Art 286 - Exam 2

"A Negra"

"In 1923, toward the end of her stay in Paris, Tarsila painted "A Negra." The work depicts a naked black woman of exaggerated proportions: an enormous breast, drooping lips, and large hands and feet. The figure fills most of the canvas, the background composed of abstract blocks of color; she stares coolly at the viewer. Tarsila replaced the ubiquitous European depiction of the nude female bather with a Brazilian black woman. It was the first of many artworks in which Tarsila would subvert a European tradition to assert a Brazilian presence. Still, the painting is not exactly a portrait of empowerment. Tarsila later said that "A Negra" was inspired by the female slave who lived on her family farm in rural São Paulo. Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, only two years after Tarsila was born, and her wealthy father, a landowner, had at one point owned many slaves. In its current exhibition, MoMA does not fully acknowledge the problem of race in Tarsila's work. The museum points out that a 21st-century American audience might find this painting challenging to reckon with, but, as some critics have already argued, the exhibition downplays the politics and power dynamics at play in Tarsila's art. In the catalogue, for instance, the curators, Luis Pérez-Oramas and Stephanie D'Alessandro, can seem evasive, alluding briefly to "our possible reaction" and how "some may find [the painting] disturbing," rather than stating point-blank that Tarsila, like many of her social class, was kind of racist. (Even Tarsila would later acknowledge the work as a "very controversial picture" and only chose to exhibit it twice in her lifetime.) We must, as with so much art, see Tarsila's through the lens of privilege. While her decision to foreground Brazil's marginalized histories was radical at the time, she could also afford to idealize her heritage and surroundings. At the same time, the simple fact that she was a woman making and exhibiting work in a conservative and sexist culture was exceptional, and a feat in itself."

Ouro Preto legacies empire and ensalvement

A colonial mining town the meandering roadways followed mining and a trade paths, bending to the mountainous landscape. Mining began with the Portuguese occupation of what is now Brazil (at the behest of the Pope who divided the world into two parts). The work was done by enslaved and trafficked Africans, and the city itself was built by that same captured and bonded group of people.

Section

A cut through the body of a building, perpendicular to the horizon line. A section drawing is one that shows a vertical cut transecting, typically along a primary axis, an object or building.

Tarsila - Abaporú

A few years later, in 1928, Tarsila gave this painting to Oswald de Andrade, who a year later will publish his Cannibal Manifesto. The painting is a portrait of an elongated figure, almost elastic, with large feet and tiny head—an indigenous figure—sitting next to a cactus sprouting what Tarsila described as an absurd/ridiculous flower. Andrade selected the title for the painting from a tupi-guarani dictionary: abaporu meaning "man eating." The tupi-guarini was a tribe of Indians in the amazon who were said to practice cannibalism.

Plan

A plan is drawn from a horizontal plane looking down from above. This is as if you sliced through a space horizontally and stood over looking down on it.

Portuguese in Brazil - Architecture Infuence

Although the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 intended to give Spain sovereignty over the Americas, it enabled the Portuguese to claim the easternmost portion of South America in 1500. The Portuguese initially established settlements along the coast of Brazil to enable natural resources such as brazilwood (from which the colony received its name) and sugar to be shipped back to Portugal. In the 1690s, however, gold—and later, diamonds—were discovered in an inland region of Brazil, subsequently named Minas Gerais ("General Mines"). Minas Gerais was unique within Brazil not only because of its remote location, but also because of the legal restrictions imposed upon the area: in order to protect their mining interests, the Portuguese government banned foreigners from the area, and manufacturing and non-essential agriculture were forbidden.

Elevation

An elevation is a view of a building seen from one side, a flat representation of one façade. This is the most common view used to describe the external appearance of a building.

Modernization Through Public Imagery

An exploration of the imagery, spread throughout the entire catalogue, provides an excellent demonstration of a new alliance between beauty, health, tropicality and modernization that the Brazilian elites adopted to represent themselves and their new nation. In most publicity materials for companies and products, white men, women, and children of classic Greco-Roman appearance, wearing white robes and crowns, were arranged against the verdant beauty of the Brazilian tropical landscape or were used to frame the architecture and machinery of modern factories.

Baroque Architecture

Baroque architecture is a highly decorative and theatrical style which appeared in Italy in the early 17th century and gradually spread across Europe. Baroque style was meant to represent the glory of the Roman Catholic Church. Baroque architecture is characterized by dynamic designs and complex architectural plan forms; intended to heighten feelings of motion and sensuality, and frequently based on the oval. There is often a mixture of the repetition, break-up and distortion of Renaissance classical motifs. Common elements include: Grandeur.

