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Between the Semana's first decadal anniversary in 1932 and its second in 1942, a major change in the narrative of its history took place. If in 1932 the Semana still felt too young to be celebrated, by 1942 it already seemed ready for burial. The fundamental issues of this critical moment were to determine exactly what aspects of the Semana were dead, who its true heirs were, and what could be done with the legacy of something still so new and yet already old. Twenty years on, the Semana's seeming decrepitude led to a productive crisis, in which the two Andrades (Mário and Oswald) confronted divergent ways of thinking about the continuity – or lack thereof – of the cultural revolution originally kindled by the Semana.¹⁰ Although by 1942 the iconoclastic impetus of 1922 had cooled off, its ramifications for future development were still tremendously productive.

These developments were preceded, however, by a painful aura of defeat and crisis prompted by the Estado Novo: “I did very little,” recalled Mário de Andrade in hindsight, “because all of my doings were derived from a vast delusion …. I lacked humanity. My aristocratism hurt me. My intentions tricked me” (Andrade 1974, p. 252). Or on even more tragic note: “my past is no longer my friend. I distrust my past” (Andrade 1974, p. 252). In 1942, such was Andrade's mood in the midst of the Estado Novo dictatorship, the uncertainty of World War II and the prospects of Nazism and fascism, and faced with his own uneasy position as “leader” of a cultural and political modernization movement whose triumphs seemed to flounder, impotent in the face of these regressive circumstances. Pointing a finger at himself as much as at others, Andrade lamented that, with few exceptions (of which he was not one), the victorious modernists had become “victims of [their] own pleasure in life and revelry, which emasculated [them]” as they turned their backs on a revolt “against life as it is.” Incapable in practice of reading history and politics, they stopped fighting for the “socio‐political betterment of man” (Andrade 1974, p. 252).

Perhaps no Brazilian intellectual has ever fought so violently against himself as Mário de Andrade. His lamentations, however, were both a self‐criticism and a program for action. Indeed, Andrade paradoxically pointed to his own “betrayal” of his earlier call for a vanguard aesthetics as a strategy for overcoming defeat: “In a conscious betrayal, I left fiction in favor of being a learned man that I fundamentally am not. But I had decided to imbue everything that I did with a utilitarian value, a practical value, something more down‐to‐earth than fiction, aesthetic pleasure, or divine beauty” (Andrade 1974, p. 254).

Not everything was dead, however, and the living would be able to move forward. In that same early 1940s testimony, Mário de Andrade synthesized three principles derived from the modernist adventures of the 1920s: the permanent right to aesthetic research (here understood as the right to modern culture), the modernizing of the Brazilian artistic intelligentsia, and the establishment of a national creative consciousness (Andrade 1974). This was the positive outcome of an “individualism that took risks” but that now, under the renewed politicization of the intelligentsia (“March with the multitudes!”), needed to be thought of in the collective sense. To enact these three principles, argued Andrade, it would be necessary to think of culture and art beyond the aesthetic (and “aristocratic”) imperatives of early modernism. This was to be done through engaging in a politics for the masses – although there was no sign that such a politics would be about class, as it had been for the CAM only a decade earlier. This was a peculiar call to transition from writing fiction to a new sort of intellectual practice, whose place would be neither the aristocratic opera theater nor the bourgeois‐proletarian salon; it would be the university.

“Class” was, however, an important concept for Oswald de Andrade, the modernist and Marxist convert. Oswald did not commemorate the coming of age (or the death) of the Semana in 1942. He waited for a more practical, but not less symbolically charged, opportunity. In 1944, at the invitation of Juscelino Kubitschek, then the mayor of Belo Horizonte (the capital city of the state of Minas Gerais), he announced his version of the modernist movement, tracing the path traveled from 1922 to 1944. There, “in the perfect city,” in front of new Mineiro allies (who were not Marxists, but developmentalists), he gave his version of the scene 20 years earlier: “It is necessary to understand modernism with its material and enriching causes, exhausted in São Paulo's industrial park, with the class commitments of the gilded‐bourgeois period of the first coffee boom, ending with the harrowing watershed moment that was antropofagia (anthropophagy), foreshadowing the global shock of the Wall Street crash. Modernism is a diagram of the height of the coffee boom, its fall, and the Brazilian revolution” (Andrade 1972, p. 102). All of this meant to explain that the Semana was more pre‐anthropophagy than it was truly modernist. Oswald de Andrade had written his famous Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) in 1928, six years after the Semana, proclaiming that Brazil's lack of a modernist tradition meant paradoxically that it could inventively “cannibalize” European traditions to produce something uniquely modern and Brazilian.¹¹ “In the first decade of modernism,” argued Oswald in hindsight, “Antropofagia was the ideological apex, the first contact with our political reality because it divided and oriented us in relation to the future” (Andrade 1972, pp. 95–96). In his view, it was anthropophagy that would guide the destiny of Brazil.

