Dressing or undressing the Harlequin?

Modernisms, regional disputes, and images of the nation in Brazil

by

Durval Muniz Albuquerque Júnior

São Paulo! comoção da minha vida...
Meus amores são flores feitas de original... Arlequinal!...
Trajes de losangos...
Cinza e ouro...
Luz e bruma...
Forno e inverno morno...
Elegâncias sutis sem escândalos, sem ciúmes...
Perfumes de Paris...
Arys!
Bofetadas líricas no Trianon...
Algodoal!...
São Paulo! comoção da minha vida...
Galicismo a berrar nos desertos da América!
Arlequinal!...Traje de losangos...
Cinza e ouro...

São Paulo! My life’s commotion...
My loves are flowers made of original...
Harlequinal!...
Lozenge costumes......
Grey and gold
Light and mist...
Oven and warm winter...
Subtle elegance without scandals, without jealousy...
Parisian perfumes...
Arys!
Lyrical slaps on the Trianon...
Cotton crop!...
São Paulo! My life’s commotion...
Gallicism screaming in the deserts of America!
Harlequinal!... Lozenge costume...
Grey and gold

(Mário de Andrade, Pauliceia Desvairada)

The presence of the figure of the Harlequin is a constant in the poetic and literary production of Mário de Andrade (1893-1945). In his book, Pauliceia Desvairada, published in 1922, the year of the Modern Art Week, it is used to express what would be the patched, multicolored (including from the ethnic-racial perspective), plural and diverse body of the city of São Paulo. The Harlequin – a classic character from the Italian Commedia dell'Arte, a kind of jester who dresses in patchwork, with lozenges of various colors, and who, being sagacious and seductive, steals the Columbine from the wretched Pierrot in love –, is a figure that stands between the comic and the tragic, carrying a certain melancholy, a certain cynicism or nihilism, very close to representing Mário de Andrade’s own way of seeing the world. We can say the Arlequim, this composite and torn figure, is a kind of alter ego of the São Paulo intellectual. It also implicitly appears in the title of his next book of poems, published in 1926, O Losango Cáqui [The Khaki Lozenge]. The geometric figure of the lozenge is what characterizes the harlequinal being, a geometric figure resembling a square, positioned and seen upside down, the other way around, crossed, referring to the idea of disarray, out of order and place. The character's laughable or comical personality would be indicted by his disheveled, multicolored clothing, where everything seems to be scrambled.

The adjective harlequinal, a neologism often used by Mário de Andrade, will appear in his greatest work, Macunaíma, published in 1928, defining the very image of Brazil, of the Brazilian nationality. Brazil would be a harlequinal nation, that is, a nation marked, above all, by the diversity of colors, by the chromatic diversity of its body, its natural and human clothing. As a black man, Mário de Andrade pays attention to what would be the skin, the epidermis of the nation. He tends to define the national identity, consistent with the racialist theories in fashion, but in opposition to them, by racial diversity, by the mixing and miscegenation of the races that form the nationality. Macunaíma is a hero without any character because he embodies and symbolizes a nation that also lacks a precise characterization, a nation with a composite and gangly body, as was the hero of our people. The fact of being homosexual – an element that is little considered for the analysis of his work, even more than his blackness (there is an embarrassed and embarrassing silence of the faithful disciples around the theme, deemed irrelevant to the understanding of what he writes) –, added to the fact that he is black, gives Mário de Andrade the identity of a Harlequim, a buffoon. Those who, despite being at Court, frequenting the halls of palaces, sharing a table with the powerful, even having become one of them, always feel out of place, have this distant and ironic look at everything, and even of himself, always considering himself a kind of clown, a man with a masked face, who hides his true face, his true skin, under the whitewash of the rice powder and who, under the mask and only with it, lets go of the laughter and the relativizing mockery of everything that is taken seriously. Laughter that can hide tears, that can hide pain, suffering and melancholy. A character who can fascinate and seduce the public, even if he remains in absolute solitude when he leaves the center and the lights of the arena.

Therefore, we must only look at Mario de Andrade’s work to find an image of the nation that emphasizes diversity, plurality, the difficulty in defining a face, a character, a spirit, an identity for a homeland marked by multiplicity, both in its ethnic composition, and in its natural landscapes, both in terms of the different processes of historical formation of its different spaces, generating deep inequalities and regional singularities, as well as in the differentiated process of modernization and in the different impacts that modernity will have on the immense territory of the country. It is common to discuss, therefore, the different images of the nation that will be elaborated by the modernist works, which will be present in the speeches of its artists and intellectuals, especially if we consider the diversity of modernist manifestations in the country. There are several images of the country that appear in these different manifestations of modernist aesthetics, in the various regional spaces into which the national territory is divided. The purpose of this text is to think, precisely, the very image of the nation that appears when we consider the different occurrences of modernism among us. Could it be that, if we look at the various modernism events that were gestated in different locations in Brazil, the Harlequin might appear again as a possible image to represent the reality that would emerge from it?