CURRAL DEL REY The blank slate that wasn't blank

Belo Horizonte, city, southern Minas Gerais state, southeastern Brazil. It lies on the western slope of the Espinhaço Mountains. The first of Brazil's planned cities, Belo Horizonte occupies a wide plateau encircled by the Curral del Rey Mountains, a hilly ridge forming the "beautiful horizon" for which the city was named. Belo Horizonte lies on the eastern edge of the sertão, or dry interior, of Brazil. The site was chosen in the late 19th century after the city of Ouro Preto, enclosed within a narrow valley 50 miles (80 km) southeast, was abandoned as the state capital because it could not accommodate the necessary expansions. Belo Horizonte was laid out on a grid, modeled after Washington, D.C., in the United States and La Plata in Argentina. The city was inaugurated as the capital of Minas Gerais in 1897 under the name Cidade de Minas, adopting its present name in 1901. Originally designed with an area of 8 square miles (20 square km), Belo Horizonte is now many times that size, having surpassed a target population of 200,000 people by 1925. Belo Horizonte is the hub of the state's large central region, with extensive mining and livestock activity throughout the sertão west of the city and heavy industry in its suburbs. It is the regional commercial centre as well, with vigorous activity in banking, commerce, and administration. The city's older, longer-established industries include publishing, textiles, furniture, and food processing. The steady growth of heavy industry since 1950, however, has made Belo Horizonte one of the largest industrial centres in Brazil. Electrical generating facilities and plants manufacturing and working iron and steel have been established, primarily in the industrial suburb of Contagem, and a large oil refinery and automobile factories have been constructed in nearby Betim. Auto parts and consumer goods industries have multiplied in their wake. Despite the upsurge in industrial activity, Belo Horizonte has remained relatively pollution free, and a considerable number of tourists are attracted by the impressive buildings and the wide tree-lined avenues radiating from the city centre like the spokes of a wheel. The nearby suburb of Pampulha is noted for its bold architecture, exemplified by the Chapel of São Francisco, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and decorated by Cándido Portinari, and by the Mineirão stadium, one of the largest football (soccer) stadiums in the country. Notable sights in the city centre include the Municipal Park, the broad tree-lined Afonso Pena Avenue, and the Liberdade Palácio (Portuguese: "Freedom Palace"), which houses the governor's offices. Belo Horizonte is an important cultural centre, having several museums, including the Palace of the Arts and the Mineiro Museum, as well as a music conservatory, a ballet school, a technical college, and a wide range of secondary and primary schools. The Federal University of Minas Gerais (1927) and the Catholic University of Minas Gerais (1958) are situated in Belo Horizonte. The city has a subway, and major highways and railroads extend from the city in all directions, linking it to communities in the sertão as well as to the main population centres of Brazil's Atlantic coast. A domestic airport in Pampulha serves the Belo Horizonte metropolitan area, and there is an international airport on the outskirts at Confins. Pop. (2010) 2,375,151; metro. area, 5,414,701. Following the modernist tendency to claim a clean blank slate right over the top of existing communities, the planning committee for the new capital of the State of Minas Gerais explored 6 different sites. Of the six, they decided to demolish the city of Curral del Rey with a population of approximately 4000, made up of mostly Black and Indigenous communities. While the State Secretary of Agriculture suggested that in exchange for the new site all former inhabitants of Curral del Rey should be offered a lot to build on within the new capital of Belo Horizonte: the architect Aaraõ Reis had exclusion, rather than inclusion, expressly in mind. According to historian Abílio Barreto, Reis remarked to a priest that "he did not want any of the old inhabitants [of Curral del Rei] within the urban or suburban areas delineated for the new city. Reis did express remorse at one point for the expulsions, writing that the rapid expulsions humiliated the dignity of people whose ties to the land went back centuries. However, the stakes of the project for the positivist engineer seemingly outweighed the indignity visited upon longtime residents.

Brazil Context

Between 1893 and 1897, the Cidade de Minas-renamed Belo Horizonte in 1906--moved from imaginary vision to become an actual built city. The vision came from a group influenced by French Positivist thinkers, who saw humans as something like complex mice in a maze. Improving the conditions of the maze, would, they thought, improve the body, mind and even the genetics of the mice / humans.

Brasilia

Brasilia would be--like America in F. Scott Fitzgerald's description--the "bright green breast of the New World." and shown here, in the clothing of the Portuguese "explorers", Kubitshceck would be the one to colonize it. Pure geometry, made of white concrete... the intent was visible in the material choice: to mold the nation, to mold its people, into clean, modern, hyper-organized and segregated citizens. The city was designed to be viewed from the air. It had very little relationship to the reality of its population. Pure geometry, made of white concrete... the intent was visible in the material choice: to mold the nation, to mold its people, into clean, modern, hyper-organized and segregated citizens. There is no life in the heart of Brasilia. There is geometry. There are highways. There are superquadras. It is the opposite of any other facet of Brazilian life - which is renowned for its public celebrations (think Carnival) for it's lively streets, for people moving and synchronizing nature and culture. Surrounding Brasilia an artificial lake was created to serve as the "green lungs of the city"... it was there to fulfill a hygenic function - of purifying the air from disease, of purifying the city from the un-tamed nature that was the Brazilian countryside. Or so the prejudice of the day would have one think... Brasilia was built for the car. One has to travel long distances to get from the planned residential quarters to the urban, working core of the city.

