anthropophagY in
SÃo paulo'S cold war
caroline a. jones
Country, now it’s time for art. Enough of being macumbeiros
or aspiring soccer players. Now, we’ll be given class artists!
LYG I A FA G U N D E S T E L L E S O N T H E O P E N I N G
O F T H E F I R S T B I E N A L D E S Ã O PA U LO, 19 51 1
. . . the plane is dead. . . . We have swallowed the
shards of this shattered rectangle and absorbed it.
LYG I A C L A R K , “ T H E D E AT H O F T H E P L A N E ,” 19 6 0 2
The first biennial to emerge after Venice’s was founded by a “third
world” nation in the early Cold War. New Brazilian institutions proved
the replicability of the Venetian model, opening the first São Paulo
Bienal in 1951 and setting off a cascade of other imitators. Still
1
2
Macumbeiros are macumba initiates in the West African religion brought to South
America by slaves (it is related to Caribbean Vodun). The Bantu-based word macumba can
be used in Brazil by nonpractitioners as a pejorative signifying witchcraft. (Translation
by the author) Lygia Fagundes Telles, “I Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna,” A Manhá,
Rio de Janeiro, July 15, 1951, as cited in the crucial history of the Bienal by Francisco
Alambert and Polyana Canhête, As Bienais de São Paulo, da era do Museu à era dos curadores (1951–2001) (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2004), 37.
Lygia Clark, “A morte do plano” [The death of the plane], 1960, as translated in
Fundación Juan March, Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America
(1934–1973) (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2011), 444.
© 2013 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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proliferating today, biennials seek city branding, urban development,
art world tourism, and a global cosmopolitanism that might transcend
banal nationalism and connect with an expanding world.3 Although
art history has viewed biennials in largely negative terms, this essay
argues that the São Paulo Bienal stimulated new aesthetic strategies
that became crucial to what we now think of as “global” contemporary
practice. 4 My narrative requires a brief review of two phases of
Brazilians’ unique 20th-century modernity: first, the dialectic between
(indigenous/racialized) signs of Brasilidade and the Euro-American
avant-garde in Brazil before 1930 and, second, the turn against this
“Brazilianness” toward a cool geometric international style promulgated by the Bienal in the immediate postwar period.5 After this context
is established, I offer a close reading of artists’ and architects’ rejection
of this pure, technocratic abstraction in favor of antropofagia, a theory
of cultural “cannibalism” brought from an earlier Brazilian Modernismo but transformed into an acutely conceptual and abstract tool.6
Brazil’s Bienal do São Paulo (SPB) presents a special case that confounds the standard history of this exhibitionary form as it emerged
from the logic of the 19th-century world’s fairs.7 Where world’s fairs
(and the Venice Biennale in their image) had required artists from the
margins to take up the international artistic language—but to speak
only of difference—the early SPB initially took up contemporary
abstraction in order to eradicate difference.8 The implications of that
4
3
See, e.g., Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).
4 Global is here meant to refer to the sophisticated intertwined economies connecting the
contemporary art world and its many markets, as distinguished from the category of “world
art”—a positivist dream of art history that would account for all culture from everywhere.
5 A note on my use of indigenous, here yoked to racialized—I mean to use these terms as
neutrally as possible, hoping to avoid the case in which any references to native South
Americans (in this case, Tupi Indians) or Afro-Brazilians collapse both into “national” or
“vernacular” categories. I also mean to avoid triggering indigenism/indigenismo, a programmatic component of Romantic-Latin American modernism wielding symbolic
tropes of the native in the late 19th/early 20th centuries (needless to say, these were not
the speech acts of actual indigenous people). And finally, indigenous is here distinguished
from indigeneity, which has lately come into use to designate the radical ontological difference and/or specific sociohistorical experience of native peoples.
6 Antropofagia, Portuguese for the practice of cannibalism (literally “man eating”), refers
to the powerful surrealist agenda announced by poet Oswald de Andrade in 1928 in the
“Anthropophagite Manifesto,” inspired by the paintings of his partner Tarsila do Amaral,
discussed below.
7 See Tony Bennett’s influential article “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4
(Spring 1988).
8 This argument is developed more fully in my Desires for the World Picture: The Global
Work of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
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9 The concept of “transculturation” was invented by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz
in 1940 as a specific rejection of the Anglo-American concept of “acculturation,” which
assumes simple assimilation of the dominated other into the hegemonic culture. For a
strong application of Ortiz in Latin American literary studies, see Ángel Rama, Writing
across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America, ed. and trans. David Frye
(1982; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).
10 Cícero Dias, letter to “Ciccillo” Matarazzo, director, Fundação de Arte Moderna,
Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (henceforth Svevo/SPB
Archives),“Fundação de Arte Moderna, Executive Director, Correspondence Received”
folder. The dating and authorship of this letter are both based on my deduction, rather
than clearly identified on the document. A date of July is visible, and the folder bears an
inscription of 1949, but based on internal evidence, and on a previous letter more obviously from Cícero Dias to Matarazzo referencing similar matters and clearly dated June
1948, I suggest that this penciled letter is also from Dias and is dated July 1948.
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As to my exhibition in Recife, . . . part of it is didactic, showing
the thinking of cubism, of abstract art, of construction in art, with
plastic Brazilian elements—with no romanticism and without photography of myself, Negroes and mulattos [negros e mulatos]. . . .
What if, in my small show of paintings, I start to announce your
movement of art there in São Paulo. . . . It’s necessary that all of
Brazil has a bit of a plastic revolution [um pouco de revolução
plástico] but with the aim of quality.10
a n t h r o p o p h a g y i n s à o pa u l o ' s c o l d wa r
institutional choice, and the return of an earlier antropofagia to contest
it, is my tale. I do not question existing periodizations or canons of
Brazilian art. What I hope to demonstrate instead are precise and
detailed ways in which the form of specific works of art and architecture enacted transculturation, taking lessons from the ambitious stagings of the Bienal to contest, and to change, the margins of modernity
for our time.9
Unlike its model in Venice, the São Paulo Bienal originated from
a museum, bringing with it a set of clear commitments announced at
the beginning: La Bienal do São Paulo Museu de Arte Moderna. Its
host institutions of modern art—first the São Paulo Galeria (1947),
then the Fundação (Foundation, 1948), and finally the Museu (1949)—
openly emulated their New York namesake, symbolically ratified in the
signing of a charter with MoMA President Nelson Rockefeller. A suggestion of what this all meant for Brazilian artists is revealed by an
enthusiastic letter sent to the cosmopolitan collector tapped to be its
founding director, Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho. The letter
seems to be from the artist Cícero Dias, sent to Matarazzo in the summer of 1948:
5
Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho signing the charter of the Museu
de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in the presence of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller
at the New York Museum of Modern Art, 1949. Photo by Leo Trachtenberg.
Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
Eliminating “photography” of any bodies, particularly mixed-race
ones, Dias sets up the core dialectic Brazilian artists navigated and
articulates the necessary movement between its constructed poles:
Euro-derived modernism (the thesis = “thinking of cubism” and
“construction in art”), confronted by signs of indigenous Brasilidade
(antithesis = “plastic Brazilian elements”). It would take a critical
reinvention of antropofagia to bring the two together.
artmargins 2:1
Setting the Scene
6
The dialectic Dias offers us was there from the start in São Paulo modernism, sublimation struggling against abjection in a country pulling
itself from colonialism (1822) and slavery (1888) during the last phase
of the industrial age. The sublimatory mode was articulated by diplomat and intellectual José Pereira da Graça Aranha in an inaugural
address, “A Emoção Estética na Arte Moderna” (Aesthetic Emotion in
Modern Art), for the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) in
São Paulo on February 13, 1922. (The Semana would recur annually,
a n t h r o p o p h a g y i n s à o pa u l o ' s c o l d wa r
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11 For the “will to globality,” see Okwui Enwezor, Documenta XI (2002), 47. The global
“South” is a strategic essentialism utilized effectively in postcolonial theory, but it is
manifestly in flux, never more so than in the burgeoning economy of Brazil, first of the
“BRIC” cluster of rapidly developing formerly third world economies.
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with great success, setting the terms for the recurring future SPB.)
Graça Aranha, well versed in Parisian modernism, followed with
an Apollinairean call for a “new spirit” (O Espírito Moderno) at the
Brazilian Academy in Rio on June 19, 1924—arguing for a subliming
of the spirits of the various races into the singular “soul” of an elevated
Brazilian culture.
