Pedro Figari: African Nostalgias
essay published in the exhibition catalog, MASP, 2018
For me, it matters little or nothing what others make of their paths; we should sow on our own furrow, to make the fruit legitimately ours…Ah, if I could recreate, as I see and feel, the all-American poem! Pedro Figari [1]1. The carving of memory
The exhibition Pedro Figari: African Nostalgias offers a selection of works portraying Afro-Uruguayan communities from the memories of the Uruguayan lawyer, politician and artist, and borrows the title from one of his paintings. Figari represented the black people of his country with the dignity of daily life, in simple scenes that, however, reveal how complex were their ways of living. The cardboard he painted on showed people dancing candombes and bailongos, living in collective housing or holding traditional wakes; there are fights, kisses, cooks resting, visitors going away, masses, honeymoons, strolls in the countryside, and the effort of bringing a coffin downstairs.
It is a type of painting that is diaphanous, undone, as if it recorded not only people focused on their tasks but the fluidity of memory itself; an art “impervious to external data, changes or influences,” in the words of historian and art critic Marta Traba (1930-1983), whose work is fundamental for the study of Latin American art.[2] Over the porous cardboard, the quick strokes create an atmosphere of movement and dream; or of nostalgia, as described by the painter himself. There is a temporal distance between facts and their recording, and Figari is not interested in detailing faces or creating a well-rounded narrative about the past. In reality, the way his paintings are made only suggests something that has passed and that is remembered through them. In the paintings, memo - ry confuses itself and creates new stories, in a wavering shift between gestures and narratives. They are glimpses that bring to life aspects of an Afro-Uruguayan past and which strengthen the nostalgic character of the present, where one dreams about a happy and harmonious time that probably never existed. [3]
The idea of a past captured through the paintings of Pedro Figari— both from the theme and the way they were painted—was pointed out by several commentators of his work. One Uruguayan historian, for instance, reports a conversation between Figari and critic Jules Supervieille (1884-1960) in an imprecise and evocative way, like memory itself: “Supervieille was saying…that one day he told Figari: ‘There is a magical light in your paintings,’ to which Figari replied: ‘It’s the light of memory’.”[4]
Arturo Ardao (1912-2003) and Desiré Roustan (1873-1941), two fundamental writers for Figari’s critical reception, described the memory issue in the following terms:
Whose art, better than Figari’s, favors the indefinite evocation of images? He tried to save an entire civilization. In young countries, the customs, the social organization, the appearance of cities and also of the countryside, transform so quickly and deeply; on the other hand, the cult of the past is so rare that forgetfulness threatens to bury eras that are still close, like that invasive plants that cover abandoned cities in some areas of Brazil. [5]Ardao and Roustan echoed Jorge Luis Borges (1899 -1986) when he said that “memories are implications of the past…[and] only new countries have a past; meaning an autobiographical memory of it; meaning that their history is alive.” [6] For Borges, more than a living history, new countries also would have a permanent contemporary history: “Here [in America] we are of the same time as time, we are its brothers.”[7]
The notion of a new country whose population lives in the same time as its past is precarious because it disregards all the civilizations that flourished in its lands before the colonizers arrived, but the image—of an equivalent temporality between peoples and their history—is very significant when it comes to a sense of loss, and suggest the fragility of that same history. At any rate, being “living history,” for Borges and other critics of Pedro Figari’s work, constantly runs the risk of disappearing, which makes fixating its remembrance seem urgent: “Figari was a painter of urgency; an impatient painter. He knew how to bear witness to everything that was being lost and how to handle the responsibility of his conviction.” [8]
While the quick and uncertain strokes bear witness of a more or less idealized memory, by the gesture’s own nature we cannot know whether certain memories of the painter actually existed or were imagined by him. This information makes his work even more fluid and wavering: it transcribes not only what Figari rescued, but it is as if those oil paintings were spelled out memory itself: wavering, imprecise, illusory. Curiously, even the artist himself becomes confused when speaking about the past he lived in Montevideo. He often remembers the candombes he saw as a child; in other times he admits he could not have witnessed those cultural manifestations. But little does it matters, since his paintings offer some “glimpses” of history and the memory of communities of African descendants who lived in Uruguay, perhaps even more important than documents or photographs of the time.
