Dialectical Anthropology 28: 125–145, 2004.

125

2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Avant-Garde in Brazil

MICHAEL KORFMANN and MARCELO NOGUEIRA

UFRGS – Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul/Instituto de Letras, Porto Alegre
91540-000, RS, Brazil

Abstract. The focus of this article is on the relationship between European avant-gardes
and Brazilian art works in the 1920s and 1950s/1960s. It understands movements such
as modernism, anthropophagism or concrete poetry marked by a tension between the
fascination for new artistic procedures provided by impulses from cubism, surrealism or
the concept of ‘‘melody of timbres’’ by Anton Webern and the question of a post-
colonial modern aesthetic. Brazilian art of these periods are also investigated for
interrelation between painting, music, architecture, literary forms and filmic structured
perspectives.

Introduction

A comparative analysis of the avant-garde movements in Europe and

Brazil seems to encounter, at first glance, basic parallels: as a counter-
part of the European avant-garde movements between 1910 and 1930
one might consider Brazilian modernism, in particular ‘‘The Week of
Modern Art’’ in São Paulo (February 1922) as well as, some years later,
the Anthropophagy movement. Certain European neo-avant-garde
tendencies could be compared to Brazilian concrete poetry of the 1950s
and 1960s by authors like Haroldo and Augusto de Campos as well as
Decio Pignatari, at which we will take a closer look later on in this
article. In regard to literature and painting of the 1920s, it is therefore of
no surprise that art critics like Ronaldo Brito1 or Jorge Schwartz2 try to
understand these works in the international context and conceive them
as avant-garde.3 Both European and Brazilian art of that time share at
least certain formal similarities such as the manifesto-character,
ephemeral magazines, confrontations between artists and the public as
well as allegedly provoking appearances like that of the composer Vila-
Lobos, who conducted his works in sandals in the São Paulo event
mentioned above, although his act was, opposed to popular belief, due
to an inflamed foot and not meant to be a subversive attack on cultural
institutions or procedures.
126 MICHAEL KORFMANN AND MARCELO NOGUEIRA

The visit of Marinetti to Brazil in 1929 seems to round off the picture

of an international avant-garde exchange, as is pointed out by Alfons
Knauth.
That, which unites the European and the Latin American avant-garde
the most, is the element of the simultaneity and the aesthetic principle
of the simultanism. The simultaneous-modernistic avant-garde is the
first literary movement which emerged world wide, […] the first
realization of the universal literature postulated by Goethe, the direct
dialog between literatures of the world.4
Quite different is the perspective of the Brazilian author and critic
Ferreira Gullar. In his study Avant-garde and Underdevelopment5 as well
as in later publications, he withdraws from the universal embrace
emphasizing regional and national specifics. ‘‘The concept of avant-
garde has no universal validity. What is regarded in New York or Paris
as avant-garde does not automatically mean the same thing in Rio de
Janeiro or Recife.’’6 The author, a major figure of concrete poetry in the
1950s, later turns into one of the sharpest critics of experimental art-
works, that, in his opinion, show a exaggerated self-referentiality and
only continue
the historically absolutely justifiable experiments of the avant-garde
as empty academic practice. The more radical tendencies of contem-
porary art resulted in the destruction of the artistic languages.
Because of a lack of courage, there is no critic of this process, in which
the radical proposals of the avant-garde came to an exhaustive point,
a point that has nothing more to do with the arts. […] I think what art
has to do is to stop speaking about itself and to begin to speak of the
world. We have 40,000 years of art speaking about the world and of
man’s problems in the world. Art should again speak about life.7
In his already mentioned historical study about the relation between
avant-garde and underdevelopment, Gullar starts from the different
political and cultural conditions of Europe and South America and then
tries to determine the value and status of avant-garde art forms in both
regions. In an analysis inspired by Lukács he accuses European avant-
gardists of failing to recognize the ‘‘dialectic between the particular and
the universal.’’8 Based on the literary work of authors like Joyce, Elliot
and Pound he also draws the dubious conclusion,9 that a ‘‘circular
vision of history’’ established itself in Europe about 1900, while South
America looks ‘‘unprosperous but optimistically’’10 into the future,
expecting a form of art, which does not satisfy itself with formalistic and
 AVANT-GARDE IN BRAZIL 127