The more abject mode came in a twofold blast from poet Oswald
de Andrade (born José Oswald de Sousa Andrade): a “Brazilwood
Manifesto,” published in a Rio newspaper on March 18, 1924, followed
by his “Anthropophagite Manifesto” in the short-lived artistic journal
Revista da Antropofagia (Review of Cannibalism) published in 1928. For
polemical purposes, the town of the manifesto’s signing was recorded
as Piratininga (São Paulo’s Tupi Indian name), and the date given as
374, the number of years elapsed since the ritual consumption of the
first European—bishop Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha—on the
Brazilian coast in 1556. Where Graça Aranha called for transcendence
of the local, de Andrade demanded an art built from it. While Graça
Aranha’s first speech was staged as an internationalist alternative to
the national celebrations of Brazil’s noisy centennial, de Andrade’s
rebuttal sought to dive below the rhetoric of nation to discover hybrid
forms at the cellular level—“cannibalism” as an indigenous communion or pagan transmutation of body and blood. We should emphasize
that this symbolic move was made by an elite; actual Tupi natives or
African-descended people were not making this art. Nonetheless,
Graça Aranha’s and de Andrade’s alternatives would preoccupy
Brazilian culture for decades. Certainly they haunted the Bienal, staging a dialectic between local needs and the “will to globality” that continues to be productive today, and not only for cultures in the putatively
global South.11
The two poles of early-20th-century Brazilian modernism that I
have brutally summarized here as “sublimatory” and “abject” were
both engaged with the European avant-garde (Graça Aranha and de
Andrade had come of age aesthetically in Paris, with Cubism and
Surrealism, respectively). And both were steeped in the plantation
culture of the agregado (“dependent”), characteristic of the São Paulo
7
artmargins 2:1
region in particular, as Roberto Schwarz has explored.12 What changed
in the update of all this during the Cold War was Brazil’s rejection of
the need for “synthesis.” As the SPB made manifest, Brazil could simply be modern, with a coolly geometric and nonobjective art whose closest correlative was “International Style” architectural modernism.
Here it is important to clarify the Cold War role of Nelson
Rockefeller (and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund more generally), difficult for most theorists of Brazilian culture to handle. Given the first
world/third world relation of refinement to extract (or “civilization” to
“standing reserve”), the Standard Oil scions had “natural” interests in
Latin America, and the Rockefellers had pursued these interests extensively since the Great Depression, on both cultural and economic
fronts. Nelson Rockefeller (NAR) was able to convert them to national
U.S. priorities just prior to the Second World War; Brazil would prove
to be a key ally, as NAR had predicted. When approached by ambitious
Paulistas at the war’s end to support their hopes for a museum of international stature, NAR placed a significant donation of artworks at their
disposal—stipulating that the institution created to house them must
reflect “private initiative” rather than governmental interference.
Rockefeller’s gift even came with the requirement that the resulting
institution would need to be a “museum of modern art” equipped with
a private foundation and trustees that were representative of Brazilian
society (remarkably, advocating the inclusion of educators and union
leaders on the board, not simply industrialists).13
In other words, the emerging Museu had to be a Brazilian MoMA.
But if the model, New York’s MoMA, had only intermittently played a
role in biennial culture, its offspring in São Paulo would ultimately be
8
12 Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London: Verso, 1992),
27, 30.
13 To quote from the letter setting out the terms of a private museum for modern works
versus a government museum for historical art: “Será que alguem não persuadiria o
governo a se dedicar só à arte clássica, deixando a arte moderna à iniciativa particular de
Galeria?” (“Wouldn’t someone persuade the government to devote itself only to classical
art, leaving the initiative for modern art to the initiative of the private gallery?”) And, on
the “Museum of Modern Art,” “[T]ais obras de arte contemporânea deverão ser doadas
mais tarde ao Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, constituindo dação particular do
Snr. Rockefeller.” (“Such works of contemporary art will be donated later to the Museum
of Modern Art of São Paulo, the particular donation constituted by Mr. Rockefeller.”)
From the carbon copy of a letter dated July 23, 1947, and signed by Rockefeller’s agent
for things Brazilian, Carleton Sprague Smith, MoMA, sent to Carlos Pinto Alves of
the initial group seeking to found a museum. Svevo/SPB Archives, “Galeria de Arte
Moderna” folder.
a n t h r o p o p h a g y i n s à o pa u l o ' s c o l d wa r
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14 Vargas is credited with nothing less than the production of a new urban middle class in
Brazil, if only by “an ad hoc response to market conditions rather than an attempt to
change the economic bases of the system of power.” See the analysis by Fernando
Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America,
trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979),
90–93. The institutions I examine here were founded after the “bloodless coup” that
deposed Vargas, but his policies of developmentalism extended through the Dutra and
Kubitschek regimes.
15 “[A]o mesmo tempo que para São Paulo se buscaria conquistar a posiçao de centro
artistico mundial. Era inevitabel a referencia a Veneza.” Lourival Gomes Machado
(artistic director of the Bienal), introductory essay, 1 Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna
de São Paulo (October–December 1951), 15. Unless otherwise noted, all translations
are my own.
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dwarfed by the Bienal it went on to create. I want to emphasize that this
is not an account of simple neo-imperialism or colonization. Matarazzo
and his Brazilian colleagues were active agents of their own Cold War
position and chose to embrace technocratic modernism at the expense
of many other agendas at home and abroad. In particular, Rockefeller’s
imbrication in the Museu founding the SPB did not determine the
Bienal’s specific geometric path beyond “negros e mulatos”; at home
NAR was an advocate for “primitive” art, and the artworks he donated
to São Paulo ranged from Léger to Chagall and Masson—Europeans
committed to forms of abstract figuration rather than nonobjective art.
We are thus dealing with a mesh of complex influences rather than a
one-way street. Aligning with Brazil’s “Estado Novo” (inaugurated by
President Getúlio Vargas in 1937 as the dictator’s ostensible “middle
way” between communism and home-grown Integralista fascism),
these Paulistas’ postwar cultural ambitions were deeply tied to their
economic interests.14 “Developmentalism” and “import substitution”
were explicit strategies, and Brazilians deployed them to generate culture as well as manufactured goods.
The first Bienal catalogue made all of this very clear. The organizers intended “to put modern art from Brazil not only in the discussion,
but also in lively contact with the art of the rest of the world” while
aggressively positioning São Paulo “to conquer the position of a world
artistic center.”15 The Bienal consolidated São Paulo’s young institutions
of modernism, offering both “import” (artworks from abroad) and
“export” (catalogues, exhibitions, prizes, publicity) operations; the
same administration that organized the city’s biennial would produce
“meaningful realizations” abroad (as the first Bienal catalogue put it)—
for example, they put together Brazil’s national representation for the
9
artmargins 2:1
25th Biennial in Venice (1950, another inspiration for the founding of
São Paulo’s own Bienal).
In the eyes of the painter Dias (whose given name “Cícero” is
surely appropriate to our allegorical tale), the avoidance of blacks and
mixed-race bodies as subjects was not to negate their role as givers of
artistic form.16 This artist would have been fully conscious of Picasso’s
Afro-Cubism; he himself had been living in Paris on and off since 1937
(initially as a minor employee in the Brazilian embassy), leaving only
when the German military rolled into town. A collaborator on Oswald
de Andrade’s avant-garde magazine Revista de Antropofagia, Dias was
one to talk about “negros e mulatos.” He had thought hard about how
everyday Africanisms and nativisms could be tapped for international
modernism, potentially to become Brazilian. But he could conceive of
this operation only in the terms of a still-figurative art. Dias’s flattery to
Matarazzo was a plea to exhibit artists (such as himself ) who already,
in their modernism (per Dias), “work closer to the primitives” (e.g.,
painted with the “purity” of the indigene or African rather than polished but flaccid traditionalism). The enemy was clear, and very local:
the 19th-century Brazilian academy in Rio, which had merely “prepared the path for Kodak” (preparando o caminho da Kodak).
This last point confirms the geopolitical stakes that all understood.
