On Brazilian print art.

1

We have still to compose a history or a thorough study of the role played by figure engraving in the circulation of forms, with its progressive codifications and re-codifications, its dissemination, printings, duplications and uses. When we focus uniquely on the relationships that engraving keeps with other forms of art, we lose sight of the iconographic awareness created by engraving, added by the cultural, social and commercial expansions often organized carefully in this publishing activity that since the XV century has not ceased to increase its strategic power in a wide arc of applications. All of it, for us, is added to the second great iconographic explosion trigged in the XIX century by photography and resultant photomechanics.

2

William M. Ivins Jr. was one of the pioneering authors to devote attention to the subject when he wrote "Prints and Visual Communications", published in 1953. Even when he underestimates the classic heritage in engravings history, and overestimates photography as a definite rupture (because it is completely faithful and true - in a typical post-war structure of thought,) he is precise at discussing how powerful figure engraving is as a visual communication media. He observes accurately the chains of copies established between mat and prints, degrading original images but creating a fertile soil for exchanges, changes of value, and the permanent seesaw between "high" and "low" cultures. Ivins points out that it is important to observe that values inscribed by engravers in their images do not depend only on their own abilities and the technical means of their time, but depend also on the public these images are addressed to, and the subsequent market coordinating technical and aesthetical movements. Print circulation fulfills a founding role in the circulation of themes, motives and styles. The history of mentalities will not let us forget the history of ideas intermediated, as it is, by the history of techniques: there is continued flow between them.   Let us also not lose sight of the educational perspective accomplished by prints circumnavigation: they do not only meet demands, but often trigger them.

3

The opposite of this view was based on the little importance of those graphic products in face of the "artistic print" that received in the XIX century the byname of original print, a paradoxical name whose intention was to differentiate it quite well from a copy print. Bracquemond and Whistler, among other artists, have defined this post-romantic term as a response to photomechanics advances that were substituting the engraver's chisel, and they elected etching, then, as a symbol of defense of an experimental attitude that artists would be pursuing in face of graphic means. Stanley W. Hayter confirms that idea in a sort of second manifest for the original print, with his book "New Ways of Gravure", in 1949. According to his posture, Rembrandt and Goya are examples to be followed, models of excellence. While Ivins Jr. considers, without diminishing in any way the importance of both painters-engravers, that Rembrandt and Goya are sublime anomalies. Not so much to this side or the other, maybe we can now bring those two views near and study their interpenetrations that hold deep richness of meanings and distinctions. Differences are as relevant as similarities, and they may articulate new thoughts and measures in the crucible containing the geographic, temporal and cultural distances traversed by prints.

4

The title of the book by Ivins Jr., "Prints and Visual Communications" receives a curious translation when published in Spanish: "Imagen impresa y conocimiento - análisis de la imagen prefotográfica" ("Printed image and knowledge - analysis of the pre-photographic image"), and such title gives the perfect motto for us to ponder on the appearance of a consistent graphic activity in Brazil.

We have been forbidden to make prints by an edict of the Crown of Portugal, one that was revoked only in 1808, when the imperial family came to Rio de Janeiro and this was followed by the installation of the Royal Printing Press. There were some remarkable antecedent attempts by Jesuits installed in the old colony capital who tried, between 1706 and 1724, to print textbooks, catechisms and prayer books in clandestine printing presses that were confiscated upon orders from Lisbon. Another adventure was tried by a priest, José Joaquim Viegas de Menezes, who had been for a time in Coimbra where he had acquired practical and theoretical knowledge on engraving, and where he had translated the "Traité de Manières de Graver en Taille-douce" by Abraham Bosse. Viegas de Menezes comes back to Brazil in 1801 and attempts to put his knowledge into practice in Minas Gerais. But his little work does not continue, suffocated by the possibility of very harsh penalties that could be incurred with the use of press in Brazil, according to the previously mentioned edict, dated July 6, 1747. After May 13, 1808, printing processes start slowly to establish in the colony as a matter of the State. A French Mission comes to the country in 1816, to accomplish a civilizing role imagined by the Portuguese monarchy, and brings among its members the engraver Simon Pradier, but he goes back to France two years later without having found disciples. Only in the second half of the century bases are built for a more consistent laic and civil practice of printing. Therefore, printing as an everyday practice is a post-photography phenomenon in Brazil. And the so-called original print would only come to effective existence and would start to sketch a circuit in 1930, after all the founding modern movements of the 20th century had already been distilled and inoculated by art history in general.

5

To think the Brazilian print art associating it to the vast universe of production and reproduction of contemporary printed paper and considering its characteristics of origin - this is what we deem to be an adequate path to reach a better understanding of works being produced in the area in current days, as they restore the idea of original print as much as the idea of copy print. Even if we relate the production of prints to an essential ancientry that goes beyond the history of figure print and links to man's desire for a perennial mark, for duration of the sign, and to dealing with matter and putting it in dialogue with sculpture and other manifestations of plastic art, we cannot disregard historical peculiarities as mentioned above in the colonial relations between Portugal and Brazil, and in the cultural events that took place after the end of the first republic.

The emptiness we have inherited from the lack of iconographic tradition and the inexistence of printing practices for three centuries could also be seen as the driving force of a vision with a high inquiring content, even if it is naïve and deeply intuitive, and one that must learn constantly to replace its bases in order to orient its actions. Seeing that concepts related to the language, utility and function of prints have been and are reviewed in each different time, culture and means of production - those related to technical advancement accomplished as much as those of aesthetical nature and ideological content - it seems to us that we discover now, in retrospect, the foundations of their historical course. Brazilian print art is two hundred years old, if we consider the graphic genre as a whole, and less than one hundred years if we are interested in the experimental activity of artists in printing. Our artistic production has its historical national models in a good part of the seminal works made in the first half of the XX century by pioneering artists Carlos Oswald, Oswaldo Goeldi, Lívio Abramo and Lasar Segall - to mention the main ones. At the same time, information associated to historical international print art have been conveyed to us in a period that was fully post-photographic; we have lived with reproductions of reproductions during our formation years, then particularizing our notion of original. In a magnificent paradox, reproduced originals, original prints, have always been rare among us, and our incunabula are extremely young.

   Cláudio Mubarac and Evandro Carlos Jardim