of the Semana de Arte Moderno in 1952 and 1962 was set.
2.4 1952 and After
Just ten years later, with the end of World War II and the Estado Novo, and in the middle of the most euphoric moments of the developmentalist dream, the proposal of the two Andrades seemed to be coming to fruition. In 1952, the Semana was used to feed the developmentalist project that would culminate in the 1960 construction of Brasília – that most perfect of perfect cities.22 Everything seemed to be radicalizing. Mário Pedrosa and Sérgio Milliet undertook a project of institutionalizing modern art in Brazil, founding museums of modern art and the São Paulo Biennial.23 The concretists, in both art and poetry, claimed not only to be part of the new global avant‐gardes, but also literally their vanguard.24
In 1952, the right and left were once again aligned on one matter: the Semana was theirs, part of a new nationalist‐developmentalist agreement that would survive at least until the military coup of 1964. Everything in 1952 seemed to negate the crisis of the preceding decade, while at the same time being the result of that crisis. At the outset of the Cold War, the new democratic state saw the Semana in very different terms than the old Estado Novo; for Brazil's new democracy, the Semana of the past was now simply the predecessor to the Semanas of the future.
Mário Pedrosa would summarize this new interpretation of the Semana's historical legacy during a 1952 speech in which he inverted Mário de Andrade's pessimism of a decade earlier. The living Mário proposed a dialogue with the deceased Mário, reinventing both future and past modernisms. Agreeing with Andrade over the beguiling “spirit” of the 1920s, Pedrosa localized in the psychic and “magical” contact with modern painting afforded by the experiences of Anita Malfatti and Victor Brecheret. For him, it was the visual arts that anticipated the revolution in literature: “their modernist initiation began not through literature or poetry but through the specifically non‐verbal arts of painting and sculpture” (Pedrosa 1998, p. 137). The universality of art meant that the best of modernist nationalism would not remain stuck in the traps of a “more superficial and narrow” nationalism, especially its “most stupid [form] – the political” (Pedrosa 1998, p. 139).
Buoyantly advocating both the favorable winds of developmentalism and new forms of institutional engagement of which he was at that time a partisan, Pedrosa concluded that:
[In 1922], for the first time in a sluggish and inert Brazil that was just beginning to crumble under the disintegration of the old feudal and coffee‐based economy, a handful of young people rose up against that lethargy and declared that men have reasons for which to struggle and fight beyond the political realm. Art in our times is increasingly a worthy activity for which men, the best among them, fight and sacrifice themselves.
(Pedrosa 1998, p. 139)
By 1962, the Semana would be revised to be a founding act for this new Brazil, at the vanguard of the world. Between 1952 and 1962, nothing changed significantly. On the contrary, the inauguration of Brasília would be the spectacular counterexample: from Brazil inventing modernism, now modernism was reinventing Brazil. The “perfect city,” which Oswald de Andrade saw anticipated in the Belo Horizonte of Juscelino and in the Pampulha project twenty years prior, had now become a reality through the genius of two communist modernist architects: Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer.
The question to ask was no longer what the Semana de Arte Moderna represented, but above all else who best represented it. For the optimistic generation of the 1960s, the answer was clear: Oswald. Recasting Andrade as the “Che Guevara of Brazilian Modernism,” they recuperated the confident positivity of his 1944 speech and transformed it in accordance with the fresh winds stimulated by developmentalist Brazil. Juscelino, the modernizer, once again was mixed in with the pranks of Oswald, the communist‐anthropophagist, who would become a hero as much to the modernizers as to the new avant‐gardes, first the concretists and then the tropicalists.25
Yet before ten years had passed, things would become more obscure. In 1970, in one of his most exceptional writings, “The Biennial from Here to There,” Mário Pedrosa would tone down his previous optimism of almost twenty years earlier. Now, in the midst of the horrors of the military coup and himself facing yet another defeat and exile, he explained the Semana via the image of an aristocratic group that ignored popular art and culture. If the Semana had previously been the predecessor of the dream of progress and the initiator of the aesthetic adventures of constructivism, it now morphed into the precursor to our elite's aristocratism, propensity for military coups, and disdain for the masses (Pedrosa 1995a).
Naturally, others saw it differently. Once they were quite well protected by the authoritarian state, they could easily turn against the myth of the Semana in order to cultivate more effectively the old but resurgent conservative myths. In April 1972, the journalist Franklin de Oliveira wrote a vehement article titled “This Myth Must Be Dismantled,” in which he expostulated that the Semana was treated “in strictly apologetic terms” by a seemingly official “congratulatory entourage.” According to the author, “the modernists, escapist and alienated, had not started any real artistic movement, much less had they initiated any program of cultural renewal” (Oliveira 1972). He presented the Semana as the creation of provincial Paulistas, alienated from the problems of the history of Brazil and plagiarizers of the great men of the past, while also being historically ignorant and philosophically primitive. In Oliveira's eyes, Oswald was the worst of them. Mário saved himself by having written Macunaíma and disowning the Semana.26
It was not the case, however, that the dictatorship had made commemorations of the Semana untenable. On the contrary, 1972 was the year that saw the most publications about the event. These commemorations, however, were verde‐amarelas in tone. At the same time, the Semana was reduced to a merely academic event, no more than a date on the civic calendar.
It was for this reason that, starting in 1982 as the dictatorship was reaching its end, a fundamentally anti‐Semana de Arte Moderna discourse – explicitly postmodern – began. A significant historiography against the Semana arose during this period. Youth of the 1980s felt that, even with the end of the dictatorship, progress had abandoned them. It was a lost decade, the end of any kind of developmentalist utopia, whether democratic or authoritarian. It was an era that felt like an enormous hangover among the old left. Others, however, sought to imagine a new left, founding the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT) in 1981, a project launched by old modernists Mário Pedrosa, Sérgio Buarque, and Antonio Candido, among others.
Mário Pedrosa died in the early 1980s, along with Hélio Oiticica. In that mournful epoch, everything became a “myth,” and myth was everything that was dead: the Semana de Arte Moderna, brasilidade (Brazilianness), Paulista progress, the avant‐garde, etc. At the very least, everything had to be “reevaluated.” This was the case of the peculiar antimodernism of the sociologist Gilberto Freyre or the cool reactionary stance of the dramaturge Nelson Rodrigues. In the midst of this crisis, the city of Rio developed a fascination with the era before its decline – the Tropical Paris, “our Belle Époque,” the hot city with European elegance, everything that it had been before São Paulo and Brasília had spoiled Rio's fun. In those years, fascination with premodernism coincided with postmodernism, constructivism with deconstruction and relativism, figuration returned to painting, and so on. A certain antimodernism became a mark of elegance and engagement.
Between the 1980s and 1990s, the battlefield around the Semana developed various trenches that united postmoderns, globalization theorists, a blasé antimodernist taste brought on by the crisis of the lost decades, and disappointment with the transition from the military dictatorship to neoliberalism. At that moment, no certainty seemed to exist that would explain Brazil’s modern past or seek to learn something from