Even as New York was inheriting the mantle of modernism from Paris
in the postwar period, American Kodak technologies were figures for
U.S. capital, business practices, and control of information in the modern age. To refuse to “prepare the way for Kodak” was to deny Brazil’s
fate as an importer of image protocols developed elsewhere. It was also
to refuse a position as a photo opportunity and friendly tourist destination for first-worlders (pushed openly during the war by Rockefeller’s
Office for Inter-American Affairs, which FDR approved in 1940 to foster friendly cultural and commercial ties between the United States
and “the Americans from the south”).17 But importantly, Dias’s opposition also signaled combat against the “Americanization” that Kodak
implied, pushing back at the onslaught of ready-made images and commodity culture that a truly Brazilian (bold, modern, abstract?) art might
10
16 Quotes in this section are all taken and translated from the previously cited letter from
Dias to Matarazzo, July 1948, Svevo/SPB Archives.
17 For Brazilian views of the agency, see Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 29ff., and
Antonio Pedro Tota, O imperialismo sedutor: A americanização do Brasil na época da
segunda guerra (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000).
18 Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Marc Chagall, Lyonel Feininger, and
Jackson Pollock,” Nation, November 27, 1943, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays
and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 166.
a n t h r o p o p h a g y i n s à o pa u l o ' s c o l d wa r
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hope to hold at bay. Dias knew that Matarazzo cared
deeply about these questions.
By the time of his writing, Dias had shifted in
his own work from Chagall-like, faux-naïve village
scenes to hot Picassoid surrealism, as reflected in
his Seated Woman with a Mirror from a few years
earlier (1942). Refusing “representation” and Kodak
academicism, such a painting can be located in the
center of the vanguard of the day, exactly as “provincial” as Jackson Pollock around that time, who was
then moving (as New York art writer Clement
Greenberg put it in 1943) “through the influences
of Miró, Picasso, Mexican paintings, and what not”
to “come out the other side . . . painting mostly with
Cícero Dias, Seated Woman with a Mirror
his own brush.”18 In other words, Dias’s abstraction
(Mulher sentada com espelho), 1942.
had rejected the Mexican model of internationalism,
Oil on canvas, 21.25 ∞ 18 in. Coleção
Gilberto Chateaubriand, MAM/RJ.
but was still far from the cool, geometric style that
would announce itself at the Bienal in 1951. What
happened in that crucial interval to tip the scales?
Dias’s pictorial and epistolary celebration of “a little revolution”
suggests part of the story and hints at how “revolution” (or the
left in general) was being reconfigured in the Brazilian Cold War.
Communism as such had been held at bay by Vargas’s counterrevolutionary government in the 1930s, but homegrown fascism had risen in
that same period (often with the support of German nationals fomenting the occasional coup against Vargas’s government). Vargas’s decision
to join the Allies was in response to these infiltrations; with the emergence of the “neutral” general Gaspar Dutra in 1946, Brazilians contemplated the possibilities of “neutral” cultural forms. As in so many
countries in the immediate postwar period, the fraught politics of figuration (circulating among academicism, fascist realism, and the socialist agenda of the “Popular Front”) propelled artists to seek another way.
Younger artists increasingly saw even surrealist figuration as mired in
the past.
The drive to innovate was also fed by the delirious desire of
Brazilians in the late 1940s for an intensification of the progress
11
Tarsila do Amaral, drawing for the painting named Abaporu (“man that
eats people” in Tupi), by Oswald de Andrade, used to illustrate his
artmargins 2:1
“Manifesto antropófago” (Cannibal Manifesto) in 1928.
12
of modernization, humiliatingly interrupted by the Depression
(during which the bottom fell out of the coffee market, taking agregado
culture and the Semana with it) but back on track after the Allies’ roaring appetite for Brazilian rubber. Could the country continue to boom
after the war? The United States had canceled all its official “brotherhood” initiatives as the war ended, so the question was up to the
Brazilians. Industrial development and self-determination were
explicit goals.
Stimulated directly by the Bienal, a movement emerged to capture
this urgent postwar pragmatism: Concretismo. Embracing the nonobjective forms of an international l’Art Concret/Kunst Konkret, it was
coolly geometric, claiming the legacy of the imploded Bauhaus.
Paradoxically, this latest import seemed to circumvent the long struggle between European “form” and Brazilian “content” (perhaps by
finessing “content” altogether), presenting an entirely new option for
the Semanaistas. Especially when embracing Oswald’s “Brazilwood”
antropofagia, they had depended on figurative imagery for their project, as Tarsila’s illustration for the 1928 manifesto made clear. But the
Brazilian art world had expanded since the 1920s, and artist collectives
(some spawned by the Semana and others ostracized by them) had a
role to play in the turn to abstraction.19 Themselves sponsoring repeating exhibitionary structures, these groups’ commitments split between
the figurative pathos of the proletariat and practical industrial design—
the latter reinforcing the Concretism that would announce itself in that
first Bienal.20
The agons of early Brazilian modernism were restaged by the new
SPB institutions, but as vanguard teleology rather than dialectics.
Setting that up was the exhibition Matarazzo was preparing when he
received Dias’s letter, planned for the Museu de Arte Moderna’s inauguration in 1949: Do Figurativismo ao Abstracionismo (From Figuration
to Abstraction). Given the history I have summarized above, this could
be metaphorically understood as “from bodies with their inevitable
color and labor relations, to a sublimated geometry that can include
us all.” The very syntax set up a trajectory and implied the correct evolution; moving forward was the only option for a contemporary modernizing country such as Brazil.21 Here Matarazzo, coming from an
industrial family whose share of the national economy was larger than
Rio’s and São Paulo’s combined, had significant stakes in the pace of
Brazilian progress; in this regard he was Rockefeller’s peer.
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19 These ostracized modernisms included the Grupo Santa Helena, forming in the 1930s as
“proletarian artists,” and the Sociedade Pro-Arte Moderna (with the unfortunate acronym SPAM) and Clube dos Artistas Modernos (CAM), both founded in 1932 to push the
Semana goals into real politics. The Club of Artists and Friends of the Arts (Clube dos
Artistas e Amigos da Arte) formed later, in 1945.
20 Repeating exhibitions mounted by these groups included the May Salons held in São
Paulo from 1937 to 1939, along with the first Salon of Art at the National Industrial Fair
in Rio de Janeiro in 1941. See Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 24.
21 As Marcio Siwi notes in a paper delivered at the 2009 congress of the Latin American
Studies Association, the Belgian curator Léon Degand may have been the primary inspiration for Matarazzo’s own turn from staid academic painting (which filled his collection
early on) to the radical experiments of post-Cubism. See Siwi, “U.S.-Brazil Cultural
Relations during the Cold War: The Making of Modern Art Museums in São Paulo,”
accessed August 2011, lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/ilassa/2007/siwi.pdf.
22 Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the
Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
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In the United States, at Rockefeller’s MoMA, Alfred Barr had famously
set up the teleology the Brazilians were staging, with a split between
“non-geometrical abstract art” and “geometrical abstract art”; art writer
Clement Greenberg would work hard to enforce the general turn
against figuration after the war.22 But if there was agreement that
abstraction signified progression, there was no consensus about what
a n t h r o p o p h a g y i n s à o pa u l o ' s c o l d wa r
Concretismo
13
Alfred Barr, Jr., diagram reproduced from the cover of Cubism
and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1935).
artmargins 2:1
© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.
14
kind of abstraction should rule the visual arts (the proliferation in Paris
of vanguard “isms” such as Tachisme, Informel, Nouveaux Realisme, etc.,
suggests the problem). Thus Brazil is striking for the apparent consensus that formed among the administrators, artists, judges, and critics
contributing to that first Bienal: abstraction would be ruled neither by
existentialist tropes of European Informel nor by the expressive, ideological “freedom” of what Greenberg was calling “American-type painting.” Instead, the austere geometries of International Style modern
architecture, itself a European synthesis of the “classical” South and
the “gothic” North, seemed to provide the appropriate model. But
where New York’s MoMA would locate this branch purely in the
Bauhaus and architecture, the Brazilians took it deep into the visual
arts, and took it South.
Antonio Maluf’s handsome screen-print posters for the first Bienal
set the tone with a set of concentric rectangles that deploy a subtle
architectural illusion in a flat, planar composition. In one version the
Antonio Maluf, two versions of Poster for La Bienal de São Paulo of the
Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, 1951. Left: Lithograph, 37 ∞ 25 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Museu de Arte
Moderna de São Paulo. Right: Offset, 36.5 ∞ 24.75 in. Private collection.
Reproduced from Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America
23 In addition to the ones illustrated here, versions also exist in red (with black and white
lettering and yellow and burnt orange rectangles) and blue (with lettering and rectangles
in white).
