Most of Heitor's musical career was with his group Heitor dos Prazeres e sua Gente, formed in the 1930s, in which the artist was accompanied by the “pastoras”, as they called themselves. They sang and danced to all the popular rhythms and wore different costumes every season, designed by Heitor and produced by the chorus women. 

“My mother, who together with her sister, aunt Natividade, was a chorister in the ensemble of Heitor dos Prazeres e sua Gente, used to tell us about traveling to shows all over Brazil, about filming, casinos, circuses, theaters and parties, in late afternoon conversations when families would get together to listen to the radio and tell stories in between songs.”

Heitor dos Prazeres Filho, in Heitor dos Prazeres: sua arte e seu tempo, 2003

Exhibition view, Heitor dos Prazeres é meu nome, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil – CCBB Rio de Janeiro (2023). Photo: Tânia Rego / Agência Brasil

The group took part in shows, performances and auditorium programs at Rádio Nacional, where Heitor worked from 1943 to 1964 as a rhythm player with the group Cassino da Urca. Heitor took part in several performances by guest artists, including the famous American dancer Josephine Baker, who was in Rio de Janeiro in 1939. It was Heitor who organized the visit of the celebrity and Orson Wells – who was producing a film in the city at the time and hired Heitor as his helper – to the Candomblé terreiro of Mãe Adedé. On that memorable evening, rumored to have lasted until the morning of the next day, Heitor met journalist Carlos Cavalcanti, who encouraged Heitor's entry into the visual arts.

The painting of Heitor dos Prazeres

Visuality and expressiveness

Heitor dos Prazeres began painting in 1937, after the death of his first wife, Glória. Initially, his work was destined for the walls of his house and his sheet music, which he decorated with colorfully dressed characters. Heitor's career as a visual artist began when journalist Carlos Cavalcanti, a friend and cavaquinho student, noticed the composer's recurring doodles on bar napkins and encouraged him to paint. He was also encouraged by the caricaturist, photographer, journalist and educator Augusto Rodrigues. 

“My painting is important to me. It's an escape from my pain, my sorrows, my suffering, my passions. I feel like I'm in another world, a world of suffering, a world of enjoyment, a world of happiness. A happy world. Yes, painting gives me all that joy, it gives me all that richness for me.” 

Heitor dos Prazeres, testimony for the documentary by Antonio Carlos Fontoura, 1966

Still in 1937, Heitor – whose pictorial research began with gouache – took part in an exhibition of Latin American art in London with a painting. The exhibit was promoted by the Royal Air Force (RAF) to benefit the victims of the Second World War. 

From this first phase of production comes Sonho [Dream] (1939), which shows a scene of a young man dreaming in his bedroom, with photographs and paintings on the wall, next to a cavaquinho case. The scene, seen from above, in earthy tones, reveals a memory (or desire), embodied by a female figure floating beside the bed.

His unmistakable way of representing bodies and landscapes, and the visual force of dance in his paintings, has a strong sense of cultural identity. The work in rural areas, children's games, leisure and religiosity are some of the themes he represented in works inspired by the people and places he visited throughout his life. 

Institutionalization and prestige

From Biennials to the art market

In 1951, Heitor dos Prazeres’ work Moenda [Milling] (1951) was awarded a prize at the 1st Bienal de São Paulo, held by the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, and is currently in the collection of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea of the Universidade de São Paulo - MAC USP. 

“With his figurative painting at the 1st Bienal de São Paulo, Heitor enters a field of narrative dispute about Brazilian reality and the legacies of modernity. By creating everyday scenes of Black people, he signals another Brazilian reality, one that differs from the new geometric and abstract narratives.” 

Raquel Barreto, Haroldo Campos, Pablo León de la Barra, in Heitor dos Prazeres é meu nome, 2024, p.149

A great moment in the multi-artist's career was his participation in the celebrations for the 4th Centenary of the city of São Paulo in 1954. For this historic event, Heitor was invited to create costumes and sets for the show O guarda-chuva [The Umbrella], produced by the Ballet for the IV Centenary at the Theatro Municipal, a space reserved for the great operas and theatrical productions of São Paulo's elite. 

