O modernismo "com sabor local": contatos, trocas e misturas na arquitetura e nas artes brasileiras

Abstract

This dissertation discusses the complex relationships between the international culture, or the fine arts and architecture international avant garde, and the local culture in the beginning of the modern style in Brazil. It focuses on the years between 1923 and 1933 and on the works of two Eastern Europeans, Lasar Segall and Gregori Warchavchik, and of twoBrazilians educated in Europe, Tarsila do Amaral and Flávio de Carvalho. It begins by looking at the education of those artists and architects in Europe and at the identification of their most important influences. The second chapter studies the first modern houses in Brazil, and particularly the projects by Warchavchik; it identifies his major influences and howhe incorporated the works of Segall and Tarsila. The third chapter studies the relationship between artists and architects and their associations to promote art exhibitions, parties, theater plays, lectures, among other cultural activities. In that context, the architects were involved with collective housing while the artists were bringing social issues into their works. The analysis of their contacts, exchanges and mixtures shows several references such as German Expressionism, Cubism, art nègre, the projects and theories of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, the Brazilian traditional house and popular culture, the local Negro people and theirculture, the yokel colors, the tropical light, among others. It is possible to see a relation between some aspects of contemporary literature and of arts and architecture, such as it appears in Mario de Andrades Macunaíma, in the dialectic between the archaic and the modern, and in Oswald de Andrades Manifesto Antropófago. Both the arts and architecture eat the international and local references without considering the original contexts. The act of devouring creates an art form and an architecture that belong to both worlds, and to no one,indefinable, a mixture between the archaic and the modern, an invention of a modern style with a local taste.