This is the second edition of the book by Theodor Koch-Grünberg, Anfänge der Kunst im Urwald: Indianer-Handzeichnungen auf seinen Reisen in Brasilien gesammelt [Principles of Art in the Virgin Jungle: A Collection of Indigenous Drawings Assembled during a Visit to Brazil], published in Berlin (1906). The German ethnologist refers to the drawings produced by members of the various tribes with which he came in contact during his journey from the Mato Grosso to the Amazon in the late nineteenth century. He supplied the Indians with paper and pencil and asked them to draw something for him. Koch-Grünberg provides detailed comments on the 393 drawings in his book, which include ornamental patterns, dance masks, dwellings, men and women, supernatural things, and birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. The book is illustrated with eleven lithographs of his photographs (of dances, hunting scenes, fabrics, and masks), and contains two maps: an astral map of the equatorial region, and a map of his expedition to the Rio Negro and Japurá (1903–05). There is also a detailed index of the drawings and the photographs.     

The German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872–1924) is a key figure in the field of Brazilian ethnology, a writer who has published countless essays in books and European journals. His major work is the five-volume book, Vom Roroima zum Orinoco. Ergebnisse einer Reise in Nordbrasilien und Venezuela in den Jahren 1911-1913 [From the Roraima to the Orinoco. Results of a Journey to Northern Brazil and Venezuela in 1911–13]. Koch-Grünberg made many valuable contributions to the study of the indigenous peoples of South America, especially in his writings on the Pemón Indians in Venezuela and the vast number of tribes in the Amazon. This essay—an excellent brief text—in fact paves the way for a kind of research that Brazilian anthropologists and ethnologists were unable to develop until some decades later; that is, the study of indigenous drawings and their depiction of the world. Its historical importance is therefore obvious. It is unfortunate that it has never been translated into Portuguese.   

What does exist in Spanish is the translation of a seminal book on Brazilian Modernism that is based on many aspects of Koch-Grünberg’s mythical research: Macunaíma (a hero without a character), written by Mário de Andrade in 1928. The re-creation of this varia-invención [varied invention] rhapsody was produced by the Mexican writer, art critic, and avant-garde theoretician Héctor Olea; first edition (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977); second edition that includes drawings by Héctor Páride Bernabó (Carybé) (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005). Actually, Mário de Andrade—who read German and was an expert on the music of many ethnic groups, including the tribes of the Amazon region—kept this book beside him while he was writing Macunaíma (a story about the Uraricoera River) at the Pio Lourenço hacienda in Araraquara, in the state of São Paulo.