A photo of Djanira kept popping into my head while I was working on my first book, a biography of Jorge Amado. Her companion, José Shaw da Motta e Silva, is kissing her on the cheek, in a kind of coquettish, mischievous way, like a happy couple. Everything indicates that Zélia Gattai took the picture in those days when the painter, a family friend, was working on the impressive mural depicting a candomblé scene in the kitchen of her apartment on Rua Rodolfo Dantas, in Rio, at the end of 1950.
The kitchen was a regular place for the painter. When she was still only the owner of a boarding house, she used to cook for the guests herself. Her culinary skills were known among her acquaintances and, although she was from Avaré in São Paulo, she mastered Bahian recipes. Djanira had been widowed very young, and when she met Motta, he was by then already Mottinha, a captivating Bahian. These elements were enough for me, in my imagination, to start thinking of her as the inspiration for Dona Flor, the protagonist of the novel that Amado published shortly afterwards. The prototype of Vadinho, of course, would be the second husband. The novel’s plot seemed to reverse the order a touch, but my free association was not to be frustrated by so little.
There is no proof for these conjectures, in fact Amado used to mention other starting points for this, one of his most famous novels, but the fanciful connection I established between Djanira and Dona Flor led me to keep her in a different box in my memory. Her presence, while I was researching the writer, became more and more noticeable to me when she appeared in a photo or report, and to pique my curiosity further, she was described in a decisive way by her friend, with whom she shared views on art and politics: “Djanira is Brazil”. Amado was giving me news of a country; what else could she tell me?
The decision of undertaking a biographical project goes through many stages and trials. From the first idea up to the certainty that you’re going to see it through, one has to test how much enthusiasm can be kept up for this kind of dedication. At a certain point, I realized that if I had a new book on the horizon, I could more easily put an end to the one already in progress. In 2016, two years before my biography of Amado went to the printers, I woke up one day with Djanira in my head as the likely subject of a second book.
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That morning I did the obvious: I finally typed her name into Google and a wealth of dramatic information appeared. She was no longer a Dona Flor captured in the lightness of a kiss. Her life as I found it through links appeared to have been on the edge, quite apart from her early widowhood. There was a near-death from tuberculosis, and her salvation through drawing, in a sanatorium bed. Then there was a poorly explained imprisonment during the dictatorship, a murdered dog and a confiscated passport. In her maturity, marked by a via crúcis at Silvestre hospital, she maintained her always feverish dedication to art, with an oeuvre that was particularly successful between the 1940s and 1960s and which had almost been forgotten after her death in 1979. For her funeral, at her own request, she was shoeless and dressed in a Carmelite habit. Some people had mistakenly identified her as a nun in recent years.
I bought a ticket to Rio, booked a hotel and had a first name to look for: the engraver Anna Letycia. From the conversation at her studio in Urca, I came away with the names and phone numbers of three other friends. Each of the three led me to another three, and so there were already nine – seeing the pyramid effect is always a relief when you’re looking for interviews. But it wasn’t until I met Ceres Feijó, a lawyer and the widow of art critic Flavio de Aquino, that my adventure became irreversible. When I arrived at her home, an apartment in Leblon where, as well as paintings by Djanira, she kept her last bed, she awaited me holding her friend’s will.
– Can I photograph it?
– Take it with you
To the dozens of interviews with friends, relatives, art critics, collectors and auctioneers, a steadily expanding bibliography was added, and now there was the will. It contained a clue that there was a personal collection, and it could have been destined for the FUNARTE, as she had requested. It took me a while to understand that it was all there, in the CEDOC on Rua São José, in Rio’s city center. The staff insisted on discretion at first, as I asked questions. The reason was that they didn’t think it could be released for consultation by researchers, even forty years after the artist’s death. With one exception so far: it had been opened to the team preparing Djanira’s first solo show at MASP, which opened a few months after my visit, in 2019. I was also able to free up my access, helped by this precedent and the ambition of what I wanted to do. However, the pandemic prevented me from moving forward the following year. It wasn’t until 2022 that I was able to return, even though the building had been sealed off by the Civil Defense due to the risk of collapsing. It may sound like a fabrication, but the last document from her archive that I recorded with my cell phone was a telegram of condolences sent to Mottinha by Zélia and Jorge.
