Art and artists

Heitor dos Prazeres: paintings, samba and everyday life

Heitor dos Prazeres through three paintings: St. John's Day, Moenda and O artista, with samba, work and Black daily life in Rio de Janeiro.

At a June festival, couples dance between a house and a bonfire. In another painting, two people work at a sugarcane mill, surrounded by tall cane. In a portrait, a man with a white beard and a red beret smokes a pipe. Heitor dos Prazeres (1898–1966) painted these scenes, bringing to the canvas the Black life he knew in Rio de Janeiro. He already had a career in samba when he began to devote himself to painting in the late 1930s.¹²³

Music appears in the dancers’ gestures, but work, houses and the act of painting also have a place in his pictures. Three paintings offer a way into this work: Festa de São João (St. John’s Day), from 1942, Moenda, from 1951, and O artista, from 1959.²³¹

The Rio de Janeiro that Heitor painted

Heitor was born in Rio in 1898 and grew up around Praça Onze. His family came from Bahia, as did other Black families who settled near the port and in Cidade Nova. Tia Ciata’s house, Carnival groups known as ranchos and samba gatherings were part of this world. His father was a cabinetmaker and clarinettist; his mother was a seamstress. Music and manual work were part of his life before painting became an occupation.⁴

As an adult, Heitor spent time in the places that appear in his paintings: bars, samba dance halls known as gafieiras, Carnival groups and Afro-Brazilian religious spaces known as terreiros. His work as a composer and instrumentalist also spanned the formative years of Rio’s samba schools. The Fundação Bienal records his involvement in the origins of Mangueira and Portela, as well as his work as a tailor, shoemaker and cabinetmaker. In 1954, he designed sets and costumes for O guarda-chuva, performed by São Paulo’s Ballet do IV Centenário.⁵

A patterned dress or a striped suit can occupy as much of a composition as the wearer’s face. In many dance scenes, fabrics bring bodies together and set them apart: the yellow of a skirt meets a dark jacket, one pattern interrupts another. Clothing plays a part in the movement the painting suggests.²

Three paintings to get to know his work

Festa de São João, 1942

MoMA in New York holds St. John’s Day, from 1942, the English title of Festa de São João. It is an oil painting on canvas measuring 64.8 × 80.6 cm. Musicians stand on the left, in front of a house; couples dance in the centre; on the right, other figures gather around a bonfire. Above them, a paper balloon stands out against the night.²

The yard has clear boundaries. A fence runs across the foreground, and vegetation closes in from the sides. Strings of bunting cross diagonally above the group. Within this space, each activity has its place: playing music, dancing, watching the balloon, standing by the fire. There is plenty happening, but the eye can follow it all.

The yellow, green and red dresses have small patterns; pale stripes cross the dark suits. Seen up close, the celebration is also made of these details. Turned heads and bent arms show relationships between people, while feet and hemlines give direction to the steps. The painting invites a look at each couple before returning to the group.²

Moenda, 1951

Moenda is an oil painting on canvas measuring 65 × 81.1 cm, now at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. It received the Toddy do Brasil Acquisition Prize at the first São Paulo Bienal in 1951. The collection record notes that it entered MAC USP as a gift from the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo.³

Two people stand beside the equipment used to crush sugarcane. On the left, a man leans beneath a long pole; closer to the centre, a woman in a blue blouse and pink skirt raises an arm. Pale liquid flows from the mill into a dark container. Around them, the leaves of the cane bend and repeat; a house occupies the upper right corner.³

Here, movement comes from work. The raised arm, the diagonal pole and the curves of the plants divide the surface. The mill stands between the figures, involved in both their actions. Vegetation covers much of the canvas and reaches into the foreground, placing the work within the landscape.

The prize places this painting at a specific point in Heitor’s career. He submitted three paintings to the first Bienal and was given a special room at the second edition in 1953.⁵

O artista, 1959

In O artista, at MASP, a single figure fills the space. A Black man in profile wears a red beret and a pale shirt. His hair and beard are grey; he smokes a pipe and looks to the left. The strands of his beard and the small patterns on his buttons call for a close look. The oil painting on canvas measures 45.5 × 39 cm.¹

Olivia Ardui, who wrote the museum’s text, notes that the beret also appears in Heitor’s self-portraits. She therefore suggests that this painting may be another self-portrait. This is an interpretation; the title does not establish the sitter’s identity. Ardui also connects the pipe with depictions of pretos-velhos, spirits in Afro-Brazilian religions.¹

The painting changes our distance from the group scenes. Clothing and face occupy almost the entire surface; the blue background surrounds the profile. The attention shared among many people at a festival now rests on the details of one man.

How the paintings acquire rhythm

In the group scenes, the eye can follow sequences of raised heads, bent arms and legs in different positions. Figures draw together in couples or groups; the spaces between them also count. In Olivia Ardui’s reading for MASP, rhythm comes from gestures and the alternation of colours applied in even areas.¹

A studio technique lies behind the repetition of certain figures. The catalogue Heitor dos Prazeres é meu nome, published in 2024, describes drawings on translucent paper with graphite on the reverse. By tracing the drawing, Heitor transferred the figure to the canvas. He could arrange the positions and mark the colours before painting, as well as use the same figure in different pictures.⁶

This method offers another way to look at the similarities between bodies. An arm returns, a profile repeats, the clothes change. In Festa de São João, patterns and gestures connect the couples; in Moenda, the workers’ positions follow the equipment.²³

Was Heitor dos Prazeres a naïve painter?

Heitor’s name often appears in histories of Brazilian naïve art. In 1972, MoMA included his work in an exhibition called Naive Painting: A Selection from the Museum Collection. The word is part of the history of how museums received and classified his paintings.⁷

More recent interpretations question the limits of this classification. In the CCBB exhibition catalogue, Raquel Barreto, Haroldo Costa and Pablo León de la Barra criticise the use of “naïve” and “primitive” when these terms diminish the artistic thought behind Heitor’s work. The curators propose reading the paintings through the artist’s Black, urban and Brazilian experience.⁸

To understand his pictures, the term can serve as a historical starting point. Looking closely means examining his choices: how he arranges a group, transfers a drawing, distributes patterns and paints a face. The relationship between this vocabulary and other Brazilian painters is discussed in Chico da Silva and Brazilian naïve art.

Where to see the works

The three paintings discussed here belong to MoMA, MAC USP and MASP. MAM Rio also holds Autorretrato, from 1956, an oil painting on wood in the Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection. The museum’s page includes the work’s details and an audio description in Portuguese.⁹

In the 1956 painting, the figure sits at an easel outdoors. The red beret appears again in O artista, painted three years later.¹⁰ MAM Rio’s audio description, in Portuguese, accompanies a closer look at Autorretrato.