ART AND THE GREAT TRADITION

I have just paid the princely sum of £25 (US $40) for one of my greatest cultural investments of recent years. In a second-hand bookshop in Brasilia I came across a copy of Masterpieces of Western Art, edited by Ingo P. Walther, presumably taking time off from making guns, and edited by Taschen. The shop wanted the equivalent of £100 for it so I bought it on the Internet and to save on postage had it delivered to my home in Wales. I have just got back and opened the package, to be stunned by the contents: two heavy volumes containing every masterpiece you would wish to see, from the Middle Ages until today. When I go to London my first stop is usually the National Gallery to visit the old friends who wait patiently for me on its walls and now they have come to stay with me permanently on my bookshelf – and brought their friends from all over Europe. The content of these books would be a bargain at any price but what is astounding is the physical quality: the reproduction is pin sharp and sometimes you think you have turned over two pages at once, such is the weight of the paper that has been used.

These artists represent the Great Tradition in European painting and their works make up the stock of references to which our civilisation turns: those mediaeval religious paintings remind us of one of the pillars of our civilisation; these Renaissance imaginings of classical figures remind us of another; the portraits of hard-faced Italian mercenaries, German moneychangers and English landowners allude to the lives of those individuals to give us various lessons in how to deal with our lives today.

But what, you may well ask, is the contribution of this tradition to the rest of the world? Let me explain first of all that in Brazil I translate books on art from Portuguese into English, a task that has been very instructive in teaching me about art and culture in that country. Secondly, just before I returned from there two days ago, while looking for cheap thrillers to read on the aeroplane I bought in that same bookshop a used copy of a book on American (US) painting. Although I only had time to quickly glance at it before leaving, the three strands of painting and culture represented in these experiences gave rise to some thoughts.

The major idea that has struck me is: how do ‘newly-invented’ countries develop a cultural and artistic tradition to use as their reference points? This is especially interesting when we compare and contrast the traditions of the USA and Brazil. In many ways the two share historic parallels – both founded by Europeans who imposed a culture on a pre-existing indigenous base; both immensely large in area and possessing vast mineral wealth; both benefiting from, and subsequently struggling with the legacy of, slavery; both maintaining linguistic and, to a great extent, cultural unity.

And then they have their differences: the USA seamlessly inherited the global influence of the British Empire whereas Brazil’s relationship with the remnants of the Portuguese empire is limited to the rather futile Organisation of Portuguese-Speaking Countries; internally, the United States devastated its natural heritage of forests and hills to become the most powerful economic power in the world whereas Brazil is devastating its natural heritage to export raw materials to be manufactured or consumed in other, more economically powerful countries; culturally the USA dominates the global film industry and its television programmes appear everywhere whereas Brazil made some small global impact with bossa nova but its only other globally recognised ‘cultural’ brand is football.

If we turn to the more specific theme of painting we find that while the USA probably benefited from its proximity to Europe as a base for establishing its own themes and traditions. Brazil suffered from two problems: its distance from the metropolis, which made it a less attractive destination for an artist to re-establish himself, and also the weaker position of Portugal itself in terms of an artistic tradition. The Reformation in northern Europe had freed painters from the near-monopoly of the Catholic Church while Portuguese painters were still mainly restricted to religious painting and portraiture.

Nevertheless, when the Portuguese Court was removed to Brazil by reason of the invasion of Napoleon, one of the first things the King did was to set up a School of Fine Arts, but the next step, after the fall of the French tyrant, was to invite a group of French artists to Brazil to ‘kickstart’ art in the country. This led to a social division in Brazilian art: the social elite studied at the School of Fine Arts while the slaves and recently-released slaves were employed to paint in churches religious works they copied from illustrations in European books. Links with European traditions also were maintained by scholarships that took promising painters (not all of them from the social elite) to Europe, but there remained much more of a gulf between the United States of Brazil and Europe than there was between the United States of America and Europe.

One of the reasons for this lies quite simply in the physical differences between the two countries. The landscape of North America is not markedly different from that in many parts of Europe but the painter stepping off the boat in 19th-century Rio de Janeiro was faced with a landscape that does not exist in his artistic tradition and walked into an Atlantic rainforest which was totally new in terms of its representational demands. How do you begin to paint the profusion of plants in a jungle when you have never seen a jungle before? 

And a third element of the influences referred to above comes into play - a social difference exists as well: the racial separation between the three main groups in North America – indigenous, European and African – was then as now much more marked than in Brazil. American indians appear in 19th-century US paintings merely as Romantic, 'walk-on' figures and black people hardly at all, so the subject-matter of social painting is recognisably European. With the smaller numbers of Europeans colonising Brazil, miscegenation was inevitable and so the representation in painting of these different physical types is more blurred. The painter in Brazil has to paint a new kind of society.

Nevertheless, the European scholarships provided for Brazilian painters and the influence of the latter when they returned to Brazil, provided a sense of tradition and a line of logic in painting that lasted until the disaster of the Week of 1922. Note that I am writing this from the safety of my home in Wales otherwise I would be liable to assassination at the hands of enraged Brazilians for referring to their famous Week as a disaster, but let’s take a closer look at it.