The curious thing is that the realization that São Paulo and Brazil had a harlequinal face does not seem to be to the liking of the great São Paulo intellectual leadership. The cultural and artistic militancy undertaken by Mário de Andrade, throughout his career, seems to have gone against the acceptance of the patched up, fragmented, broken character of Brazilian culture. He was a militant in the sense that he worked so that São Paulo's hegemony at the national level, which was already visible on the economic and political level, could be extended to the cultural field. The very narrative that he built around the event of the Semana de Arte Moderna [Modern Art Week] and modernism, giving absolute centrality to São Paulo and silencing the participation of artists and intellectuals from other states in the movement and even in the Semana – when they appear, they do so to support the movement's core in São Paulo –, explains that in his militancy there is a desire to assassinate the Harlequin, to remove his clothes, or, at least, to dress, along with his modernist peers like the Harlequin, giving it the clothing and colors of their choice. The series of articles he published in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, in 1942, when the Semana de Arte Moderna celebrated its 20th anniversary, later bundled into the book O Movimento Modernista [The Modernist Movement], published in the same year, became the master narrative, not only to narrate the history of modernism in Brazil, but also to narrate the history of culture, literature, thought and the arts in the country. The Modern Art Week, which took place in the city of São Paulo, in February 1922, became the founding event, the myth of origin not only of modernism, but of modernity itself in the country. Everything arises and everything goes through this ephemeral event, through these five days of scandal, debates, and controversies. The city of São Paulo is erected as the nuclear space of Brazilian modernity, completely obscuring other important urban centers in the country, including its capital, Rio de Janeiro, as well as Porto Alegre, Salvador, Recife, Belém, etc. The Harlequin seems to be stripped of his clothes and, in his place, a country with a monochromatic body appears, with a pronounced navel, the protuberance of the Serra do Mar. Perhaps the image of the khaki lozenge is a faulty act, a symptom of the desire for uniformity and opaque homogeneity that motivated Mário de Andrade's cultural militancy. The Modern Art Week, in which Carioca intellectuals and artists took part, such as Graça Aranha (author of the opening conference on the modern), Villa-Lobos, Di Cavalcanti (who in addition to exhibiting 11 works was the author of the cover of the Semana's catalog), as well as Northeastern artists – such as Vicente do Rego Monteiro - began to be narrated as an exclusively São Paulo event, if not stemming from São Paulo, thanks to the version prepared by the author who saw in our Macunaímic face a problem to be resolved.

The trip that Mário de Andrade took in 1927 in the company of the coffee baroness and patron of modernism, D. Olívia Guedes Penteado, her niece Margarida Guedes Nogueira and the daughter of Tarsila do Amaral, Dulce do Amaral Pinto, visiting what she called deep Brazil, the North and Northeast regions, searching for folkloric material, materials, and forms of expression said to be popular, regional and/or local, as well as his performance at the head of the Department of Culture of the city of São Paulo, which sponsored, between February and July 1938, the so-called folkloric research mission, also aimed at collecting and recording, using the most modern sound recording equipment available, the so-called manifestations of popular culture, aimed at the elaboration of a national and erudite culture, which he considered to be urgent and necessary.[1]

The image of the nation that appears, not only in his speeches and works, but in his actions, and in his cultural policy projects, is of a nation that needed to be unified from a center that generates and distributes meaning to the national whole. A nation, at the same time, cosmopolitan, informed of what was happening and becoming more modern, also from a technological perspective, and focused on its cultural roots, its traditions, its materials and popular, folkloric and authentic forms of expression, to turn them into material for the elaboration of a scholarly and cultured nation, capable of producing, according to the most modern international procedures, a culture both modern and original at the same time. However, a nation seen from above, not only from the Serra do Mar, from the heights of the pretensions of hegemony and geopolitical domination of the São Paulo elites, but also, as we can see from the company he chooses for his field trips, as well as his entourage’s hosts in each state, a nation seen from above from the social and class standpoint. Mário de Andrade is an exception, a fugitive among his brothers of color who, as it happens, must deal with the ideal of whitening, and, in a way, embody this explicit project of the elites of the state where he was born and where he worked. Dedication to intellectual life was a way of getting closer to the ideal of representation of whiteness. We can see from his narratives in his travel diary, published in 1977, called O Turista Aprendiz [The apprentice tourist], that he doesn’t identify with and has little empathy for the black and mestizo men and women he meets in his wanderings. There are statements and gestures that refer to a eugenic and racist view of poor men and women, from whom he wants to extract information and artistic performances that interest him.