In a 1926 interview, Figari talked about his creative process to a French critic, saying he dives into his memories to paint, but at the same time that he never lived the past he is remembering:
—You know I never use models. Even for landscapes. Everything I do is from my imagination. I dive into my memories… I paint above all the past.
—A past that you saw, that you know…
—Actually not. It already didn’t exist since my childhood. But I was told these things, and they really fired up my imagination. [They have] disappeared for a long time, these campesino feasts…, these old colonial houses, these dances and burials of blacks, these marriages…But they give to our lives extraordinary tranquility and flavor; there is an entire literature among us inspired by this absence.[9]
Therefore, along with the imprecision that comes from the nature of memory itself, the means of accessing the past mix up in Figari’s work through the relationship between two elements: on the one hand, the history of populations of African descent who lived in Uruguay but had little or no space in narratives and official images and, on the other, the consolidation of that history through loose layers of paint, in scenes remembered or invented by memory itself. The fluidity and imprecision of that relationship, however, do not turn into inconsistency. They actually become a force inasmuch as the past can never be learned from an allegedly assertive and monolithic truth. For Figari,
This social role, we may even call it civic, of painting, as the ideal media to create a legendary representation, something like a collection of false memories common to an entire tribe, is a declared goal of his educational projects and his theories on American culture.[10]
To put it differently, the articulation of a past “does not mean knowing it ‘as it properly were’,” in the sense that there is always a polyphony of voices and subjects, and that “facts” are always elected as fundamental parts of a discourse—as stated by philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), in whose work history and memory were central topics.[11] In reality, articulating the past historically “means taking control of a memory as if it sparkled in dangerous instant”[12] —in Figari’s case, perhaps the instant in which the history of African descendant communities ran the risk of dissolving into a distant memory, as if they had never occupied any space in the city with their candombes, carnival feasts and funeral ceremonies.[13] As put by Jules Supervielle: “In our time [the 1930s], blacks are very few in my home country. They are so rare that almost all of them were able to marvelously seek refuge in the paintings of Figari.”[14] That is why the painter perhaps felt the urgency of recording his memories and of African descendants in his country, through painting the most varied scenes that happened in Montevideo. “It is that, for Figari, the city was not only a physical space where life developed but also a space for political construction from which a community thought about itself at the intersection of temporalities.”[15]
2. the natural-born painter
In 1930, Pedro Figari already had been living in Paris for some years and participating of contemporary artistic and intellectual circles in the city, all the while painting scenes of his country’s past on the middle of the boulevard. In the European interwar period, a euphoric mood reigned and during the 1920s and 1930s Paris also articulated a kind of “intersection of temporalities.”
Those years saw great interest from European artists and critics in a formal renewal of art with elements from other cultures that were con - sidered autochthonous, immemorial and authentic, like African sculptures or pre-Columbian ceramics. At the same time, there was a massive number of non-European or Eastern artists seeking modern artistic training in France, which was considered more advanced than the fine-art schools of their original countries. Paris was a mythical city of bohemian life and creativity and a mandatory rite of passage for any painter, sculptor, musician or writer seeking new aesthetic experiments.[16]
Latin American artists were present in such large numbers that they formed a group whose first exhibition happened in April 1930 at Galerie Zak. Figari participated with two paintings.[17] In Paris, by becoming acquainted with modernist circles, several Latin American artists “rediscovered” their origins and started to rescue them, soon spiking the curiosity of critics excited with this production, which, to their eyes, was filled with “native” elements.[18] The Latin American artists’ presence actually represented a very welcome exoticism to European eyes. Even though they were in Europe exactly to study modern painting and sculpture, Latin American artists were viewed almost as if they were trustees of their “original” cultures—even if most of them were born from European immigrants and came from the elite of their countries, as Pedro Figari, whose parents were born in Genoa, Italy. In fact, it should be noted that whatever contact white Latin American artists had with indigenous or African peoples in their countries, if there was any, mostly was mediated by relations of power and exploitation.[19]
Early in the 20th century, intellectuals of several countries were trying to rescue their “roots” within a wider context of a debate about national identities and how to build them. In parallel, native and African-descendant populations, which had been kidnapped for enslavement in the Americas, continued socially marginalized, distant from such debates and frequently persecuted by governments. It is as if they offered great formal and symbolic help while their real presence represented a threat to “civilization” and should be destroyed or silenced. In other words, in order to engage a more serious discussion about the relations between modern European art and African or Amerindian cultures, one should take into account that power relations among those populations were absolutely unequal.