The future had already arrived, and it was in Belo Horizonte – in the architecture of Pampulha and in Jucelino Kubitschek himself.¹² Oswald compared the Paulista modernist experience with the eighteenth‐century Minas Gerais intellectual Arcades Mineiros (Arcadian Movement) group culminating in the independence movement, Inconfidência Mineira (Minas Gerais Conspiracy).¹³ He exalted the young, modernizing Kubitschek and the bourgeois democratic revolutions, pointing toward the flow of modernism, and above all toward anthropophagy as the beacon of Brazil's future. In Oswald's history, full of continuities and conflicts, there is no trace of Mário de Andrade's crisis of conscience. The aristocratic character that Mário denounced was of little interest to Oswald, and even less so any sense of a nationalist crisis.

The strong association of modernism with Europe was not a source of shame for either of the Andrades. On the contrary, “importing” the European modernist spirit, as Mário called it, was essential to synchronizing “Brazil's pace with the rest of the world,” as Oswald explained. However, the similarities between the two ended there. Oswald enumerated examples of Brazilian cultural backwardness that would be swept away by the modernist drive, one that would make “the people” the protagonists of art produced in Brazil. The task for the new generation would be political, the result of a new alliance that would substitute the café com leite (coffee with milk) politics of the old Republic from which modernism emerged with a new type of postfascist Brazil on the verge of revolution.¹⁴ “Let us create a brotherhood between Mineiros and Paulistas, a great triumph of national brotherhood,” clamored Oswald, “Let us pay tribute to the union that is proclaimed! Here today we validate the twenty‐two years of struggle on this journey. From São Paulo to Belo Horizonte” (Andrade 1972, p. 101). For Oswald, both the verde‐amarelista (green‐yellow, nationalist fascist) modernists and Mário's liberal followers would remain in the past of the Estado Novo. The future of Brazil would lie in his now‐Marxist anthropophagy with new allies among the developmentalists of Minas Gerais.

By the time they delivered their speeches on the twentieth anniversary of the Semana, the Andrades had already experienced concrete political engagement. Mário was one of the organizers of the Democratic Party and head of the Division of Cultural Expansion during the Vargas government. Oswald was a member of the Communist Party, engaging in political agitprop in the provinces with his wife, the militant Communist poet Pagu, and writing radical tracts about politics.¹⁵ Jobless and with no desire to engage in constructing the state, Oswald allowed himself to be an optimist, egocentric, and utopian.¹⁶ “We need to know how to take our place in contemporary history,” he reasoned, “Today the role of the intellectual and the artist is as important as that of the fighter on the front lines.” Oswald's memory of 1922 was as self‐centered as Mário's but was much more forgiving and optimistic. He aimed to form militant armies and in this sense was very close to the CAM. After establishing parallels between the Inconfidência Mineira and the Semana de Arte Moderna as movements that sought “to keep pace with the world,” Oswald argued that subsequent political developments, such as Tenente revolts, the related Coluna Prestes, and the 1930 Revolution, directly followed the path opened by the Semana's “semaphores of 1922.”¹⁷ And from there he made his appeal, his version of Mario's “walk with the masses” exhortation: “Intellectuals of Minas Gerais, take your places in your tanks, in your airplanes. Exchange your serenade for a machine gun… Define your position!” (Andrade 1972, pp. 100–101).

Both Andrades shared in common an effort to appeal to young people. Although the Semana seemed more and more alienated and reactionary as it aged, both felt that in Brazil's youth there was hope for the future. At the same moment in which the Andrades positioned themselves to breathe new life into the movement of modernist advancement, a new generation of modern intellectuals was evolving, many of whom owed their perspectives to Mário de Andrade's crisis of conscience. The founding of the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo, fostered by modernists, modernizers, and progressive descendants of the 1922 oligarchs, was crucial for the emergence of this new moment committed to the study of Brazilian culture. Its principal consequence was the formation of a certain intellectual radicalism, or in the words of literary critic Antonio Candido, a “modest radicalism that became a tradition that has produced positive effects” (Candido 1980, p. 103).

