In-text plate (page 96) from MACUNAÍMA

Carybé was a Brazilian painter and muralist known for large-scale works depicting Afro-Brazilian culture, religious ritual, and the daily life of working people in Bahia. Working primarily in oil and fresco from the 1940s onward, his compositions combined modernist spatial compression with documentary urgency, rendering ceremonies, markets, and domestic scenes with anthropological detail and chromatic intensity. His murals and easel paintings established him as a defining figure in postwar Brazilian social realism.