In this context, the appropriation of modern aesthetics by Latin American artists, at a center of power like Paris, tends to be seen as passive assimilation or desire to imitate the dominant culture, and thus join that privileged society. On the other hand, when elements of the several colonial regions influence European artists, they are seen as subjects who actively select and reinterpret original sources, giving them an entirely new meaning—for instance, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), when he painted his Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, with explicit references to African masks. Latin Americans, in their turn, would never be considered “original” artists and at best would bring along the freshness of “original” populations.[20]
In this sense, Raymond Cogniat (1896–1977), an art critic who collaborated actively with several Parisian journals of the time, praised Latin American artists by mixing up the notions of “origin” and “original,” and confusing autochthonous civilizations with the originality of form in modern art, in contraposition to what was valued by fine-art schools. For him, the art of “original peoples” would be an ideal source of renewal for painting and, more than that, artists from Latin America would incarnate through their own bodies the autochthonous civilizations of the territories where they were born. Cogniat says:
The artists from Latin America who can appear honorably among avant-garde groups are becoming more and more numerous… The return to original inspirations, the widespread taste among us for black sculptures and all primitive arts in general, has facilitated this emergence of South American artists. They indeed have the great advantage of finding very close to their sensibility and perhaps even in their subconscious memories very new and profoundly original formulas for us.[21]As it is noticeable, such exoticism would not only appear in the paintings— often resembling what the French were doing—but Latin American artists themselves were seen as naive or “natural-born artists,” as if their artistic work did not involve any labor, reflection, critical thought. In other words, it is as if their work was produced as naturally as an exotic plant developed. The painter André Lhote (1885–1962), when analyzing Figari’s work, called “incursions into oneself” what Cogniat had defined in a certainly biased way, coming from the notion of “sensibility”:
He [Figari] sought a chronicle of his previous life as a natural-born painter…Thus, he always goes in search of lost time, and returns from such incursions into oneself loaded with pearls, like a bedazzled diver.[22]French critic André Warnod (1885–1960) is even more explicit: “What gives pictorial value to Pedro Figari’s paintings could not have been acquired in any fine-art school of the world: he carries it inside himself.”[23]
In his turn, French-Uruguayan writer Jules Supervielle saw Figari’s output with a little more complexity and wrote a letter to a friend, Valery Larbaud (1881–1957), praising Figari’s exhibition and recommending a visit. To him, unlike most European critics, the authenticity is not inside the painter himself, but in the themes of his work:
My excellent friend Pedro Figari, a painter and foreign correspondent of La Nácion of Buenos Aires, currently is showing paintings at Galerie Druet, Rue Royale, number 20. I deeply wish that [you] see the paintings in which the themes are so authentically South America and the technique infinitely suggestive.[24]
3. A painting of suggestions
The adjective “impressionist” was used to attack a group of artists at the turn of the 19th century who employed loose strokes to capture the fugacity of life and the impressions of light, as if their paintings were superficial—in the sense that they depleted themselves on the canvas surface and lacked thematic or symbolic depth.[25] But by the early 20th century an “infinitely suggestive” painting becomes a positive trait while connecting it with one of the traditions seen as pioneering for modern art. This formal proximity between Figari’s paintings and the impressionists’ did not go unnoticed by several critics of his work, even though there is a subtle difference between light impressions and memory impressions. Meaning there is, on the one hand, the desire of European artists to capture an instant of a present that, amid the changes of modern life, dissipates increasingly faster (like daylight). On the other hand, there is the nostalgia of a Latin American working to capture instants of a past that has already dissipated, and of which only vague memories remain. Marta Traba’s words eloquently establish an approximation between the work of Figari and the impressionist and post-impressionist schools:
Rarely a painting… assimilates with such intuitive strength the innovations of conception and technique. Plane, invertebrate, unconcerned with composition, arbitrary in its cuts, presented as if were episodes or fragments of the same sequence, [Pedro Figari’s paintings] are only technically comparable to those of [Pierre] Bonnard [1867-1947], for the same gentleness and weakness of its strokes, which seem impotent to articulate the outline.[26]It is possible to compare Figari’s strokes to the wavering ones of Bonnard or, more so, of Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), where the form almost disappears. But the French artists’ works still depict bourgeois interiors, with people from their inner circle—sometimes a more explicit interior, as it is the case of the The Princess Bibesco (circa 1920) by Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), sometimes a kind of landscape, like the garden of Morisot’s home. Even a painting that portrays a group of workers in an outdoor scene, Déjeuner des canotiers [Luncheon of the Boating Party] (1880-81), by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), presents its characters in an atmosphere built to denote the leisure of the petty bourgeoisie.
Unlike those examples, Figari seems to dissolve the form even more and, with that, create an environment that is genuinely more communal, where the bourgeois social configuration perhaps has yet to exist. In his work, group life earns a leading role through several compositions reinforced by broad strokes, where all things receive the same pictorial treatment that dissolves hierarchies. In Cambacuá, for instance, everything seems to be made of the same substance and on the same pictorial and symbolic plane; no person is more important than the other, and they, in their turn, are as relevant as the big ombú to the right (a tree native to the Pampas region), or the red setting sun. Among other works, this “communal vocation” also can be noted in two Candombes by Figari, which present the drum as the center of the composition. In this case, the instrument mixes with the things surrounding it and everything is moving: people, walls, fabrics, trees, windows and the sky, all built in the same way. The compositions also reinforce the movement of the scene and the cohesion of subjects: Figari operates with sudden cuts—as the head of the second musician to the right, suggesting that several other people are dancing in the imaginary continuity of the painting, beyond the boundaries of its physical media.
Perhaps it can be said that French Impressionist painters challenged the institutionalized form of fine-art schools but were not bold enough to imagine a lifestyle outside the bourgeoisie, even if sometimes an impoverished one. The subjects of Figari—undone, smudged, and almost always numerous at their dances, feasts, candombes and burial ceremonies—challenge not only the well-finished style of painting and its institutional form but the social norm itself imposed by Uruguayan colonial society under the European aegis.
In a society working hard to dehistoricize itself, to deny even its last vestiges of an authentic origin to absorb what is foreign politely, Figari seeks a strange and unpredictable return to an imaginary colony. He leans on the original ethnic groups, the black slaves of the colony, the most modest urban groups, the bailongos, the compadrito, the boleros… [His work] consists of expressing… a rejection of the cordial welcome to bourgeois mediocrity and underdevelopment fostered by the groups who hold power.[27]4. Pedro Figari: African Nostalgias
In a year dedicated to Afro-Atlantic histories, an exhibition of Pedro Figari’s work at MASP not only reaffirms the importance of this painter for Latin American modernism but also draws attention to the rich heritage of African peoples in Uruguay—generally little known even in neighboring countries like Brazil.
