Book awarded with the Jabuti was reprinted. Collection brings a hidden side of the creative process of great visual artists.
After a few years out of print, the book Tarsila do Amaral – Drawing Notebooks It was reprinted by Editora da Unicamp. The work integrates the Drawing Notebooks Collection and won the 2009 Jabuti Award in the “Architecture and Urbanism, Photography, Communication and Arts” category.
The collection is organized by the artist Lygia Eluf, PhD in Visual Poetic Arts from USP and retired professor from the Unicamp Arts Institute. Published since 2008 and counting, to date, with eight volumes, the collection aims to expose the creative processes of great visual artists based on their notebooks, whether sketches, preliminary sketches or projects. Among the published artists, there are names such as Eliseu Visconti, Anita Malfatti, Iberê Camargo and Fayga Ostrower.
We invited Lygia Eluf to talk a little about the creation and development of the collection and the particularities of each volume.
Unicamp Publisher: A Drawing Notebooks Collection allows readers to have contact with part of the creative process of great visual artists. As coordinator of the collection, what criteria guided the organization of the books?
Lygia Eluf: The idea of sketchbooks has always fascinated me. Through these almost unpretentious notes, we are often able to record the essence of our visual thinking. They have followed artists throughout history and bring together little-known aspects of their production. These are moments of unique intimacy and complicity, almost never publicized and remain in a corner of the studio, generally accessible only to the artist's own eyes. Its recurring use, as a notebook, travel booklets or artists' diaries, presents the possibility of revealing the constructive thought that guides the process of creation and construction of images. A Drawing Notebooks Collection it is born from this relationship and through it it intends to reveal what is hidden, kept in the intimacy of the pocket notebook, the studio, the artist's first expression in contact with the world that surrounds him. We seek to privilege drawing as a means of artistic expression, as a record of ideas, sensations and thoughts, as a project or even as an independent means of plastic achievements.
Everything developed in an almost intimate way: people directly related to this story got closer, became interested and we present the first result of our work that seeks to provide some clues about the way in which some artists relate to what is revealed to them through their eyes. . This is, in fact, work carried out with the help of many people to whom we are grateful; people who somehow share this passion for drawing. We decided that the volumes would present a kind of visual discourse, without the aid of large academic essays or information that could guide the reader. We included some clues that could complement this experience: a short biography, a short text, preferably written by someone who was intimate with the artist. There were no restrictions for these texts in relation to style and content, the only requirement being that they should be written in a way that brings the reader closer and allows them to feed this sensitive knowledge.
Unicamp Publisher: You notebooks they bring sketches and projects from very different artists, such as Anita Malfatti, Iberê Camargo and Fayga Ostrower. Could you talk a little about the particularities of the first volumes?
Lygia Eluf: It's always a pleasure for me to talk about these volumes. In fact, the artists are very different from each other and this diversity enchants me. This characteristic is one of the fundamental aspects of the collection. Present the immense diversity of artistic thought and try to make clear how this diversity strengthens artistic production. Art is not exclusion, on the contrary: everything coexists simultaneously and each action strengthens the others.
The choice of the first two volumes, Tarsila and Visconti, has a peculiar reason and I tell this story in the text I wrote to present the collection for the first time. On a trip to Italy in 1995, Fernando Chaves and I found, at the house of friends from our school days, two collections of drawings: by Tarsila do Amaral and Eliseu Visconti. We already knew about their existence, but the memory of how they came to be in the hands of our Italian friends was lost somewhere in our memory. As children, we were family friends and attended the same school. Although the family returned to Italy in the 1970s, the friendship continued. We never talk about these things again. These were difficult times to remember: the gallery being invaded in the middle of the night to recover whatever was possible. What was lost, without us ever knowing the end of it all...
We knew the story: the collection had been purchased directly from Tarsila, who was already ill and in need of all kinds of help. We also knew that on that visit our friend “returned” to Tarsila the pair of earrings, from the famous self-portrait, previously purchased by another collector, and “bought up” everything that was in the studio. Today we must thank the Gnutti-Businco family for this opportunity to showcase this hitherto unprecedented collection. Talking about this collection is remembering the work and generosity of this Italian collector who was in Brazil in the 1970s and who changed the country's artistic scene in a unique way (until today).
At the end of the 1970s, I discovered Evandro Carlos Jardim's sketchbooks and, in that universe, the magnificent graphic quality of the engravings began to be revealed by the initial drawings that generated such images. There were entire series of figures, places, poetic memories and indications for the construction of engravings. When the idea of carrying out the Drawing Notebooks Collection, I remembered Evandro's drawings and proposed the third name to the collection council. We chose the notebook created during the trip along the São Francisco River, in 1972, from Juazeiro do Norte to Pirapora. The first batch of booklets was complete. Unfortunately, this volume was not printed and is still “in the queue” today, awaiting a green light from the publisher.
Unicamp Publisher: After these first volumes, what was it like continuing to coordinate the collection?
