The first draft of a seven-part manifesto, this document declares that the aesthetic principles of the intellectuals and artists tied to the Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC) are based on the social problems facing Brazil, issues connected to material processes that exceed the strictly aesthetic. In the view of the members of the CPC, this relative autonomy from the artistic field allows the group to be an efficacious force active at the core of society’s structure; though based on art and culture, the CPC’s vision is popular and revolutionary. Insofar as it is an entity that represents the people, the CPC sees its own emergence, development, and expansion as part of the rise of “the masses” and of classes exploited economically and subjugated politically. The public and the people cannot be considered a homogenous mass; instead, artistic formulations committed to the revolutionary class and to its interests must be developed in order to channel different sectors and social strata. This is the basis for the difference between an art of the people, or popular art, and what the CPC advocates, that is, a revolutionary people’s art that recognizes that, in Brazil in the early sixties, there is no popular art that is not also political art. Art of this sort is considered greater than “high art” insofar as it “duly represents reality as a whole, as a being in motion.” Any other kind of art, that is, an art that ignores the real hierarchies that exist in the world, is inevitably an alienated art of the elites.

The first Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC) started in Rio de Janeiro as part of the União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE). It opened in 1961, at the beginning of the brief term of President João Goulart (1961-64). The CPC was a gathering place for artists and intellectuals working in theater, dance, film, literature, and the visual arts who were dedicated to social transformation through socially committed art bound to the people. Though short-lived because of the CIA-backed military coup that took place in 1964, the original CPC inspired the creation of similar organizations throughout Brazil; the pedagogical aims of those organizations included the popularization of artistic practices and production.

This draft of the manifesto was composed jointly by members of the CPC and sociologist Carlos Estevam Martins, director of the CPC in Rio de Janeiro at the time. It was used to raise political consciousness in a number of similar organizations around Brazil. Regardless, some members of the CPC, mostly those who defended the need to delve into “aesthetic” debates beyond a strictly national-popular vision of culture, reacted negatively to this text.

For additional texts on this topic, see Sebastião Uchoa Leite’s “Cultura popular” (doc. no. 1110365) and Ferreira Gullar’s “Cultura posta em questão” (doc. no. 1110364).