Other names
Semana de Arte de Moderna de 22 [Modern Art Week of 1922]

Semana de 22 [1922 Week]

History
A part of the festivities to commemorate the centenary of Brazilian independence in 1922, Modern Art Week emerges as the first collective public manifestation in the cultural history of Brazil in favour of a new and modern spirit opposed to the culture and art of a conservative stamp that had been predominant in Brazil since the 19th Century. From 13-18 February, 1922 a festival was held at the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo [Municipal Theatre of São Paulo] with the exhibition of around 100 works and three literary-musical sessions. Among the painters taking part were Anita Malfatti, Di Cavalcanti, Ferrignac, John Graz, Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Zina Aita, Yan de Almeida Prado and Antônio Paim Vieira, with two joint works, and the Rio de Janeiro artist, Alberto Martins Ribeiro, whose work failed to develop after Modern Art Week of 1922. The field of sculpture included Victor Brecheret, Wilhelm Haarberg and Hildegardo Velloso. Architecture was represented by Antônio Moya and Georg Przyrembel. The literary participants and poets included Graça Aranha, Guilherme de Almeida, Mário de Andrade, Menotti Del Picchia, Oswald de Andrade, Renato de Almeida, Ronald de Carvalho, Tácito de Almeida, and Manuel Bandeira, who read the poem Os Sapos [The Toads]. The musical programme included compositions by Villa-Lobos and Debussy, interpreted by Guiomar Novaes and Hernani Braga, among others.

Modern Art Week of 1922 was not an isolated event without precedents. Discussions regarding the need for the renewal of the arts emerged in the middle of the previous decade in magazine articles and exhibitions, such as that of Anita Malfatti in 1917. By 1921, intellectuals such as Oswald de Andrade and Menotti Del Picchia already had the intention of transforming the centenary celebrations into a moment of artistic emancipation. Having said this, it was at the salon of the collector, Paulo Prado, at the end of this year, that the idea of a week-long festival with various artistic events took form, inspired by the Semaine de Fêtes of the French city of Deauville. It should be noted that without the efforts of Paulo Prado, the project would have remained on the drawing board. This collector, an influential and prestigious figure within São Paulo society persuaded other coffee barons and influential figures to sponsor the rental of the theatre in order to stage the event. He also played a fundamental role in attracting Graça Aranha to the cause of the "revolutionary" artists. Having recently arrived from Europe as an acclaimed novelist, Aranha's presence served the strategic purpose of legitimating the seriousness of the demands by the young and as yet unknown Modernist group.

Without a defined aesthetic programme, Modern Art Week played a role in the history of Brazilian art that was more a destructive stage of rejecting the then current conservativism of literary, musical and visual output than a constructive event with proposals and the creation of new languages. If there was therefore a unifying link between its highly diverse artifices, it was, according to its two principal ideologues, Mário and Oswald de Andrade, the negation of all and any "Pastism": the rejection of imported literature and art bearing the traces of an increasingly outmoded civilisation in both space and time. In general, every speech demanded freedom of expression and the end of rules in art. Also present was a certain Futurist set of ideas which insisted on the abandonment of traditional themes in the name of the society of electricity, the machine and speed. In the lecture given by Mário de Andrade on the evening of the 15th and subsequently published as A Escrava que Não É Isaura, 1925 [The Slave that isn't Isaura], one of the first attempts was made to formulate modern aesthetic ideas within the country. In this lecture, the author foresees the importance of seasoning the process of importing a modern aesthetics with Nativism, the movement of returning to the roots of Brazilian popular culture. The dynamics between the national and the international became the main question of these artists in the following years.

At a distance of more than 80 years, we now know that with regard to the elaboration and presentation of a genuinely modern language, Modern Art Week of 1922 does not represent a profound break in the history of Brazilian art, since it is not possible to identify in the set of exhibited works of irregular quality any unity of expression or anything like a radical aesthetics of Modernism. At the same time, it should be recognised that, despite all the antagonisms, this event emerges as a cultural event that is fundamental for the understanding of the development of modern art in Brazil, above all for the public debates it provoked (which were surrounded both by negative reactions and declarations of support) and the richness of its consequences for the work of some of its participants.