In literature TS Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922. What is significant about this year? It is three years after four of the most catastrophic years in European history - the First World War.  European history is an almost non-stop chronicle of war, so why should this one have been one of its greatest disasters? First because European civilisation had reached the point when it should have been possible for rational diplomacy to avoid war, especially as most of the heads of state involved were related to one another. Second because the results of rational industrial methods (mass production of both traditional military items as well as of civilian goods such as barbed wire, mass transport and poisonous chemicals) were forced into service to perform an irrational mass extinction of human beings. Thirdly, this was a truly world War, fought in Europe, Africa and the Middle East and, as the gravestones on the Western Front indicate, involving also soldiers from Canada, New Zealnd, Australia and India, and labourers were even brought from China to dig trenches.

To those who had followed or participated in the Great Tradition of European culture represented by its magnificent literature and by the paintings contained in the books I have just bought, and used that tradition as a source of reference believing it illustrated and assisted the process of working towards a civilised way of life, the self-destruction of European civilisation in World War I was traumatic. The invention of photography before the War had already caused painters to rethink their art and this feeling intensified in the 1920s.

For Brazil, which had always looked to Europe for its values, the situation was similar to watching one parent murdering another. Suddenly the country had to look for its own values within its own traditions, but so little investment had been made in either of those elements that new art had to be created out of very little, and by a restricted number of people.  This restriction was caused not only by the rigid social hierarchy of Brazil but also because economic and social development still clung mainly to the Atlantic coastline. Where there was agricultural development in the interior, primitive transport facilities limited the exchange of people and ideas.

The United States, by contrast, had two coastlines, no impenetrable interior and easy communication between developed cities throughout its territory. For example, after the First War artists travelled to the American Southwest by means of the Santa Fe Railroad and the railway company then used their work in advertisements to popularise the region and attract people to visit it. In addition, the US education system, which included scholarships to higher education, was well-developed and could teach art widely throughout the country, while again its proximity to Europe meant that even young people without much money (e.g. Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald) could go to Europe in larger numbers than their Brazilian counterparts. In that Europe they discovered the ruins of a once-proud civilisation but, like TS Eliot, they had enough in common with it that they could use those ruins on which to build their new culture. During the subsequent depression years of the 1920s the US government used some of its vast wealth to create financial schemes to support artists and the first of these produced 15,000 works in one year. Portuguese-speaking Brazilians found very little in Europe that they could relate to because their society was so different from that of either Portugal or the rest of the continent.

But the most profound difference in the reactions of the USA and Brazil to World War I was that America, which had started the war with an army smaller than that of Portugal, used it to gain a foothold in Europe which it has never given up. Brazil on the other hand, except for maintaining certain cultural links with France, turned away from Europe and in the Week of Modern Art in 1922, staked its claim to the creation of its own form of Modernism based in Brazil.  One of the elements of the Modernist movement that played a part in the 1922 Week was that of ‘Anthropophagy’, a reference to the cannibal tradition attributed to the original inhabitants of Brazil, especially the consumption of Bishop Sardinha. The Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade, one of the instigators of the Week, understood the idea of ‘antropophagism’ or cultural cannibalism in the sense of taking what Europe had to offer, consuming it, and using it for Brazilian artistic purposes. Unfortunately, if we follow that analogy to its logical conclusion, the results can only be called shit.

Nevertheless, we can see the reasoning behind this thinking: if the Great Tradition of Europe has resulted in catastrophe and if Portugal has become such a geopolitical nonentity that the troops it sent to World War I had to be pulled out of the front line and set to digging trenches, it is logical that Brazil should feel the need to look for its own roots. At the start of this new movement the elite artists had the paradoxical advantage of having studied in Europe and were able to turn to national themes with a technical background based in the Great Tradition. Tarsila do Amaral, one of the more original painters in the group and possibly the most successful, used to invite Picasso and the boys to Brazilian lunches in Paris when she was studying and painting there. It is later, as the European connection begins to fade, that I feel Brazilian painting gets out of its depth. In an attempt to overcome that problem, some artists turned to the United States while others turned to the heritage of black art that had been preserved by slaves.

Here again it is an advantage to be writing from a distance because I have to make the heretical statement that the visual heritage of African art is rather limited. We have the Benin bronzes, wooden carvings and textile designs. We have the figures of a cosmology that were taken to Brazil to produce the Afro-Brazilian religions. We have the music that once did produce the core of Brazilian popular music, and that is about it. Of course African art was produced during the whole of the period encompassed by my two volumes of European masterpieces but we simply don’t have a record of most of it. Black Brazilian artists have gone to Africa in search of their cultural roots but it is a hard historical fact that the recoverable roots found there are very shallow.

And the moral of the story? Certainly in Britain, painting seems to have lost its way; any society that can support the playful antics of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Gilbert and George cannot be taken seriously. In Brazil you can go to the São Paulo Biennial and I challenge you to find any work of art you would wish to give house room to. I must confess that I am not conversant with the very latest US painters but again we have to recall that it was the blue-rinsed matrons of America who made the fortune of the meaningless hollow man, Andy Warhol.

The solution? To follow the advice of Voltaire and do what I have been doing this afternoon after four months away, ‘cultiver notre jardin’, prowl the markets until you see a work of real value, pounce on it and buy it.