The Brazilian artist Sérvulo Esmeraldo talks about his interest in popular printmaking, and discusses the important effect that this artistic language had on his work during a visit to Carirí, in his home state of Ceará (1954). While there, he noticed that this popular form of graphic expression was disappearing, and suggested several ways in which it could be preserved. He proposed the establishment of a Museu de Arte Contemporânea e Popular, in the city of Crato, but this project never materialized. After spending five years in Europe, mainly in Paris, he returned to Ceará in 1962 and learned about the plans to create an archive of popular prints at the recently founded Museu de Arte da Universidade do Ceará, which acquired the entire collection of woodcut blocks owned by the print shop Tipografia São Francisco. Esmeraldo believed that transferring those woodcut blocks to Fortaleza, the state capital, would have a devastating effect on the culture of the Juazeiro region, and therefore went in search of artists who were still producing prints in that area of the state of Ceará. He found the Mestre Noza workshop, where he encouraged the participating artists to produce a series of prints on the subject of Os Doze Apóstolos and on the Life of Lampião. Both of these series can still be seen in the collection at the Museu de Arte da Universidade do Ceará. “Lampião” was the nickname for Virgulino Ferreira da Silva (1897–1938), the famous bandit and leader of the Cangaço, a popular uprising in the northeastern region of Brazil (from Pernambuco to Bahia) during the 1920s and 1930s.               

This is a vignette remembered by Sérvulo Esmeraldo (b. 1929), the Brazilian artist who spent many years in France. He was one of the best-known artists outside of his home state, in a somewhat similar vein to the experience enjoyed (in their own fields) by the poet Manoel Bandeira (Recife, Pernambuco) and the painters Aldemir Martins and Xico da Silva, both from Ceará. Esmeraldo’s work attained its greatest fame in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of its positive reception in Europe. While he was living in France Esmeraldo started experimenting with works—which, to some extent evoked an incipient kineticism and a basic constructivism—that he called “excitáveis” [the excitables] because of the electrostatic friction generated by the viewer. This explains why he was referred to as a “knowledgeable” artist.    

In this vignette, Esmeraldo outlines the history of popular printmaking based on his own personal experience as a “knowledgeable” artist whose roots are firmly planted in the northeastern area of the country, specifically in the region of Ceará. He has a thorough understanding of the technical simplicity of the woodcut printing process, which he considers to be a form of writing executed with great economy. He is surprised by the quality of the prints produced by the artists at the Mestre Noza workshop, and asks them to produce a Via Sacra, thus encouraging the use of new motifs in that part of the country. He discusses the history of the popular print and the “literatura de cordel” [printed works hung on a length of string] in Europe and then, later, in Brazil where they found fertile ground in the simple skill of local peasants’ hands.

There is an essay that complements Esmeraldo’s vignette: “Engenho e Arte. A Fala dos Gravadores” [Ingenuity and Art: The Printmakers’ Jargon], one of the seven chapters of “Madeira Matriz,” the book by Gilmar de Carvalho that tells the history of woodcut printing in the northeast of Brazil. This book describes the connection between woodcut printing and the genre of popular verse known as “literatura de cordel” (named for the “cordel” or length of string on which the very short publications are hung), which is sold in public markets in that part of the country [see doc. no. 1110758].