Before Tropicália became Brazil's loudest movement, Rogério Duarte gave it a face.
Someone put Tropicália ou Panis et Circenses on in the house this week and the talk turned to the sleeve before it turned to the songs. It's the cover that borrows the staged group portrait from the Beatles' Sgt Pepper and sets it in the colours of the Brazilian flag.
Somebody asked who made it. Almost nobody ever does.
The answer is Rogério Duarte, a Bahian designer the movement is hard to explain without. He trained in Rio under Alexandre Wollner and Max Bense, interned with Aloísio Magalhães and took the Ulm and Bauhaus rulebook in classes with Tomás Maldonado, who had run Ulm itself. He knew the rational grid as well as anyone in Brazil. Then he spent his career arguing with it.
In 1965, before Caetano and Gil had recorded a note of it, Duarte published an essay calling the relationship between a designer and the thing they make anthropophagic. Cultural cannibalism, eat everything and give back something new, worked out on design before it reached a song.
He'd already made agit-prop for the students' union, much of it burned when right-wing groups torched the UNE headquarters on the day of the 1964 coup. The politics and the design were never separate for him.
You can see the theory in the work.
His poster for Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe keeps a constructivist photomontage and sets it spinning, handwritten type bleeding off the edges, the whole thing read in a spiral. The self-titled Caetano Veloso cover in 1968 and Gilberto Gil the year after run on acid colour and undulating pattern lifted from American psychedelia and rebuilt around Brazilian material.
He held onto the discipline of the Swiss grid and poured brasilidade into it. It overturned the clean black-and-red sleeves the Bossa Nova labels had made the national standard, though Duarte called it evolution rather than a break.
At the Modern Art Museum in Rio he met Hélio Oiticica and the two staged the events where the movement found its shape. Asked later whether his design was Tropicália's visual answer, he said no, it was the other way around and Caetano agreed that without their conversations it might never have existed. He paid for the politics in the work. Duarte was among the first Tropicalists arrested and the torture that followed broke something. He moved in and out of a psychiatric hospital for the two years after.
The record's still spinning in the house. We'll turn the sleeve over between songs now, because the man who drew it had written down what it meant a year before anyone sang it.
The music almost always gets the credit but the visual identity got there first. That's something we think deserves a nod in this house.
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