For him, it was obvious that São Paulo was the space that should spearhead this process. In other regions of the country, in the deep Brazil, in the North and Northeast, he sought places which preserved the most authentically national cultural and artistic manifestations, the materials, and forms of expression with which he would produce culture and art that were both modern and Brazilian. Reproducing, within the country, the colonial logic that constituted it. The São Paulo intellectual, in the position of the avant-garde of cultural production, proposes to plunder the popular strata and the poorest places, which were on the outskirts of capitalist development, and their cultural riches, to give them a new value, to give them the new meaning of being representations and icons of national identity. For Mário de Andrade, the patched up and fragmented image of the nation, the carnivalesque and burlesque image of the country (remember that Mário de Andrade hated carnival, he said it was a sad party) should be replaced by a homogeneous and integral image, born of a work of transforming our diversity of realities and manifestations into the unity of a national and popular culture.

São Paulo, then, represented what was best and superior in the country's present, embodying its future in advance. After all, it was there that futurism – as modernism was called by many, in its first mentions –, appeared first. He had the mission (Mário had a predilection for that word of Christian and religious origin to name his actions) of rereading the national past, of collecting what was best in it, to build a future project for the country and its culture in the present. In line with how the Northeastern intellectuals and political agents themselves invented the Northeast region, it represented, for Mário de Andrade, the colonial past, the nation’s past, where one could find this past still alive, still singing, dancing and partying in the streets, in the terreiros of farms and mills, in the voice and body of the most humble people, not yet denationalized by foreign fashions, among which, contradictorily, modernism itself could be placed, as Gilberto Freyre, his rival in the country's intellectual leadership, will do.

Although he was part of a regional elite and undertook regionalist programs, Mário de Andrade, like a great part of the São Paulo intellectual elite and a great part of those who embraced modernist militancy, spoke and acted based on the concept and idea of the nation. The regionalism of São Paulo did not assume itself and was not seen as such because the political and cultural elites of that state intended to speak for the nation, to be the incarnation and spokespeople of nationality. Modernist nationalism, including that professed by intellectuals from other states in the country, was almost always a regionalism that was not assumed or seen as such. For the version of the history of modernism and Brazilian culture, elaborated by the leader of São Paulo intellectuals, to become hegemonic, to become the truth about modernism and its trajectory in the country, the intellectuals who were located in economically and politically non-hegemonic places at national level not only reproduced and passed on this version, but also placed themselves within this narrative, explaining their own intellectual and artistic trajectories based on Mario de Andrade’s narrative. In order to feel that they belonged to what would be the central spot of national culture, being part of the country's cultural avant-garde, many intellectuals and artists from these peripheries accepted the centrality of São Paulo, both in the capitalist economy and in the management of the Brazilian State, and acted as conveyors and representatives of this narrative, which reduced modernism to a pioneering initiative of a group of intellectuals and men of letters from São Paulo, placing that city as the generator and disseminator core of the new aesthetic.

As an example, we can mention the official version and established narrative around the biography of Luís da Câmara Cascudo, his intellectual trajectory and his role in Brazilian cultural life. Having been elaborated, to a large extent, both by himself and by disciples such as the folklorist Veríssimo de Melo, this narrative erases his participation, in the 1920s, in what Gilberto Freyre called the Regionalist and Traditionalist Movement (Movimento Regionalista e Tradicionalista).[2] When finishing his law degree at the 100-years old Recife Law School, Cascudo not only followed, but was also part of the regional movement promoted by the Centro Regionalista do Nordeste (Northeast Regionalist Center), an institution conceived by Freyre, founded in 1924, and which brought together several generations of intellectuals and politicians around the cultural and political militancy centered around the concept of region, the Northeast region. Câmara Cascudo not only was seen attending and taking part in the weekly meetings held by the Center, according to reports of these meetings published in the pages of the newspaper Diário de Pernambuco, he was also appointed representative of the institution in Rio Grande do Norte and a member of the editorial board of the magazine Nordeste, which the association intended to publish.[3]

