararapes), which depicts the clash of forces between Brazilians and Dutch in the seventeenth century.3 Like their French Cultural Mission predecessors, Meirelles and an even younger generation of artists including Augusto Rodrigues Duarte, José Maria de Medeiros, and Rodolfo Amoedo drew inspiration from romantic themes associated with Indianism. For example, Meirelles, Amoedo, and Duarte painted stunning portraits of Indians dramatically Modernist Brazil eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee c h a p t e r 5 Modernist Brazil | 185 posed in death. Meirelles’s Moema and Amoedo’s O último tamoio (The Last Tamoio) portray solitary, heroic Amerindians whose bodies have washed up on shore,4 while Duarte’s As exéquias de Atala (The Funeral Rites of Atala) shows the Natchez warrior Chactas mourning the death of the Europeanized Atala, who preferred suicide to marriage with a non-Christian. In both Amoedo’s O último tamoio and Duarte’s Atala, a priest attends the dead, and a crucifix appears in Atala’s folded hands. In the spirit of Alencar, Christianity appears as a positive force in both paintings, its role in the Amerindians ’ subjugation and demise having been deftly sidestepped. Amoedo’s painting Marabá was likely influenced by Gonçalves Dias’s famous poem by the same title that describes the suffering of a maidenoutcast of mixed Indian and European blood. With the possible exception of her dark hair, there is nothing in the portrait itself to identify her as an Indian. Her nude pose is in keeping with pseudo-classical eroticism of the time, and her skin appears alabaster against the painting’s dark background . Medeiros’s Alencar-inspired painting Iracema displays the melancholia associated with the “honey-lipped” maiden, who is darker in skin tone than the other indigenous figures just mentioned. Unlike the dramatic representations of many indigenous people of this period, she is portrayed as a living woman, although those familiar with Alencar’s novel cannot help but associate Medeiros’s solitary image at the water’s edge with Iracema’s fateful encounter with “civilization.” Meirelles did include a black figure in his Batalha de Guararapes (besides the heroic Henrique Dias), but the startled and bugged-eyed look of the 5.1 Moema, by Vítor Meirelles (1866) black soldier contrasts vividly with the more determined demeanor of the Dutch occupying forces and other local insurgents. A student of Meirelles, the Spanish painter Modesto Brocos, painted two important works that feature blacks in Republican Brazil. His A redenção de Cam (The Redemption of Ham) shows a black female servant with eyes raised to the heavens and hands lifted up in prayer as a light-skinned mother and father look adoringly at their even whiter son. This painting gained iconic status during the republic...