Oiticica. In that mournful epoch, everything became a “myth,” and myth was everything that was dead: the Semana de Arte Moderna, brasilidade (Brazilianness), Paulista progress, the avant‐garde, etc. At the very least, everything had to be “reevaluated.” This was the case of the peculiar antimodernism of the sociologist Gilberto Freyre or the cool reactionary stance of the dramaturge Nelson Rodrigues. In the midst of this crisis, the city of Rio developed a fascination with the era before its decline – the Tropical Paris, “our Belle Époque,” the hot city with European elegance, everything that it had been before São Paulo and Brasília had spoiled Rio's fun. In those years, fascination with premodernism coincided with postmodernism, constructivism with deconstruction and relativism, figuration returned to painting, and so on. A certain antimodernism became a mark of elegance and engagement.
Between the 1980s and 1990s, the battlefield around the Semana developed various trenches that united postmoderns, globalization theorists, a blasé antimodernist taste brought on by the crisis of the lost decades, and disappointment with the transition from the military dictatorship to neoliberalism. At that moment, no certainty seemed to exist that would explain Brazil’s modern past or seek to learn something from it. One of the most important consequences of this uncertainty, however, was the ability to ask questions, even when the answers 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”:
Modernism, which one? That of the 1922 artists, or of those of 1900? Of the generation of 1930 or 1870? Of the communists of 1922 or the socialist and anarchist workers movement of the preceding decades? Of the academic architects or the public works engineers? Of the tenentes (lieutenants) of the 1920s or the abolitionists and republicans of a half century earlier? Of the metropolitan poets or the rubber tappers in Acre? Of the Rondon Commission's telegraphic wires or the rebellious Indians? Of Mário and Oswald de Andrade or of Mário Pedrosa and Lívio Xavier? Of the “technical” revolution or the “social” revolution? Of the national‐integralists or the Bolsheviks? Of the Anthropophagist Manifesto or the First of May?
(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
