Essay on the legacy of slavery in Brazil

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.