It is true that Cascudo, since the beginning of his career, at the end of the 1910s, was already in contact with the São Paulo intelligentsia, notably with Monteiro Lobato, editor of Revista do Brasil, a periodical in which he published his first studies on folklore. He was always reticent and averse to placing himself under the intellectual leadership of Gilberto Freyre, establishing a certain rivalry from an early age, for the position of intellectual leadership in the Northeast region. In 1925, invited by Gilberto Freyre to be one of the intellectuals to collaborate in the Livro do Nordeste, an insert of the 100 years commemorative edition of the Diário de Pernambuco. Freyre declined the invitation, and would also not be present as a representative of his home state in the Regionalist Congress of 1926[4]. Câmara Cascudo, from an early age, contacted and started to exchange letters with Mário de Andrade (the first letter was sent on August 14, 1924, just over two years after the Modern Art Week), whom he received with great ceremony in his residence, the Principality of Tyrol, during folk studies journey undertaken by the modernist leader in 1928. He puts his car, one of the few in the city, at the disposal of the apprentice tourist and accompanies him on his journey through the countryside of the states of Rio Grande do Norte and Paraíba. Mário de Andrade, when registering his arrival in the city of Natal in his diary, calls it the kingdom of Cascudinho, from whom he enjoys the aristocratic hospitality (Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 224). The State President, Juvenal Lamartine, of whom Colonel Francisco Cascudo, father of the future eminent folklorist, was a cohort and friend, offers to the illustrious visitor a beach house located at Ponta do Morcego, on Areias Pretas beach, neighboring his own summer residence and that of the Cascudo family, as a gift. Câmara Cascudo will be responsible for getting rid of the annoying gift, whose paperwork was not yet formalized, when President Lamartine is overthrown by the so-called movement of the thirties, since the dubious nature of the donation and the situation of the land made the modernist chief fearful of being questioned in court.[5]

According to the established version about the intellectual trajectory of Câmara Cascudo, his decision to dedicate himself to folklore studies – since until the beginning of the thirties he had dedicated himself to other fields of knowledge such as literary criticism and historiography – is attributed to a “terrible” letter sent by Mário de Andrade, in 1937. In that letter, he made serious criticisms of what Cascudo had been producing until then and advised him to leave the comfort of his hammock, look around, see the cultural manifestations of a popular and traditional character, which would be threatened with disappearance with the changes that had been taking place in the country, and suggested that he dedicate himself to collecting and studying them (Oliveira, 70)[6]. The publication of Vaqueiros e cantadores, in 1939, the first Brazilian book on folklore studies, is thus attributed to the influence and almost imposition of the São Paulo intellectual leader, who gained the status of a national intellectual leader. It is possible to contest this version of Cascudo's biography. This is because he launched himself in the intellectual field in the early twenties, with articles on folklore and with the intention of becoming an intellectual of national scope, as he published his articles in the most prestigious cultural journal of the time: Revista do Brasil. This even enabled his contact with Mário de Andrade, since it is their mutual interest in popular matters and forms of expression as a basis for the construction of a national culture that makes them become friends and correspondents. But the curious thing is that Cascudo himself never publicly contested this narrative about his trajectory, possibly because it made him a participant in the cultural movement that became hegemonic in the country. To be considered a first-rate modernist, a disciple and friend of the top leader of that movement, to be considered the introducer of modern aesthetics in his state was a version of his intellectual life that was interesting to him (Oliveira, 67-69).

Moreover, one should consider the rivalry with Gilberto Freyre, whose intellectual leadership was instrumental for the elaboration of the idea of the Northeast. For this very reason, he had enormous prestige and prominence in regional terms, in addition to becoming, notably after the publication of Casa-Grande & Senzala, in 1933 – a book that became a classic soon after it was published –, a national intellectual leadership, to the point of intending to compete with Mário de Andrade, offering in his work another image of the nation, perhaps even more harlequinal than the one diagnosed by the São Paulo writer. This rivalry can be verified in a letter sent by Câmara Cascudo to the sociologist from Apipucos, towards the end of his life. In this letter, when referring to his participation in the meetings of the Centro Regionalista do Nordeste, he seems to purposely miss the name of the institution and call it Centro Nacionalista, thus affirming what had always been an argument to distance his intellectual trajectory and his work from any Freyrean influence. That is, Cascudo’s distrust of the regionalist project and his adherence to the concept of nation as the one around which their action in the cultural and intellectual fields was made[7].

Câmara Cascudo, by assuming the version of his intellectual life that made him a disciple of Mário de Andrade, also incorporated the role of someone who, when asked by the São Paulo intellectual, sends him folk material, information and data pertinent to the so-called popular traditions, so that his mentor can turn them into scholarly and artistic cultural products. By refusing to take the region as the space that delimits and gives meaning to his intellectual production, by placing everything he did as a product of the influxes of São Paulo’s modernism and placing himself as the one who brought the novelty of the Semana de Arte Moderna to his state, Cascudo contributes to undress the Harlequin and to the production of an image of a culturally unified nation, in the terms defended by Mário de Andrade. This is because even within the São Paulo modernism there was no consensus on which Brazil was desired, both from an aesthetic point of view and from a political point of view. Although they were all gathered when the Semana was held, artists and intellectuals such as Oswald de Andrade, Plínio Salgado, Menotti Del Picchia, Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti followed very different aesthetic and political paths[8]. Even Câmara Cascudo, when engaging in the integralist movement in the early thirties, is politically very distant from his so-called master.

