Modernism in Brazil

Modernism in Brazil was a broad cultural movement that strongly affected the art scene and Brazilian society in the first half of the 20th century, especially in the fields of literature and the plastic arts. It was inspired by the cultural and artistic trends launched in Europe in the period before the World War I such as Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and Surrealism. These new modern languages brought by the European artistic and literary movements were gradually assimilated into the Brazilian artistic context, but with elements of the country's culture, as there was a need to valorize the national identity.^[1][2]

The Modern Art Week, which took place in São Paulo in 1922, is considered by official historiography to be the starting point of Modernism in Brazil. However, recent research reveals that artistic and cultural renewal initiatives were taking place in different parts of the country at that moment.^[3][4] According to some scholars, Recife pioneered this artistic movement in Brazil through the works of Vicente do Rego Monteiro, the poetry of Manuel Bandeira, the sociology of Gilberto Freyre, manifestations of popular culture such as frevo and cordel and the urban changes that occurred in the city during that period. For art critic Paulo Herkenhoff, former assistant curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "the historiography of Pernambuco's culture has the challenge of confronting internal colonialism and the erasure of its history".^[5]

Not all the participants in the Modern Art Week were modernists, like Graça Aranha from Maranhão, one of the speakers at the event. The movement wasn't dominant from the start, but over time it replaced its predecessors through its freedom of style and approach to spoken language.^[6]

Didactically, Modernism is divided into three phases. The first, called Heroic, was the most radical and strongly opposed to everything that came before. The second, milder, called the 1930s Generation, produced great novelists and poets and was characterized by social and political concerns and regionalism, especially in the prose of the Northeast region. The third phase, called Post-Modernist by several authors (or also known as the 1945 Generation), opposed the first stage and was ridiculed with the nickname Parnassianism; it was characterized by a mixture of styles and a concern with aesthetics, whose predominant literary genre was poetry.^[2]