Eurocentric Origin of Brazilian Antropofagia

But before continuing into the subject of Brazilian Antropofagia, we must take into account the Eurocentric origin of this concept. It seems that before Antropofagia was a culinary custom of the native peoples of America and the Caribbean, cannibalism was, fundamentally speaking, a European invention and obsession. "The first conquerors and missionaries in the New Continent covered up the stories of their own atrocities against the cities and the peoples of America with stories about the cannibalistic ferocity of the [so called] savages there." Cannibalism was a very important element in the representation of the discovery of the New World throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century as we can observe in the engravings and documents made by different European travelers and artists during that time like this painting of a Tarairiu Indian woman. This way of portraying the human figure is almost exactly like the portrayal of nature in the image. Eckhout's painting reflects a "colonizing mode of mapping the native." In Brazil, even though Brazil's First Peoples were already present in colonial literature and painting, and their visibility reached its greatest heights in the 19th century romanticism, the cannibalistic reading of the 1920's provided it with a revolutionary, messianic and utopian function.

Tarsila do Amaral

But it was the brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral, the main inspiration that oriented the poet and philosopher Oswald de Andrade and a heterogeneous group of writers and philosophers to create the artistic and intellectual movement that they called Movimiento Antropofagico. Tarsila: born in 1886 into a rural family of coffee plantation owners. she had studied art first in Sao Paulo and then in Paris with Fernand Leger - which is amazing for a farmer's daughter at that time.

Demise of Brasilia

But the people themselves have fought back against the heavy-handed planning of the Brasilian elite. Clarissa Tossin has mapped out the ways that residents in Brasilia have carved well-worn foot paths, making their own pedestrian highways that function according to the citizens' will and design. It's a beautiful project that shows how the people leverage what they have, knowingly or not, to resist and make space for themselves were there was only space for cars, airplanes and ideals before...

La Plata - Architecture

Designed by architect and engineer, Pedro Benoit, the original plan for La Plata included an orthogonal grid of 36 blocks, cut through by diagonals that marked key institutions. It melded the classical grid of the Spanish-American city with a progressivist model. La Plata was praised and named the city of Jules Verne (sci-fi) at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1889. It's likely that Belo Horizonte's planner, Reis, had seen and visited it. While La Plata was built on the flat Argentine plains (pampas), the geography of Belo Horizonte is that of a mountainous mining town. Adjusting to sharp rises and drops in elevation, Reis' plan had to sacrifice symmetry to meet the terrain. Thus Avenida Alfonso Peña, the widest of the diagonal, monumental streets, is cited not in the center of the plan, but in a stretch that moves in a straight line from the highest to lowest points, created more diversification in streetscapes than Benoit's relatively flat plain.

Vargas Election

Drawing a through-line from the 1930 election of Vargas who ran on the promise of finally building Brazil's centralized capital to Kubitshceck, from Brazil's first industrializing hay-day to prosperity to come....

La Plata, Argentina Social hygiene, eugenics + the city

Founded in 1882, La Plata became the capital of the state of Buenos Aires, due to disputes over port taxation in the city of Buenos Aires itself. Designed by architect and engineer, Pedro Benoit, the original plan for La Plata included an orthogonal grid of 36 blocks, cut through by diagonals that marked key institutions. It melded the classical grid of the Spanish-American city with a progressivist model.

Connection within Brazil

Here the country would be united. All roads would (quite literally be built to) lead not to the old capitals or centers of São Paulo or Rio, but to a new modern city. The center from which Brazil's resource rich interior could be mined, tilled and managed for the sake of modern development.

Expedição Roncador Xingu

Here we have a photographic work, titled Expedição Roncador Xingu, taken by the Brazilian photographer José Medeiros, in which we can observe a yawalapti Indian holding the propeller of a plane. The first image is practically an unknown drawing that, being done in 1921 (seven years earlier than the Antropophagous manifesto) should be recognized at least as an antecedent of the anthropophagous movement The second image, seems to synthesizes the duality nature/culture, forest/machine, or Levi-Strauss's raw/cooked concept. Regarding Levi-Strauss's RAW/COOKED (from the NY Times): "Raw" and "cooked" are shorthand terms meant to differentiate what is found in nature from what is a product of human culture. That dichotomy, Lévi-Strauss believed, exists in all human societies. Part of what makes us human, however, is our need to reconcile those opposites, to find a balance between raw and cooked. But where is the dividing line between nature, which we believe is emotional and instinctive, and culture, which is based on rules and conventions? In a metaphoric sense, a cook is a kind of mediator between those realms, transforming an object originally from the natural world into an item fit for human consumption. So by "cooked," Lévi-Strauss means anything that is socialized from its natural state. Yes, the definition of what is considered edible varies from one society or religious group to another. But all have binary structures that separate the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the rotten, the moist and the dry or burned. I selected these two images to illustrate how the Brazilian Antropofagia opened up a completely different political and artistic perspective from the dialectic of the European Avant-Garde.