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rectangles are printed on cream-colored stock in earthy colors: mustard
yellow and brownish black. The figure is nonobjective, yet triggers an
optical illusion in which the innermost rectangles appear to recede and
the outer ones advance toward us. Above this quasi-architectural element (a window or doorway perhaps), modernist sans serif fonts proclaim the Bienal in reddish orange. As if coding for the schizophrenia
of the Brazilian context (would Concretismo connect Brazilians to an
earthly substrate, or to the foreign origins of this movement?), the
same design also exists in the “primaries” of European constructivism:
bright red, blue, and yellow, with a silvery gray typography.23
a n t h r o p o p h a g y i n s à o pa u l o ' s c o l d wa r
(1934–1973) (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2011), 167, 170.
15
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Maluf was a significant choice, awarded the commission in a contest judged by a committee that included Matarazzo and “proletarian”
printmaker Livio Abramo.24 Trained as an engineer and industrial
designer, Maluf became a celebrated participant in “Art Concret,” as
launched by de Stijl architect Theo van Doesburg in 1930 and brought
to Latin America by Argentinean poet Edgar Bayley, among others.25
Significant for our story, Concrete Art was tirelessly promoted by exBauhäusler Max Bill, who organized a first international exhibition
of the style (in neutral Switzerland) in 1944. Flattening the legacy
of the Bauhaus (which had been saturated with spirituality and primitivism from its first manifesto through Kandinsky and Klee), Bill’s
Concretism was a kind of aesthetic Esperanto, a way of superseding the
noxious localisms of the European scene in favor of a transcendental
discourse of universal mathematical form. Initially, it was associated
with socialism; as Bayley argued for his Argentinean readers in “On
Concrete Art” (published in the local organ of the Communist Party),
representational art must be replaced by Arte Concreto “because representation in art is the spiritual image of classist social organizations.”26
The leftist tenor of geometric abstraction was fueled in the global
South by the diaspora of leftist abstractionists driven with their
families out of Europe by fascism—as, for example, in the case of
Slovakian-born Gyula Kosice, who founded both an Argentinean journal dedicated to geometric abstraction (1944) and a branch of international Concrete Art resonating with Bayley’s parallel movement in
poetry (1946).27 What distinguished the somewhat belated Brazilian
uptake of l’Art Concret/Kunst Konkret/Arte Concreto was one crucial
move, by which concretism would be associated, literally, with “concrete.” Via International Style architecture and its predilection for reinforced concrete as a building material, Concretismo became affiliated
with pragmatic production rather than elite aesthetics. Its European
16
24 See correspondence between Abramo and Matarazzo, Svevo/SPB Archives, box 1/08
Diretoria Executiva (executive director Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho).
25 See Edgar M. Bayley, “Sobre arte concreto,” in Orientación, the “órgano central del
Partido Comunista” (Buenos Aires, Argentina) no. 327 (February 20, 1946), translated
into English as “On Concrete Art,” in Fundación Juan March, Cold America, 422.
26 Ibid., 422.
27 Born Fernando Fallik (April 26, 1924) in Košice (Slovakia), Gyula Kosice was brought to
Argentina as a very young child in 1928 and chose to take the name of his city of origin
rather than his patronymic. He studied at the art academy in Buenos Aires, founded the
journal Arturo (with Joaquín Torres-Garcia, one issue) to promote geometric abstraction
in 1944, and later became an active proponent of kinetic art.
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28 Regina Teixeria Barros and Taisa Helena P. Linhares, Antônio Maluf, Arte Concreto
Paulista ([São Paulo?]: Ed. Cosac + Naif, 2000), 13.
29 Carlos Pinto Alves, director of Galeria de Arte Moderna and initially also director of its
Fundaçao (Foundation) prior to Ciccillo Matarazzo, writing to Carleton Sprague Smith
(a Brazilian expert in New York who often acted for NAR whether on behalf of the
Rockefeller Foundation or MoMA business), August 4, 1947, Svevo/SPB Archives,
“Galeria de Arte Moderna, Diretoria, Correspondence” folder.
30 “Might there be a specific angle from which history can be seen in the underdeveloped
countries?” Ferreira Gullar, Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento (ensaios sobre a arte) (Rio de
Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1969), 21, as translated in Mari Carmen Ramirez and
Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004), 329.
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borrowings and leftist pedigree were ideologically massaged to conform to the urgencies of modern development in Brazil. As Brazilian
scholars have recently proclaimed, “The principle guiding the entire
production of Antonio Maluf, from the design for the first Biennial
poster to the present, is the concept of the development equation.”28
Concretismo was how development took visual form.
Development, emblematized by hard, geometric edges and architectonic composition, was the central obsession of the Paulistas forging
the Bienal, and concrete (in all of its senses) was its abstract metaphor
and material semiotic. It is not coincidental that this came together in
São Paulo. The posters, people, papers, networks, buildings, and artworks promoting the Bienal emerged from a city that had historically
dominated the Brazilian heartland and ruled its industries of extraction (coffee no less than rubber) but had played a “provincial” role to
Rio’s more French, therefore “international,” history. Understood to be
peripheral and sluggish (as one Paulista curator wrote to his counterpart at the New York MoMA in 1947, “Unfortunately, everything in
Brazil takes time: you talk there in terms of weeks, and we talk in
terms of years. Don’t be shocked.”), São Paulo would be willfully transformed by ambitious “Paulistas” to lead Brazil into contemporaneity.29
Pace postcolonial theorist and poet Ferreira Gullar, the “specific
angle” of this history from the undeveloped South was not a singular
gaze.30 With Maluf’s multiple posters (and the more biomorphic but
still nonobjective cover he designed for the accompanying catalogue),
the Bienal orchestrated several agendas while signaling that it was
following the teleology set out in the Museu’s inaugural show. As
critics recognized, even the Brazilian section of that first Bienal would
be seen to feature or privilege tendências abstrato-geométricas (the
abstract-geometric tendencies) with artists such as Ivan Serpa, Almir
17
Victor Brecheret, O Índio e a suassuapara (The Indian and the Fallow
Deer), winner of first prize for national (Brazilian) sculpture at the
first Bienal, 1951. Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Universidade de
São Paulo. Reproduced from Jorge Schwartz and Elizabeth Power,
Brasil, 1920–1950: Da antropofagia a Brasília: MAB-FAAP Museu de Arte
artmargins 2:1
Brasileira (São Paulo: Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, 2002), 61.
18
Mavignier, Maluf himself, and Abraham Palatnik. (Notice the
emergence of Eastern European names in the place of the largely
Portuguese Semanaistas, those descendants of colons and agregados.)
Although the old heroes of 1920s Modernismo were still on view, they
would now be part of an explicit comparison codified in the Bienal’s
awards. As it turned out, national awards went to abstracting but stillfigurative works, while international awards favored the nonobjective.
Controversially, the national painting award went to an Italian
immigrant, Danilo Di Prete (reputed to be a favorite of Matarazzo), for
his small, inconsequential still-life Limãos (Lemons). All agreed with
the merits of the national sculpture prize given to Victor Brecheret’s
O Índio e a Suassuapara (The Indian and [in Tupi] the Fallow Deer).
Brecheret’s earlier “deco” figuration from the 1930s had now evolved
toward an Arp-like modernist abstraction, still based on biomorphic
forms but difficult to read as “indigenous” without the cues provided
by its title. Endorsing this work of residually figurative Brasilidade, the
jury was enforcing technical standards of achievement; an abstract
sculpture by a Brazilian (Franz Weissman, Cubo Vazado [Emptied Cube],
1951) was discounted because of its obvious soldering marks, causing
the artist to sputter, “No one had taken into
consideration that it had not been made
in Switzerland, but in Belo Horizonte!”31
“Switzerland” here is an open reference to
the advantages possessed by developed countries, specifically those leading to the Bienal’s
prestigious international sculpture award,
given to a fully abstract work by the Swiss
Bauhäusler and “Kunst Konkret” popularizer
Max Bill. As art historian Michael Asbury theorizes, the jury’s odd decision to split awards
between biomorphic Brazilian artworks and
geometrically abstract international ones
Max Bill, Tripartite Unity, 1947, winner of first prize for
international sculpture at the first Bienal, 1951. Stainless steel,
47.875 ∞ 34.75 ∞ 38 .625 in. Museu de Arte Contemporanea da
31 See Caroline Lewis, “Brazilian Sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds,” Culture
24, February 7, 2006, accessed April 2012, http://www.culture24.org.uk/places%20
to%20go/yorkshire/leeds/art33920.
