In this essay, the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre reflects on the interest generated by things resulting from the inverse reason to their proximity. His inquiry led to the basic question of why had the northeastern region of Brazil not produced an artist that was fundamentally “ours” yet? The author felt that “life in that region of the country had not been duly examined, only superficially probed, leaving its most intimate values untouched.” Freyre mentioned various artists of the colonial period and commented on nineteenth-century historical art, examining the contributions of the artists, not only Brazilian, who participated in the development of art in Brazil. At the core of the artistic creations that were being produced in the state of Pernambuco, the author pointed to those artists capable of assembling the physical elements of the landscape with the local human elements, which was something that was similarly done in the seventeenth century by the Flemish painter Franz Post. Freyre was convinced of the regional expression, in an intensely specialized manner, by the artist Telles Jr., an artist from the “Mata” region, as well as the emergence of a generational style of art during the 1920s and 1930s by the artists Fedora do Rego Monteiro, and her younger brothers, Joaquim and Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Joaquim Cardoso, and the poet Manoel Bandeira, among others.

In this essay, Gilberto Freyre predicted innumerable aspects of his “Manifesto Regionalista de 1926,” thereby pointing out the importance of the regional element that is articulated with the universal. The essay is an incentive for artists to assume these stances prior to artistic production.

The Brazilian sociologist and congressman Gilberto Freyre (1900−87) was one of the intellectuals who exerted the greatest influence on his country during the first half of the twentieth century, especially regarding racial issues. Around 1933, Freyre received international recognition for his major work Casa-Grande e Senzala, published in English as The Masters and the Slaves, the first of a series of three works that included Sobrados e mucambos (The Mansions and the Shanties), 1936, and finally, Ordem e Progresso, 1957 [see in the ICAA digital archive the following texts on the subject, respectively: “Interamericanismo” (doc. no. 807911) and “A propósito da política cultural do Brasil na América” (doc. no. 807856)].

It was Freyre who led a group of writers who aligned themselves with his “Manifesto Regionalista” [see in the archive “Manifesto Regionalista de 1926” (doc. no. 1074787), his twenty-five year retrospective in “Manifesto Regionalista de 1926: vinte e cinco anos depois” (doc. no. 1110808), and fifty years later in “Regionalismo brasileiro” (doc. no. 1110810)].