From the Terreiro to the Museum: the Mario Barata Afro-Brazilian Art collection

In 2023, the National Museum of Fine Arts received, as a donation, the Afro-Brazilian Art collection from journalist, museologist and art historian Mario Barata.

This collection emphasizes the African and Afro-religious matrix art that has been produced in the country beyond the European and Western canons.

From journalist to museologist

Born in 1921, son of Pará journalist Hamilton Barata and Portuguese seamstress Maria Augusta Barata. At sixteen he began working at his father's newspaper O Homem Livre.

He later entered the Museology course at the National Historical Museum, graduating in 1940. He was one of the founders of the International Council of Museums in 1946.

Having followed the persecution of Afro-Brazilian cult objects carried out in the first half of the 20th century, journalist Barata writes, at the age of twenty,

the Arte Negra report in Revista da Semana, published in May 1941.

In this report he states:

 “The artistic production of Africans and their direct descendants in Brazil has always been curious and worthy of study.”

In this sense, researchers Roberto Conduru and Eloisa Sousa point out that Mario Barata was one of the first authors to classify Afro-Brazilian objects as Art.

Barata, after his first article on Afro-Brazilian art, already an intellectual and museologist with an established career, launches a call to researchers who, when finding pieces of black origin,

must make an effort to find documents or information that details the time of its creation, the technique, the location, showing the importance it gave to the idea of consolidating collections of Afro-Brazilian art.

“ The opportunity we referred to at the beginning of this work, with perhaps unproductive optimism, is to create a photographic register: - a 'corpus sculptorom' – published in a book, with the pieces existing in private or public collections from all over the country and

"These pieces must be classified by origin, function, local data and compared with those of a similar style from Africa, existing in museums and publications in other countries.” 

In the 1940s and 1950s Barata embarked on a search for religious objects in the Praça Cairu market, in the lower city of Salvador.

About the market he stated: “There are 6 or 8 stalls specialized in selling pieces linked to religious tradition”.

In the early 1950s, he found an iron exu ccosting 120 cruzeiros. About the artwork he stated:

“It is in the wrought iron exuses that the “geometrizing” tradition of Black art was best preserved”.

“In this the formal tendencies of much of Black art are evident. Furthermore, its seats and weapons show the plastic strength of the artist who created it.”

“Making art like this in 1950 shows the vigor that the artistic expression of Black Bahians still has.”

 “Ainda resta uma oportunidade de conhecer a criação plástica do negro no Brasil e de estudar-lhe as transformações depois de seu contato com a cultura do branco.”

It was with a sense of urgency, fearing the disappearance of artistic objects that Barata started a collection whose fragments can produce new testimonies and dialogues about Afro-Brazilian art.