Sacred Art

Pravina Shukla, Henry Glassie

Description

Sacred art flourishes today in northeastern Brazil, where European and African religious traditions have intersected for centuries. Professional artists create images of both the Catholic saints and the African gods of Candomblé to meet the needs of a vast market of believers and art collectors.

Over the past decade, Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla conducted intense research in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco, interviewing the artists at length, photographing their processes and products, attending Catholic and Candomblé services, and finally creating a comprehensive book, governed by a deep understanding of the artists themselves.

Beginning with Edival Rosas, who carves monumental baroque statues for churches, and ending with Francisco Santos, who paints images of the gods for Candomblé terreiros, the book displays the diversity of Brazilian artistic techniques and religious interpretations. Glassie and Shukla enhance their findings with comparisons from art and religion in the United States, Nigeria, Portugal, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, and Japan and gesture toward an encompassing theology of power and beauty that brings unity into the spiritual art of the world.

An Introduction
1. The Historical Center
2. Modern Masters of Sacred Art
3. The Sculptor's Story
4. Markets for Sacred Art
5. Ibimirim: Carvers in the Sertão
6. Maragojipinho: Sacred Clay in Bahia
7. Tracunhaém: Sacred Clay in Pernambuco
8. Painting in Olinda
9. Carving in Cachoeira
10. Return to Pelourinho
11. Saints and Orixás in Pelourinho
12. Smiths of the Sacred
13. The Painter of Orixás
14. Power and Beauty
15. Time Passes
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Themes
• Subjects
• Religious
• Religión
• Folclore
• América del Sur
• Painting
• Catholicism
• South America
• Anthropology
• Art
• Religion
• Brazil
• Statues
• Candomblé
• Folklore
• Sculpture
• Peinture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253032065
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 32 Mo

Extrait

SACRED
ART
Edival Rosas with his statue of Nossa Senhora da Concei o in progress. Jau , 2007
SACRED
ART
Catholic Saints and Candombl Gods in Modern Brazil
HENRY GLASSIE and PRAVINA SHUKLA
Photographs and Drawings by the Authors
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2018 by Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in China
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Glassie, Henry, author. | Shukla, Pravina, author.
Title: Sacred art : Catholic saints and Candomble gods in modern Brazil / Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017019014 (print) | LCCN 2017018453 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253032065 (E-book) | ISBN 9780253032058 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Christian saints in art. | Orishas in art. | Folk art-Brazil, Northeast-History-21st century.
Classification: LCC N8079.5 (print) | LCC N8079.5 .G59 2018 (ebook) | DDC 745.0981/0905-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019014
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18
C ONTENTS
An Introduction
1 The Historical Center
2 Modern Masters of Sacred Art
3 The Sculptor s Story
4 Markets for Sacred Art
5 Ibimirim: Carvers in the Sert o
6 Maragojipinho: Sacred Clay in Bahia
7 Tracunha m: Sacred Clay in Pernambuco
8 Painting in Olinda
9 Carving in Cachoeira
10 Return to Pelourinho
11 Saints and Orix s in Pelourinho
12 Smiths of the Sacred
13 The Painter of Orix s
14 Power and Beauty
15 Time Passes
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SACRED
ART
Our book is dedicated to
Divya and Bobby
and to
Edival and Izaura