Blue and White Porcelain, Ming Dynasty (1386-1644 CE)

History of Chinese Ceramics Chinese ceramics has a long history. The production of deluxe porcelain ware started during the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) onwards. The Tang dynasty ceramic has two most innovative characters viz. fine white earthenware covered with a lead glaze of glowing yellow and green tints and the other was thin, delicate bowls and vases with clear, bluish or greenish glazed porcelain. Buddhism continued to be a major influence during this period. Sulaiman (851 AD), the Arab merchant has mentioned about the manufacturing of Chinese porcelain in China (Shen 1996). During the Tang dynasty ceramic were exported to India, Southeast Asia and the Muslim Empires. Blue and white porcelain came into light during the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368 AD) but this ceramic reached its highest water mark during the Ming (1368-1644 AD) and Qing dynasties (1644-1911 AD).The quality of the Ming blue and whites is indisputably superior to those of other periods and the production was enormous (Lion-Goldschmidt 1978). The most popular decorative motifs of the Ming dynasty were dragon and phoenix. The decoration on the blue and white and polychrome wares included plants such as peony, prunus, chrysanthemum, pine, lotus, birds and butterflies, dragons, deer, and other animals. Discussion and Conclusions One of the contributions of China was the invention of porcelain. Initially Chinese pottery is fired at limited temperature. Over a period of time the clay fired at high temperatures between 1250 and 1400 degrees until it hardens into an entirely new substance which is popularly known as ceramic. Firing ceramics at high temperature enhances their durability and impermeability and changes their surface colour. Since ancient times earthen vessels were used in ships to carry consignment to distant countries, however slowly the shape, size and design of ceramics changed. Al-Biruni (973-1050 AD),also detailed how the Chinese potters took care in the preparation and maturing of the clay (Lane1950). China was engaged in ceramic trade in the world more than 2000 years ago. The designs and motifs on Chinese pottery communicate some denotation related to Chinese culture, history or folklore. Chinese pottery of different dynasties has been identified on the basis of painting, texture, design, even the kilns. Chinese ceramics started coming to India from 8th-9th century onwards, but tangible evidences indicate that maritime contact between India and China continued from the Ming dynasty(1368-1644 AD) onwards. The first blue and white porcelain was imported to India by the rulers of Bijapur, then the Nawab of Arcot. The Ming porcelains were an indelible highwater mark in the history of world art. "Study of Chinese porcelain sherds of Old Goa, India: Indicators of trade contacts" Sila Tripati, 2011, Man and Environment.

European Avant-Garde

If the European Avant-Garde started from the elimination of the past, and tendentiously endorse the substitution of the individual artistic experience for the artificial logic of the machine or the elevation of aesthetic representation to a real spectacle, the Antropofagia, addressed the historical roots of destroyed civilizations of America, strove to achieve a reconstruction of cultural memories, the recreation, based on their symbols and knowledge, of a non aggressive relationship between nature and civilization, a pleasurable restoration of sacred nakedness and the rejection of a magnificently adorned civilizing oppression.

Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos (Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black Community) Architect: José Pereira dos Santos, (Aleijadinho) 1764-1793

Igreja Nossa Senhora do Rosario dos Homens Pretos is an important historic and religious site. The church was built in colonial style in the 17th century, sometime between 1662 and 1667, by the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men, which was a brotherhood of black slaves. The church is Baroque, with just a single tower, but nevertheless the church is a very beautiful one, with three altars, images of Our Lady of the Rosary and other black saints. The main altar is engraved in gold. It is a great example of the architecture of 17th century Recife. The church is located 90 m to the east from the intersection of Avenida Dantas Barreto and Rua Estreita do Rosário.

Blue and Whitle tile painting style from Macau, China

Igreja de São Francisco/ Church of St. Francis Salvador de Bahia, Brazil UNESCO World Heritage Site

Portraits of Tarsilla

In 1923, during her stay in Paris, Tarsila painted two portraits that captured the duality of her own condition. It was not by chance that Tarsila was characterized by a critic in 1925: as the "Little country girl dressed by [French fashion designers]." both naive & sophisticated Brazilian & cosmopolitan On "Red Coat", Tarsila depicts herself as a sophisticated Paris urban girl wearing an elegant red coat designed by the Parisian fashion designer Paul Poiret, and on "Caipirinha," even though it was not considered a self- portrait, the representation of a country girl, carrying a pitchfork in a landscape with a house and a tree, is a clear expression of her attachment to her rural brazilian roots as a rural girl. In 1923, during her stay in Paris, Tarsila painted two portraits that captured the duality of her own condition. It was not by chance that Tarsila was characterized by a critic in 1925: as the "Little country girl dressed by [French fashion designers]." both naive & sophisticated Brazilian & cosmopolitan In "Red Coat", Tarsila depicts herself as a sophisticated Paris urban girl wearing an elegant red coat designed by the Parisian fashion designer Paul Poiret, and on "Caipirinha," even though it was not considered a self- portrait, the representation of a country girl, carrying a pitchfork in a landscape with a house and a tree, is a clear expression of her attachment to her rural brazilian roots as a rural girl. As we can see, it is precisely in "Caipirinha" or "Little Hick/Or Little Peasant Girl" that Tarsila used the language of her Cubist studies in Paris.

Tarsilla Brazilian Paris

In 1924 when Tarsila returned from Paris, she started painting scenes of Brazilian folk culture: fairs, fruit markets, shanty-towns... an Eiffel tower in the middle of a tropical landscape celebrates the possibility of two worlds: the Parisian and the Brazilian. And do not forget that the carnival is the rite of passage into, temporarily being the other. the work emphasizes the folkloric charm of the hill with no hint of the squalid conditions of its inhabitants - everyone is allowed to do whatever, everyone can dress like someone they are not...

