Arte popular brasileira e a criação da Casa do Pontal: um olhar antropológico

Abstract

Popular art, apart from the contribution of some authors, has received little attention from art scholars, generating few critique texts. Produced by people from the underprivileged economic strata of the population, this art occasionally occupies art galleries, cultural centers and museums. The reflections about this form of production generally question its condition of "art", when their option is not to propose the use of classifying scales, discussing the prevalence of their craftsmanship aspects over the artistic ones, or vice-versa. ln the period focused by this research, from the second half of this century on, only a few times was this genre substantially taken as an art, favouring its esthetic aspects. A rare example of this viewpoint, was given by the work of the French artist and collector Jacques Van de Beuque, who dedicated the last 45 years to the research, selection, classification and creation of an adequate space for the exhibition of this work, in the city of Rio de Janeiro: Casa do Pontal. Such peculiarity initially suggested that the objective of this dissertation should be to discuss this enterprise, which collection includes 4.500 objects, focusing the tridimensional production, and is considered as the largest and most complete popular art museum in the country. At first, I thought about recovering the data concerning the history of its creation, through a biographical approach, since it was a private enterprise, carried on by the initiative and the financial resources of one only person. However, as the indepth research on this theme advanced, I perceived that this work developed by Jacques Van de Beuque was based upon the cooperation amongst a number of people and events, which careful examination raised a question about the cultural encounters between social layers. This perception changed the major focus of my research, and I began to study the relatively large group of social actors, where each one, in their own way, performed an important role, and all of them contributed to shape the idea of popular art, as a form of contemporary plastic expression. For this reason and, considering that art in this century is a complex problematic, and that there is no space for unanimity or certainty, I made an option to observe from the diversity of viewpoints expressed by the participants in this network, composed of people who cooperate round the very idea of "popular art", analyzing what they think and practice: artists, shop owners, consumers, critics, scholars and collectors. ln examining this network through a sociological perspective, a fact became clear; that different social actors contribute, sometimes without knowing, to the establishment of a certain conceptual view of the Brazilian popular art. Dueto the lack of references to support the research in the field of History of Art - based on the development of stylistic schools and on the reconstitution of historical personalities - where the current popular production is, generally, not mentioned - I chose to verify which would be the concept shared by artists and consumers (the collector seen as a privileged consumar), trying to identify the coincident and the opposite points, aiming at finding the acccurate vision of art that corresponds to their ideas. When placing these cooperations into perspective, it is my interest to contribute to expand the visibility around what constitutes the Brazilian popular art, if not in its totallity - which seems to be impossible, due to the proliferation of this sort of artistic production and to their many possible interpretations - at least, a portion of the constituents of this universe, which I consider as part of one world among the many "art worlds", multiplied in Brazil and abroad, in our present time, when fragmentation is the emphasis.