Pedro Figari: African Nostalgias develops through six thematic groups which, as they break down into topics of daily life, give solidity and complexity to the communities portrayed. The first group brings a profusion of dances and festivities, starting with the representation of candombes, the emblematic dances of Afro-Uruguayan communities and of Figari’s work.[28] Many people dance in groups, with moves as sinuous as the strokes, which give a pace to the compositions and also convey the sense they are something that ceased to exist, a scene evoked from mem - ory. In some of them, we see the interior of large houses, decorated with colorful geometric panels. In others, people dance under moonlight and the several blue hues of Figari’s sky. The work from which this exhibition borrows the title, African Nostalgias, also portrays a candombe scene. A musician is playing his drum right in the center of the painting, and dividing it into two planes through an imprecise geometry: to the right is a man and to the left a woman, each surrounded by two people following the rhythm of their dance. If the idea of nostalgia itself carries the idealization of the past, the distinction between remembering and imagining becomes as imprecise as the painting. A similar procedure happens in The Lighthouse, where a couple stands out in the center and several people surround them in sinuous movement. In reality, those scenes seem to show a double nostalgia: of Pedro Figari, who portrays a supposedly happy past of his country and of his own subjects, who miss their African homelands from where they brought forcefully and which, in a way, they remember through dance. The selection also presents a pericón scene and another of a bailongo, dances present other characteristics—the first is a kind of square dance and the second, with couples, is more similar to European dances. Nevertheless, they happen collectively, in the open and on a large patio. In Bailongo (circa 1925), many colors confer rhythm to the painting. Below to the left, a woman plays her accordion, while a man peers over the handrail restlessly looking for something. In its turn (and as if it were a completely banal event), a cat gazes at the sky indifferently. Perhaps it is hard to consider that the life of African descendants was so calm and happy in Uruguay, even though the patio dances certainly existed and continue existing.
The second group brings other festive representations, which among others portray the Epiphany, a hybrid celebration placing the Catholic day devoted to the Three Magi in the middle of Carnival, in which blacks form a parade with their drums until the home of the local governor in an ironic demand for social rights. Two horizontal paintings create a kind of narrative of this path, traveled by several horse-drawn buggies alongside those who walk. The dance takes over the city’s streets and assumes an eminently political character even though its official date is on January 6, according to the Catholic calendar.
Next, the scenes that compose the third group happen inside conventillos, or tenements, collective housings that flourished in Montevideo between the late 19th and early 20th centuries and which represented true centers of community and resistance for their residents. In the patios, aside from dancing candombes, people talked, fought, rested and enjoyed the mornings. It is as if life revealed itself through these small scenes of daily life: an old man with his cane walks among the houses, cooking women take a few minutes off, dogs loiter around and three men seated on stools plot something. In this last painting, the three subjects seem to be talking distractedly, and nothing indicates a Criminal Plot. But with the title, Figari provokes viewers to create their own fictional stories and imagine what could be happening there.
The fourth group presents the marriages. One painting shows the bride and groom riding a horse to the ceremony. The marriage party, represented on horizontal cardboard, introduces a scene with very happy and varied colors, and the characteristically unstable strokes of Figari, which alludes to a dream-like atmosphere, and gathers several elegant people. The patterns of the fabrics, the frills, the top hats, and wall textures form a single set suggesting a cohesive community. Another painting, built with stains of red, ocher and pink paint, shows a black couple kissing while preparing for the honeymoon in a sumptuous and wealthy home. Their elegantly dressed friends and parents, leave the room and contemplate another daily scene that the painter imagined.
Funeral rites were very important to the Afro-Uruguayan tradition. They also were conducted in group and featured drum music on the background. This is the central theme of the fifth group: like narratives, people on Figari’s paintings watch their loved ones, lower coffins through stairs, decide who will carry the dead and finally bury them on open fields under the moonlight. In The Life (circa 1925), the ironic title describes a scene from a wake where several people pay homage to a loved one resting to the right and surrounding by candles. A man plays his drum on the foreground, solemn, and dressed in a tailcoat. The Burial that follows it also is accompanied by music and happens outside the cemetery—reinforcing the social segregation between whites and blacks, also in death, even though the painter did not portray them with the suffering of those who are marginalized, like Candido Portinari (1903–1962) did in Burial (1942) or Burial on hammock (1944).