Candido defined the poet and modernist critic Sérgio Milliet as the homem‐ponte (man‐bridge) between the generation of 1922 and the one that he himself represented. And Milliet would be the thinker with whom Candido would have the closest allegiance; Milliet's work would be the starting point on which he based his own critical ideology. Candido stressed the qualities of essayistic writing that Milliet had introduced to Brazil, including his ability to frame problems while avoiding dogmas, sharpening his reflections through a critical form that grappled “freely with facts and ideas via ‘experimental’ thought” (Candido 1987, p. 131). It was an attitude that made possible the dialectical criticism that would follow. This was a lesson that the participants of the Revista Clima, founded in 1941 (just before the events of 1942) would continue and develop.¹⁸

Alongside Antonio Candido, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes was another young post‐Semana modernist intellectual who made history. His ideas were truly decisive in the intellectual formation of his generation. A Marxist militant, political exile, participant in radical French intellectual circles, and a dialectic theorist of the vicissitudes of national cinematography and its impasses, the young editor of Revista Clima had everything necessary to gain the attention of the new intellectuals sympathetic to Milliet's essayism and to the outbursts of Mário and Oswald. Moreover, he gave these intellectuals a working plan with a concrete political direction, taking up the mantle of responsibility for rethinking modernism in the name of his generation after Mário de Andrade's departure and under the influence of Oswald's project for critical continuity.

In 1943, still reeling from the 1942 commemorations, the journalist Mário Neme, likely influenced by Mário de Andrade's lecture on the crisis of modernism and the tasks awaiting the new generation, conducted an inquiry into this new generation of scholars who emerged in the 1940s. The results were published in the pages of the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo and later compiled in a book titled Platform of the New Generation. In these interviews, Neme questioned young critics and writers regarding the legacy they had received from previous generations and about their new aesthetic, scientific, and ideological values, especially in relation to the ongoing world war (Neme 1945).¹⁹ This was a sign of changing times. As recorded in a July 1943 note, none other than the “man‐bridge” Milliet himself discerned a generation “on the eve of the emergence of a new aesthetic” (and, I would add, of a new understanding of aesthetics within a new set of circumstances). A new generation was ready for engagement, ready to bring together cultural research with social action: “the generation of 1922 spoke French and read the poets,” argued Milliet, “[but] the generation of 1944 reads English and studies sociology” (Milliet 1981, p. 109).²⁰

Among the declarations of the young intellectuals Neme interviewed in Platform of the New Generation, that of Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes stands out for its admirable lucidity and for its ability to organize the decisive debates of both that moment and what would follow. From the beginning, Paulo Emílio made clear that he was speaking as a young leftist from the “intellectual elite” of São Paulo, but that he belonged to a new generation that possessed no clear ideological unity. It seemed obvious to him, however, that the right was defeated, merely lingering on in a climate of delirium, taking refuge in the lunatic praise of “Argentine soldiers,” and seeing itself “in the [rightist] novels of Clarice Lispector” (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 82). All of this pointed to a turn away from the previous generation which, as Mário de Andrade said and Paulo Emílio reiterated, had lost the course of history: “the road of opportunism is a real road, and it was already well trodden by illustrious representatives” of the first generation of modernists (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 82).

Paulo Emílio remained cautious about Brazil's future. He believed that, because of the era's ideological “confusion” even among the left, fascism could far too easily return. He noted the resurgence of reactionary Catholicism along with widespread political disillusionment reaching from the right to the Communist left. Certainly, liberalism would suffer a great defeat. On this subject, Paulo Emílio made a surprising prognosis that has effectively been realized in recent years: “There is no properly liberal intellectual sector in the old sense of the word. Associated with the intellectual activities of Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo (Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo, FIESP), some young economists are perhaps the nucleus for a future neoliberalist current” (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 85).

