Is there a brazilian art? (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Brazilianness of Brazilian Art: Discourses on art and national identity, c.1850-1930
Third Text, 2012
Discussions of Brazilianness in art have a substantial history prior to the Modernist focus on 'brasilidade' in the 1930s. This article looks at the development of such ideas from Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre in the 1850s to Mário de Andrade in the 1920s, linking prevailing discourses to the historical context in which they arose and gained currency.
Thoughts upon Brazilian art in the years 1960 and 1970
PORTO ARTE: Revista de Artes Visuais, 2013
This article is a reflection upon art in Brazil during the years 1960 and 1970, from avant-garde and neo-avant-garde concepts in the art of the 20th century, with comments on the situation of Brazilian neo-avant-garde movements, especially the actions of militant critics and artists in the cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte.
Histories of nineteenth-century Brazilian art: A critical review of bibliography, 2000-2012
Perspective (La revue de l'INHA), 2014
The history of nineteenth-century Brazilian art has undergone enormous transformation over the past twelve years, to the point where it has been arguably re-written with regard to the output of the preceding century. The present essay attempts to provide a critical overview of the bibliography produced during the interval between 2000 and 2012, focusing primarily on books but also taking into account catalogues, journals, scholarly articles and websites. These are situated, in turn, in their institutional and professional contexts, so as to map the scholarship currently being produced. The review is broken down into evaluations of the state of the art in the 1990s; general surveys; landscape and other genres; biographies and monographs; thematic approaches; internet resources; and a brief summary of the institutional landscape. Special attention is given to non-elite histories of art and trans-disciplinarity as fronts that still pose a particular challenge to the further development of the field.
Leonardo, 2015
To anyone unfamiliar with the interventions made by avant-garde artists into the art world and occasionally wider society during the middle of the 20th century, this volume delivers a very readable account. The artists, the objects they made and the discussions they generated are selected here in relation to the particular practices and contexts emergent in Brazil following the chaos of World War II (during which the country remained neutral). In keeping with a historiographical approach-rather than an art historical account-the author introduces an initial group of Brazilian artists attracted to ideas concerned with the nature of the object in art and the abstraction of space and time in two and three dimensions.
Brazilian Colonial Art and the Decolonization of Art History
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2021
There are at least two ways to think about the term “Brazilian colonial art.” It can refer, in general, to the art produced in the region presently known as Brazil between 1500, when navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the coastal territory for the Lusitanian crown, and the country’s independence in the early 19th century. It can also refer, more specifically, to the artistic manifestations produced in certain Brazilian regions—most notably Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro—over the 18th century and first decades of the 19th century. In other words, while denotatively it corresponds to the art produced in the period during which Brazil was a colony, it can also work as a metonym valid to indicate particular temporal and geographical arcs within this period. The reasons for its widespread metonymical use are related, on the one hand, to the survival of a relatively large number of art objects and buildings produced in these arcs, but also to a judicative value: at least since the 1920s, artists, historians, and cultivated Brazilians have tended to regard Brazilian colonial art—in its more specific meaning—as the greatest cultural product of those centuries. In this sense, Brazilian colonial art is often identified with the Baroque—to the extent that the terms “Brazilian Baroque,” “Brazilian colonial art,” and even “barroco mineiro” (i.e., Baroque produced in the province of Minas Gerais) may be used interchangeably by some scholars and, even more so, the general public. The study of Brazilian colonial art is currently intermingled with the question of what should be understood as Brazil in the early modern period. Just like some 20th- and 21st-century scholars have been questioning, for example, the term “Italian Renaissance”—given the fact that Italy, as a political entity, did not exist until the 19th century—so have researchers problematized the concept of a unified term to designate the whole artistic production of the territory that would later become the Federative Republic of Brazil between the 16th and 19th centuries. This territory, moreover, encompassed a myriad of very different societies and languages originating from at least three different continents. Should the production, for example, of Tupi or Yoruba artworks be considered colonial? Or should they, instead, be understood as belonging to a distinctive path and independent art historical process? Is it viable to propose a transcultural academic approach without, at the same time, flattening the specificities and richness of the various societies that inhabited the territory? Recent scholarly work has been bringing together traditional historiographical references in Brazilian colonial art and perspectives from so-called “global art history.” These efforts have not only internationalized the field, but also made it multidisciplinary by combining researches in anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, history, and art history.
Missing 'Brazilianness' of Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Art and Architecture
IASTE 2014: Whose Tradition?
Despite their ideological oppositions, Brazilian modernists and eclectic nationalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had one stance in common: both groups agreed that the country’s art and architecture since the second half of the previous century lacked national character and adaptation to Brazil’s climate and social conditions. This postulate was partly refuted in Portuguese-language scholarship published since the 1960s, exposing the persistence of colonial-era patterns in the hinterland and, in a few cases, in urban settings. In the urge to rehabilitate nineteenth-century Brazilian art and architecture, however, the actual discourses by which it came to be ostracized were themselves suppressed from scholarship. This paper shall examine a few landmark narratives on the issue of national character published between 1880 and 1940. Some major authors in point were academic art critic Luiz Gonzaga Duque Estrada (1863–1911), neocolonial engineer Ricardo Severo (1869–1940) and physician José Marianno Filho (1881–1946), Beaux-Arts architect Adolfo Morales de los Ríos Filho (1887–1973), writer Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948), and modernist architect Lucio Costa (1902–1998). In the first part of the paper, these authors’ writings will be examined with regard to their definition of a Brazilian character and the purported lack thereof in works produced in the generations that preceded them. In the second part, it is argued that the discourse on the lack of national character put forward in these narratives stems both from well-documented aesthetic agendas advanced by these authors, and from the less frequently acknowledged difficulty in dating Brazilian vernacular architecture due to its marked continuity and stability. This brings attention to the matter of how canonical examples of Brazilian art and architecture were cherry-picked, then oftentimes tampered with, to conform to certain expectations regarding national character. Finally, I argue that the authors’ aesthetic movements are less relevant to how each addressed the matter of Brazilianness in art, than is their understanding of the nature of artistic and building professions.
Some Notes on the Contamination and Quarantine of Brazilian Art
Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics
Some Notes on the Contamination and Quarantine of Brazilian Art This essay seeks to question the characteristics that have come to be celebrated as forming a specific genealogy for Brazilian art. It traces how these very same characteristics have gone from providing the diagnosis that Brazilian art was the product of a culture suffering from a seemingly incurable malaise, to one in which it is seen to be thriving and dynamic, constituting its very own genealogy not despite but precisely because of its inherent hybrid or (as I will posit) contaminated nature. I will argue that within this new understanding of Brazilian contemporary art and its specific genealogy there exists a conflation of cartography, political history, and the praxis of art that is not without its own problematics. The art critic Paulo Sergio Duarte begins his survey entitled The 60s: Transformations of Art in Brazil by proposing a visit to an imaginary museum. This is not André Malraux's "musée imaginaire,"1 but very much a traditional one; as Duarte himself stresses, it is one that could be located in the United States, Europe, or anywhere else in the world.2 In the first gallery of Duarte's imaginary museum the viewer finds Oldenburg's "huge cushioned plastic hamburger," Warhol's Two Elvis, Jackie Kennedy and Cans of Campbell's Soup, Jasper Johns' Flag, a Roy Lichtenstein comic book painting, and so forth. The second gallery contains work that Duarte considers to be "diametrically opposed manifestations" by