Izaura Rosas with S o Roque. Salvador, 2016
AN INTRODUCTION
A T THE END WE WALKED UP THE L ADEIRA DO C ARMO to say goodbye to Izaura. She had just finished painting a new image of S o Roque that Edival carved and a Portuguese customer wanted to buy, and she gave us a ride out to the Feira de S o Joaquim, so we could say farewell to Jorge and Samuel. We found them both in their workshops, making iron images of Ogum. After warm hugs, they all asked when we would be back. When this book is published, we answered, we ll return to give copies to all the book s artists. Projects like this, from beginning to book, always take about a decade of work.
This one began one sweet evening in Salvador when we went to hear a friend of ours, Z u Lobo, play in a caf . His voice flowed over his guitar s rhythmic complexity, and we were hit by an idea. His songs, the popular classics of the national repertory, were hymns of praise to Brazil. We had already been talking with artists in Brazil, mainly to gain information useful for comparison in projects we had going in other places, in the United States and in the Yorubaland of Nigeria. But suddenly a project in Brazil took shape. We would seek artists who created images of Brazil, paintings and sculpture that, like Z u Lobo s songs, enfold a Brazilian idea of Brazil. Brazilians love their place, a tropical country blessed by God, in the words of Pa s Tropical, one of the standards of Brazilian popular music. We find the country enticing because of its people, and we were off on a quest.
Ethnographic work of the kind we do is like photography. The informational photograph focuses clearly on its subject in context, inevitably pulling in random and productively disruptive facts, while intentionally excluding other things. Brazil is vast. To step back for a long shot and focus on the whole nation would yield a view so hazy that it would lack the fine detail the writer needs and obscure the individuals, the real people with their real names and words and works, from whom deep understanding expands. Having been around Brazil, casually learning a bit about artists and art, we chose to restrict ourselves to the Northeast.
The Northeast, poor and agricultural by contrast with the rich and industrial South, is where Native, European, and African cultures first fused into something new and Brazilian. The Northeast fits into the regional mosaic of the nation as the source of religious, musical, and artistic traditions - all of them distinctively Brazilian and some of them conspicuously African in origin - that have spread over the country to become markers of national identity. Artists in the Northeast work to meet the needs of their neighbors and they find profitable markets in the South, in Rio and S o Paulo.
In motion on the land, thankful for efficient public transportation, we came to feel that two of the states of the Northeast, Bahia and Pernambuco, offered a sufficiency of diversity, enough variety in setting, urban and rural, and enough variety in population, in race, class, gender, and age, to serve as generally representative. Those states still make a place plenty spacious; people in Bahia like to say that their state is as big as France, which it nearly is. So, our story of Brazil centers in the Northeast and our story of the Northeast centers in Bahia and Pernambuco. Such focusing and exclusion makes ethnographic endeavor feasible.
All of the art of the Northeast, the lace and pottery and sculpture, can be read as implicitly Brazilian, but we chose to focus on the explicitly Brazilian, the overtly representational. Not that we identify art with the pictorial, the representational. As everyone should, we appreciate the abstract aspect of modernism as it developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Even more we admire the art of Islam in which the possibilities of abstraction in art, in calligraphic karalama and geometrically figured textiles and ceramics, have been explored for more than a millennium. And still more we reject, as a figment of class prejudice, the division of art from craft by medium. All art requires craft; all craft holds a potential for art. Art is not to be defined universally by medium; the medium is a factor of chance: some are fated to paint, others to sweat at the forge. Nor is art defined by the eye of the beholder, the rhetoric of the auction catalog, or the fat purse of the patron. We follow Kandinsky, Leach, Coomaraswamy, and Suzuki in defining art by sincerity and passion - by the devotion of the creator. Devotion can yield, artistic action can yield, the representational or the abstract or the utilitarian, and often enough all of that at once, but looking for art that - among other things - is intended to evoke Brazil, we sought the representational.

This book s portion of Brazil
In some places, of course, in Muslim Pakistan or Protestant Appalachia, our representational focus would leave little to consider. But not in Bahia and Pernambuco. At work, we quickly recognized a distinction among the artists between sacred and quotidian representations. Our goal from the start was a book about both, but once it came our time to write, it is this simple, we had met too many people, taken too many pictures, recorded too many interviews. The artists were unsuspicious, gracious, and grateful for the attention. A few of them had been interviewed briefly before during surveys reported in handsome Brazilian publications, but we lingered and let the recorder run. We came back, came back again, and the artists thanked us for letting them say what they wanted to say. So, awash in data, we split the results, imagining a future book on the quotidian, on painting in Pelourinho, sculpture in Alto do Moura, and woodblock prints in Bezerros. Quotidian imagery will appear from time to time, providing pertinent context, but this book is centered on the sacred, a subject significantly complex since the Brazilian sacred is both European and African. That s what makes it distinctively Brazilian. There are two simultaneous and interlinked traditions of faith and creation that artists shape and reshape by transforming earthly materials into celestial images. Out of one tradition the Catholic saints appear, from the other come the African gods of Candombl . This book is about that.
Allow us to introduce ourselves. We are a married couple, both of us professional folklorists trained in anthropology, inheritors of the traditions of Boas and Synge. Together we combine ethnographic experience in the United States, and in Ireland, England, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, Japan, and Nigeria - as well as Brazil. Pravina was raised in Brazil. Portuguese was her first language, and she conducted all the interviews in Portuguese, transcribed them in Portuguese, and then we carefully translated the transcriptions into English to preserve the distinctive qualities of individual speakers. The interviews, as you will see, provide the book s foundation. Pravina s parents were born in India, she speaks the Portuguese of S o Paulo like a native, and she was always taken for Brazilian. Henry was sometimes mistaken for a ga cho from the South. His Portuguese, though, is a sort of botched Italian, useful for reading, worthless in conversation, but hav