In 1963, Heitor was invited to join Rhodia's Brazilian Look project, creating designs for a collection to be presented in Europe. The fabric prints he created referenced objects and symbols from his musical culture and present in Afro-Brazilian visual culture, such as atabaques (a musical instrument) and adinkras (traditional African ideograms). 

"As well as making the music, he uses his skills as a tailor to make the costumes that people wear to play Carnival. And it's an impressive wealth of detail. So, it's no wonder, when you look at his paintings, the attention he pays to people's clothes, accessories, shoes, hats, the rich detail, the detail – why so much detail? – it's because he's already mastered it, it's already part of him, of his expressiveness. And he transfers that to painting"

Glaucea Helena, MASP Pannels: Heitor dos Prazeres: protagonismo e arte, 2018

As the production of Heitor's paintings intensified at the same time as his recognition, the artist began to rely on assistants to meet the volume of orders. At his General Pedra studio, in the Little Africa region, he had up to thirty people – including friends and family – helping him finish paintings that were commissioned with similar motifs to previous works. Heitor therefore adopted a method of decals, which he positioned on the canvas and his helpers inserted, adopting a workshop system, as Alba Lirio defined it. He did the painting, the faces and the details of the clothing himself, giving each scene its own specificity.

Resistance and legacy

The 1960s, the last decade of Heitor dos Prazeres' life, was marked by political instability in Brazil. In 1964, with the military coup, after 22 years of service, the musician was sacked along with 36 other employees of Rádio Nacional, without employment rights, for being considered a communist threat within the station. The dismissals were commented on in the newspapers and Rubem Braga wrote in the Jornal do Brasil newpaper on July 30, 1964: “Heitor dos Prazeres, painter and sambista, is one of the most beloved figures in carioca life and instead of dismissing him after 22 years of service as a rhythm player at Nacional, the government, if it had any imagination and sense of justice, should inscribe his name on the National Order of Merit.”

“Despite all the repression, what history shows us is that, as much as the performance practices of indigenous peoples and Africans were banned, demonized, coerced and excluded, these same practices, through various processes of restoration and resistance, ensured the survival of a body of knowledge that resisted attempts to erase it completely”

Leda Maria Martins, in Performances do tempo espiralar, 2021

One of his great friends was the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who often visited Heitor in his studio. To Heitor he dedicated the poem Um homem e seu carnaval [A Man and His Carnival]. Drummond, who also helped him get hired by the Ministry of Education and Culture as a restoration assistant in 1930, commented on the artist: 

“I don't know how the wise explain the Heitor 'case'; to me, a layman, it seems like the happy result of acculturation: all the liveliness and delicacy of the original elements of the Black man were preserved in him, in contact with different cultural forms; and without shock, but without renouncing the best of his ancestry. Heitor integrated himself into Rio's urban and cosmopolitan culture, giving us an example of purity and authenticity at the same time.”

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in Heitor dos Prazeres: sua arte e seu tempo, 2003

The historic event, which brought together personalities from various African and Afro-diasporic countries, was promoted by the president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the country's first elected president after it became independent, and a key figure in the Négritude movement, along with Aimé Césaire, among others.   

"We need to revisit our history of art, our productions, thinking about our experience as Brazilians, how we are shaped, what this place is, how this encounter took place, how these relations are today – which are racialized, hierarchical relations. They are unequal relations. It's like that in life and it's like that in art. And we must look at this, we must recognize this and be able to create other narratives, other perspectives.”

Glaucea Helena, MASP Pannels: Heitor dos Prazeres: protagonismo e arte, 2018

In 2023, Heitor dos Prazeres' body of work was finally presented to the contemporary public in a major retrospective at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil – CCBB, in Rio de Janeiro. Supported by Almeida & Dale and accompanied by Heitor dos Prazeres Filho and people close to the artist, the show was curated by Raquel Barreto, Haroldo Costa and Pablo León de la Barra. 

“What he does in his paintings is to give a sense of humanity, which was denied to the Black population by the enslavement process that took place. This is the great work of Heitor dos Prazeres.”

Glaucea Helena, MASP Pannels: Heitor dos Prazeres: protagonismo e arte, 2018