Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This essay, by the Brazilian curator and art historian Aracy Amaral, appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition Modernidade: arte brasileira do século XX (Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1988). Amaral discusses the origins of the [...]

Mário de Andrade was a staunch supporter of “Brazilianizing literature and music with injections of the art of the people,” a strategy he thought would narrow the gap between high and popular art by incorporating oral literature into the written [...]

This is a letter published in the newspaper O Estado by the art critic Mário Baratta, written posthumously to the modernist poet Mário de Andrade, a year after his death. Baratta wanted to convey to the reader a hypothetical letter that he would [...]

In this article Mário Pedrosa discusses the differences between the São Paulo and the Rio de Janeiro versions of concrete art. In his (rather Manichaeisticly oversimplified) view, the former are a more theoretical, rigid response to the dogmatic [...]

In this essay, the well-known Argentinean critic Jorge Romero Brest attempts to assess national problems as they were understood by the most famous Brazilian artists, touching on a raw nerve concerning the differences between the art produced in [...]

This is an interview with Mário de Andrade, who is referred to here as the “Daddy” of the new art movement that the newspaper calls “futuristic,” and that the São Paulo writer calls “modernist.” De Andrade prefers to reply to the [...]

This [document] by Mário de Andrade is a reply, dated May 20, 1928, to the letter in which Augusto Meyer discussed the former’s controversial activity, conscience, and references to national subject matter. De Andrade outlines his intellectual [...]