374 CE, Bishop Sardinha was eaten by the people of northeast Brazil. . .

In 1928, 5 years after the Semana de Arte Moderno: the Anthropophagic Manifesto, inspired by this painting by Tarsila, was published in the short-lived artistic journal Revista da antropofagia according to his creator Oswald de Andrade, the inauguration date of the anthropophagous era was the year 374, when Bishop Sardinha was eaten by the Indians in the north east of Brazil. For polemical purposes, the town of the manifesto's signing was recorded as Piratininga (São Paulo's Tupi Indian name), and the date given as 374, the number of years passed since the ritual consumption of the first European—bishop Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha—on the north-east coast of Brazil in 1556. Cannibalism for Andrade implied the absorption of the enemy in order to appropriate his best qualities as a metaphor for Brazilians' ability to appropriate European culture and transform it into something original. It was inspired by A 16th century European text purporting to document cannibalism practices of Tupinamba peoples[9] A ritual interchange w/ the enemy: eating captured warriors, who talk with pride and self-satisfaction about having previously eaten captors' kinsmen. As a mean of securing power of enemy for oneself

Lucio Costa, Plano Piloto, 1957

In 1957, the government of Juscileno Kubitshceck, then President of Brazil, hosted an international call for for proposals for the design of a new city, a new capital, placed in the open space of Brazil's vast countryside. With experience designing master plans for cities across the Americas, Lucio Costa won with this Pilot Plan. A bird, an airplane, a shield... the Pilot Plan, or Plan Piloto, is most rigorously an X-marks-the-spot, a mark made on the surface of the nation... A declaration of colonization on a new, modern scale. Here you see urban planner Lucio Costa planting the flag, recreating the timeless symbolism of conquest and colonization.

New capital Proposal

In 1957, the government of Juscileno Kubitshceck, then President of Brazil, hosted an international call for for proposals for the design of a new city, a new capital, placed in the open space of Brazil's vast countryside. With experience designing master plans for cities across the Americas, Lucio Costa won with this Pilot Plan. What do you see when you look at the plans/sketches on the left?

2018 Protest Against the aggressive Development of unseeded Indigenous Lands

In 2018, Protesting the election of Jair Bolsonaro, protesting the devastation of the lands of Brazil's first peoples for the sake of developing the so called "natural resources" of the Amazon, groups of citizens, First Nations, filled the central core of the Plan Piloto. People on foot were met with barricades, and mounted military... As they made public their cry for a return of their lands, and a protected status for themselves and their territories.

Anthropophagy

In Andrade words: "We were never catechized... we never let the concept of logic invade our midst.....We were never catechized. Instead we invented the Carnival. ...We already had communism. We already had surrealist language. ...Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. In order to transform him into totem. [...]" "Only anthropophagy unites us.... The world's only law." Andrade's manifesto was a call to discover Brazilian hybrid forms at the cellular level—"cannibalism" as an indigenous communion. But we need to emphasize that this symbolic move was made by an elite group of artists; actual Tupi natives or African-descendants were not making this art or manifesto. Andrade's proposal would preoccupy Brazilian culture for decades. Certainly they haunted the Sao Paolo Biennials, staging a dialectic between local needs and globalization that continues to be productive today.

Race in Tarsila's Work

In its current exhibition, MoMA does not fully acknowledge the problem of race in Tarsila's work. The museum points out that a 21st-century American audience might find this painting challenging to reckon with, but, as some critics have already argued, the exhibition downplays the politics and power dynamics at play in Tarsila's art. In the catalogue, for instance, the curators, Luis Pérez-Oramas and Stephanie D'Alessandro, can seem evasive, alluding briefly to "our possible reaction" and how "some may find [the painting] disturbing," rather than stating point-blank that Tarsila, like many of her social class, was kind of racist. (Even Tarsila would later acknowledge the work as a "very controversial picture" and only chose to exhibit it twice in her lifetime.) We must, as with so much art, see Tarsila's through the lens of privilege. While her decision to foreground Brazil's marginalized histories was radical at the time, she could also afford to idealize her heritage and surroundings. At the same time, the simple fact that she was a woman making and exhibiting work in a conservative and sexist culture was exceptional, and a feat in itself.

Belo Horizonte Social hygiene, eugenics + the city

Instead, the new capital of Minas Gerais (called the city of Minas, meaning capital of Minas) was designed to segregate the population from the very start. The dense urban core with an orthogonal plan and overlaid diagonal, monumental streets, would be expensive and zoned so tightly the inhabitants of Curral del Rey would never be allowed to live there. Influenced by French Positivists, and as you read, by the French eugenicists, Aaraõ Reis' 1893plan sought to conceptualize the city as a rational entity that emerged form the needs for hygiene and traffic management... and racial segregation. The systematic application of science to human affairs - Auguste Comte Promoted by mid-19th century Brazilians of privilege seeing a progressive template for social order and development Gained favor when the Catholic Church, monarchy and slavery were all seen as obstructing Brazilian social and material progress

Avante Garde Maifestos

It emphasized the dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life in general. The name Futurism reflects Marinetti's emphasis on discarding what he conceived to be the static and irrelevant art of the past and celebrating change, originality, and innovation in culture and society. Marinetti's manifesto glorified the new technology of the automobile and the beauty of its speed, power, and movement - which they saw at the International Exhibition. He exalted violence and conflict and called for the all-embracing repudiation of traditional cultural, social, and political values and the destruction of such cultural institutions as museums and libraries. The manifesto's rhetoric was passionately bombastic; its tone was aggressive and inflammatory and was purposely intended to inspire public anger, to arouse controversy, and to attract widespread attention. It contrasted to the sentimentalism of previous Romantic period. the extreme violence of this manifesto could help explaining why Fascism had the opportunity of successfully using its typical nationalistic style and look.

