These articles are based on recorded gatherings of the four artists in the Grupo de Bagé. Scliar described the format as “a sort of group therapy session” during the I Encontro Nacional de Artistas Plásticos in Bagé (state of Rio Grande do Sul) in January 1976. Artists from around the country participated in that event, which was organized by the city of Bagé’s tourism office. In keeping with a modality developed by the Grupo de Bagé in their research into the landscape and the rural setting, the owners of local estates put up the visiting artists. In September 1976, a retrospective of the Grupo de Bagé was held at the festivities hall of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre—the capital of that state in southern Brazil— featuring works produced following those visits to the countryside. The exhibition, entitled Por uma arte brasileira, was sponsored by public departments of education and tourism (Projeto Cultur). This event took place at the height of the dictatorship in Brazil (1964?85), when the state of Rio Grande do Sul’s cultural department had been turned into the Department of Education’s Division of Cultural Affairs. The disconnect between the images created by the group and the conservative ideology of the rural oligarchy is evident not only in the text, but also in the events themselves, although it is never directly addressed by the artists or the journalists.
For information on the Clube de Gravura do Rio de Janeiro founded in the fifties (a number of print clubs were founded in various Brazilian states during those years), see [doc. no. 1110336]; for information on the Oficina Guaianases de Gravura in operation in Recife and Olinda (state of Pernambuco) in the seventies, see “O caminho das pedras” [doc. no. 1110677]; in the eighties, the Cooperativa de Artistas Plásticos (CAP) group in São Paulo advocated “A gravura na cooperativa” [doc. no. 1110659]; on the revival of printmaking in the state of Ceará in the nineties, see “A nova gravura de Juazeiro do Norte” [doc. no. 1110756].