Ouro Preto: – 06/12/2023 – Tourism

Those who visit the historic cities of Minas Gerais today will find monuments, churches and works of art, representative of the Brazilian Baroque, duly restored and preserved. These cities, especially Ouro Preto, are true open-air museums with works by artists such as Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Aleijadinho, and Manuel da Costa Ataíde, among others. But it wasn’t like that before.

For a long time, these works were abandoned until a trip by a group of modernist intellectuals to these cities, almost a hundred years ago, was decisive in laying the foundations of the National Service for the Preservation of Brazilian Cultural Heritage, SPHAN.

The body was inaugurated in 1937, during the government of Getúlio Vargas, based on a preliminary project by writer Mário de Andrade. The modernists’ trip took place during Holy Week in 1924 and Mário himself took part, as well as Oswald de Andrade, the painter Tarsila do Amaral, the farmer Olivia Guedes Penteado, the writer and patron Paulo Prado and the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars.

The group intended to search for the roots of Brazilian art in what they called “the journey of discovery of Brazil”. The caravan left São Paulo by train towards the city of São João del-Rei. There, the group stayed at the Hotel Macedo, which kept the autographs of the illustrious visitors in its guest book for years.

With the humor that was peculiar to them, the modernists assumed other personalities when recording their passage through the city in the book. “D. Olívia Guedes Penteado, single, photographer, Anglaise, London. D. Tarsila do Amaral, single, dentist, American, Chicago. Blaise Cendrars, single, violinist, Allemand, Berlin. Mário de Andrade, single, farmer, black, Bahia. Oswald de Andrade Filho, single, writer, Swiss”.

The next stop was in the city of Congonhas, where one of Aleijadinho’s main works is located, the set of soapstone sculptures representing the 12 prophets, created between the years 1800 and 1805. In neighboring Tiradentes, Mário de Andrade recorded in a sheet of newspaper paper a poem that is still in the archives of the Institute of Brazilian Studies, at the University of São Paulo, along with its entire collection.

It is not known whether it was his authorship — if so, it is unpublished, because it was never published — or whether he collected it from someone popular, as was his custom. In the text, the writer adopts the old name of the city, São José Del Rey and uses his usual freedom to spell the words in his own way: “There was a prisoner in S. José d´el Rey / For many years, a month and one day / That I’m imprisoned in S. José d’el Rey If I ate a man’s heart / If I drank his hot blood / What do others have to do with that?”.

It was there in that city that a passage also took place, mentioned by Mário de Andrade, years later, in an interview: “In a certain city, we were the object of popular curiosity, due to the large number of people and luggage”, said Mário. “And, when we were counting the suitcases at the hotel, I was approached by a member of the public who wanted to know if we were from the circus. Then, in a moment of inspiration, I asked Tarsila: And the elephants, where are they? You can’t calculate the success of the pseudo circus company in a quiet little town”. The highlight of the trip was the visit to Ouro Preto.

“Minas coincided with me”, Mário confessed to the poet Henriqueta Lisboa, in a letter. The amazement came from realizing that Aleijadinho, son of a slave and a Portuguese man, synthesized everything the group was looking for as the genesis of Brazilian art.

“Our mestizos at the end of the colony glorified the ‘greatest mulataria’, showing themselves as visual and musical artists”, wrote Mário. According to him, there, in Minas Gerais, the true Brazilian Baroque was translated, unlike Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, which would have received strong Portuguese influence. According to the modernist, Aleijadinho’s art gained strength “by Brazilianizing the Portuguese thing, giving it grace, delicacy and dengue in architecture”.

Tarsila do Amaral would also speak years later about the influence of the trip on the composition of her work: “I found in Minas the colors that I loved as a child. They taught me later that they were ugly and country people… I took revenge on the oppression, passing them on to my canvases: pure blue, violet pink, bright yellow, singing green…”. Clean painting, above all without fear of conventional canons. Freedom and sincerity, a certain stylization that adapted it to the modern era.

The work that most touched the modernists was the Church of São Francisco de Assis, in Ouro Preto, one of the most celebrated creations by Aleijadinho, who created the basic design of the facade and the decoration in reliefs and gilded carvings.

At the time of the visit, the work was in a state of abandonment, as evidenced by a poem written by Oswald de Andrade, called “Ouro Preto”, which is part of his first book, “Pau Brasil”, released in 1925: “Let’s visit São Francisco de Assis/ Church built by the people of Minas/ The sacristan who is next door to Maria Cana-Verde/ Opens and shows the abandonment/ The pulpits of Aleijadinho/ The ceiling of Ataíde…”

Today, restored, the church is one of the main visiting points in Ouro Preto, with its two rounded towers and decorative elements in the Rococo style. When entering through its portal sculpted by Aleijadinho, looking up and catching a glimpse of the painting by Manuel da Costa Ataíde on the ceiling of the nave, it is impossible not to think about the reaction of the modernists who passed through there almost a hundred years ago.