Antropofago

It is a drawing, titled Antropofago, made by the practically unknown painter from Pernambuco, (a state in the northeast coast of Brazil) Vicente do Rego Monteiro in 1921. This horizontal image shows a sculptural human figure placidly chewing on a human femur while lying back in paradisiacal leisure, a paradise that seems was lost after the arrival of the first Portuguese in Brazil.

Cannibal manifesto and its origins

It was published in the first edition of the famous Revista Antropofagia published in the Diario de Sao Paulo the first of May in 1928. The most important source of inspirations were: Marx and his Communist Manifesto and the social revolution that it caused. Freud and Breton for the recovery of the primitive element in civilized man Michel de Montaigne and Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the revision of the concept barbarian and primitive de Andrade, in this manifesto, separates himself from aesthetic concerns. The aesthetic object is displaced by the social subject. The dilemma national/cosmopolitan is inverted by the transformation of the so-called good savage into the so-called bad savage, devourer of the European, shifting the traditional relationship colonizer/colonized.

Brazil Race + The Modern Nation

It was the year of the celebration of the Centennial anniversary of Brazilian independence; the year in which this painting --by Georgina de Albuquerque-- was shown at the centennial international exhibition, together with other works commissioned by the federal government to represent the moments that lead up to independence. This painting, titled "First Session of the Council of State," was the most important of these nostalgic-memorial paintings. In this large canvas Princess Leopoldina, wife to Prince Pedro, was depicted discussing with Jose Bonifacio de Andrade (the Patriarch of Brazilian Independence) how best to advise Prince Pedro on the question of independence from Portugal. The painting documents the quiet, interior moments leading up to Pedro's cry of Independence. It is a nostalgic, quasi-Impressionist painting, stripped of any avant-garde charge Independence, here, is represented as a highly domesticated act based on reason rather than passion - totally different than the Mexican Revolution and it's tumult and rupture. even the Brazilians make fun of themselves for gaining independence over tea and caipirinha's It reinforces the idea of gradual transition towards greater civilization. The memory of independence turned on evolution rather than rupture.

Manifesto Pau-Brazil (1924)

Manifesto Pau-Brazil (1924). The same year that Andre Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto Oswald de Andrade published the Manifesto Pau-Brazil or Brazilhood Manifesto. First I should say that the term Pau-Brasil refers to the name of a red wood that represents the first material for exportation from Brazil in the Sixteenth Century, the first source of wealth for the country which later became the country's very name. In other words, the Pau-Brasil manifesto was a poetry manifesto named precisely for the first product Brazil exported to Europe in colonial times and from which the country took its name: Brazil. In his book manifesto, Oswald de Andrade referred to Brazilian poetry as "poetry for export" like the Brazilian-wood in a reversal of the common notion that Brazil imported its culture from Europe. The cover represents the Brazilian flag, but the book's title pau brasil substitutes for the flag's positivist logo "ordem and progreso"—the mark of a rational philosophy imported from Europe in the nineteenth century. Pau-Brasil as a term emphasized the authentic and the native while at the same time the possibility of a double heritage: the jungle and the school. Oswald de Andrade's aim was a cultural revision of Brazil through the primacy of the primitive element Assuming a poetic form with short and powerful phrases, the Pau-Brazil Manifesto brought with it the seeds of the Anthropofagic Manifesto, which were: To assimilate the qualities of the foreign enemy and to blend them with national ones. And in this act of devouring, there is not (Rousseau's) good savage, idealized by the brazilian romanticism of previous nativist art and literature, but the bad savage - able to eat the white man... there is not a submission, a catequesis, but a transculturation, the cannibal was a polemist (from the Greek polemos that means fight, combat.) but also an anthologist since the cannibal only devoured the enemies that he or she considered brave in order to take the proteins and reinforce his own natural forces. Being in Paris, Oswald de Andrade observed that what the European cubists searched in Africa and the Polynesia as aesthetic and exotic support for modern art was part of everyday life in the tropics: the First Peoples and African descendents

Belo Horizonte - Architecture

Neo-classical and eclectic Greek-Revival buildings sat alone, emptiness in the surrounding blocks. Other factors that lead to the slow growth of the new capital were the same economic difficulties that plagued the original capital, Ouro Preto. While social hygienists and eugenicists blamed the skin tones of Brazil's majority populations, the sharp downfall of mining, followed by a global fall in coffee prices hit the nation's economy hard, but the state of Minas Gerais even harder. By the 1920s, Belo Horizonte was finally connected to the rest of the nation by modern roadways, and throughout the 1920s Belo was one of the best railway-connected cities in the country. While modern architecture arrived only in the 1940s, Reis' modern plan set the stage for the nation's modernization and for the country's most famous city: Brasilia.

Marcel Gautherot, Sacalândia, c. 1958 Source: Acervo do Instituto Moreia Salles, Rio de Janerio

On the other side of this self-sufficiency and resistance, however, life the people of Sacolandia - litteraly Land of Sacks - who fell outside the cities master plan. There was no allowance for the poor, for those low-wage workers required by capitalism for the difficult jobs of cleaning, cooking and childcare for the elite.

