A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art - Группа авторов

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were not always powerful enough to cause new shocks. An elaborate example of this comes from the essay of historian Francisco Foot Hardman, extolling the forgotten pre‐1922 “modernities”:

      (Hardman 1992, p. 303)

      The only certainty was that modernism should be surpassed and not necessarily rethought. For example, during that period researchers in Rio de Janeiro produced countless works that generally sought to displace the centrality of Paulista modernism in favor of an “alternative” Carioca modernism, more politicized and sympathetic to Getúlio Vargas. According to these new trends, the history of culture was a mythological creation of critics, writers, and journalists, the result of which was to obscure the “alternative modernities” created in other regions of the country.

      The history of culture became above all else a history of regional struggle, and modernism ended up presented as a fragmented conglomeration of projects and positions. One of the most significant results of this change in perspective is the sharp increase in the number of research projects seeking to recuperate “forgotten” works and authors. What was left was a collection of eclectic positions that in the majority of cases put modernism in a negative light and, not infrequently, adapted very well to discourses of neoliberal Brazil while at the same time raising various debates, true and false, relevant and irrelevant, demanding answers, more research, more wordplay, more iconoclastic poses, and more unnerving questions. At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, almost 100 years old, the Semana of 1922, ghost‐like, haunted the dreams and the nightmares of the living.

      Translated by Daniel Gough, with revisions by Megan A. Sullivan.

      Notes

      1 1 Brazil's first avant‐garde journal, Klaxon emerged out the Semana de Arte Moderna, running for nine issues until 1923. Many of the principal originators of Brazil's modernism collaborated in Klaxon, among them Mário de Andrade (the unstated director of the journal), Oswald de Andrade, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Tarsila do Amaral, and Anita Malfatti.

      2 2 Rio de Janeiro was Brazil's capital from 1763 until the inauguration of the current capital city, Brasília, in 1960. São Paulo, long an economic power, had often vied with Rio for political power.

      3 3 Paulista is an adjectival form of São Paulo.

      4 4 The Tenente Revolts were a series of uprisings that began between 1922 and 1927 led by junior officers in Brazilian army against their senior officers. The younger officers demanded social modernization and reforms and an end to the control of the landed coffee oligarchs. The Tenente Revolts were part of a larger shift in power from the rural oligarchy to new urban, professional groups.

      5 5 Carioca is a person from Rio de Janiero, the counterpart to Paulista. On the rivalry between the two coastal cities, see note 2.

      6 6 1930 marked the end of the Old Republic, a major turning point in the history of Brazil. In 1930, a coup prevented the inauguration of president‐elect Júlio Prestes, installing Getúlio Vargas in the presidency. In 1937, Vargas would institute the Estado Novo (New State), a populist, authoritarian regime.

      7 7 Board members of the CAM included, among others, Anita Malfatti, Noêmia Mourão, Tarsila do Amaral, John Graz, Yvone Maia, Antônio Gomide, Carlos Prado, Flávio de Carvalho, Procópio Ferreira, Paulo Torres, Afonso Schimidt, Paulo Prado, Sérgio Milliet, Caio Prado Júnior, Yolanda Prado do Amaral, Baby C. Prado, and Beatriz Gomide. Oswald de Andrade was named an “associate,” and Mário de Andrade and Mário Pedrosa were “frequenters.”

      8 8 On Mário Pedrosa, see Juan Ledezma, Chapter 8 in this volume.

      9 9 The original title of the piece was “Käthe Kollwitz e o seu modo vermelho de perceber a vida” and was later changed to the definitive “As tendências sociais da arte e Käthe Kollwitz.”

      10 10 Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) and Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) were not related by blood.

      11 11 On antropofagia, see Irene Small, Chapter 13 in this volume.

      12 12 Pampulha refers to both a man‐made lake in Belo Horizonte, constructed while Kubitschek was mayor, and the surrounding neighborhood that housed important cultural and architectural landmarks, including Oscar Niemeyer's Church of St. Francis of Assisi. In his 1944 speech in Belo Horizonte, Oswald de Andrade referred to Niemeyer's church as the only cathedral still capable of converting people. Kubitschek, often referred to as the “father of modern Brazil,” would go on to be the nation's president (1956–1960) and the mastermind behind the building of Brasília.

      13 13 The Inconfidência Mineira was an unsuccessful independence movement that took shape in Minas Gerais in the late eighteenth century, when Brazil was still a colony of Portugal. Along with military personnel and clergy, the movement included intellectuals, philosophers, and poets of the Arcades Mineiros (Arcadian movement), and was inspired by Enlightenment ideals as well as the recent independence of the United States from Great Britain.

      14 14 Café com leite, or “coffee with milk,” politics refers to an alliance under the Old Republic (1889–1930) between the landed oligarchs of São Paulo (dominated by coffee plantations) and Minas Gerais (dominated by dairy interests). During the Old Republic, presidents were drawn from the oligarchies of these two states, and their interests dominated national politics.

      15 15 “Pagu” was the pseudonym of Patrícia Rehder Galvão, a poet, playwright, journalist, and communist militant. She married Oswald de Andrade in 1930, after he had left Tarsila do Amaral, to whom de Andrade had previously been married.

      16 16 Silviano Santiago observed that Oswald's choice of giving the talk in 1944 rather than in 1942 was a strategy of remembering the 1924 trip of the modernists to the historic city of Minas Gerais and his own Pau Brasil movement or, in other words, placing himself at the center of modernism. See Santiago, S. (2006). Sobre plataformas e testamentos. In: Oras (direis) puxar conversa!: ensaios literarios 116. Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG.

      17 17 On the Tenente Revolts, see note 4. The Coluna Prestes (Prestes Column), linked to the Tenente Revolts, was a resistance movement active

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