Brazilian art has recently grabbed the attention of many international private and public collections in the past years. Along with the economic growth and with the new role the country has been taking in the political sphere, Brazilian modern and contemporary art is currently a key element for the projection of a new identity towards the Western centers of power. If economy and politics in Brazil are shifting to a more integrated relation with Europe and the United States, then culture is by no means behind; when it comes to art, the placement of Brazilian artists in important collections throughout the world, followed by mega exhibitions and the increasing value of their works in auction houses in London and New York, is a clear example of this new age.

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In order to understand the dynamics of the contemporary art scene in Brazil, it is essential to look back to at least two main periods in the 20th Century: the modernists in the 1920s, and the neoconcretes in the 1950s and 1960s. Both movements are extremely detailed and complex, with extensive material published, so I investigate here their surfaces; mostly, how they relate to the contemporary production and what these three moments have in common from the perspective of a local individual, to give the global reader an overall view of the Brazilian art in the last hundred years.

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Throughout many countries in Latin America, the rise of the 20th Century brought the necessity of building national identities and the wish to breakthrough from the old traditions; a range of experimentations in literature and fine arts spread in the continent, such as the Muralismo movement in Mexico. In Brazil, the centenary of the country’s independence came accompanied by the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) in Sao Paulo, 1922; it was the pinnacle of a series of events trying to push the national culture into a new level, and the city was the perfect stage for it to happen, given its intense flux of immigration and its strong process of industrialization at the time. Influenced by the Europeans modernist movements, Brazilian artists, writers and musicians defied the rules of academism in their cultural areas: in Mario de Andrade’s and Oswald de Andrade’s poems, in Villa-Lobos’s compositions or in Victor Brecheret’s sculptures, new ideas for a more original society took form. The painter Anita Malfatti - author of the first polemic exhibition of Brazilian modernist art in 1917 - was the pioneer of modern paintings in Brazil, along with Di Cavalcanti, Lasar Segall and Vicente do Rego Monteiro among others, exploring the techniques created by the European vanguards and mixing them with visual elements exclusive from the national scenery.

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Tarsila do Amaral a few years later in her famous work Abaporu (1928) captured the spirit of the time. It is composed by a human figure in abnormal disproportion: the right leg and right arm occupy almost half of the canvas, the lines and the stance of the naked body, a swollen human form sitting with one elbow on the knee and a hand holding the head, are clear signs of the impact of surrealism and cubism in the Brazilian art scene.The rest of the picture is made by a cactus that has the same size of the man and a sun in a blue sky, reminding us of the landscapes in some parts of the Brazilian countryside. It is as if one of Rodin’s sculptures have been painted by Dali and had gone lost thinking under the tropical sun. Abaporu means “the man that eats” in the indigenous language Tupi-guarani; the painting was a gift to her husband at the time, Oswald de Andrade, who inspired by it wrote the Manifesto Antropofágico (Anthropophagite Manifesto), which in short claims that European culture had to be swallowed and digested in order to become something pure Brazilian.

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The attempts of constructing an original Brazilian language in the early 20th Century developed later on in new aesthetic forms. In 1959 in Rio de Janeiro, the poet Ferreira Gullar and the artists Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Amilcar de Castro and Franz Weissmann among others publish the Manifesto Neoconcreto, a specific reaction to the Concrete movement undergoing in previous years in Sao Paulo.While the concretes defended an abstract art based on the geometric principles of the Bauhaus and the Russian vanguards, some of the original members of the group disagreed on the orthodox methods the movement was taking and joined other artists to establish a new doctrine: the neoconcretes argued that they needed to break free from these rationalist dogmas; for them, art should be more than mere perfect visual composition, it had to become more connected with the human being. Both movements were extremely linked with the refreshment of the Brazilian culture at the time, not only in arts but also in literature, cinema, design and music. This is the period of the Cinema Novo (New Cinema) with Glauber Rocha, the brewing of Bossa Nova and the inauguration of the country’s new capital, Brasilia. Modernity seemed to have finally arrived and a new cultural heritage was about to be born.

The context was propitious for new experimentations, so concrete artists like Waldemar Cordeiro and Luis Sacilotto explored the numerous possibilities of the basic elements in the visual forms; on the other hand, to truly be experimental it was necessary to go beyond recycling European models. Neoconcretes reinvented the concept of art in Brazil, they literally played with the media: Lygia Clark’s Bichos (aka Animals) were interactive sculptures which needed the touch of the public to become real artworks; Lygia Pape’s Livros (Books) brought in discussion the role of the space in our perception of the objects. Finally, Hélio Oiticica joined the Neoconcrete movement and invited the spectator to “wear” the art in his works Parangolés, and invade the art space by stepping into his installations Penetráveis (Penetrables). In the 1960s, Oiticica’s pieces even influenced the cultural movement Tropicália, which revived the questions risen by the Anthropophagite Manifesto in music and poetry, and was named after one of the Penetráveis. The neoconcretes succeeded in engaging the public with the artworks, they managed to show to the Brazilians that art was not something exclusive of the elites, it was actually part of everyday life; art became more intimate, colorful, less intellectual and more intuitive - it became once again more Brazilian.

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The modernists introduced important elements to the visual vocabulary in the country, and later on the neoconcretes - which by some are referred to as the inventors of post-modernism in Brazil - took the national artistic creation to higher levels; these movements were the main platforms for the Brazilian contemporary art production. The following decades in the Brazilian art scene showed a wide variety of styles and ideas in the use of media and language. Artists like Tunga, Cildo Meireles and Adriana Varejão updated the image of Brazilian art in both national and international spheres by introducing aesthetics and conceptual aspects in their works coming from a blend of historical artistic references in both the Brazilian and Western iconographies and techniques, with innovative proposals to analyze the complex structure of the contemporary world and its arts.

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Beatriz Milhazes, Vik Muniz and Rivane Neuenschwander are among a long list of names that nowadays help to project Brazilian art as a laboratory as cutting-edge and with the same quality as any other foreign art production.The capacity to reinvent its formats and reorganize its thoughts in accordance to the new moment in the Brazilian society, is an efficient skill in the present artistic practices in the country; Ernesto Neto’s large installations combine the natural Brazilian interest in textures, colors and smells - the human body’s senses, basically - with the studies of the relation between environment and its effects on the public’s participation, found in Oiticica’s methods. In Neto’s endless labyrinths made of nylon (The Edges of the World), one can feel like a contemporary Abaporu inside a new version of the Penetráveis; over here, art embraces the instincts in a very Brazilian way.

 

If the question of finding the Brazilian identity is still not solved, than at least the past artistic movements have lightened up the pathways to it; as a consequence, the country steps into a new era more confident not only because of its recent success in economic and political fields, but also due to a strong originality and a heavier presence in the contemporary culture. Although the comparison with global phenomenons in Art History seem always to bounce back, Brazilian contemporary art has discovered that the roots of heritage are deep, but the lack of limits and the amount of chances for the growth of this tropical tree are even bigger. When it comes to the 21st Century, to label Brazil as an emergent art scene or as an exotic and exuberant country is far outdated. The nation is conquering more than space or respect; as contemporary art unveils beneath its attractive looks and witty sense of humor, Brazil is in a privileged position to offer people something more and more scarce nowadays: opportunities.