Surrealism + Political Protest

One of the most original and interesting movements formulated in Latin America, the Anthropophagous Movement was on the one hand, an attempt to solve the tensions and contradictions of striving to shake off its patriarchal and colonizing roots, and, on the other hand, an adaptation to the revolutionary artistic and cultural manifestations of the historic European Avant-Garde movements. "Rather than assuaging their hunger, the act of devouring people had the ritualistic value of taking on the attributes of the 'other' a tribal ceremony whose purpose is to surpass the limitations of the 'ego' by assimilating and assuming the qualities of one's enemy."

Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho (15 December 1907 - 5 December 2012), known as Oscar Niemeyer (Brazilian Portuguese: [ˈoskaʁ ni.eˈmajeʁ]), was a Brazilian architect considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city that became Brazil's capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. His exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete was highly influential in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Both lauded and criticized for being a "sculptor of monuments", Niemeyer was hailed as a great artist and one of the greatest architects of his generation by his supporters. He said his architecture was strongly influenced by Le Corbusier, but in an interview, assured that this "didn't prevent [his] architecture from going in a different direction". Niemeyer was most famous for his use of abstract forms and curves and wrote in his memoirs: I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman. Curves make up the entire Universe, the curved Universe of Einstein. Niemeyer was educated at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and after graduating, he worked at his father's typography house and as a draftsman for local architectural firms. In the 1930s, he interned with Lúcio Costa, with the pair collaborating on the design for the Palácio Gustavo Capanema in Rio de Janeiro. Niemeyer's first major project was a series of buildings for Pampulha, a planned suburb north of Belo Horizonte. His work, especially on the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, received critical acclaim and drew international attention. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Niemeyer became one of Brazil's most prolific architects, working both domestically and overseas. This included the design of the Edifício Copan (a large residential building in São Paulo) and a collaboration with Le Corbusier (and others) on the United Nations Headquarters, which yielded invitations to teach at Yale University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1956, Niemeyer was invited by Brazil's new president, Juscelino Kubitschek, to design the civic buildings for Brazil's new capital, which was to be built in the centre of the country, far from any existing cities. His designs for the National Congress of Brazil, the Cathedral of Brasília, the Palácio da Alvorada, the Palácio do Planalto, and the Supreme Federal Court, all designed by 1960, were experimental and linked by common design elements. This work led to his appointment as inaugural head of architecture at the University of Brasília, as well as honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects. Due to his largely left-wing ideology, and involvement with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), Niemeyer left the country after the 1964 military coup and opened an office in Paris. He returned to Brazil in 1985, and was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988. A socialist and atheist from an early age, Niemeyer had spent time in both Cuba and the Soviet Union during his exile, and on his return served as the PCB's president from 1992 to 1996. Niemeyer continued working at the end of the 20th and early 21st century, notably designing the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (1996) and the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (2002). Over a career of 78 years he designed approximately 600 projects.[5] Niemeyer died in Rio de Janeiro on 5 December 2012 at the age of 104.

Revista De Antropofagia

Pau-Brasil: which was creation of both Oswald de Andrade & Tarsila reaction against what they saw in Paris after the war, in particular European fascination w/ "exotic Other" of Latin American cultures

Belo Horizonte - Race and Class

Racist and classist zoning laws in Belo Horizonte meant that for the first couple of decades, the new city was bizarrely uninhabited. Reis created the orthogonal blocks for the city's most privileged / most white, while the suburbs were created for workers as he relegated farmers and other subsistence communities to the hinterlands of the plan. In 1907, the first Brazilian Ambassador to the United States, Joaquim Nabuco, visited the city. While driving down Avenida Afonso Pena, the city's heart and main thoroughfare, the statesman blatantly asked, "and when do we get to the city?"

Casa do Baile (Ballroom) Architect: Oscar Niemeyer, 1943

The "Casa do Baile" (Ballroom) was originally created in 1943 on an artificial island as an event space, with a restaurant and a ballroom. Affected by the nearby casino closure that had given the Ensemble an air of excitement, the Ballroom shut down in 1948 and was repurposed several times until it became the Reference Center for Architecture, Urbanism, and Design in 2002. Modeled after a boat was ready for entry into the water, the Tennis Yacht Club (originally known as the Golf Yacht Club) was built in 1942, and noticeably lacks the curvaceous features of the other buildings. The raison d'être behind its construction was to serve as a place of family fun and recreation, in addition to being the location for themed parties.

Igreja São Francisco de Assisi (Church of Saint Francis of Assisi) Architect: Oscar Niemeyer, 1943

The chapel is considered the masterpiece of Niemeyer's Modern Ensemble at Pampulha. In this project, Niemeyer experimented with reinforced concrete, abandoning the architecture of slabs on columns and creating a parabolic concrete vault—a form until then only used in hangars. The concrete vault serves as both the structure and the enclosure, eliminating the need for masonry. With this project, Niemeyer started what would become the guiding principle of his later works: an architecture dominated by the plasticity of reinforced concrete in bold, unconventional, striking forms. The interior features the Stations of the Cross, made up of 14 panels by Candido Portinari, considered one of his most characteristic works. Alfredo Ceschiatti carved the bronze bas-reliefs of the baptistery. On the exterior, the figurative art panels are by Portinari and the abstract ones are by Paulo Werneck. The exterior walls are covered in pastel ceramic tiles in shades of light blue and white, forming abstract designs. The distinctive landscape of the church is the work of Roberto Burle Marx, a longtime Niemeyer collaborator.[1] The little church of Pampulha is one of the most well-known "postcard scenes" of Belo Horizonte.

