Week of Modern Art
Encyclopedia
Arts festival
An arts festival is a festival that focuses on the visual arts in all its forms, but which may also focus on or include other arts.Arts festivals in the visual arts are exhibitions and are not to be confused with the commercial art fair. Artists participate in the most important of such festival...
in São Paulo, Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
, that ran from February 11 to February 18, 1922. Historically, the Week marked the start of Modernismo (Brazilian Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
); though a number of individual Brazilian artists were doing modernist work before the week, it coalesced and defined the movement and introduced it to Brazilian society at large. For Brazil, it was as important as the International Exhibition of Modern Art (also known as the Armory Show
Armory Show
Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors...
), held in New York City in 1913, which became a legendary watershed date in the history of American art.
The Week took place at the Municipal Theater in São Paulo, and included plastic arts exhibitions, lectures, concerts, and reading of poems. In its breadth it differed significantly from the Armory Show, with which it is often compared, but which featured only visual art. It was organized chiefly by painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti
Emiliano Di Cavalcanti
Emiliano Augusto Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Melo , known as Di Cavalcanti, was a Brazilian painter who sought to produce a form of Brazilian art free of any noticeable European influences...
and poet Mário de Andrade
Mário de Andrade
Mário Raul de Morais Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada in 1922...
, in an attempt to bring to a head a long-running conflict between the young modernists and the cultural establishment, headed by the Brazilian Academy of Letters, which adhered strictly to academicism
Academic art
Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism,...
. The event was controversial at best and divisive at worst, with one member of the Academy, Graça Aranha
Graça Aranha
José Pereira da Graça Aranha was a Brazilian writer and diplomat, considered to be a forerunner of the Modernism in Brazil. He was also one of the organizers of the Brazilian Modern Art Week of 1922....
, ostracized for attending. He had opened the week with a conference titled "The aesthetic emotion in modern art". Due to the radicalism (for the times) of some of their poems and music, the artists were vigorously booed and pelted by the audience, and the press and art critics in general were strong in their condemnation (such as in a famous episode by editor, writer and art critic Monteiro Lobato
Monteiro Lobato
José Bento Renato Monteiro Lobato was one of Brazil's most influential writers, mostly for his children's books set in the fictional Sítio do Picapau Amarelo but he had been previously a prolific writer of fiction, a translator and an art critic...
).
The group that took part in the Week, contrary to their initial intentions, did not remain a unified movement. A number of separate groups split off, and the original core members had separated by 1929. Two divisions predominated: the Anthropophagics (cannibalists), led by Oswald de Andrade
Oswald de Andrade
José Oswald de Andrade Souza was a Brazilian poet and polemicist. He was born and spent most of his life in São Paulo....
, wanted to make use of the influence of European and American artists but freely create their own art out of the regurgitations of what they had taken from abroad (thus the term anthropophagy: they would "eat" all influences, digest it, and throw out new things). The Nationalists wanted no foreign influences, and sought a "purely Brazilian" form of art. This group was led by writer Plínio Salgado
Plínio Salgado
Plínio Salgado was a Brazilian politician, writer, journalist, and theologian. He founded and led the Brazilian Integralist Action, a far-right political party inspired on the Italian Fascist movement....
, who later became a fascist political leader (Brazilian Integralism
Brazilian Integralism
Brazilian Integralism was a fascist political movement in Brazil, created on October 1932. Founded and led by Plínio Salgado, a literary figure who was somewhat famous for his participation in the 1922 Modern Art Week, the movement had adopted some characteristics of European mass movements of...
) and arrested by dictator Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas served as President of Brazil, first as dictator, from 1930 to 1945, and in a democratically elected term from 1951 until his suicide in 1954. Vargas led Brazil for 18 years, the most for any President, and second in Brazilian history to Emperor Pedro II...
after a failed coup.
Before the events leading up to 1922, São Paulo was a prosperous but culturally relatively unimportant city. However, the Week established São Paulo as the seat of the new modernist movement, against the far more culturally conservative Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
.
Participants
Painters:- Anita MalfattiAnita MalfattiAnita Catarina Malfatti is heralded as the first Brazilian artist to introduce European and American forms of Modernism to Brazil...
- Emiliano Di CavalcantiEmiliano Di CavalcantiEmiliano Augusto Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Melo , known as Di Cavalcanti, was a Brazilian painter who sought to produce a form of Brazilian art free of any noticeable European influences...
- Zina Aita
- Vicente do Rego MonteiroVicente do Rego MonteiroVicente do Rego Monteiro , born in Recife, in a family of artists, was a Brazilian painter.Already in 1911 Vicente do Rego Monteiro was in Paris , attending a course, for little time, at the Académie Julian. Precocious talent, in 1913 he participated of the Hall of the Independent Artists, in the...
- Ferrignac (Inácio da Costa Ferreira)
- Yan de Almeida Prado
- John Graz
- Alberto Martins Ribeiro
- Oswaldo GoeldiOswaldo GoeldiOswaldo Goeldi was a Brazilian artist and renowned engraver, the son of Swiss naturalist Émil Goeldi....
Sculptors:
- Victor BrecheretVictor BrecheretVictor Brecheret was an Italian-Brazilian sculptor. He lived most of his life in São Paulo, except for his studies in Paris in his early twenties...
- Hildegardo Leão Velloso
- Wilhelm Haarberg
Architects:
- Antonio Garcia Moya
- Georg Przyrembel
Writers:
- Mário de AndradeMário de AndradeMário Raul de Morais Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada in 1922...
- Oswald de AndradeOswald de AndradeJosé Oswald de Andrade Souza was a Brazilian poet and polemicist. He was born and spent most of his life in São Paulo....
- Menotti del PicchiaMenotti Del PicchiaPaulo Menotti Del Picchia was a Brazilian poet, journalist, and painter. He is associated with the Generation of 1922, the first generation of Brazilian modernists....
- Sérgio MillietSérgio MillietSérgio Milliet da Costa e Silva, generally known as Sérgio Milliet was a Brazilian writer, painter, poet,essayist, literary and art critic, and sociologist.-External links:* in...
- Plínio SalgadoPlínio SalgadoPlínio Salgado was a Brazilian politician, writer, journalist, and theologian. He founded and led the Brazilian Integralist Action, a far-right political party inspired on the Italian Fascist movement....
- Ronald de CarvalhoRonald de CarvalhoRonald de Carvalho was a Brazilian poet and diplomat from Rio de Janeiro. A street in Rio is named for him.- Works :* Luz Gloriosa * Pequena História da Literatura Brasileira...
- Álvaro Moreira
- Renato de Almeida
- Ribeiro Couto
- Guilherme de AlmeidaGuilherme de AlmeidaGuilherme de Andrade e Almeida was a lawyer, journalist, film critic, poet, essayist and Brazilian translator...
- Graça AranhaGraça AranhaJosé Pereira da Graça Aranha was a Brazilian writer and diplomat, considered to be a forerunner of the Modernism in Brazil. He was also one of the organizers of the Brazilian Modern Art Week of 1922....
Composers:
- Heitor Villa-LobosHeitor Villa-LobosHeitor Villa-Lobos was a Brazilian composer, described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music". Villa-Lobos has become the best-known and most significant Latin American composer to date. He wrote numerous orchestral, chamber, instrumental and vocal works...
- Guiomar Novais
- Ernâni Braga
- Frutuoso Viana
External links
- Brazil Body and Soul, exhibit at the Guggenheim MuseumSolomon R. Guggenheim MuseumThe Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
. - Semana de Arte Moderna (in Portuguese).