According to the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar, the essential problem concerning the “national” nature of art is directly related to the cultural dependence of the country. By way of explanation, he suggests that this question would not arise when considering art produced by a European painter. The level of cultural development in Latin America in the 1970s reflected the nationalism attained when “conventional ideas of nationalism were no longer relevant.” This situation was increasingly prevalent at that time as a result of the rise of military governments in the region, and in response to recent changes both in Latin America and farther afield: on one hand, there was the achievement of autonomy over Latin American cultural expression, and on the other, the exhaustion of aesthetic forms derived from the European mother countries, which had been the referents for centuries. In the specific case of Brazil—where the goal was to include archaic, folkloric, traditional, and handcraft expressions as well as other forms emanating from the dynamic, contemporary urban culture—there was no attempt to limit the scope to a particular style or restrict it solely to a “national art” approach. In Ferreira Gullar’s opinion, an artist’s creative efforts should transcend local and regional considerations in order to achieve a measure of universal expression, so that the resulting work is “universal” in content and “national” in form. He cites the work of Tarsila do Amaral as an example. Whereas the “modernist” generation of 1922 sought to exalt national subjects, Amaral took a different approach: over and above the influences of her foreign studies (at the workshops of Fernand Léger and André Lhote), the regional aspect of her paintings was “the determining factor in the expression of her artistic persona.”

Written in 1975, this essay by the art critic [José Ribamar] Ferreira Gullar (b. 1930) was part of the discussion about the question of ‘national expression’ in Latin American art of the period. Ferreira Gullar warns against the error of relying on conventional standards of nationalism (whether of the ‘why-I’m-proud’ or the ‘Malinche-ist chauvinism’ variety) to address cultural issues. The author defends the theory that all aesthetic creation arises from specific sources, never from general ones. Furthermore, at that time in Brazil and the rest of Latin America, artistic searches for “national” elements were in terms of the creation of a particular work, as well as for the development of other forms of expression beyond the realm of art. In the author’s opinion, the ‘national’ nature of a work of art is an expression of an accumulation of cultural experiences that cannot be separated from social practices.     

This essay is emblematic of Ferreira Gullar’s point of view since the early 1960s, and illustrates the disagreements that existed between artists who favored international avant-garde styles and those who took a national approach. His most controversial essay, subsequently published as a book, was undoubtedly Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento: ensaios de arte (1969), in which he analyzed the European art and cultural movements that exerted an influence in Brazil. The crux of his ideas concerns the question of the existence of avant-garde expression in the early stages of developing countries, as in the case of his archenemy, the concrete poetry of São Paulo.