Abstracted Resistance: Third-Worldism in Rubem Valentim’s Afro-Brazilian Symbolism, 1963–66

Abstract

Here I examine the research, drawings, and paintings of the Afro-Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim produced during his trip to Western Europe and Senegal from 1963 to 1966. Valentim’s work has recently become a paradigm of Brazilian geometric abstraction. Scholars have largely interpreted the symbolism in his paintings as stemming from African-derived religions in Brazil and as divorced from contemporaneous politics. Building on this literature, I explore the political dimensions and multifaceted articulations of abstraction in Valentim’s five notebooks from his trip to Europe, which have only come to light in the past few years and are the foundation of his painting practice. I argue that his study of African and Polynesian objects from the British Museum as well as his abstract notebook drawings highlight his private support of Third-Worldism, which promoted solidarity among countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in favor of national liberation and against global capitalism. Valentim’s time abroad coincided with the April 1964 Brazilian military coup, the regime of which combatted progressive politics like Third-Worldism. While his notebook drawings contain politicized words opposing the dictatorship, the resulting paintings are devoid of them, which qualified them for regime-sponsored exhibitions like the Brazilian display at the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, and veiled the artist’s private resistance embedded in his geometry. The true intentions of his abstract visual language, revealed in the notebooks, were unintelligible to the regime, making his work a contested landscape of political conversation.