São Franciso de Assis Saint Francis of AssisArchitect: José Pereira dos Santos, aka O AleijadinhoOuro Preto, Brazil

The church of São Francisco is located in the heart of this gold mining region, in the bustling commercial center of Ouro Preto. The town was originally named Vila Rica de Ouro Preto, meaning "Rich Town of Black Gold" (so named because the gold deposits contained iron ore, making them appear dark in color). Although it is traditionally considered geographically and culturally isolated, many goods, including artists' materials and tools, were transported across the hilly landscape to Ouro Preto, and the local wealth attracted artists and architects from Portugal. Brazil's gold mining region is famed for church architecture that was unique within the Portuguese empire, and the church of São Francisco is a prime example of this. The Portuguese and Brazilian artists and architects who worked on the church of São Francisco were well-versed in contemporary artistic trends from Europe. Whereas other churches in Brazil at the time tended to reflect the rectangular plans and restrained exterior ornamentation of contemporary churches in Portugal, the dynamic architecture of the church of São Francisco is reminiscent of Italian and central European, rather than Portuguese, church design. For example, the projecting central portion of the façade and broken pediment recall the church of San Domenico in Noto, Sicily. Large domes or cupolas Elaborate motifs and decorations: alive and complex Gilded sculpture on the interior and exterior: extravagance Attention-grabbing features: emphasizing dynamismPilast

Brazlian Baroque Colonial-Era Ouro Preto + Salvador de Bahia 16th - 18th Century

The city the mining-elite wanted to replace is the colonial-era mining town of Ouro Preto - which translates in English to Black Gold.

Morro de Castelo

The demolition of the Morro de Castelo was not a new idea but it was not possible until the early 1920s, when hygiene—usually understood either as an individual moral attribute or associated with the physical condition of space—became social hygiene, and [Click] hydraulic technologies reached a more innovative level of development.

Pavilhao de Festas, Rio de Janerio, Brazil, 1922

The paintings commissioned by the state and on display at the Centennial exhibition were in harmony with the official neo-colonial pavilions built for the exhibition. The architectural language of the exhibition endorsed by the republican oligarchy reinforced the image of a gradualist, domesticated approach to national development. The state embraced an architectural language that drew deeply upon the Luso-Brazilian colonial past. But this story was a little bit more complicated: Conceived as the modern and successful face of a country that, nearing the end of its First Republic (1889-1930), still faced serious political and economic crises, the 1922 Centennial Commemoration Exhibition was literally placed over the void left by the erased main urban nucleus of the city and its thousands of displaced "undesirable" inhabitants.

Tarsila's Homage to Brazilian Modernity

This painting was Tarsila's homage to Brazilian modernity and to Swiss-French poet Blaise Cendrars, who along-side Apollinaire had founded cubist poetry in 1913. After being invited to Brazil in 1924, by the cultural maecenas Paulo Prado, and amazed at the newly extended vibrant metropolis of Sao Paolo (whose modern buildings and cosmopolitan culture reflected the wealth of the coffee-producing elite), Cendrars wrote a number of poems about the city, celebrating its scope and achievements, including the railway system and the train station that had been built as a replica of Paddington Station in London. At the turn of the century, train stations and trains were always symbols of modernity, vehicles of modernization and representations always present in modern art.

Connection with Belo Horizonte to Washington

Washington D.C. was established in 1790 when an act of Congress authorized a federal district along the Potomac River, a location offering an easy route to the western frontier (via the Potomac and Ohio River valleys) and conveniently situated between the northern and southern states. President Washington chose an area of land measuring 100 square miles where the Eastern Branch (today's Anacostia River) met the Potomac just north of Mount Vernon, his Virginia home. The site already contained the lively port towns of Alexandria and Georgetown, but the new nation needed a federal center with space dedicated to government buildings. Washington asked L'Enfant, by then an established architect, to survey the area and recommend locations for buildings and streets. The Frenchman arrived in Georgetown on a rainy night in March 1791 and immediately got to work. "He had this rolling landscape at the confluence of two great rivers," said Judy Scott Feldman, chairwoman of the National Coalition to Save Our Mall. "He essentially had a clean slate on which to design the city." Inspired by the topography, L'Enfant went beyond a simple survey and envisioned a city where important buildings would occupy strategic places based on changes in elevation and the contours of waterways. While Thomas Jefferson had already sketched out a small and simple federal town, L'Enfant reported back to the president with a much more ambitious plan. For many, the thought of a metropolis rising out of a rural area seemed impractical for a fledgling nation, but L'Enfant won over an important ally. "Everything he said, a lot of people would have found it crazy back then, but Washington didn't," says L'Enfant biographer Scott Berg.

Pilaster

a (mostly) non-structural column-like ornament