More than the crisis of the right, what concerned Paulo Emílio was the crisis of the left, particularly the one brewing among “young middle‐class and bourgeois intellectuals who express themselves ideologically on the left.” These were young people who had become politicized around the year 1935 – the era of the Intentona Comunista (Communist Uprising), before the Estado Novo and after the CAM – who were influenced by Marxism, psychoanalysis, and “artistic post‐[Semana] modernism” in the aftermath of the “superficial” 1930 revolution.²¹ For many of them, argued Paulo Emílio, Russia had become a “religion,” a result of the “very low” theoretical level of the Brazilian communists. Only a mere “half dozen” had an advanced understanding of theory; the others were nowhere close. Still others took refuge in the leftist opposition (he was perhaps thinking here of Caio Prado and Mário Pedrosa). According to Paulo Emílio, this new left barely limped along for two basic reasons: “no one ever read Das Kapital. From Brazil, no one knew anything.” Stalinists or Trotskyists, for different reasons, “loved Russia,” but no one “knew how to think dialectically” (Salles Gomes 1986, pp. 85–87).

This was the context in which Paulo Emílio’s generation, that of Revista Clima, emerged and within which it would act. These young artists and critics had “acquired a seriousness and efficiency of thought that would distinguish them in comparison with the bohemian tone of 1922” (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 88). To the extent that they saw the Russia of the Moscow Trials as a nightmare, they took France as a paradigm. The Clima generation united around the idea of fostering originality and an alternative to the Soviet model, while also being interested in the critique of that model offered by Trotskyism.

In this process, Marxism could be revisited through a more speculative, less doctrinaire prism. No longer dogmatic (in other words, free from the Soviet “religion”), it was to be rethought in the light of the new context of Brazil and its history. In addition to reading Marx and classical Marxists, the new generation was likewise attracted to reinterpretations of Marxism coming from North American thinkers, above all, sociologists. (This is why, Milliet joked, it was now necessary to “read English.”) A new period of study began, for which America (whether North American society marked by the consequences of the 1930s Depression or the “peripheral” societies of Latin America) and its problems would be the central focus.

This revisionist program addressing both modernist and Marxist thought found itself contending with an unfamiliar history: that of the colonial, peripheral, and dependent origins of Latin America's nations. As such, the key concept under scrutiny would be the old, indeed modernist, question of nationalism. To explain this, Paulo Emílio took an unusual example: that of “old” pre‐Soviet Russia. Before the 1917 Revolution, he wrote, semifeudal Russia did not know nationalism. Its internationalism was imported from the West. Yet in the center of Europe the climate was revolutionary, particularly in the countries defeated in World War I. Paradoxically, with the failure of revolution in Europe, Soviet Russian nationalism emerged. It was within this context that Paulo Emílio presented his peculiar argument regarding the dialectics of the national question:

Without knowing anything about more advanced capitalist countries, the point of comparison for the [Brazilian and Latin American] present was the past of [Soviet] Russia itself. From this came the very high ethical stance seen in certain Russian sectors, particularly the youth. The Russian example shows how ideas about nation and nationalism were not approached completely correctly by Marxism. Nation and nationalism are not necessarily connected to society's bourgeois direction. It was a workers' revolution of an internationalist spirit that allowed the birth of Russian nationalism. Now that nationalism exists, it is possible to contradict and overcome it through internationalism.

(Salles Gomes 1986, p. 92)

In arguing thus, Paulo Emílio expressed the ideology of his generation: that nationalism needed to be constructed, precisely in order to be superseded. Yet nationalism's overthrow should not occur through a simple internationalism, but rather through a “pan‐nationalism,” i.e. a “higher state” in which national identities would coexist “internationally” without diluting each other (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 93). After speculating about the potential of this odd dialectic between nationalism and internationalism to emerge in various countries, he ended his declaration by calling for open debate on the issue. In a renewed echo of the Andrades, Paulo Emílio urged young intellectuals to leave the “ivory tower” and to take on “questions of culture” as their responsibility. Their main task, he argued, should be to “participate in the disappearance of formal Brazil and in the birth of a nation” (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 95).

Thus the young university generation, the children of the uproar wrought by the developmentalism of the 1930 revolution, resolved in its own way the call to arms of Mário and Oswald. It was not a revolution in the streets but rather one of ideas and organizations. After being buried by Mário and devoured by Oswald, modernist culture gained new life through study and engagement, politicization and institutionalization. The key for future commemorations of the Semana de Arte Moderno in 1952 and 1962 was set.