ABSTRACT
The North East of Brazil is renowned for its rich and vibrant popular culture. The region's festivals, music, poetry and popular religious rituals have attracted increasing interest from scholars from around the world in recent decades. The woodcuts that are the subject of this book are one more expression of that cultural dynamism. They have been a significant art form in Brazil since the 1940s, when they began to be produced in large quantities as illustrations for the covers of cheap pamphlets of poetry sold in streets and markets throughout the North East. In subsequent decades, however, the woodcuts assumed larger and more complex forms, and they are now regularly made as posters, prints for framing and wall hangings for sale to collectors and tourists. Today, alongside the stark, rustic woodcut prints on age-old themes, produced in the same way as they have been for decades, there are more polished and stylish versions, influenced by modem painting and sculpture.
