Читать книгу A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art - Группа авторов - Страница 34

In 1932, after its first ten years of existence, the Semana still reverberated as a living fact that might proceed in a variety of directions. There had already clearly emerged, as sociologist and journalist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda synthesized in 1926, both an “opposite side” and “other sides” – groups that alternately embraced freedom and construction in the forging of a new nation and national art in a country without established traditions (Buarque de Holanda 1996). As it became commonplace to repeat, in the 1920s this polemic still reigned in the salons of the aristocracy, the state, and the radicalized middle class. This was a sign of a Brazilian upheaval still underway, in which the Semana participated.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the geopolitical axis of vanguard intellectual production (as well as in the political dominion of the state) shifted toward São Paulo.² In that period, both the state of São Paulo and its capital city experienced large‐scale economic growth, the result of a booming coffee industry. Alongside provincial traditions, a more or less Europeanized culture – erudite, pedantic, and conservative – grew up around São Paulo's law school. This conservative culture clashed with the intellectual climate fostered by technical and urban modernization (and by the thousands of immigrants it drew from all over the world), producing a new generation of modernist artists and intellectuals predisposed to transforming radically the cultural panorama of the young republic. For the modernists, especially those from São Paulo, the continued influence of symbolist, romantic, and Parnassian art (that is to say, idealistic, antitechnical, and antimodern) represented not only aesthetic movements already surpassed by modernity but also regressive social characteristics that obstructed Brazil's modernization. Against these anachronisms, the modernists posited concepts like the “tentacular” city, the “hallucinated” city, as reflections of modernist euphoria and potential change. As a result, the performative and programmatic actions of the Semana, which were staged during the centenary of Brazilian independence, were definitively Paulista.³

The modernist art movement was contemporary with the Tenente revolts of the military's junior officers, the founding of the Brazilian Communist Party, and debates surrounding educational reform and modernization.⁴ Transformations in the arts, education, politics, and urban life proceeded alongside one another, giving the optimistic impression of continual progress. If 1920s literature (for most people) or the visual arts (for some) were at the vanguard of this synchronized progress, ten years later architecture would become the synthesis of this sentiment, erected in stone and reinforced concrete.

The figure of the architect emerged as central in the 1930s and 1940s. In the words of the critic Mário Pedrosa, “for a moment, the country really was a paradise for architects” (Pedrosa 1995a, p. 237). The most important figure is Lúcio Costa – the counterpart to Mário de Andrade's Paulista modernism. His importance solidified after he became director of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (the National School of Fine Arts) in Rio de Janeiro and promoted the institution's 38th Salon in 1931. It was there, for the first time almost a decade after the Semana of 1922, that the modernist vanguard and modern art were presented for a “Brazilian” audience in Rio. The path of modernism in Brazil, at least until the 1960s, was always the result of a tense negotiation and exchange between Paulistas and Cariocas, or, in other words, between new structural forms of modern Brazilian capitalism.⁵

In the post‐1930 reorganization of modernism, the state assumed a central role, resulting in the first revamping of the Semana of 1922 as well as in its premature aging.⁶ “Being modern,” at that moment, implied “the conscious will to supersede that indecisive moment of unorganized avant‐garde manifestations” (Arantes 1997, p. 119). Turning to the national capital (still Rio de Janeiro at that moment) and the new modern city (São Paulo), together with President Getúlio Vargas's authoritarian nationalist government, Estado Novo (New State), founded in 1937, Brazil began to think of its urban and architecturally modern side as a distinguishing feature of its identity. Lacking a classical history (which in 1930s Europe was being relived through fascism's classicizing stylistics) and nostalgic for its former status as a great empire, Brazil saw in itself “the very raw material of modernity, already well‐diagnosed and worked out by a local vanguard in the previous decade” of the 1920s (Recamán 2001, p. 220). Already here, the original principles of the Semana would die in order to be reborn.

Despite this turn, the Semana was still sufficiently alive to be reinvented by other means. Not wanting to produce a mere commemoration of the Semana, the architect, multimedia artist, and embodiment of the Semana itself, Flávio de Carvalho, founded the Club dos Artistas Modernas (Modern Artists Club, or CAM) together with other veterans of the previous decade as well as some new faces in November 1932. His intention was to create a “society” of modern art (and politics) that did not depend on the financial support of wealthy patrons or of the state.⁷ In a 1932 interview published in the newspaper Folha da Noite, Jaime Adour da Câmara, one of the founders of the group, declared that the CAM should both bring together “all modern artists” and “encourage meetings, organize lectures on artistic issues, and seek out connections with all of the world's great artistic centers. Besides these characteristics, the club will seek to facilitate that acquisition of collective models; in short, it will address the defense of class‐based interests” (Adour da Câmara 1932, p. 4).

The CAM was the Semana at work via other means, above all, from a political position much further to the left than the original 1922 event. In the CAM, anarchists, unionists, and Marxists dialogued with each other, gave speeches, exhibited, and produced pamphlets together. What was an aristocratic performance in 1922 became, by 1932, a set of performance‐rallies with a clear leftist political perspective. The rapid closure of the CAM by the police had more to do with this than with the experimental hijinks and transgressions of mainstream morality for which the club is best remembered. Politics as performance was a decisive aspect of their subversive intent. To understand this fully, a larger reflection on the directions of the left in the 1930s and 1940s is necessary – one that moves beyond the dogmatism of the Communist Party and the modernist nationalism of Mário de Andrade and Lúcio Costa, to include the crucial contributions of other modernists such as Flávio de Carvalho and Mário Pedrosa.⁸

In 1932, the Semana of 1922 could not, in effect, be “commemorated” because its foundations, particularly its more progressive ones, seemed still incomplete. The CAM sought to revive the partnership between Paulistas and Cariocas that had marked the 1922 movement. The leaders of the Paulista group and the Rio‐based Sociedade Pró‐Arte (Pro‐Art Society), founded in 1931 primarily by German Jews who had migrated to Brazil to escape Nazism, tried to establish a broader modernist alliance. Along with the CAM, the Carioca organization, headed by Alberto da Veiga Guignard, undertook a form of idealized franchising of their centers in order to stage exhibitions, to create a School of Arts and Crafts and an Artists' Retreat in Rio de Janeiro, and to found a magazine jointly edited with the CAM. As the first outcome of this partnership, a show of the works of the German engraver and militant socialist Käthe Kollwitz, originally exhibited in the Carioca Heuberger Gallery, was sent to São Paulo in June 1932. It was at the São Paulo‐based iteration of the exhibition that Mário Pedrosa presented his first text of art criticism, launching what would be the most radical critical trajectory of Brazilian thought on modern visual art (Pedrosa 1995b).⁹ His audience was not made up of the bourgeoisie or cosmopolitan aristocrats hoping for (or being scandalized by) shocks and novelties. Rather, it included many for whom the modernist “revolution” must necessarily move far beyond the walls of salons and stages of municipal theaters.