Carybé

Biography

Héctor Julio Páride Bernabó was born on 7 February 1911 in Lanús, a suburb of Buenos Aires. In official records his birthday is entered differently: his parents reported the birth formally only on the third day, 9 February.

He was the youngest of five children of Enea Bernabó, an Italian, and Constantina González, an Argentine from a Brazilian family. His father was a restless man, and the family kept moving. Before the boy was a year old they were living in Italy, first in Genoa and then, when the First World War began, in Rome. In 1919 the family moved to Rio de Janeiro.

The nickname dates from Rio, around 1921. The boy belonged to a scout troop of the Flamengo club, where it was the custom to give the boys the names of fish. He became Carybé, after a small piranha, and the name replaced his real one: his own was too close to that of his brother, also an artist. He started work early. From 1925 he helped his elder brother Arnaldo Bernabó in a pottery workshop, and in 1927–1929 he studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio.

In 1930 the family moved to Buenos Aires. There Carybé, like his brothers, went into newspapers, drawing advertisements, caricatures and illustrations. In 1935–1936 he worked alongside the writer Julio Cortázar and drew for the newspaper El Diario. In 1938 the newspaper El Pregón sent him on a trip through the ports of South America, and from each he was to send drawings and notes. In Salvador he learned that the paper had folded and that no more money would come. By his own account, he returned home with drawings for his first solo exhibition and with the certainty that a painter’s place was Bahia.

In 1939 his first group exhibition, with Clemente Moreau, was held at the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, and in 1943 his first solo show took place, at the Nordiska gallery. In those years he illustrated many books. He drew for Mário de Andrade’s “Macunaíma” in 1940, and in 1943, together with Raúl Brié, translated it into Spanish. For his drawings for Miguel Cané’s “Juvenilia” the Argentine Book Council gave him first prize. In 1941, with the money from drawing an almanac for the Esso company, he set off on a long journey through Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. In 1944, visiting Salvador for the third time, he took capoeira lessons, attended Candomblé ceremonies and made drawings and paintings.

The decisive year was 1950. At the invitation of Anísio Teixeira, Bahia’s secretary of education, he settled in Salvador and made two panels for the Carneiro Ribeiro education centre. He lived there for the rest of his life. In the 1950s he took part in the renewal of Bahian art together with Mário Cravo Júnior, Genaro de Carvalho and Jenner Augusto. In 1951 he won a gold medal at the 1st Biennial of Books and Graphic Arts for his drawings for Odorico Tavares’s book “Bahia, Imagens da Terra e do Povo”. In 1952 he made about 1,600 drawings for the scenes of Lima Barreto’s film “O Cangaceiro”, was its art director and appeared in it as an extra. In 1955, at the 3rd São Paulo Art Biennial, he received first prize for drawing. He took Brazilian citizenship in 1957.

In 1959 he won first and second prizes in a competition for murals for the American Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York. The two panels, about 16.5 by 53 feet, hung there from 1960. When the terminal was slated for demolition they were given to Miami-Dade County, and they are now at Miami International Airport.

At home in Salvador he became part of the religious community that he wrote and drew about. In 1967, commissioned by the Banco da Bahia, he made 27 cedar panels of the orixás, the deities of Candomblé. Each showed one deity with its implements and animal. In 1968 the bank installed them in its branch on Avenida Sete de Setembro, and later they went to the Afro-Brazilian Museum. He received the honorary title of Obá de Xangô at the Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá temple. Thirty years of studying the rites produced the book “Iconografia dos Deuses Africanos no Candomblé da Bahia” (1981).

From 1969 he illustrated Gabriel García Márquez, including “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1971), “The Autumn of the Patriarch”, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” and “Love in the Time of Cholera”. His woodcuts for “One Hundred Years” gave many readers a visual image of Macondo: colourful, winding houses, the railway bridge, the stifling climate. He also drew for Jorge Amado, his friend and the author of the book “O Capeta Carybé”. In 1971, in Rio, he spent two days sketching rehearsals of Rudolf Nureyev and assembled the drawings into an album.

Honours came one after another: honorary citizen of Salvador (1963), the Odorico Tavares Prize as best artist of the year (1967), a gold medal at the first Brazil-Japan Fine Arts Exhibition (1973), an honorary doctorate from the Federal University of Bahia (1982). He made the concrete sculpture “Oxóssi” in Catacumba Park (1978) and the bronze “Homage to the Bahian woman” (1984) in Salvador, and designed the ballet “Quincas Berro D’Água” (1980) and the opera “La Bohème” (1985).

Carybé died on 2 October 1997 in Salvador. He was a member of the Cruz Santa Opô Afonjá Society, the lay board of the temple; on the day he died it was holding a meeting.