Modern Art Week in 1922 showcased São Paulo’s new attitude toward the world

Scholars attending the 8th FAPESP 60 Years Conference discussed the impacts of the modernist movement on Brazilian culture and its repercussions for education and research in the ensuing decades.

Agência FAPESP – Although its roots were in literature and art, modernism in Brazil created a climate of renewal and change, and a new attitude toward the world and knowledge. In doing so, it had a huge impact on education and research, especially in the humanities, although its influence extends well beyond that field.

This view was expressed by Marco Antonio Zago, President of FAPESP, in his welcoming remarks to the 8th FAPESP 60 Years Conference (https://60anos.fapesp.br/oitava-conferencia) on February 16.

“The foundation of the University of São Paulo [USP, in 1934] and consequently of FAPESP [in 1962], 40 years after the 1922 Modern Art Week, were part of this new attitude toward the world,” Zago said.

The conference was the first of a series of online seminars on “100 Years of Modern Art Week: Research, Art and Literature”, hosted by FAPESP on February 16-18 to celebrate the centenary of the 1922 event, reflect on the different meanings of modernism over time, and discuss future challenges.

According to Flávia Camargo Toni, a professor at the Institute of Brazilian Studies (IEB-USP) and mediator of the conference, the decade after the 1922 event saw a welter of educational reforms that included the foundation of USP and the creation of São Paulo City’s Department of Culture headed by modernist Mário de Andrade.

“The links between modernism and the humanities were strengthened 40 years on: Carvalho Pinto [Governor of São Paulo] set up FAPESP in 1962,” Toni said, and in the same year, IEB-USP was established under the leadership of sociologist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda.

Zago stressed the importance of modernism’s prehistory. There was ferment outside São Paulo as well, and it was not limited to art and literature. “Brazilian society was modernizing in its entirety,” he said. “São Paulo City was thriving, becoming an industrial powerhouse, and leaving behind its provincialism. All these trends culminated in the twenty-first century with its accession to the ranks of the world’s great cultural capitals.” 

According to Jacqueline Penjon, a professor at New Sorbonne University (Paris III) in France, Paris took no notice of São Paulo’s Modern Art Week, but the year was important for Franco-Brazilian cultural ties, which had intensified since 1908 thanks to the establishment of an association of universities and grandes écoles in Paris to build relations with Latin America.

“There are no references to Modern Art Week, but the centenary of Independence [declared on April 22, 1822] was noted,” she said. “France was invited to a world’s fair held in Rio de Janeiro, and much discussed in the pages of Revue de l'Amérique Latine [a journal founded that year], alongside the sad fate of Prince Gaston d’Orléans, Count of Eu [son-in-law of Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil from 1831 to 1889], who died in August 1922 on a voyage to visit the centenary expo.”

In 1924, the first exhibition of Latin American art was held in Paris. Brazilian painters Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti were highly praised, and Heitor Villa-Lobos conducted his own compositions at several concerts.

Interest in Brazilian modernism waned in the 1930s, not returning until the 1970 when a French translation of Mário de Andrade’s seminal novel Macunaíma was published, and a special issue of a literary review was devoted to the topic of Brazilian modernism.

Resignification from the prism of Black culture

On the following day (February 17), FAPESP hosted an online panel session on “Writings, archives and resignifications”, where researchers discussed how to reinterpret an imaginary past haunted by silences and absences through a present in which ambiguities are no less prevalent but certain concealments are starting to be cleared away. 

This type of critique, as foregrounded in the discussion, included insistence on the need to “de-whiten” Modern Art Week, as proposed by Lígia Fonseca Ferreira, a professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), and a specialist in the life and work of Luiz Gama (1830-82), an important Black writer and abolitionist.

Ferreira spoke, among other things, about texts by Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) that remained unpublished for a long time, including his enormous correspondence. He was the preeminent Brazilian modernist. He wrote poetry, novels, newspaper columns, and criticism. He conducted groundbreaking ethnological and musicological research on folklore and popular art. He was a cultural agitator, as well as running São Paulo’s new culture apparatus.

Ferreira studied these texts for her postdoctoral research and continues to do so in collaboration with the students whose work she supervises. She wrote a chapter entitled “Mário de Andrade, Africanist” for the book Mário de Andrade: aspectos do folclore brasileiro published by Global and edited by Telê Ancona Lopez, with text establishment, preface and notes by Angela Teodoro Grillo. 

Ferreira began her presentation by reading and commenting on passages from a speech written by Andrade for the closing ceremony of an event held in 1938 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Abolition in Brazil. Andrade was then head of the Municipal Department of Culture and worked very hard to prepare the celebrations, but was unable to deliver the speech because he was dismissed – or “thrown out”, as he put it – from the department shortly beforehand as part of the measures taken to curtail democratic freedoms by Getúlio Vargas and his recently installed dictatorship, known as the New State (Estado Novo, 1937-46). “The text was unpublished until a few years ago,” Ferreira noted.

She read out a passage in which Andrade said the Culture Department had made a point of “bringing Blacks into this room full of Whites”, referring particularly to an invitation sent to Dr. Francisco Lucrécio (1909-2001), one of the founders of the Brazilian Black Front (Frente Negra Brasileira, FNB), to attend the commemorative event that was to have taken place at São Paulo’s Municipal Theater.

Ferreira stressed that studies of Andrade’s unpublished writings, and above all of his correspondence with other intellectuals, with the methodological rigor that began to be applied in the twenty-first century, have dispelled fictions, made biographical corrections, and brought to light concealed information. “His letters and correspondence end up creating networks with each other,” she said.

Among several examples, Ferreira mentioned Andrade’s correspondence with Roger Bastide (1898-1974), a member of the famous “French mission” engaged in the mid-to-late 1930s to beef up the faculty of the recently founded USP. Bastide took up the first Chair of Sociology and became an authority on Afro-Brazilian religion. He was actually initiated into Candomblé in Bahia. “As soon as he arrived in Brazil in 1938,” she said, “he wrote to Andrade to thank him for the books he'd sent and said, ‘They’ll be the most reliable guide for me to penetrate the depths of the Black soul, for a poet’s intuition almost always goes farther than a scientist’s attention’.”

Other seminars from the “100 Years of Modern Art Week: Research, Art and Literature” series can be watched at: fapesp.br/eventos/semanartemoderna.