Modern Art Week celebrates its 100th anniversary with tributes and exhibitions.

Brazil Agency – Exactly 100 years ago, the Municipal Theater in São Paulo opened its doors for an exhibition of painting and sculpture, soirées, and musical performances by the composer Villa-Lobos and the pianist Guiomar Novaes. This event, which took place between February 13th and 17th, 1922, became known as the Week of Modern Art, considered an official landmark of the modernist movement in Brazil.

The main figures at the event were the writers Mário de Andrade, Menotti del Picchia, and Oswald de Andrade, and the artists Anita Malfatti and Di Cavalcanti. The idea was to provoke the press, to make a lot of noise, in order to present avant-garde ideas.

“Certainly, the organizers of the week, the artists who made this festival happen, had in mind this idea of ​​having an impact on the media, of making noise, of aligning themselves with an avant-garde idea, of challenging traditions,” said Heloísa Espada, curator at the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS), an organization that, last year, held a series of lectures [available on the institution's website] to discuss the event together with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) and the Pinacoteca do Estado.

The week was held shortly after the end of the First World War and the Spanish flu pandemic, and in the year that Brazil celebrated the centenary of its independence.

São Paulo was beginning its industrialization process, with its economy still based on coffee. Brazil was modernizing, and some intellectuals and artists of the time, influenced by the European avant-garde, were also proposing a new perspective on Brazilian art.

“The idea of ​​modern art ends up being related to the idea of ​​the city, to the creation of urban spaces. This moment, at the beginning of the century, is a moment of urbanization, of transformation of cities, of modernization,” said the curator of the IMS.

“São Paulo began to develop with the coffee trade in the second half of the 19th century. And those who financed the week, those who put money into making the week exist, were a coffee elite who earned money in the countryside, on the farms, but who no longer wanted to live on the farms; who had the possibility of traveling abroad and wanted to live in a city that had the benefits of modernity. It was the wealth of the countryside that paid for this idea of ​​modern art. This urbanization, this development, was fostered by this wealth that came mainly from the coffee plantations,” he explained.

The seed of the Modern Art Week was planted in 1921, at a meeting in the Grande Hotel of the Rotisserie Sportsman, where the São Paulo city hall is located today. There, intellectuals and artists met with the writer and diplomat Graça Aranha.

“On that occasion, he [Graça Aranha] came into contact with this small group formed by Di Cavalcanti, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Guilherme de Almeida and many others. Anita Malfatti was invited to participate in this meeting. She went accompanied by a young woman, a friend, because it wouldn't have been appropriate for her to go alone, since she was single and a woman. The idea arose to hold a large event, bringing together arts such as painting, poetry and music, as well as food,” said Luiz Armando Bagolin, professor at the Institute of Brazilian Studies (IEB) of the University of São Paulo (USP).

It was Graça Aranha's idea that the group should seek out Paulo Prado, a major coffee exporter from São Paulo. "They then met with Paulo Prado at his home in the Higienópolis neighborhood, and that's where the idea for the week emerged. It was Paulo Prado who suggested the name [of the event] and financed it," highlighted the USP professor.

Months after the meeting, the Municipal Theater hosted an art exhibition in its lobby and three nights of literary and musical performances. The event was inaugurated with a lecture by the writer and diplomat Graça Aranha, on February 13, 1922.

The program also included a reading of poetry by Manuel Bandeira, called the frogsThis was a critique of Parnassianism – a literary movement concerned with the act of writing poetry: art for art's sake. Due to their obsession with precision, the Parnassians were criticized by the Modernists, who advocated aesthetic freedom. Bandeira's reading was met with loud boos from the audience. In fact, boos and criticism were the norm throughout the week. And that's what made it a success, in the view of the artists responsible for the event.

“The interpretation they [the modernists] made, at the end of the week, was that they managed to provoke the macaws. Who are the macaws? The journalists. Mário [de Andrade] says: 'the macaws bit the bait. The macaws were provoked and then we succeeded'. The week, at the time it happened, was a very successful event from the point of view of propaganda, due to a propaganda strategy,” described Luiz Armando Bagolin. 

“Unlike all the individual and collective initiatives that had happened before, this was the first time that it attracted the fury of the macaws. In their time, the week was important not so much for the works that were presented – and many of them weren't even modern – but because this propaganda strategy generated a chain reaction in the press,” added the professor from IEB and curator of the exhibition Once Upon a Time in Modernism, currently on display at the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (Fiesp).

Historical building

Prior to that week, other modern cultural initiatives had already taken place in the country, such as the two solo exhibitions of Anita Malfatti, in 1914 and 1917. 

“It is necessary to emphasize a point that seems to me of fundamental importance: modernism in Brazil does not begin with the Week of Modern Art. This idea that the Week of Modern Art comes along, presents works that mark a break from what was being done, is a false idea. There were many initiatives before and after the Week of Modern Art, and to the set of all these initiatives, some individual, others collective, we give the name Brazilian modernism,” explained Bagolin.

The Week of Modern Art only became a landmark many years after it took place, in a process of historical construction.

“We know today that, for example, immediately following the week in the 30s, nobody talked about the week. This idea of ​​the Week of Modern Art is something that was also constructed by historiography. And only in the late 40s, in the 50s, when the museums of modern art were formed in Brazil and also when the first Biennial was launched in 1951, was there a whole effort to rescue and publicly recognize these names, especially Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral, who did not participate in the week, but soon joined the group,” said Heloisa Espada, in an interview with [publication name]. Agency Brazil.

“It is necessary to say that there was a historical construction of the narrative of the Week of Modern Art as a founding event of our modernism. This was built, mainly, with the help of the University of São Paulo (USP), starting in the early 70s, especially when the university bought the collection of Mário de Andrade's family and this collection went to the IEB. Then a series of research projects began to emerge, which became master's and doctoral theses, mainly in two areas: the area of ​​literary theory and the area of ​​social sciences,” explained Luiz Armando Bagolin.

Exhibition Once Upon a Time in Modernism [1910-1944], curated by researcher Luiz Armando Bagolin and historian Fabrício Reiner, at the Fiesp Cultural Center, Avenida Paulista. Rovena Rosa / Agência Brasil

Furthermore, the book Plastic Arts in the Week of 22"This work, written by art historian Aracy Amaral and published in the 70s, helped establish the importance of the Week. 'This work marked historiography,' Heloisa emphasized."

All of this contributed to the event taking on a positive, celebratory character. "We see how, in fact, the topic of the week emerges throughout history according to the conveniences of each era. I think that talking about the Modern Art Week of 1922, a hundred years later, is to remember how topics are constructed and what the interests are in discussing these topics," he said.

This is the first article in a series that... Agency Brazil We will be publishing articles over the next few days about the centenary of the Week of Modern Art.