The poet, essayist, journalist and lawyer from Pernambuco, Joaquim Inojosa (1901-1987), provides us with another example of an intellectual who was born and active in a place that was becoming peripheral and politically dependent in the capitalist development of the country, and who puts himself at the service, either consciously or not, of the São Paulo cultural hegemonical project that was spearheaded in the modernist militancy. He was still a student at the Recife Law School when he went to Rio de Janeiro, acting as secretary for an delegation of students from Pernambuco who were going to participate in the I International Congress of Students, one of the events commemorating the centenary of Brazil's independence. Therefore, in 1922 and at the age of 21, when going to São Paulo after the end of the Congress, he had the opportunity to meet, at the newspaper Correio Paulistano, some of the intellectuals who had just caused an intense cultural debate by holding the Semana de Arte Moderna. He meets Menotti Del Picchia and Oswald de Andrade and receives a copy of the Klaxon magazine and books from Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade (Oliveira, 180-189).[9] The first book of modernist poems by Mário de Andrade, the recently published Pauliceia Desvairada, is the inspiration for the title of the magazine he founded as soon as he returned to Recife, aiming to publicize the new aesthetic among his peers in Pernambuco: the Mauriceia magazine. The title makes an explicit reference to the book by Mário de Andrade, which would be the most modern in terms of poetry, and, at the same time, to the Dutch Count Maurício de Nassau, a legendary figure and founder of the capital of Pernambuco, once called Mauritius city. In other words, the past and present of the modern would meet there, since, in the established version of the city's history, elaborated by local historiography, the count's management had been a factor in the birth of the city as a modern one.

He seems to want to take the place of leadership of the movement in that region of the that was polarized, in economic and intellectual terms, by the city of Recife (a port where a large part of the production of neighboring states converged and a mecca for all those children of the elites who sought a university). In addition to residing in the central city of a vast area, he had family, political and intellectual connections with the state of Paraíba, as his mother, Ninfa Pessoa de Albuquerque Vasconcelos, belonged to the powerful Pessoa clan, in the municipality of Umbuzeiro. This clan headed the dominant oligarchy in the state and, for that very reason, Inojosa did part of his secondary studies at Lyceu Paraibano, in the state's capital, Paraíba do Norte (the name was changed to João Pessoa in 1930). To this end, two years later, in 1924, in the same year the Centro Regionalista do Nordeste was founded by Gilberto Freyre, Inojosa published a booklet entitled A arte moderna, a manifesto in favor of modernist aesthetics. The text affirmed the leadership of the São Paulo group in the Brazilian modernist movement and the Semana de Arte Moderna as a founding event of modern art in the country. I don’t think it is a mere coincidence that he chose the year 1924 to launch his manifesto in defense of São Paulo modernism. To become an intellectual leader in his city and region he had to rival Gilberto Freyre, who, since he had returned to Recife in 1923, with all the prestige of being one of the few Brazilian intellectuals with postgraduate studies, carried out at Columbia University, had become an undisputed intellectual leader, to the point of gravitating towards his surroundings literati from generations before his own, such as his own father, Alfredo Freyre.

Possibly, the booklet published by Inojosa already responded and confronted Freyre’s views. Even before arriving in Recife, Freyre was already constantly criticizing modernity and modernization, in the so-called numbered articles he sent from the United States to be published in the Diário de Pernambuco. Gilberto Freyre was a critic of São Paulo modernism from the beginning. He always considered it a foreign trend, a cosmopolitan movement that disfigured his idea of a true national culture, which Brazilian art should be. Joaquim Inojosa will spend his whole life competing with Gilberto Freyre, without ever being able to have the same prominence, either nationally or locally, as his competitor. But if his militancy is not decisive to erase the regionalist and traditionalist version of modernism, led by Freyre, it contributed greatly to the hegemony of Mario de Andrade’s narrative of the movement and its centrality in the history of culture, literature, and the arts in the country. We can say that, if Mário de Andrade intended to undress the Harlequin, which was the fragmented reality of culture and intellectual and artistic production in the country, Joaquim Inojosa was, in the Northeast, an important supporter in this task of providing the country with a homogeneous single face from the cultural point of view, which the very idea of nationality seemed to require.

During the period in which Brazil was under the government of Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945), the norm became that the nation should imply the production of a unity, of a homogeneous national identity, which implied the fight against regionalisms and local dissent, both in political and cultural terms. Notably, starting in the dictatorial period of the Estado Novo (1937-1945), the Vargas government will adopt a nationalist cultural policy, focusing on the need to create a national culture based on popular traditions. These would be the reserves of authenticity and cultural uniqueness in a country where the elites were foreign and cosmopolitan and were unaware and/or despised what was truly Brazilian. This affirmation of the nation as the space around which political, intellectual, and artistic action should take place implied a refusal of regionalisms, seen as dangerous and deleterious to national unity. Undressing the Harlequin becomes, at that moment, national policy. It is not a mere coincidence that nationalist intellectuals such as Mário de Andrade, Câmara Cascudo and Joaquim Inojosa sympathized with the regime and, in the case of Mário de Andrade, made part of the government, despite the initial resistance of the São Paulo elites, defeated in the so-called Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932. Câmara Cascudo even wrote a letter to the Minister of Education Gustavo Capanema putting himself at the disposal of the government to carry out tasks in the field of culture through his studies of popular traditions. According to him, he would be capable of teaching Brazilians about their own country.[10]