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A genre that has existed since antiquity, with precursors such as Diogenes and Plutarch, the writing of lives has crossed centuries with various contributions from literature and history, the social sciences and psychoanalysis. In trying to clarify what he was doing, Plutarch warned that he didn’t intend to list all the facts of the Caesars’ lives, but rather to capture their souls, sometimes shown in the most trivial gestures, in an anecdote. Octavio Paz, in his biographical essay on Sóror Juana Inés de La Cruz – which is actually a panel of colonial Mexico – says that the ambition of the author of a biography is to make the reader feel like an old friend of the person being biographed. For each era, a style prevails, from the monumental biographies of the 19th century to the modernist experiments at the turn of the 20th. There seems to be only one unanimity around a biographical project: for each character, a form is imposed.
From the amount of material left by Jorge Amado, it was possible to construct a trajectory that covered the entire 20th century, encompassing not only his private but also his public life. This is transoceanic research: in Brazilian and foreign archives there are letters, handwritten documents, book manuscripts, photos and old cassette tapes. This vast collection constitutes an open and expanding subject, with friendships spread across all continents, as well as his work, in 49 languages. In addition, there are memoirs, or almost memoirs, written by him and his wife, their sons and daughters, and friends. The challenge for those who write their lives is to navigate this excess of sources and choose the thread. The threads of their narrative.
Djanira’s case seems to be the opposite. She left virtually no written material about herself. We can glimpse her story told by herself in interviews with newspapers and magazines. Thanks to what she left in her will to FUNARTE, the personal folders she kept still exist: press clippings, photographic contacts, letters – not many – exchanged with buyers, sometimes invitations to events, medical prescriptions. It’s not exactly scarcity, but rather a reflection of a quieter life – compared to Amado’s – almost always in the same city, Rio de Janeiro, surrounded by a small group. In comparison with the writer, the painter takes us to a less narrative form, plasticity is imposed, the atmosphere is distinguished by introspection and reserve. And there is no doubting her immense effort to preserve her own memory. Among many clues to this, I offer this testimony: art critic José Roberto Teixeira Leite told me that, shortly before she died, Djanira offered him her studio-home in Santa Teresa in exchange for him writing a book about her. He refused.
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I meet Djanira with every painting I see face to face. A bit like holding the manuscripts of Amado’s novels in your hands. What does a researcher work with, apart from seeing and reading? I’ve smelled the clove perfume the writer wore. I have sampled his favorite dish, hauçá rice. I listened in many ways to what he said in audios and videos. In fact, I met Amado in person long before I started a book about him. As for Djanira, her low, paused voice is recorded, for anyone who wants to hear it, in a long testimony at the Museu da Imagem do Som, in Rio, in the series of testimonies they carried out over decades with artists and intellectuals of various fields. I visited Avaré and listened to the Villa-Lobos she liked. But in scarce moments have I felt so close to her as, on one of the visits I was able to make to her studio-home, while recording images of windows, furniture, saints, almost everything preserved as she left it, I was able to hold the cloth with which she cleaned her brushes. A square of fabric covered in colors, the dark background, the relief of the overlapping paints. I remembered the day I was told at the Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado that there was an object for me to see: his pacemaker, which had to be removed before he was cremated, gave me a feeling of astonishment and enigma. Djanira’s cloth, like Amado’s pacemaker, made me feel her heart beating.
Djanira (1914–1979), of Austrian and indigenous descent, was born in Avaré and lived most of her life in Rio de Janeiro. Her family name was Job Paiva. On her first marriage, she became Gomes Pereira. As a widow, she became Motta e Silva, which became official after her second marriage. She was a self-taught bedsit owner who began to draw the attention of critics with the paintings she produced from the 1940s onwards. Thus began her career as a painter, designer, illustrator and set designer, with exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. She often traveled around the country to find people and scenes for her paintings. She created everything from posters, such as for the play Orfeu da Conceição (1954), to large panels, such as the Santa Bárbara one, initially inaugurated in the tunnel of the same name and today kept at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio. Recently, her career and work have been reappraised, with a solo exhibition at MASP in 2019 and her works included in the Venice Biennale in 2024.
About the author
Joselia Aguiar is a journalist with a PhD in history from the Universidade de São Paulo (SP). She works as an author, editor, researcher and curator in the field of literature. Her first book, Jorge Amado – uma biografia, published by Todavia, won the Jabuti prize in 2019 in the biography, documentary and reportage category. She is finalizing a book about the life and work of the painter Djanira for the same publisher. Her recent roles have included curator of the Paraty International Literary Festival – FLIP in 2017 and 2018, and director of the Biblioteca Mário de Andrade between 2019 and 2021. Born in Salvador, she lives in São Paulo.