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How Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and North Americans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian avant-garde art; the unexpected familiarity of the works serves to make them unfamiliar. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, Sérgio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil’s avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely...
The book tells the story of individual artists in Central Europe who believed in art's power to change the world; they imagined a collective of human beings living happily in a free society liberated of injustice and inequality.
Peopling for Profit provides a comprehensive history of migration to nineteenth-century imperial Brazil. Rather than focus on Brazilian slavery or the mass immigration of the end of the century, José Juan Pérez Meléndez examines the orchestrated efforts of migrant recruitment, transport to, and settlement in post-independence Brazil. The book explores Brazil's connections to global colonization drives and migratory movements, unveiling how the Brazilian Empire's engagement with privately run colonization models from overseas crucially informed the domestic sphere. It further reveals that the rise of a for-profit colonization model indelibly shaped Brazilian peopling processes and governance by creating a feedback loop between migration management and government formation. Pérez Meléndez sheds new light on how directed migrations and the business of colonization shaped Brazilian demography as well as enduring social, racial, and class inequalities. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Art produced outside hegemonic centers is often seen as a form of derivation or relegated to a provisional status. Forming Abstraction turns this narrative on its head. In the first book-length study of postwar Brazilian art and culture, Adele Nelson highlights the importance of exhibitionary and pedagogical institutions in the development of abstract art in Brazil. By focusing on the formation of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951; the early activities of artists Geraldo de Barros, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and Ivan Serpa; and the ideas of critics like Mário Pedrosa, Nelson illuminates the complex, strategic processes of citation and adaption of both local and international forms. The book ultimately demonstrates that Brazilian art institutions and abstract artistic groups—and their exhibitions of abstract art in particular—served as crucial loci for the articulation of societal identities in a newly democratic nation at the onset of the Cold War.
Presenting new scholarship, this publication is an innovative technical study of the Concrete art movement in Latin America. Purity Is a Myth presents new scholarship on Concrete art in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from the 1940s to the 1960s. Originally coined by the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg in 1930, the term concrete denotes abstract painting with no reference to external reality. Van Doesburg argued that there was nothing more real than a line, color, or plane. Artists such as Willys de Castro, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hermelindo Fiaminghi, Judith Lauand, Raúl Lozza, Tomás Maldonado, Hélio Oiticica, and Rhod Rothfuss would reinvent this concept in postwar Latin America. ...
This volume explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and examine the ways humans and nonhumans shape one another. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman. Contributors identify posthumanist themes across a range of different materials, including an anecdote about a plague of rabbits in Historia de las Indias by Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas, photography depicting desert landscapes at the site of Brazil’s War of Canudos, and digital and installation art portraying victims of state-sponsored and drug violence in Colombia an...
A fascinating look at modernist urban planning and spatial theories in Brazilian 20th-century art and architecture Exploring the intersections among art, architecture, and urbanism in Brazil from the 1920s through the 1960s, Adrian Anagnost shows how modernity was manifested in locally specific spatial forms linked to Brazil's colonial and imperial past. Discussing the ways artists and architects understood urban planning as a tool to reorganize the world, control human action, and remedy social problems, Anagnost offers a nuanced account of the seeming conflict between modernist aesthetics and a predominately poor and historically disenfranchised urban public, with particular attention to regionalist forms of urban development. Organized as a series of case studies of projects such as Flávio de Carvalho's performative urbanism, the construction of the Ministry of Education and Public Health building, Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi's efforts to modernize Brazilian museums, and Hélio Oiticica's interstitial works, this study is full of groundbreaking insights into the ways that modernist theories of urbanism shaped the art and architecture of 20th-century Brazil.
"Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka's haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration not as the enemy of revolutionary art, but as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Tracing Deineka's path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the Revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Great Terror and beyond, Collective Body demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood ...
Global biennials have proliferated in the contemporary art world, but artists’ engagement with large-scale international exhibitions has a much longer history that has influenced the present in important ways. Going back to the earliest world’s fairs in the nineteenth century, this book argues that “globalism” was incubated in a century of international art contests and today constitutes an important tactic for artists. As world’s fairs brought millions of attendees into contact with foreign cultures, products, and processes, artworks became juxtaposed in a “theater of nations,” which challenged artists and critics to think outside their local academies. From Gustave Courbet’...
A major rethinking of twentieth-century abstract art mobilized by the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark What would it mean to treat an interval of space as a line, thus drawing an empty void into a constellation of art and meaning-laden things? In this book, Irene Small elucidates the signal discovery of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in 1954: a fissure of space between material elements that Clark called “the organic line.” For much of the history of art, Clark’s discovery, much like the organic line, has escaped legibility. Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge. A spatial cavity th...