The symnbol of this refusal to regionalisms is the ceremony held in Praça Roosevelt, on November 27, 1937, in which President Vargas himself, on the occasion of the commemorations of the National Flag Day, had all the state flags burned and replaced each of them with the Brazilian flag. They were abolished by the Constitution of 1937, a charter that legitimized the implantation of the Vargas dictatorship of the Estado Novo and which had been prepared by a single jurist: Francisco Campos. When, during the Estado Novo, Mário de Andrade publishes his narrative about the Semana de Arte Moderna and about the trajectory of modernism in Brazilian culture, he does so at a very favorable moment. The centrality that he advocates for the São Paulo movement and the image of national culture that modernism aimed to produce – a culture at the same time modern, attuned to what was avant-garde from the perspective of form and aesthetics; but that focused on themes, on national and popular content –, was the one that guided the regime's own cultural policies.[11]

Gustavo Capanema, the powerful Minister of Education who held office for eleven years, between 1934 and 1945, was largely responsible for the regime's cultural activities and an enthusiast of modernism. He had the collaboration of important artists linked to the movement, such as Villa-Lobos and Cândido Portinari, even though the latter was ideologically distant from the proto-fascist orientations of the Vargas regime. The nationalist centralism of the Vargas State favored the victory of a uniform and homogenizing view of the cultural and artistic reality of the country, such as that built by the main hero of São Paulo modernism, who influenced the cultural policies of the regime and granted free transit in his offices. The Vargas regime wanted to undress the Harlequin, to the point of forbidding paintings that portrayed the black and mestizo face of the country to be exposed in international exhibitions. In the same way, it favored a cultural militancy that aimed to unify the national culture.

This conjuncture completely disfavored the regionalist and traditionalist militancy initiated by Gilberto Freyre and the group he led in the Northeast. Unlike São Paulo modernism, the aesthetic that Gilberto Freyre attributed to the Regionalist and Traditionalist Movement articulated modern form with themes that refer to an idea of Brazil and the rural and colonial Northeast. The Regionalist and Traditionalist Movement would be materialized by the set of initiatives in the cultural field that he would have led since returning from his studies in the United States and from a trip to several European countries, where he came into direct contact with modernist artists and with their aesthetic proposals, mainly through living with his countryman, the painter Vicente do Rêgo Monteiro, who hosted him in Paris and introduced him to modernist art. The creation of the Centro Regionalista do Nordeste (Northeast Regionalist Center), the Regionalist Congress of 1926, and his collaborations in newspapers and magazines fighting modernism, as it was proposed by the paulistas, presents aesthetic principles and proposals that, if not rejecting the modern form, subordinated its use to regional and traditional themes and contents. As one of the losers of 1930, since Gilberto Freyre was chief of staff of Estácio Coimbra, president of the state of Pernambuco, who had sided with the candidacy of Júlio Prestes, the officialism candidate for the presidency of the Republic, beaten by the civil and military coup headed by Getúlio Vargas, he will live a paradoxical situation in the thirties. This is because while his pioneering book – largely written in his exile in Portugal, where he was taken for his loyalty to the deposed president of Pernambuco – raises him to the post of a great name in the country's intelligentsia. At the same time, he is seen with distrust and is persecuted by those who represent the regime, notably at the local level, where he became a public opposer and a constant critic of the intervener Agamemnon Magalhães and his modernization policies.

His cultural militancy, in the thirties, remains consistent with his regionalist view of the nation. Gilberto Freyre, instead of wanting to undress the Harlequin, to overcome what Mário de Andrade considered to be the fragmented and torn body of the nation, sought to dress it with the diversity of colors that, for him, constituted the true face of the country. He did not consider the regionalism he defended incompatible with the idea of nation and always tried to affirm that his regionalism was limited to the cultural level, with no separatist intentions in the political sphere. Representing an elite that sees in the regional, in the construction of the idea of the Northeast region, a way of confronting the national domination of the elites of the Center-South, notably of São Paulo, Gilberto Freyre seems to realize that the cultural field is the only one not yet completely hegemonized by São Paulo, the only one in which the Northeastern intellectual elites, where those men of letters who had cultural capital, within an elite in economic and political decline, could still dispute the hegemony in national terms.[12] The image of the nation would result from this very process of resistance by the regional cultural and intellectual elites to the São Paulo modernist project. This project, although being also a regional project, pretended to be national, precisely in the quest to nationalize itself, to expand throughout the country, destroying what he called local singularities.