32 Michael Asbury, “The Bienal de São Paulo: Between Nationalism and Internationalism,”
in Espaço Aberto/Espaço Fechado: Sites for Modern Brazilian Sculpture (Leeds: Henry
Moore Foundation, 2006), 75.
33 Décio Pignatari, “Desvio para o concreto,” Folha de São Paulo, Caderno Especial 2 (May
2001): 12, as translated and cited by Michael Asbury, “Bienal de São Paulo,” 77.
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Asbury reports the comments of Brazilian poet Décio Pignatari recalling the jury’s “main concern was with the international prizes . . . the
Brazilians were left to divide their share of the cake according to their
own taste.”33 The “timid” young rationalists nonetheless got a huge
boost from Bill’s international sculpture prize, which forced a pointed
contrast between Brecheret’s biomorphic narrative of Indian hunters
and Bill’s hard-edged stainless steel abstraction, Tripartite Unity (1947).
It is no coincidence that the funding for this prize had been provided
by industrialists: Premio Federação das Industrias de São Paulo.
Here is where we imagine Matarazzo playing a role, allowing a
bifurcation to form between gently modernized locality (Brecheret’s
Tupi deer and Indian) and international art/capital (the industrialists’
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Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil.
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emphasized the abyss that separated
those who still held Modernismo as the
locus of national culture from a hitherto
timid young generation of artists and
intellectuals interested in the rationalist
possibilities for art in the post-war era.32
19
award for Bill’s steely geometry). Biennials (and world’s fairs) were
invented to stage such comparisons, and their pointedness was sharpened in the Brazilian case by local desires to go with economic development in a pell-mell rush to the future. NAR could collect folk art and
leave modernity to his staff at MoMA; “Ciccillo” would need to take a
more active role.
Bill’s sculpture was an emblem for Brazilians to conjure with,
summoning the aspirational vortex that the Paulistas brought to their
world picture. Its Unity (split into a nicely Christological three before
rejoining itself as “tripartite”) was based on the geometry of the
Möbius strip. Patinated in highly polished stainless steel and installed
for full perambulatory viewing, Bill’s Möbial form instantiated technocracy’s promise to “unify” the “surface” of differences into a single
dynamic form. For Brazilians, it also confronted viewers with a
demand for vertiginous reorientations. As the modernist poet Murilo
Mendes enthused in a local paper, “the viewer could move and move
and move” around the sculpture, “and have the same surprising
sensation”—a feeling of surging exhilaration echoing in his cosmopolitan tagline claiming “the world was at the Trianon,” where the Bienal
was then on view.34
If Bill’s modern sculpture now seems banal in its tasteful abstraction, twisting smoothly on its pedestal (just waiting to be scaled up for
countless corporate plazas in the 1970s), it is important to emphasize
that in 1951 Paulistas could project on it a careening new universe—
with their own mobility and imagination supplying the velocity for
revolution. Important for my argument is the capacity for this kind of
nonobjective art to symbolize the progressive eradication of class and
racial difference (as Bayley had made explicit)—while paradoxically
serving capital as a metaphor for development and modern corporate
identity. Bill’s emphasis on mathematics could facilitate either move,
as his 1936 manifesto stated clearly:
artmargins 2:1
Concrete art is ultimately the pure expression of harmonious measure and law. It orders systems and uses artistic resources to give
life to these orders. . . . It strives for universality.35
20
34 Emphasis added. Murilo Mendes, “Sugestões da Bienal,” Diario Carioca (December 2,
1951), as paraphrased and quoted in Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 43.
35 This translation of the German is offered by the Daimler Corporation’s collection database, accessed March 2012, http://collection.daimler.com/sammlung/werke_bill_e.htm.
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36 This phenomenology is also distinctive for Latin American kinetic art—work that was
made with motors and gears in the North relied in the South on moire patterns and scintillations produced by a mobile viewer.
37 “Ruptura manifesto,” published on the occasion of the 1 Exposição do Grupo Ruptura
(Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, 1952), translated in Fundación Juan March, Cold
America, 436.
38 For the philosophical origins of the “unity” movement and its materializations at the
Bauhaus, see Peter Galison, “Auf bau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural
Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990): 709–52.
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If “Konkret” art meant universal “law” and “order” for this Swiss artist
(despite the play of meanings in the various languages into which it
was translated), the moving bodies of Brazilian viewers would put
difference once again in play (“the viewer could move and move and
move”).36 This is significant for the anthropophagic transvaluation of
Concretismo that would follow in the wake of the Bienal, together with
the transculturation of norms that has proved so crucial for the critical
praxis of contemporary artists today.
Bill’s geometries were taken up immediately after the Bienal, as
a small group of artists came together at the Modern Museum in São
Paulo in 1952 to present their work along with a manifesto (in sans
serif red, lowercase letters) announcing “ruptura”! This Brazilian
“Concrete Art” and its rhetoric of rupture was already different from
Bill’s conciliatory, Bauhaus-inflected geometries. It demanded that art
depart from the old naturalism and its surrealist biomorphs, but called
openly to “previous knowledge for its judgment” and asked viewers to
consider it a “medium of deducible knowledge of concepts.”37 This
emphasis on concept would prove to be significant.
Concretism had an attractive aura of progressivism (resonating
with the leftist politics of its first introducers). Bill’s Unity would have
resonated with the “unity of knowledge” movement coming out of the
ruins of Red Vienna and the shambles of the Weimar Bauhaus.38 Yet
as we’ve seen, this progressivism could be stripped of its left agenda
and simply signify progress, serving the procapitalist pragmatists of
the “Rockefeller” Bienal. These ironies would have been evident to
Brazilian intellectuals, such as crucial Trotskyist critic Mário Pedrosa.
But what other options were there? Stalinism and fascism had revealed
the corruptibility of a “people’s” (figurative) art. As Pedrosa saw it, this
first Bienal effectively confirmed the teleology of the museum’s 1949
“figurative/abstract” show. “Real modernists,” in Pedrosa’s account,
pursued the path of abstraction set out by the revolutionary Russian
21
Suprematists; like Alfred Barr, Pedrosa saw this as its own unique
genealogy, in contrast to contemporary artists who carried the wilted
banner of the School of Paris, those “bastards of Picasso, Matisse, or
Braque” whose still-figurative canvases were going nowhere.39
But if Pedrosa was willing to see real progress in the anointing
of Max Bill, other committed leftists were not giving up so easily.
Communist architect Vilanova Artigas penned an astonishingly
incisive critique in the leftist daily Hoje (Today), “The Bienal: An
Expression of Bourgeois Decadence”:
[T]he Biennial will create among us a comprador (shopper) class
for abstract art, a class that already appears in the “sharks” who
have linked their names to the prizes. This comprador class and the
government understand the importance of so-called modern art.
They will create a market for artists who will thereby have their
problems solved as long as they paint what buyers want, that is,
as long as they paint like the Biennial. 40
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Shockingly accurate in his prediction, Artigas anticipates one aspect
of our present biennial culture, in which gallerists’ publicity budgets,
illy coffee, the Soros Foundation, regional planning authorities, and
federal culture ministries all drive our global art world. But Artigas
failed to calculate the sheer power that such global cultural forces
could offer, and how, in the hands of specific artists, it could be bent
toward critique.
The “shark” in Artigas’s criticism was a consistent symbol for capitalists in the Brazilian imaginary, also appearing on a placard waved by
leftist protesters during the Bienal’s opening: “um charuto a menos
para o tubarão, e um pão a mais para o bancario” (“one less cigar for
the shark, and one more loaf for the banker”)—an effective summary
of neoliberalism’s transfer of funds from one elite to another. 41 But
again, the leftist opposition paled in the face of right-wing academicians who roused some two hundred members of their Associação
22
39 Mário Pedrosa, “The First Bienal,” as cited in Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 42.
As cited, the quote reads, “Há também os bastardos de Picasso, Matisse ou Braque: são
os Pignons, Birollis e outros Capaillés.” It seems that Capaillés is a typo, substituting for
an original meant to refer to Jules Cavaillès, a French painter who participated in the 1951
São Paulo Bienal (thanks to scholar Pedro Erber for this decoding).
40 Vilanova Artigas, “A Bienal: Expressão da decadência burguesa,” Hoje, São Paulo, August
12, 1951, cited in the original Portuguese in Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 46.