The sixth group has a few representations of slavery, a system which was legal during the colonial period, and are as sorrowful as death itself. The paintings, however, seem to portray a nearly conflictless routine: we see black persons serving their white masters in elegant homes, as in Ma’am Augustina, or accompanying a high-society lady to church a few steps behind her as in Toque de oración. These diminutive persons do not show any reaction or embarrassment, being part of an imprecise atmosphere of dream and fantasy. But there is also a great party, in which one dances through the strokes and celebrates the emancipation of the slaves, which in Uruguay happened in 1842.[29]
After over 170 years since emancipation, Pedro Figari’s paintings are precious artifacts to the imaginary of Afro-Uruguayan populations, since they create a shared and utopian memory for people who suffered so much in American lands. And precisely for being utopia, nostalgia, that this so fluid and “invertebrate” imaginary, like color stains, seems to indicate to this day the dream of a more communal and less unequal future not only for Uruguay but all of Latin America.
Notes
[1] FIGARI, Pedro. “Una carta de Pedro Figari”. La Pluma. Montevideo, n. 3, Nov. 1927, pp. 29 –30. ICAA Record ID: 1197040. (Several documents referred to in this article are contained in the digital files of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, United States [ICAA/MFAH], and have a registration number for future research that from now on will be included in footnotes as “ICAA Record ID: #”.)
[2] TRABA, Marta. “Historia abierta”. In: América: mirada interior. Figari, Reverón, Santa María, pp. 7–13. ICAA Record ID: 1107039.
[3] The notion of nostalgia goes back to Homer’s Odyssey, written around the 8th century B.C. and describing the return of hero Ulysses to the Greek island of Ithaca ten years after the Trojan War. It delves into the “return home” theme where memories of a happy place in the past are built from the idealization of the same past. Upon returning, Ulysses is only recognized by his dog, Argos. See HOMER. Odyssey, Book 17.
[4] IBÁÑEZ, Roberto. “La cultura del 900”. Enciclopedia Uruguaya, n. 31. Montevideo: Editores Reunidos e Editorial Arca, 1969, p.18.
[5] ARDAO, Arturo; ROUSTAN, Desiré. “Figari filósofo, pintor, poeta”. Revista Nacional. Segundo ciclo, year VI, n. 208, dec.1925. ICAA Record ID: 1218493.
[6] BORGES, Jorge Luis. Figari. Buenos Aires: Editorial “Alfa”, 1930, p. 10. ICAA Record ID: 732858.
[7] BORGES, Jorge Luis. Op. cit., p. 10.
[8] ZAFFARONI, Raúl. “Para una aproximación a Figari”. Jaque, n. 84, Papeles de la Fundación Angel Rama, 26.7.1985.
[9] MIOMANDRE, Francis. “Le maté chez Figari”. Bulletin de la Vie Artistique, year 7, n. 6, 15.3.1926, pp. 88–89.
[10] FLO, Juan; PELUFFO LINARES, Gabriel. Pedro Figari 1861 –1938. Montevideo: Museo Municipal Juan Manuel Blanes, p. 42, 1999.
[11] BENJAMIN, Walter. “On the Concept of History”. Gesammelten Schriften I: 2. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1974. Also see GAGNEBIN, Jeanne-Marie. “Verdade e memória do passado”. Projeto História. São Paulo, n. 17, nov. 1998.
[12] Idem, ibidem.
[13] Based on scientific racism ideas of the 19th century, several Latin American nations, including Uruguay, implemented policies that aimed at miscegenating and whitening the population through government incentives for European immigration. On the matter, see ANDREWS, George Reid. Afro-Latin America.1800 –2000. Oxford University Press, 2004, especially chapter 4 .
[14] Jules Supervieille, Poète Intime et légendaire. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1984, p. 26.
[15] TOMEO, Daniela. “Pedro Figari y la ciudad batllista. Reflexiones de un kirio en movimiento”. In: ROMANO, Antonio; MORENO, Inés (orgs.). Pedro Figari: el presente de una utopía. Montevideo: Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad de la República, 2016, p. 15.
