Traços de Belo Horizonte: a contribuição dos caricaturistas para a consolidação do modernismo na cidade moderna

Abstract

The main proposal that organize this paper is to identify the significance of the way that caricaturists in the 1920s and 1930s and their productions worked out as elements that had an influence over the modernism of Belo Horizonte. Through a qualitative research, this paper argues how this artistic movement spread all over the city in a wider range on account of the industrial and urban development. In order to understand the progress of the modernism in Belo Horizonte and its connection to caricaturists, it was necessary to look for the social formation of the city that enabled the comprehension of the artistic field which these artists aimed to reach. The sources consulted were: newspapers, magazines and journals as well as an iconographic research based on cartoons and caricatures. The resulting conclusions show how, during the first decades of the twenty century, the symbolic productions valorized by the belo-horizontinian elite were of an impressionist academic nature to turn, from the 1920s, into a struggle against the modern movements. Therefore, it was testified that the urban and industrial progress of the city contributed not only to the increase of activities of the local press, but also, in an ideological way, to the impulse of performance of an intellectual group who advocated for the modernism consolidation in Belo Horizonte. Summing up, the claim of a modern art made possible a bigger space of action for the caricaturists and, consequently, a symbolic valorization of their productions.