His first book, Casa Grande & Senzala, published in 1933, offers a narrative of the historical formation of the country, privileging racial diversity and, at the same time, what would be the harmonious coexistence and the mixture between the three matrix races of nationality, extending the notion of miscegenation to the cultural field. Not only from the point of view of the formation of its population, but from the cultural point of view, Brazil would be a country marked by the diversity and multiplicity of colors and formal matrices. Brazil could be connected only to a European and white aesthetic, which he believed the São Paulo modernism proposed. In 1934, the year after the release of his debut book, he organized the 1st Congress of Afro-Brazilian Studies[13] in the city of Recife with the support of the director of the National Museum, Roquette-Pinto, and of Ulysses Pernambucano, a pioneer in psychiatric studies in Recife. In the midst of a regime that counted on the participation of intellectuals who embraced eugenist theses for the improvement and whitening of the national race, such as Oliveira Vianna and Cassiano Ricardo, who would increasingly show sympathy for the Nazi-fascist regimes with their official racist policies, Freyre’s initiative, in the sense of affirming the importance of the contribution of Africans and their descendants to Brazilian history and culture, puts him in the opposite direction of the regime’s expectations, which contributes to his version of modernism being forgotten.

By publishing the book Nordeste in 1937, in addition to consolidating the imagetic-discursive elaboration of this regional identity, he will reaffirm, in the same year the state flags were burned, the importance of regional studies and of the regions to understand the history of the country. Furthermore, he will once again place the northeastern space and its sugar-producing elites, as he had done in his pioneering book, at the origins of nationality itself, while at the same time holding them responsible for many of the ecological and environmental problems experienced by the region, which would be one of the reasons for its decline. The book seems to reaffirm the harlequinal character of the nation, if we take the category adopted by Mário de Andrade to define the country, understanding it as the sum of its regions, the amalgamation of its regional particularities. Representative of a defeated and subordinated elite in the process of constitution of the independent, modern, and republican nation, Gilberto Freyre opposes the homogeneous image of the nation formulated by the winners in the economic and political arena who were headed, if there was no resistance, towards dominance in the intellectual field, especially when the creation of universities increasingly centralized intellectual production in the Center-South. Soon he would have to face competition and fierce opposition from the São Paulo school of sociology and from historians linked to the University of São Paulo. Having chosen to remain outside the University, he will find it increasingly difficult to make himself heard when it comes to academic production in the country, although he enjoys enormous prestige abroad where his reading of the country's history forms generations of scholars.

The nation, for Freyre, contrary to what Mário de Andrade thought, and unlike what Câmara Cascudo and Joaquim Inojosa espoused, was constituted by its different regional realities, which should be preserved in their authenticity and singularity, serving as a starting point for the elaboration of a national culture marked by diversity and polychromy. It is not a mere coincidence that when he brought together his articles on literary and artistic criticism, in which he presented what would be his guidelines for the production of a traditionalist and regionalist art – since for him the region was anchored in the past and represented a reserve of tradition – , he named the anthology Vida, forma e cor (Life, form and color). He always criticized the São Paulo modernism using formal arguments in which the issue of local colors and the reflection of regional life stands out. We can say that he launches chromatic arguments against modernism, as he considers that modernists are unaware of local colors, the colors and shapes from the colonial past. Thus, they let themselves be enchanted by the gray and brown of the cities, of the modern artifacts. The question was not, therefore, just about being or not being harlequinal, dressing or undressing the Harlequin, but also the colors that would dye the lozenges of his clothing. If Mário de Andrade seems to dream of khaki lozenges, of a Harlequin stripped of his colorful and torn clothes, to wear a monochromatic and one-piece outfit, Gilberto Freyre wants to dress the Harlequin in colonial colors, with reds, yellows, greens, pinks and blues of the landscapes and buildings belonging to the colonial past, at the time of splendor and glory of the Pernambuco slave elite, from which he was a descendant and whose dominion and nobility he seemed to miss.

NOTES

[1] See Andrade, Mário de. O turista aprendiz. Brasília, IPHAN, 2015; AndradeE, Mário de. Missão de pesquisas folclóricas: música tradicional do Norte e Nordeste. São Paulo, SESC-SP, 2006.

[2] See Sales Neto, Francisco Firmino. Palavras que silenciam: Câmara Cascudo e o regionalismo-tradicionalista nordestino. João Pessoa, Ed. da UFPB, 2008.

[3] See Albuquerque Jr. Durval Muniz de. A feira dos mitos: a fabricação do folclore e/ou da cultura popular (Nordeste, 1920-1950). São Paulo: Intermeios, 2013.

