{"id":311867,"date":"2019-11-14T16:41:20","date_gmt":"2019-11-14T19:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=311867"},"modified":"2019-11-14T16:41:20","modified_gmt":"2019-11-14T19:41:20","slug":"rediscovered-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/rediscovered-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"Rediscovered archives"},"content":{"rendered":"
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MAC USP Collection \/ Ding Musa <\/span><\/a> Tarantelle<\/em> (1943), by Stanley William Hayter, soft-ground etching and gauffrage in color on paper: etchings were marked by their experimental natureMAC USP Collection \/ Ding Musa <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

A study developed as part of the activities of a project about museum archives recently identified a collection of 28 North American etchings that were stored for more than six decades in the technical reserve of the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (MAC-USP). Donated to Brazil in 1951 by American businessman and politician Nelson Rockefeller (1909\u20131979), the discovered collection shows that etchings served as an initial platform for the circulation of United States artistic production in Brazil. Some of the works are on display in Atelier 17 e a gravura moderna nas Am\u00e9ricas<\/em> (Atelier 17 and the modern etching in the Americas),<\/em> organized by MAC-USP, in partnership with the Terra Foundation for American Art. Open to the public until July 2, the exhibition also brings together etchings from institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil the 1950s, the Brazilian art scene was focused on European production. The discovery of this set of etchings confirms a time when American art began to circulate in Brazil with greater intensity,\u201d says Ana Gon\u00e7alves Magalh\u00e3es, vice director of MAC, remembering that the archives of the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) and of the S\u00e3o Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) were primarily built with works by European artists. Magalh\u00e3es coordinates the research project that identified the works.<\/p>\n

Produced between 1910 and 1960, the collection of etchings had been on display only once in Brazil after the donation by Rockefeller, during the show Gravadores norte-americanos<\/em> (North American Etchers<\/em>),<\/em> organized by the MAM only a few months before the first Biennial of S\u00e3o Paulo in 1951. After this event, the collection remained in storage in the MAC-USP technical reserve. \u201cThe historiography knew that some of the etchings existed, but not that they were part of a collection that was planned for donation to Brazil as part of America\u2019s efforts to broaden the circulation of the country\u2019s works of art in Brazil,\u201d explains Luiz Claudio Mubarac, professor of visual arts at the School of Communication and Art (ECA) at USP, which is not participating in the project.<\/p>\n

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MAC USP Collection <\/span><\/a> Entre acte<\/em> (1950\/51), by Geraldo de Barros, monotype on paper colored by hand: artist visited Atelier 17 in 1951MAC USP Collection <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The donation was made through the curatorial team of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and brings together works done using techniques and esthetic parameters for etchings produced in the United States at the end of the 1940s. The majority are by artists linked with Atelier 17, by the Englishman Stanley William Hayter (1901\u20131988). Hayter founded Atelier 17 in 1927 in Paris, but in 1940, after the invasion of France by the Nazis, it moved to New York. \u201cThe studio was a space of experimentation of new procedures and methods and brought together immigrant artists and women,\u201d informs journalist Carolina Rossetti de Toledo, author of the master\u2019s research project that identified the collection and one of the curators of the exposition, along with Magalh\u00e3es.<\/p>\n

Toledo, who is also doing her doctorate in the Inter-unit Program of Esthetics and Art History at USP, says that the collection was sent with the intention of contributing to the development of a collection at the first museum of modern art in Brazil. As part of this effort, Rockefeller had already donated in 1946 a set of 14 works. \u201cThe works of art were sent as a strategy to bring American culture, politics, and economics closer to Brazil in the postwar period. The donations by Rockefeller sought to increase the influence of the United States in Latin America,\u201d she says. The two collections were moved to MAC-USP in 1963, the year the museum was founded and which today has close to 12,000 works.<\/p>\n

The curator recalls that, after WWII, the United States economy went through a period of growth, attracting intellectuals and artists from Europe to the country. \u201cGraphic art is a low-cost, fast-production medium that is focused on mass reproduction, which facilitated at that time an increased capacity to promote modern art,\u201d confirms Toledo. She states that, in 1945, it was possible to buy one of Hayter\u2019s award-winning etchings, such as Tarantelle, <\/em>for US$45. Toledo undertook her research in Brazilian museums and newspaper archives, as well as at the Rockefeller Archive Center in New York.<\/p>\n