[16] Art historian Michele Greet, in a farreaching study on the issue, said that over 300 Latin American artists lived and worked in Paris between 1918 and 1939. See: GREETTransatlatic Encounters. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2018. The following names could be cited among several others: Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), Emiliano Di Cavalcanti (1897-1976), Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899-1970), Joaquim do Rego Monteiro (1903-1934), Anita Malfatti (1889-1964), Joaquín Torres-Garcia (1874-1949), Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Roberto Matta (1911-2002) and Eduardo Abela (1889-1965); among artists from Eastern Europe, Russia and Japan are Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973), Chana Orloff (1888-1968), Marie Vassilieff (1884-1957), Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) and Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968).
[17] In 1923, also in the French capital, the Maison de l’Amérique Latine opened its doors; in 1924 there was the Exposition d’Art Latino-Américain (but still not a “collective” one), and in 1930 the already cited collective exhibition at Galerie Zak—nearly 50 galleries in the city held at least one showing dedicated to Latin American artists (see GREET, op. cit., chapter 5). Important publications also circulated, like Revue de l’Amérique latine, which lasted from 1922 to 1932; France-Amérique, published between 1910 and 1940, aside from others that were more ephemeral, like Bulletin de l’Amérique Latine (1921) and Revue de l’Amérique Latine Illustré (1932).
[18] Another example aside from Figari of an artist in search of the “national roots,” painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886 -1973) wrote in a letter to her parents soon after arriving in the city in 1923: “How much I thank you for having spent my entire childhood in the farm. The reminiscences of that times are becoming precious to me. In art, I want to be the little hick from São Bernardo, playing with straw dolls, like the last painting I am doing.” See BATISTA, Marta Rossetti. Os artistas brasileiros na Escola de Paris: anos 1920. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2012, p. 384.
[19] Figari himself refers to enslaved Africans as “submissive, loyal and good” and “happily going to the master’s home, [to] serve him.” FIGARI, Pedro. El arquitecto. Paris: Le Livre Libre, 1928, p. 109.
[20] But that does not mean they did not realize the unequal treatment. On 9 November 1932, Figari wrote to an Uruguayan friend: “Now, see: I would like to emphasize to a friend and countryman what this mean not only as an Uruguayan— meaning, being a despicable artist, following the current concept, for its imitative trend—but as an artist who showed something that immediately earns the honor letter of European citizenship as an original painting…etc, etc.” Pedro Figari’s letter to writer Eduardo Salterain y Herrera (1892-1966), cited in PEREDA, Raquel. Pedro Figari. Vida y pasión. Montevideo: Cruz del Sur/ Linardi y Risso, 2016, p. 244 .
[21] COGNIAT, Raymond. “Abela” (La vie artistique). Revue de L’Amerique latine. Paris, n. 85, 1.1.1929, pp. 73-74. In 1924, one year before Figari arrived, the French critic already noted the presence of Latin American artists and encouraged them to seek “means of expression that are your own.” COGNIAT, Raymond. “Exposition d’Art Américain-Latin au Musée Galliéra”. Revue de l’Amérique latine. Paris, n. 29, 1.5.1924, p. 434.
[22] Curiously, Lhote ignored the fact that several “natural born” artists like Antonio Berni (1905-1981) and Tarsila do Amaral were precisely his students. LHOTE, André. “Exposition Pedro Figari” (Les Arts). La Nouvelle Revue Française. Paris, n. 123, 1.12.1923, p. 772.
[23] WARNOD, André. “L’exposition Pedro Figari”. Comoedia. Paris, 18.10.1925.
[24] Cited in SUPERVIEILLE, Jules. Poète intime et légendaire. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1984, p. 25.
[25] LEROY, Louis. “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes”. Le Charivari, Paris, 25.4 .1874.
[26] TRABA, Marta. Op. cit. ICAA Record ID: 1107039 .
[27] Idem , ibidem.
[28] For more details on candombe, and on its social and historical aspects, see in this same catalog Olga Picún’s article, “Candombe and the scenes of Pedro Figari: dialogues between past and present”, pp. 122 -37.
[29] In Brazil, the slavery system was only abolished 46 years later, giving the country the unflattering title of last in the Americas to end the slave-owning institution—aside from being the largest recipient of enslaved peoples.