Heitor dos Prazeres is fondly remembered in Brazil as a samba legend, who made classics like “Vai Saudade” in 1965. But his parallel trajectory as an artist was somewhat forgotten until recently, when his paintings celebrating the diasporic Black experience in Brazil have won renewed acclaim.
US audiences will have a chance to discover this multifaceted figure in September at Independent 20th Century in New York, where Heitor’s works will be jointly exhibited by Galatea and Simões de Assis, two Brazilian galleries that are actively building value, in both critical discourse and the market, for the country’s artists who have been overlooked by 20th-century art history.
Heitor invests his scenes of Afro-Brazilian life—carnival, samba musicians and dancers, religious ceremonies, the favelas, and capoeira—with a rhythmic and dynamic quality. His stylized, two-dimensional figures, whether set in the countryside or in Rio de Janeiro, are animated and exuberant, reflecting “his own vision of Black life and Black people,” says Fernanda Morse, a researcher at Galatea. “They are proud, happy, and strong.”
Heitor dos Prazeres at his studio in Rio de Janeiro, 1963, photography by Patrik Ward, courtesy Collection Getty Images
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1898, Heitor had already achieved some acclaim nationally and internationally by the 1940s. He was the only Black artist featured in a Brazilian war relief exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1944. A much-repeated story goes that his depiction of a midsummer festival, Festa de São João, inspired the then Princess Elizabeth of England to ask, “Who is this extraordinary painter?”
Another breakthrough came in 1951, when Heitor’s painting of workers on a sugar plantation, Moenda, came in third place in the first São Paulo Biennial. He was honored with a special room in the second edition in 1953, and in between was included in the 26th Venice Biennale.
Heitor worked up until his death in October 1966 from pancreatic cancer, even making art and music from his hospital bed in Rio de Janeiro. Just a few months earlier he had participated in the seminal first edition of the World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal.
Yet despite his success, it is only in recent years that scholars and curators have reappraised the longtime labeling of Heitor’s painting as “naive,” which diminished his importance in the history of Brazilian modern art. A major retrospective was held last year at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, reframing his multiple contributions to visual art, music, design, and fashion through more than 200 works.
One of the paintings from that exhibition will also appear at Independent 20th Century. A dynamic samba scene from around 1963, it hints at Heitor’s legacy as a founding member of three of the oldest samba schools in Rio de Janeiro: Deixa Falar, Mangueira, and Portela, established in the 1920s.
Heitor dos Prazeres, Untitled, 1961, Oil on canvas, 21 5/8 x 18 1/8 in, Photo by Ding Musa, Courtesy Galatea & Simões de Assis
This will hang with another late-career work from 1961, showing a man wielding a knife as he advances towards another figure. Widely reproduced in the media during Heitor’s lifetime, the street scene was displayed in a 1964 exhibition in Rio de Janeiro where his band, Heitor de Brasileiros e Sua Gente, performed at the opening.
Gallerists Guilherme and Laura Simões de Assis began procuring the artist’s paintings after an introduction to his work by the late Emanoel Araújo, the founder of São Paulo’s Museu Afro Brasil. The Simões de Assis gallery is now collaborating with researchers and private collectors to catalog his oeuvre, which has been almost entirely dispersed in private collections.
Proving Heitor’s hand in the paintings is critical, says the curator Ademar Britto, who organized a gallery exhibition placing the artist’s work in dialogue with contemporary artist Zéh Palito. As Heitor’s fame grew, he ran a workshop of assistants to keep up with demand, so some examples do not represent the full breadth and quality of his practice, and several counterfeits have surfaced over the years.
Heitor dos Prazeres, Macumba, 1965, Oil on canvas, 19 3/8 x 23 3/8 in, Photo by Ding Musa, Courtesy Galatea & Simões de Assis
The artist’s vibrant downtown atelier in Praça XI, Rio’s so-called “Little Africa,” was captured in a 1965 documentary by the filmmaker Antonio Carlos da Fontoura, in which Heitor asserted his belief that his paintings were inseparable from the people and places around him.
One work coming to Independent, Untitled (Macumba), directly addresses the religious rituals of the Afro-Brazilian community. It shows a bearded man with a sacrificial chicken evoking a “Preto Velho,” a figure believed to represent the souls of deceased African slaves.
“Later in his life, Heitor saw himself as a Preto Velho,” Britto says. “As an artist, he was proudly teaching people about the music, dances and rituals involved in macumba, and advocating for the Afro-Brazilian religions that were prohibited and criminalized at the time—and that still face much prejudice today. It was radically political.”
As Heitor expressed in his own words at the time, “The joy of these people, the suffering of these people is what compels me to work. It’s what makes me transport the suffering of the people to the canvas. These people are me, the man of the people.”
Gabriella Angeleti is an arts and culture writer and editor based between Brooklyn and Rio de Janeiro. Her writing focuses on South American art, Indigenous art, art in the American high desert, archeological and cultural heritage conservation, and the intersection of art and the environment.
