MASP

Victor Meirelles studied at the Academia Imperial de Belas-Artes, in Rio de Janeiro, and was awarded a travel grant to Europe in 1853, studying in Rome, Florence and Paris. He was one of the artists responsible for the consolidation of historical painting during the reign of Dom Pedro II (1825–1891), from 1841 to 1889, and taught artists such as Eliseu Visconti (1866–1944) and Almeida Júnior (1850–1899). Moema presents the character of the same name from the epic poem Caramuru (1781) by Frei Durão (1722–1784), after she drowned while swimming after the ship carrying her lover, Diogo Álvares, who was returning to Portugal. Moema was a highly successful theme in the art, literature and music of that period. The theme belongs to the tradition of Indianist romanticism, typical of that time, which sought to valorize native themes in Brazil’s national history within an idealized view that glossed over the barbarities of the colonization. In MASP’s painting, Meirelles recurred to the European theme of the female nude within a landscape under tragic circumstances, depicting Moema like an Indigenous Venus. The painting alludes to the contradiction between the image, constructed during the Empire, of the indigenous person as a hero of Brazil’s nationhood, and the violence practiced against the native populations and their cultures.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2015

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By Eugênia Gorini Esmeraldo
The work Moema, as Donato Mello Júnior informs in a letter dated 1967, “has a painful history... It was on display at the Pinacoteca da Escola Nacional de Belas-Artes up to October 1929 when it was removed... because the Government never managed to allocate the scant funds needed to purchase it. It was never shown at the Museu Nacional de Belas-Artes (which dates from 1937)”, contrary to data published in the 1963 Masp catalogue. Mello Júnior also informs that as early as 1866, Councilor Tomás Gomes dos Santos stated: “A work of remarkable value because it features, in marked degree, all the qualities of great painting; it is the Moema of Mr. Meirelles de Lima. Drawing, color, aerial transparency, light effects, perspective, exact imitation of the most beautiful aspects of nature, raise this masterly composition to the category of a very high-priced original. The subject matter, all Brazilian, is one of our most touching legends”. He refers to Diogo Álvares – acclaimed by the Indians as Caramuru, “Son of Thunder” – a conqueror who returned to Europe with his Indian wife, Paraguaçu, leaving several other, lovesick, behind in Brazil. Some of these women swim after the ship, and one of them, Moema, dies in her attempt to keep up with the ship. Meirelles, with a romantic eye, portrays the body of the young Indian girl lying on the shore in a sensual pose, with her loin cloth tied on only one hip, the left leg resting on a rock, and her hair spread out on the sand. The sea is blurrily depicted in the background, and the forest can be seen in the distance, where a few palms and other trees stand out. The well-drawn figure demonstrates Meirelles’ mastery, which is also apparent in the preparatory drawing conserved at the Museu Nacional de Belas-Artes. As Coli points out, the renowned critic Gonzaga-Duque commented on this work in 1887: “... painted ‘Moema’ with great delicacy, not realistically, but in accordance with the ideals of his time, the artistic aspirations of his era. I say unrealistically because for a drowned woman thrown up onto the sand, the Indian girl’s form is too soft and the color still very warm...”. Coli, drawing a parallel between the painting and Charles Baudelaire’s poem, La chevelure, analyzes the work as follows: “From morbid necrophilia to the damp black medusa of the hair, perfumed by tropical odors saturated with coconut oil; from the caressing water to the ambiguous immobility of the superb body, both poem and painting are pervaded with sensuality. Moema concentrates strong pulses that blossomed in Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (1857). In these 1860s, artists insist on depicting female bodies as elongated, their forces abandoned, exposed, offering. Bodies offered up, ruled by gravity, inert, like the long hair, spread out. (...) Moema is the most Baudelairian of all. In her one senses the heady perfumes of distant shores, the coppery color that can invoke eroticism based on novelty. Implicit is the suggestion of the ship that has set sail as well as the gift of the magnificent body, almost a corpse, rest and death entwined. (...) The powerfully synthetic, geometrized volumes of the body of Moema, the shading defined with scant transitions, the implacable outline, spiritualize – there is no other word for it – the insistently erotic theme. (...) The painting combines the great sensual obsession of the time, tirelessly repeated in international art, with the Indianist romanticism overlaid here by the impression of distant seas. Because Meirelles achieves a stylistic transfiguration capable of conveying the image to that tenuous dividing line between sensitive seduction and beauty of form”.

— Eugênia Gorini Esmeraldo, 1998

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