[4] See Sales Neto, Francisco Firmino. Palavras que silenciam; Freyre, Gilberto & outros. Livro do Nordeste. Recife: Secretaria da Justiça/Arquivo Público Estadual, 1979. (Edição fac-similada)

[5] See Tércio, Jason. Em busca da alma brasileira: biografia de Mário de Andrade. São Paulo: Estação Brasil, 2019; Letter from Mário de Andrade to Luís da Câmara Cascudo, 11 de janeiro de 1931 (Acervo Ludovicus – Instituto Câmara Cascudo).

[6] See, also, Letter from Mário de Andrade to Luís da Câmara Cascudo, June 9, 1937 (Acervo Ludovicus – Instituto Câmara Cascudo)

[7] Letter from Luís da Câmara Cascudo to Gilberto Freyre, 1940 (Acervo da Fundação Casa de Gilberto Freyre)

[8] See Amaral, Aracy and Barros, Regina Teixeira. Moderno onde? Moderno quando? A Semana de 22 como motivação. São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2021.

[9] See also INOJOSA, Joaquim. O movimento modernista em Pernambuco, 1º volume. Rio de Janeiro: Gráfica Tupy, 1968.

[10] See Letter from Luís da Câmara Cascudo to Gustavo Capanema, December 30, 1937 (Acervo do Ludovicus – Instituto Câmara Cascudo).

[11] See Chauí, Marilena. O nacional e o popular na cultura brasileira: seminários. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1984.

[12] See Albuquerque Jr, Durval Muniz de. The invention of the brazilian Northeast. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2014.

[13] See Freyre, Gilberto (ed.). Estudos Afro-Brasileiros: trabalhos apresentados ao 1º Congresso Afro-Brasileiro, Recife, 1934. Rio de Janeiro, Ariel, 1935 (2 volumes).

WORKS CITED

Albuquerque Jr., Durval Muniz de. A feira dos mitos: a fabricação do folclore e/ou da cultura popular (Nordeste, 1920-1950). São Paulo, Intermeios, 2013.

Albuquerque Jr., Durval Muniz de. The invention of the brazilian Northeast. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2014.

Andrade, Mário de. Pauliceia Desvairada. São Paulo, Casa Mayensa, 1922.

Andrade, Mário de. O Losango Cáqui. São Paulo, A. Tisi, 1926.

Andrade, Mário de. Macunaíma: o herói sem nenhum caráter. São Paulo, Oficinas Gráficas de Eugênio Cupolo, 1928.

Andrade, Mário de. O movimento modernista. In: Mário de Andrade. Aspectos da literatura brasileira. 6 ed. São Paulo, Livraria Martins Editora S.A, 1978, p. 231-255.

Andrade, Mário de. O turista aprendiz. Brasília, IPHAN, 2015.

ANDRADE, Mário de. Missão de pesquisas folclóricas: música tradicional do Norte e Nordeste. São Paulo, SESC-SP, 2006.

Amaral, Aracy e Barros, Regina Teixeira. Moderno onde? Moderno quando? A Semana de 22 como motivação. São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2021.

Cascudo, Luís da Câmara. Vaqueiros e cantadores: folclore poético dos sertões de Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte e Ceará. Porto Alegre, Globo, 1939.

Chauí, Marilena. O nacional e o popular na cultura brasileira: seminários. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1984.

Freyre, Gilberto. Casa-Grande & Senzala, Rio de Janeiro, José Olympio, 1933.

Freyre, Gilberto (org.). Estudos Afro-Brasileiros: trabalhos apresentados ao 1º Congresso Afro-Brasileiro, Recife, 1934. Rio de Janeiro, Ariel, 1935 (2 volumes).

Freyre, Gilberto et alii. Livro do Nordeste. Recife, Secretaria da Justiça/Arquivo Público Estadual, 1979. (Edição fac-similada)

Freyre, Gilberto. Nordeste: aspectos da influência da cana sobre a vida e a paisagem do Nordeste do Brasil. Recife, Fundação do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico de Pernambuco, 1985.

Freyre, Gilberto. Vida, forma e cor. São Paulo, Record, 1987.

Inojosa, Joaquim. O movimento modernista em Pernambuco, 1º volume. Rio de Janeiro, Gráfica Tupy, 1968.

Inojosa, Joaquim. A arte moderna. Rio de Janeiro, Cátedra, 1984.

Oliveira, Giuseppe Roncalli Ponce Leon. Correspondência de Luís da Câmara Cascudo: arquivos da criação e redes de sociabilidade intelectual. São Paulo, Universidade de São Paulo, 2016 (Tese de Doutorado em História)

Sales Neto, Francisco Firmino. Palavras que silenciam, Câmara Cascudo e o regionalismo-tradicionalista nordestino. João Pessoa, Ed. da UFPB, 2008.

Tércio, Jason. Em busca da alma brasileira: biografia de Mário de Andrade. São Paulo, Estação Brasil, 2019.