Research in museum archives bring to light elements that are not well known about Brazilian artistic historiography<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Brazilian etching artists<\/strong>
\nBefore 1808, when the royal family settled in Brazil, printing work was prohibited in the country. Thus, the development of the first printers only began in the second half of the nineteenth century. \u201cThe national scene is very different in Europe, where the tradition of printing dates back to the fifteenth century,\u201d compares Mubarac of ECA-USP. He believes that, because of these characteristics, the work of Brazilian etching artist pioneers, such as Carlos Oswald (1882\u20131971), L\u00edvio Abramo (1903\u20131992) and Oswaldo Goeldi (1895\u20131961), is also marked by an experimental nature.<\/p>\n

Magalh\u00e3es, of MAC-USP, says that some Brazilian artists had contact with Atelier 17 through scholarships and trips, and others through Hayter\u2019s books and the biennials in S\u00e3o Paulo, in exhibitions of etching artists connected to American artist groups. \u201cIn 1951, after Hayter returned to Paris from the United States, L\u00edvio Abramo and Geraldo de Barros [1923\u20131998], for example, went to France and had access to the printing equipment and knowledge of the techniques that were used in the studio,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Historical review<\/strong>
\nAs with the collection of etchings, research carried out as part of the project coordinated by Magalh\u00e3es has revealed previously unknown aspects of Brazilian artistic historiography. Another member of the project team, Paulo C\u00e9sar Garcez Marins, professor at the Paulista Museum, studies the formation of Brazilian imagery through the figure of the bandeirante<\/em>. He believes that there are no images of these trailblazers from the colonial period, so the characteristics that are today associated with this figure were determined through commissions by the Paulista Museum in the first decades of the twentieth century. \u201cThe majority being of mixed ancestry, the image of the bandeirante<\/em> as a white, middle-aged man, with a long beard, high boots, and a vest spread throughout Brazil on stamps, coins, and in educational books, all of which reproduced the works of art of the museum archives,\u201d he recounts. According to Marins, the most iconic image of that which would come to be known as the typical garment of the bandeirantes<\/em>\u2014the gibbon sewn with diamond shapes\u2014originated from the painting commissioned by the museum in 1920, done by Oscar Pereira da Silva (1867\u20131939), which was based on a work done in 1843 by the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768\u20131848). \u201cThe painting Combate de milicianos de Mogi das Cruzes com botocudos<\/em> [Battle of the militia of Mogi das Cruzes and the Botocudos] became an iconographic benchmark and defined the image of the clothing of the bandeirante<\/em>,\u201d he confirms.<\/p>\n

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Jean-Baptiste Debret. Sauvages Civilis\u00e9s, Soldats Indiens De Mugi Das Cruzas (Province De St Paul) Combattant Des Botocudos<\/em> (1834), Lithograph. Guita and Jos\u00e9 Mindlin Brazilian Library Archive (USP)<\/span><\/a> Painting by Debret (left) and the work of Oscar Pereira da Silva (below), which became a benchmark for the image of the bandeiranteJean-Baptiste Debret. Sauvages Civilis\u00e9s, Soldats Indiens De Mugi Das Cruzas (Province De St Paul) Combattant Des Botocudos<\/em> (1834), Lithograph. Guita and Jos\u00e9 Mindlin Brazilian Library Archive (USP)<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Ana Magalh\u00e3es, in turn, developed a study to identify how the work Formas \u00fanicas da continuidade no espa\u00e7o <\/em>(Unique forms of continuity in space), of the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni (1882\u20131916), arrived in Brazil. The original, which was done in plaster and today belongs to the archives at MAC-USP, is one of 11 pieces that the artist displayed in a futurist sculpture exposition in Paris in 1913. \u201cAfter his death, only three of the plaster sculptures he had presented in this exposition remained. We needed to know if the piece at MAC-USP was one of them,\u201d said the researcher. Through interdisciplinary studies that involved X-ray analyses and material-reading techniques, it was identified that the plaster sculpture of the MAC-USP archive is, in fact, that which was exhibited by the artist at that time.<\/p>\n

When Boccioni died, the sculpture was sold to a Milanese aristocrat and later to the futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1976\u20131944). Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho (1898\u20131977) bought it in 1952 and donated it to the MAC-USP archive in 1963. \u201cArt historians tend to treat events, such as the acquisition of Boccioni\u2019s work of art or the donation of the etchings by Rockefeller, as subject matter that is apart from Brazilian artistic historiography, but the return visits to the archive confirmed that they should be included as part of this history,\u201d concludes Magalh\u00e3es.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Collection located in a S\u00e3o Paulo museum reveals that an etching served as a platform for circulating North American art in Brazil ","protected":false},"author":601,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[204],"coauthors":[1600],"class_list":["post-311867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","tag-visual-arts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311867"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311888,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311867\/revisions\/311888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311867"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=311867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}