Antonio Henrique Amaral

In 1964, General Humberto De Alencar Castelo Branco led a coup that replaced the existing government with a military junta. There was a severe recession, which led to popular dissatisfaction with the government. The government responded to peaceful protests with Institutional Act No. 5, which closed Congress, dissolved the veneer of democracy that existed at the time, allowed the regime to arrest, imprison without habeas corpus, and to censor, outlaw criticism, and repress the populace harshly. This is when the dictatorship tortured and often murdered anyone even suspected of opposing it. Without recourse to dialogue or democracy, a small portion of the opposition took to guerrilla resistance such as high-profile kidnappings in order to demand their comrades be freed from the dictatorship's torture chambers, and bank robberies. Among other things, Amaral's banana paintings reflected the human rights abuses of the regime and its support by the United States. From 1968 to 1975, Antonio Henrique Amaral painted two series of paintings focused solely on bananas. The first, painted mainly from 1968 to 1972, was titled Brasilia, while the second, from 1973 to 1974, was titled Campos de batallha, or Battlefields. Brasiliana was more of a banana festival or, as the Brazilians would say, “bananas to sell and to give away.” These bananas were generally less corrupted than Amaral's later bananas but by the end of the series, these too have begun to rot and become entangled in ropes, mimicking the parrot's perch, the most common torture practice by the regime. The Campos de batalha series began around 1973, after Amaral moved back to New York City to avoid the intense censorship and possible retaliation by the Brazilian government. In this series, Amaral introduces sharp, metallic objects like forks and knives that penetrate and cut the bananas. Here he recreates what was happening to the bodies of those who dared resist the totalitarian regime. The symbol of the banana was complex and diverse. In the 1920s, in Tarsila do Amaral’s day, the banana represented the unique culture and identity of Brazil. By the time Antonio Henrique Amaral began painting bananas, their meaning had been added too. In one regard, the banana symbolized the existence of the “banana republics.” Brazil was the largest exporter of bananas in the world, making up approximately twenty-three percent of all the world’s bananas. The economic importance of such a valuable resource was not lost on the Brazilians but they disliked it being the metaphor for behavior because unfortunately for the Brazilian, this export was taken advantage of and exploited by more prosperous countries, particularly the United States of America. Therefore the banana became synonymous with American imperialism and Brazilian dependence on richer countries. The banana mostly represented the people in general and the state of the nation politically, socially, and economically. By the perfectionism in his art, it seemed as though Amaral was attempting to reestablish the importance of the banana as a symbol. The first of the banana series, Boa vizinhanca (The Good Neighbor) in 1968 linked the Brazilian and American flags with a banana, thus pointing out the obvious connection between the two countries. He also changed the Brazilian motto on the flag to highlight the word Esso, which was a large U.S. oil company (now Exxon Mobil) operating in Brazil. After Boa vizinhança, his paintings became more critical and darker. Amaral began to paint his bananas as rotting, mutilated, turning into “mud,” bound with cord, etc. The banana being synonymous with the human body was “being victimized by colonialism, repression, and torture.” The transition from his earlier to his later banana paintings is characterized by the sharp, pointed objects in Battlefields. The objects are gray and black, reminding the viewer of technology and smoke. The forks and knives were metaphors for repression and torture. Battlefields is the confrontation between the inorganic and the organic, the machine and the body. The ropes and sharp objects directly represent the repression occurring under the military dictatorship. The fact that the Battlefield paintings are numbered not named reinforced the anonymity of the victims of the regime. By mutilating his bananas, Amaral reveals the problems wrought by the U.S.-backed regime in Brazil.

The banana was Amaral's favorite subject and symbolic representation, but he was not the first Brazilian painter to use it. Albert Eckhout (1610–1665), the Dutch Brazilian painter from the 17th century, also associated the banana with the region that would later become Brazil. Antonio Henrique Amaral's own great-aunt, Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), also used the banana tree and leaf as symbolic of Brazil in the background of many of her paintings. Lasar Segall (1891–1957) also used banana trees as identification for Brazilian people in his painting, Bananal (1927). These artists all contributed to the emergence of the banana as a symbol of Brazil that Amaral would later adopt.