XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

1924: Pau Brazil, Verdeamarelismo and Estética at the crossroads of national culture

• In Event: Modernismo brasileiro: novas abordagens

Abstract

In 1924, amid Brazil’s rapid industrialization and modernization, the Futurist group in São Paulo, responsible for the 1922 Modern Art Week, underwent an intense transformation. What began as a broad but cohesive group proposing a general aesthetic and cosmopolitan modernization of Brazilian art, embracing experimentation and technology, started breaking off in different fronts around the lines of an increasingly intense concern with the national character of culture, and the nature of that nationality. Oswald de Andrade published the Pau Brasil Poetry Manifesto in the Correio da Manhã; Lasar Segall’s exhibition in São Paulo was dismissed by critics as “ futurist”; Menotti del Picchia published “Academia Verde-amarelo” in the Correio Paulistano; regarded as an “Anti-Pau-Brasil Manifesto”, Graça Aranha’s conference “O espírito moderno” was booed in the Academia Brasileira de Letras; Prudente de Moraes Neto and Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda launched the periodical Estética, with contributions from various modernists and the mission of synthesizing the movement; Tia Ciata died in Rio de Janeiro; a failed tenentista revolution shook São Paulo and the Coluna Prestes started. By discussing these texts and events, as published in the newspapers of the time, this paper will present the dilemmas, contradictions and consensuses in the formation of a national aesthetic by the modernists at the crossroads of 1924.

Author

• Rodrigo Cardoso, Universidad de Chile