41 Svevo/SPB Archives, “Press Clippings” folder.
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42 Décio Pignatari, “Desvio para o concreto,” Folha de S.Paulo, May 20, 2001, as quoted in
the original Portuguese by Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 41.
43 Mário Pedrosa, “A Bienal de São Paulo e os comunistas,” Tribuna da Imprensa (1951
[month and day not given]), cited by Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 46.
44 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., What Is Modern Painting? (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943).
45 Pedrosa, “A Bienal de São Paulo.”
46 Adolph Gottlieb, speaking at the Museum of Modern Art on May 5, 1948, in a talk titled
“On Unintelligibility,” in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics. An Anthology, ed.
Clifford Ross (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 53.
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Paulista de Belas Artes to lament the “fake artistic credo” of the modernist Bienal, which they found “anti-Christian, anti-Brazilian, and
anti-Latino.” In the recollection of Pignatari (then a young student
in the crowd, eventually a force for concrete poetry), elite Paulistas
ignored these slings from both left and right, enjoying being in the
spotlight of what was being constructed as the political and aesthetic
center, “drinking, laughing, and chatting in the hall, doubtless not
even hearing [Matarazzo’s opening] speech.”42
But if the right could be ignored, the battle among leftist intellectuals was more serious since it contested the Bienal’s narrative of
progress itself. Fought openly in the press, the battle limned the confrontational structure of Cold War global politics, as Pedrosa’s riposte
to Artigas made clear. Dubbing the call for working-class art a demand
from “Stalinist Creole scribes” who “parrot the Kremlin bureaucrats,”
Pedrosa minced no words, titling his essay in the daily newspaper “The
São Paulo Bienal and the Communists.”43 (Since he was one, he could
criticize.) Echoing arguments that will be familiar to historians of
American art from Alfred Barr’s multiple-editioned What Is Modern
Painting?44 (ten copies of which had been ordered in the late 1940s
for the São Paulo modern art museum’s bookshop, presumably on offer
right next to the Bienal catalogue), Pedrosa drew the evolution from
Malevich to contemporary nonobjective art as a single progressive line.
Uncompromising abstractionists had been protected by Lenin’s revolutionary state, Pedrosa argued, but were now branded by Kremlin
Stalinists as “degenerate” and “bourgeois.”45 Pedrosa’s use of “degenerate” here is particularly savvy, calling up for any educated reader the
dark side of European fascism. Brazilian intellectuals were participating in the same Cold War as Europe and the United States, where artists such as Adolph Gottlieb could protest that he and his New York
colleagues were black sheep, “neither white enough nor red enough” to
escape from attack by “both the right and the left.”46 What was left of
23
Trotskyism in New York, as in São Paulo, argued for independence
from the requirement to paint figures. It argued, in short, for
abstraction.
Pedrosa pushed this argument further in his introduction to
an exhibition of Brazilian art staged in explicit response to the first
Bienal. Opening in Rio in April 1952, the show celebrated Brazilians’
embrace of abstraction against the enduring proponents of figurative
representation for whom art was “a prime instrument of education,
but stripped of its autonomy.”47 For Pedrosa, the excitement of the only
real alternative—the global arena of international abstraction—was
palpable:
The artistic environment is now one of effervescence. Gone is the
suffocating lethargy! Artists begin to fight for their ideas, and for
their aesthetic convictions. Excellent! [Now we can make] a kind of
reassessment of the situation, after the watershed that was our first
Biennial. 48
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The following January Pedrosa would serve on the jury of Rio’s I
Exposição Internacional de Arte Abstrata, confirming the teleology
of the now global drift. 49
The capacity to terminate parasitic Modernismo and cement the
turn to developmentally sound Concretismo was thus endorsed by Rio,
as it would be in the second Bienal. Matarazzo, nothing short of a fundraising genius, got himself appointed as commissioner to the city of
São Paulo for the celebration of its four hundredth anniversary. With
the influx of these bursaries (and after an abortive plea to NAR and the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce to join in his architectural adventures),
Matarazzo could commission physical infrastructures for the Museu
and the Bienal, making manifest the new Brazilian subject of modernity, modernism, and modernization.
24
47 Mário Pedrosa, “O momento artistico” (1952, published in 1953), anthologized in Otilia
Arantes, ed., Academicos e modernos, (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo,
1996), 243, as cited in Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 49.
48 Ibid.
49 Alambert and Canhête list the opening as January 20, 1953; other sources (notably, the
chronology in Fundación Juan March, Cold America) list the opening as February 20,
1953. The second edition of the Bienal would open in December, with a triumphant set
of buildings by Oscar Niemeyer (about which more below).
50 51 Asbury, “Bienal de São Paulo,” 78.
Ibid.
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The rapidity of Brazil’s uptake of abstract modernism was breathtaking, inverting the earlier apologies (“you talk there in terms of weeks,
and we talk in terms of years”), as Bill’s Concrete Art carried the top
prize in that first, 1951 Bienal, the 1952 Ruptura manifesto in São Paulo
announced Brazilians’ break with Modernismo, and the 1953 abstraction show in Rio confirmed the geometric trajectory. In the analysis of
scholar Michael Asbury, the “Rupture” group wanted to be “associated
with the transformation of the nation itself through its emphasis on
the creation of objects in the world, as opposed to abstracting forms
from it.”50 Complicating art historians’ desires to see modernists as
avant-gardes perennially alienated from power, the Brazilians satisfied
their Cold War “non-aligned” objectives with an international Concrete
Art that could connect “with the non-figurative tradition without subjecting itself to the North American model.”51 And the Brazilians’ distance from Concretism’s European origins could allow for some very
creative misreadings of the international doctrine. The more that Swiss
Concretist Max Bill cited Albers, for example, the more Brazilian Mário
Pedrosa would cite Malevich. For both, Brazil would be the place where
the interrupted trajectory of modernity could be “completed,” realizing
the dreams that a divided Europe had crushed under its violent boots.
As plans for the 1953 Bienal were yoked to the 1954 celebration of
São Paulo’s quadricentennial, Matarazzo’s architectural dreams for a
“Palace of the Arts” took shape. Ultimately resulting in several structures, the Bienal’s functions would be concentrated in the Centennial’s
Pavilion of Industry, which later served as headquarters for the Bienal
offices and site of the biannual show. Sited in a swampy bit of land that
had been deeded by the government for the Centennial (Ibirapuera
Park, “ibirapuera” being a Tupi word signifying either the aprodecia
tree or the “rotten wood” associated with this humid territory), the new
modernist structures began to take shape. Painted luminously white
but punctured with syncopated windows or louvers, they expressed the
extraordinary vision of a team of transculturating designers, among
them lead architect Oscar Niemeyer, architect Hélio Uchôa, structural
engineer Joaquim Cardozo, and landscape designer Roberto Burle
Marx.
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Modulor Moderns
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Oscar Niemeyer and team, Pavilion of Industry, designed for the
quadricentenary of the city of São Paulo, completed in 1954, serving in
its parallel existence as “Pavilion Ciccillo Matarazzo” for the São Paulo
Bienal and its administrative headquarters. Reproduced from Oscar
Niemeyer, Alan Weintraub, and Alan Hess, Oscar Niemeyer Buildings
(New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 169. Photograph © Alan Weintraub.
artmargins 2:1
The art in this Bienal was no match for the exciting architectural
complex, still in progress as the exhibition opened. Known colloquially
as the “Guernica Bienal” for the inclusion of Picasso’s antifascist masterwork, it was more historic than polemical. Perhaps the ebb in polemics was because Sérgio Milliet was a more moderate artistic director;
perhaps it was Niemeyer’s capacity to make the case more concretely.52
26
52 Sérgio Milliet da Costa de Silva was affiliated with NAR and Cold War alignments even
during the Second World War. In an important book he published during the war, Milliet
informed Brazilians about North American art, drawing explicit and invidious comparisons between the United States and Soviet Union. Alambert and Canhête cite Milliet
regarding U.S. leadership of “free” art production (my translation): “Today, anywhere in
The modern logic of Concretism became explicit, even as the Bienal
consolidated its ideology—what Milliet described as “nota introdutória
uma análise hisórica da arte moderna” and its unassailable “espírito de
liberdade.”53
If we concur with most scholars that Concretismo was intended
to mark Brazilians’ independence from North American models, we
need nonetheless to acknowledge that the ideology of “freedom” Milliet
invoked as the history of modern art was remarkably similar to that
shared by Barr and the Rockefellers’ MoMA. In fact, Rockefeller himself had reported to Paulistas on the essential link between democratic
freedom and the freedom of art when he came in July 1950 to speak at
the festive ceremony inaugurating the other museum in São Paulo—
the traditional survey museum (metaphorical “Met” to the “Modern”
he had been involved in founding the year before). In his prepared
speech for the Museu d’Arte’s belated inauguration, NAR had praised
the private civic initiatives that had founded it, and then quoted liberally from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration of the New York
MoMA in 1939. FDR, per NAR, stated,
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the world except perhaps in Russia, painting is well protected from the government and
has admirable prospects for renewal and for research open to artists.” Sérgio Milliet,
A pintura norte-americana: Bosquejo de evolução da pintura nos EE. UU. [sic] (São Paulo:
Martins, 1944), 31, as cited by Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 30.