Lygia Eluf: I understood that we could not follow that initial logic of simultaneously launching three distinct periods within the panorama of Brazilian artistic production, but somehow this structural idea was still the central axis of my searches. The three great ladies following the releases are Anita Malfatti, Renina Katz and Fayga Ostrower. Anita Malfatti has countless sketchbooks that intensely record her artistic intention. These notebooks are the property of the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo. The IEB management and the researchers who worked with Anita at the time imposed some restrictions, such as the impossibility of reproducing an entire notebook, which was my intention. I then decided to select, among all the notebooks I had access to, drawings of the human figure, landscapes and some religious drawings. It was intense work and extremely pleasurable to be introduced to that almost inaccessible universe, as the notebooks are stored and have never been exposed.
Renina Katz always maintained the habit of using sketchbooks and notes where she created extremely refined sketches to develop them later, especially in lithographs. Her notebooks are also kept by an institution, the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. This time it was possible to reproduce an entire notebook, since Renina, still alive, authorized the publication. The artist, also a teacher, trained several generations of young engravers and her reflections, readings and poetic polychromatic compositions constitute a rare and complex record of her work in the world.
Among all the volumes, perhaps the most curious is that of Fayga Ostrower. When I spoke to her daughter on the phone, I learned about the existence of countless sketchbooks and decided that would be the next volume. On my first visit to the artist's studio in Rio de Janeiro, now the Fayga Ostrower Institute, I discovered that the artist actually destroyed all the preparatory drawings for her engravings. Another disappointment. But I also discovered a way of working that seemed unprecedented to me and that would have a place of interest within the collection. She kept a systematic record of all the engravings she made and all the works she sold. Her countless notebooks were true inventories of her sales. And the most curious thing is that it reproduced, with a simple and schematic drawing, the engraving that had been sold and the list of buyers.
After the three ladies and all the adaptations we had already made to the original idea, we decided to let the collection itself, at that point already consolidated and respected, point its way. The two volumes that followed are the result of opportunities that we could not miss: the first of them was the fact that Marcello Grassmann was still alive and very excited about the collection, in addition to the fact that, until that moment, there was no book dedicated to the drawing of the great master engraver. A compulsive drawer, Marcello maintained this daily activity until practically the last days of his life. Although he never had anything like a sketchbook or notes, his studio full of drawings was like a large notebook. Today, if we were to republish Grassmann's book, I would include photographs with the entire ambience of the space, its drawing table and walls. The choice of drawings that would go into the volume was made in partnership with Marcello and the idea of organizing them chronologically was his. The other volume, that of Flávio de Carvalho, was also chosen due to a unique opportunity: we have at Unicamp, in the collection of the Alexandre Eulálio Documentation Center (Cedae/IEL), the collection of drawings that Flávio de Carvalho made to accompany the thirty-nine articles from the column “A Moda e o Novo Homem”, in the Diary of São Paulo, between March 4th and October 21st, 1956. This work by Flávio culminated in the Happening which the artist performed on the streets of São Paulo using “men's summer attire”: pleated skirt above the knee, jacket, hat, fishnet stockings and rawhide sandals.
And finally, the last volume published, Iberê Camargo. After extensive research throughout the collection of the Fundação Iberê Camargo, in Porto Alegre, we decided to once again select a part of its immense collection (around two thousand drawings), more specifically the human figure drawings, organized chronologically, including the two drawings he made on his deathbed.
Unicamp Publisher: There is a certain fascination in admiring and analyzing drawings that, invariably, are not finished works. What do you think generates this feeling?
Lygia Eluf: What provokes this feeling is, without a doubt, the fact that the drawing is the record of a thought. Faced with the hegemony of verbal thought, visual thought is almost relegated to a secondary level. Most people are unaware of this way of articulating ideas. For the artist, this is fundamental: drawing is his first tool, it is the way he builds his work. It doesn't matter how each artist develops this process, but, most of the time, the speech is constructed with drawings, scribbles, notes. When we have the possibility of getting closer to this process, something is revealed to us that makes the artistic intention clearer.
Unicamp Publisher: Among the notebooks, would you have a favorite, whether due to the artist's choice, or the selection process, or for any special reason?
Lygia Eluf: The procedure for choosing each volume was initially designed so that we could build a small overview of Brazilian design. Initially, we intended to launch three copies, covering the periods at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, modernism and contemporary design. This is the reason why the first chosen were Visconti, Tarsila do Amaral and Evandro Carlos Jardim. Then I came across the countless obstacles in the publishing world. For reasons external to the collection, the volume with Evandro's work, which was already ready to be printed, was canceled and we released only Tarsila and Visconti. From then on, we faced a series of setbacks that sometimes prevented the process from being completed. Sometimes we encounter difficulties with heirs of the chosen artist, other times with the artists themselves. But we always had a clear path and the list of artists was somehow ready in my head. I have always tried to prioritize, above all, the work; Obviously, the affection I personally had for the artist and his work was a very important factor for me, however, I always tried to be guided by the quality of drawing as a means of thought and expression. Each of them carries, in its essence, the visual thought that builds, based on sensitive knowledge, an important work on the Brazilian scene. In fact, there is no favorite volume for me. Everyone is extremely sweet and special.
Service:
Tarsila do Amaral – Drawing Notebooks
Organizer: Lygia Eluf
ISBN: 9788526808140
Edition: 1
1st reprint 2020
Year: 2008
Pages: 104 p.
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