O sertão vira Brodósqui, Brodósqui vira sertão: Portinari e um imaginário nordestino

Abstract

This dissertation intends to analyze the paintings of the series Retirantes, from Cândido Portinari (Retirantes, Criança morta e Enterro na rede), considering them as texts that form a net of discourses about the northeast region of Brasil, mainly the ones that helped building an imaginary in which this territory means absence, misery and ignorance. Besides, these studies also intend to extend the debate of the selected works of Portinari in a way to include themes like the actual faces of precariousness and contemporary diaspora, subjects that, denounced by the painter in the 1940’s, today can be reviewed, assuming speeches that are closer to the reality we face nowadays. Using the literature of Mikail Bakhtin, Dominique Maingueneau and Michel Foucault, the objective is to demonstrate that the paintings of Portinari can assume all the discursive potential that any written or oral text has, influencing and being influenced by other works – images or literature –, compounding the large web of speeches that talk about this presumed piece of land we denominate Northeast. To exemplify this big net of discourses, three covers of Veja magazine were analyzed, all of them with the theme of the Northeast, and also three drawings sent by followers of Museum de São Paulo (MASP)’s page on Instagram to a competition based on the painting Retirantes. From this corpus it was possible to verify the way these paintings are related to the speeches of the northeast territory, but also see that they go beyond geographic borders and dialogue with the themes of misery, human life's precariousness and diaspora in other different contexts from the ones proposed by Portinari.