53 “An introductory note with historical analysis of modern art and its spirit of liberty.”
Sérgio Milliet, “Introduçao,” II Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (São Paulo:
Fundação de Arte Moderna, 1953), xvii. The historical coverage included Picasso, Italian
Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, and a curiously marginal Hodler show imported
from Switzerland.
54 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as quoted by NAR in “Address by Nelson A. Rockefeller at the
inauguration of the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo on July 5, 1950,” Rockefeller Archives,
NAR RG 4, box 122, folder 1192.
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Niemeyer’s architecture would code “freedom” very differently.
The Bienal complex in Ibirapuera Park opened in stages beginning
with the Bienal exhibition and quadricentenary in 1954. Certainly,
the astonishing modules, forms, and spaces produced by Niemeyer’s
team had one immediate result: when the President-to-be Juscelino
Kubitschek (elected in 1955) saw them, he hired much the same team to
build Brasilia, a new national capitol, from scratch. The essential idea
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The conditions for democracy and for art are one and the same.
What we call liberty in politics results in freedom in the arts. . . .
That is why this museum is a citadel of civilization.54
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Oscar Niemeyer and team, interior view of the Pavilion of Industry
(where the São Paulo Bienal is held). Reproduced from Oscar
Niemeyer, Rupert Spade, and Yukio Futagawa, Oscar Niemeyer
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(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 170.
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of the Niemeyer plan was a set of pavilhãos or pavilions (but permanent), linked by a covered walkway or marquise. The pavilions were
made of reinforced steel and concrete fitted with variations on the glass
curtain wall, elegant statements of International Style modernism; the
Pavilion of Industry that became the Bienal headquarters exemplifies
one scholar’s description of “sober structures veiling adventurous interiors.”55 The contrast between the staid rectangular geometries of the
exterior and the almost delirious interior sets up my larger claim:
Niemeyer’s architecture (and of course Burle Marx’s landscaping) is
important for the revival of antropofagia that would emerge with a
vengeance in the visual arts.
A sometime collaborator with the Swiss-born architect Le
Corbusier (they are listed as the two leads on the 1947 United Nations
Building in New York), Niemeyer is seen to have adapted Corbusian
building modes (reinforced concrete) to curved and parabolic shapes;
these gave a pronounced uniqueness to Brazilian modernism (anointed
by New York MoMA in an exhibition titled “Brazil Builds” in 1943)
but were minimized in the core buildings of the Bienal complex.
Nonetheless, Niemeyer’s constant pushback against Corbusier is well
55 Styliane Philippou, Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2008), 168.
Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris), Le Modulor, 1950.
Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, India, holding his design for the new
© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/
capital and a model of the Modulor man, ca. 1951. Photograph
F.L.C. Reproduced from Figure 22 of The Modulor: A Harmonious
Pierre Jeanneret, Fondation Corbusier. © FLC/ADAGP.
Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture
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56 Niemeyer had come to prominence as a wunderkind in the Corbusier-led team designing
the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Health in 1936 (Rio, finished in 1942). For a
standard account, see the book by CIAM architect Stamo Papadaki, Oscar Niemeyer
(New York: G. Braziller, 1960).
57 The English version of the second edition of Modulor is subtitled A Harmonious Measure
to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1968). Modulor was chosen by Corbu to mingle the words module and nombre
d’or, the latter a reference to the golden mean (golden section, golden ratio) of classical
Greek architecture. My thanks go to Nicola Pezolet for his dissertation chapter on this
material; see his “Spectacles Plastiques” (PhD diss., MIT, 2012).
58 The association of Niemeyer with antropofagia has been argued most forcefully by
Philippou, Oscar Niemeyer. Philippou’s indispensable text on Niemeyer does not make
the particular formal argument I have posed here, however. The author notes reluctantly
in a footnote, “Niemeyer, however, never referred explicitly to Antropofagia” (11n16).
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documented, forming the Brazilian architect’s mythos.56 For my purposes, I want to emphasize his departure from Corbu’s Modulor,
a “universal” metric developed by the avatar of International Style
modernism—published in 1950 and deployed around the world.57
Outside and inside the pavilions’ exteriors, Niemeyer subtly
torqued the techno-rationality of both Corbu and Concretismo to
produce a subliminal anthropophagy for Cold War Brazil.58 Key to my
argument is the oft-neglected Grande Marquise (marquee, or covered
walkway) of the Bienal complex. An open-air, free-form structure, it
covered the crowds during the second Bienal’s delayed inauguration
a n t h r o p o p h a g y i n s à o pa u l o ' s c o l d wa r
and Mechanics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968 edition), 65.
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Artists’ award at Second Bienal de São Paulo under the marquise by
Oscar Niemeyer and team, Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, 1953/1954.
Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
Left: Oscar Niemeyer and team, aerial view of the Bienal complex.
Reproduced from Styliane Philippou, Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of
Irreverence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 166.
Right: Visitor’s map for the São Paulo Bienal, shown upside down
from its usual orientation to reveal Niemeyer’s “anti-Modulor.”
artmargins 2:1
Collection of the author.
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a n t h r o p o p h a g y i n s à o pa u l o ' s c o l d wa r
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59 From Niemeyer’s “Poem of the Curve” (O poema da curva), cited by Philippou in conjunction with the first of the architect’s free-form marquises, this one at the dance hall he
designed in 1940 for the resort at Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, in the Brazilian state of
Minas Gerais—whose commissioner was none other than Juscelino Kubitschek, then
the local mayor.
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(postponed to December to join with the quadricentenary), showcasing
this feature’s capacity to shelter both luminaries and hoi polloi from
rain and summer sun. Connecting the upright modernist slab buildings
with biomorphic horizontality, the marquee’s smooth expanse begs to
be read in counterpoint to Concretismo and International Style orthodoxy, weaving around Burle Marx’s key tropical plantings, and in some
cases even punctured to incorporate them. What is striking upon seeing
the layout of all the Niemeyer structures in their relation to each other
is the walkway’s configuration as it was finally built, clearly evident in
aerial views and in the map routinely handed out to Bienal visitors.
As constructed, Niemeyer’s marquee forms a Corbusian “Modulor
Man,” but with difference, not universalism, at its core. Corbu’s “module” had modernized classical Vitruvian proportions (narcissistically
utilizing a body that was erect, white, European, and male), alluding to
the thinly veiled discourse of divinity by which Western architecture
had always accrued its power, in an upright frontal figure stretching
from the ground plane to the cosmos (and intended by Corbu to be
planted wherever modernism could establish itself). But Niemeyer’s
modulor—which would have dramatically outlined itself in the final
plans authorized by Matarazzo and the centennial building committee—was shockingly prone. Anthropophagically digesting modernist
architectural materials while proclaiming its relation to the earth and
to what Niemeyer fantasized as “the body of the beloved woman, . . . full of curves, like the mulattas painted by . . . Di Cavalcanti,” Niemeyer’s modulor was flattened, stretched, and distorted, its sprawling aegis connecting to deeply local substrates.59 If the reference to
Semanaista Emilio Di Cavalcanti is old-fashioned, betraying Niemeyer’s
link to Modernismo rather than to younger artists’ developing critiques
of Concrete Art, its determination to index “difference” is what is
salient here. The populism of Niemeyer’s “canopy-in-motion” is functional to this day, allowing visitors to the park to circulate and see into
the buildings free from admission fees or museum protocols, a fact utilized by Olafur Eliasson to democratize access to his contribution to the
1998 Bienal (which extended out of the Bienal building, through the
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glass, and into the park, under the marquee).60 Sinuous in its enormous body outline, yet club-footed and given a massive “head” formed
by the Pavilion of the Arts (dubbed “Oca,” the Tupi word for home),
Niemeyer’s giant modulor mulatta was irrevocably tethered to the
Brazilian terrain and strategically open to its landscaped jungle.
Antropofagic with a subtle vengeance, it offered a new hybridity
for an increasingly global culture.
Coda: Antropofagia and the Hand That Feeds
artmargins 2:1
Niemeyer never openly acknowledged the pull of that most powerful
theorization of colonial trauma, antropofagia, but I’ve argued that his
work subversively invoked that discourse and rendered a silent formal
critique of techno-rationalist abstraction (biting the hand that feeds).
Not coincidentally, I submit, antropofagia would soon be openly revived
in the Brazilian art world by Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and a raft of
others. This forms a late-1960s coda to my account, joining an epilogue
in which the São Paulo Bienal itself became a target of global boycott
(1969) in protest against the Brazilian dictatorship’s increasing repression, with diasporal Latin American artists gestating their own conceptual “Contrabienal.”61
Those protests occluded the debt younger artists and antropofagia
bore to the Bienal, debts of opposition that first began to stir against
Concretismo (the Bienal’s anointed style) in a Neoconcretismo manifesto offered by poet and theorist Ferreira Gullar in 1959. The stated
objective was for artists to pollute concrete abstraction’s “dangerously
extreme rationalism” and reengage with “the expressive potential they
feel their art contains.”62 For artists such as Lygia Clark (a signatory)
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60 Olafur Eliasson, The Very Large Ice Flow (1998), contributed to the twenty-fourth SPB,
whose theme explicitly invoked antropofagia. Eliasson’s work consisted of a large ice rink
that extended past the wall of the pavilion and into the park, where Paulistas enjoyed it by
just sitting on it and melting spots into its smooth surface. “Canopy-in-motion” refers to
the earlier Niemeyer marquise at the Baile dance hall in Pampulha, considered a model
for this one; see Philippou, Oscar Niemeyer, 101.
61 For an account of American-based boycotts of the Bienal over the years, see James
Green, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in
the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 124ff. For the 1971–72
Contrabienal, see the description of Luis Camnitzer (a participant) in Conceptualism in
Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007),
240–41.
62 Ferreira Gullar, “Manifesto neoconcreto” [Neoconcretist manifesto], Jornal do Brasil
(Rio), March 22, 1959, translated into English and published in Fundación Juan March,
Cold America, 442.
Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Diálogo de manos, 1966. Photograph by
63 Not detailed here is the longer story of the architectural awards at the Bienal, where
ex-Bauhaus director Walter Gropius was anointed and pronounced Brazil the nation
most hospitable to modern architecture in 1953.
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and Hélio Oiticica (a younger artist who later joined), the conceptualism of Neoconcretismo was a given. It could operate on an international stage only because that stage had constituted itself through
national representation at biennials—through Venice (where Clark
had shown consistently since Brazil was first represented), and through
the bracing contest of the São Paulo Bienal.
With the antropofagic aegis of Niemeyer’s architecture metaphorically protecting me, I assert that there would be no sense of the differentiated “audiences” (not universals) that had to be strategized by these
artists and architects without the decade and a half of the Bienal’s
prize-giving apparatus behind them.63 This is the significance, for me,
of Oiticica’s considered transformation of his installation Tropicália—
reconfigured from its 1967 premiere at the modern museum in São
Paulo for London (as Eden), or infusing the “Babylonests” he build
during his exile in New York. Ditto the manipulable, dialogical object
created by Oiticica and Lygia Clark in 1966, Diálogo de Manos, which
mightily impressed the young student Yve-Alain Bois (making a pilgrimage to Clark’s Paris studio after seeing her work in the 1968
a n t h r o p o p h a g y i n s à o pa u l o ' s c o l d wa r
Sascha Harnisch. The World of Lygia Clark Cultural Association.
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Venice Biennale). As Clark engaged him in the necessary collaboration
to activate this “object,” Bois recalls,
artmargins 2:1
[O]ur two right hands joined in opposite directions, each in one
of the loops of a little Möbius cloth ribbon (elastic, there again)
and by joining or releasing them, we experienced the resistance
of matter. . . . Lygia then told me about the beginning of the Neoconcrete movement in Brazil [in 1959], her own polemical starting
point—that of breaking with the universalist claims of geometric
abstraction. . . . She had turned one of Max Bill’s most captivating
sculptures, draped in its marmoreal autonomy, into the support
for an experiment aimed at abolishing any idea of autonomy.64
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Returning us to Bill’s Tripartite Unity of 1948–49 in confrontation
with its cannibalizer, Bois’s recollection of the 1966 Diálogo allows us
to see the transvaluation of “Concrete” values. The substitution of
hands in “elastic” for Bill’s engineered form entangles mathematical
universals with the abject. “Elastic” is made so by Brazilian stuff,
boiled sap of the rubber tree, still harvested by people, exported to factories in the North, and woven with other fibers to make cloth stretch in
biomorphic, uncanny, skin-like ways. Diálogo literally weaves together
the threads of the Brazilian economy (the foundational rubber industry), mobilizing it with “manual” labor, while wittily asserting its conceptual linkage to Möbius (and, more broadly, geometric abstraction
tout court).
Delving into the deeper context of Diálogo’s conversion of steel to
rubber targets the cruel strategies of multinational capital in its relation
to indigenous knowledge. Ever since Brazilian rubber trees were taken
in the 19th century by the British for seeding in their more tractable
colonies in India and Southeast Asia (not to mention the brutal development of a different species of rubber in the Belgian Congo), the metaphor of botanical aboriginality (recall the “Brazilwood” for which the
country was given its European name) was put into question. But by
this same argument, we can see the clever transitivity of Clark and
Oiticica’s material critique—equally readable (as rubber, at least, if not
as “neo-Concrete”) in Malaysia, Kolkota, or Kinshasa. Where Oswald
de Andrade had imagined “Brazilwood” to assert a deep vernacular,
64 Yve-Alain Bois, introduction to Lygia Clark, “Nostalgia of the Body,” October 69
(Summer 1994): 86.
Roberto Burle Marx’s landscape design in dialogue with Niemeyer’s
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a younger generation could formulate, from another once “Brazilian”
substance, a globalized argument for embodied resistance to technocracy. Contemporary installations of the flaccid rubber Möbius cuff
(which we visitors are forbidden to manipulate) do not capture the
accomplishment of Diálogo as the 1966 photograph records it—
performative, as in so much contemporary art.
In the twists and turns of this essay, I have argued that the dream
of an object- or image-based universalism fueled the uptake of geometric abstraction via the São Paulo Bienal. The style was not imposed
by Northern capitalists such as Rockefeller, who had only the vaguest
ideas of the artistic stakes on the ground in Brazil; it was embraced by
Paulistas as the vehicle of progress in its manifestly “international”
form. Crucial to my argument, this form of abstraction represented a
liberation from (figuring) the difference of actual bodies, while entering the unmarked category of the normative.
This (Western, Platonic, Cartesian, Kantian, Corbusian) dream
could not hold. Perhaps most provocatively, I have argued that within
the very belly of ostensibly Corbusian “International Style modernism,”
a n t h r o p o p h a g y i n s à o pa u l o ' s c o l d wa r
Marquise do Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, Brasil. Photograph © Pedro Kok.
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the worm was turning, in Oscar Niemeyer’s subtle abjection of the
modulor. Not just a formal riposte, Niemeyer’s move was also an ecology, the newly horizontal modulo-mulatta literally encompassing the
indigenous jungle Burle Marx shaped for Ibirapuera Park.65 Clark and
Oiticica also effected an ecology. Like the dialogue between sinuously
deployed concrete and native tree, their dialogue of hands in rubber
leveled Concretismo in a desiring-production maneuver of incredible
wit, provoking our contemplation of the art system itself. Savagely honoring its targets by devouring them, antropofagia always results in new
growth—Brazilian development countercolonizing the global art world.
Acknowledgments
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I thank the anonymous ARTMargins reviewers for their constructive
criticisms; thanks also to the archivists at the Rockefeller Foundation
and at the Archives of the São Paulo Bienal. My research in the Bienal
archives was immeasurably helped by my Brazilian research assistant
Deborah Magnani; Mariel Villeré assisted with Niemeyer materials.
Scholars Robin Greeley, José Gatti, and Pedro Erber have all been
crucial for my continuing education in things Latin American.
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65 See Fabiola López-Durán, “Eugenics in the Garden,” PhD dissertation, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 2009.