superficial innovations but ‘‘results of the particular, of the socially and

culturally determined historical fact, which demands the best possible
form of expressing itself.’’11 But even critics with a less ideological
perception see rather contrary tendencies: ‘‘While the European avant-
garde movements tried to dissolve identities and destroy icons of tra-
dition, the Brazilian avant-garde intended to absorb local conditions,
characterize them and turn them into something positive.’’12 These
statements may give an idea of the social and political implications in
which the Brazilian artistic production as well as the theoretical dis-
cussion about function and form of the artistic work is situated.
The fact that Schwitters’ collage – made from discarded materials
and occasional street objects ans one of the icons of avant-garde art-
corresponds to the actual living-conditions of millions of inhabitants in
the favelas has obviously consequences on the artistic activities as well
as on the reception by critics and the public. One should also consider
that the arts have been – and still are, specifically with the rise of post-
colonial studies – a central reference in the process of forming a national
identity after the independence from Portugal in 1822 and the procla-
mation of the republic in 1889. Two particular periods are of great
importance: First is the Brazilian romanticism in the second half of the
19th century as an initial attempt to create a unique Brazilian literature,
which could be identified as such in regard to topical questions as well as
to a national form of the Portuguese language, rejecting the geographic
transfer or takeover of the colonial imaginary and language. The second
important period is marked by the artistic movements linked to ‘‘The
Week of the Modern Art’’ in São Paulo in 1922, exactly 100 years after
the independence from Portugal, which can be seen as a more radical
continuation of romantic efforts to lay the cornerstone for a genuine
modern Brazilian aesthetic, later on to be consolidated and extended by
the Anthropophagy movement.
In spite of aesthetic or stylistic similarities between European avant-
gardists and Brazilian modernists/avant-gardists, such as the principle of
simultanism mentioned by Knauth, it is therefore necessary to remember
the different functional aspect of Brazilian art. Consequently we cannot
suppose a consolidated, modern, differentiated and autonomous art-
system, which in the 1920s radicalizes its potentials and experiments with
forms up to the limit of being recognizable as art. It makes even less sense
to postulate an intended elimination of cultural institutions, which were
far from being solid in a society that had an illiterate rate of almost 70%
at the end of the 19th century and represented a strongly stratificated
social structure. Brazilian art in the 1920s may rather be understood as
128 MICHAEL KORFMANN AND MARCELO NOGUEIRA

emerging out of a tension between the fascination and impulses offered

by the radical, innovating works of the European avant-gardes and the
struggle for a modern Brazilian post-colonial art. Such a concept does
not reduce the partly contradictory tendencies and personal disagree-
ments among modernists or claim a homogenous picture but see Bra-
zilian painting and literature of the 1920s as artistic forms as a result
from impulses given, for instance, by cubistic multiple perspectives or
surrealistic comprehension of the world as a network of interrelations
suspended in time and space. The impossibility to describe ‘‘whole
epochs or movements in cultural history in terms of at single, unified
style, philosophical outlook or intention’’13 also applies to Brazilian art
of the 1920s. Instead of repeating the theoretical reductions proposed,
for example, by the system theory describing the goal of the avant-garde
as being the annulment of the functional differentiation of modern
society and, like Bürger, (replacing his concept of ‘‘bourgeois art’’ by an
autonomous art-system) focus mainly on Dada-like art forms, it seems
more convincing to understand the aesthetic innovations of avant-garde
works in the context of technology, city-development and corresponding
perception-processes as well as a result of the confrontation with new
media such as photography and film. These may be seen as positive
sources of inspiration for methods like collage and montage or as phe-
nomena whose superficial qualities can only be overcome by a distance to
be realized in uncontaminated abstract forms.
Based on these premises, the first part of this paper will examine
possible relations between the historical avant-garde of Europe and the
Brazilian art of the 1920s considering the interaction between painting
and literature as well as – in the course of mechanization – influences
provided the new media like film. In Brazil, movies and cinemas have
exercised a cultural impact since 190514 and film history includes such
outstanding works like Limite (1931), directed and produced by Mário
Peixoto. The second part takes a closer look at the Brazilian neo-avant-
garde, especially the group Noigandres founded in the city of São Paulo
in the early 1950s and mixing elements from the tone-color melodies of
Anton Webern, ideogrammic technique of Pound’s Cantos and impulses
of street advertisements into a very special form of poetry.

The Week of Modern Art

As is well known the Brazilian intellectual and artistic elite in the

beginning of the 20th century came from traditional, wealthy families
 AVANT-GARDE IN BRAZIL 129

who saw studies or travels abroad, especially in Europe, as part of a

quality education. Anita Malfatti, one of the most important painters in
‘‘The Week of Modern Art,’’ had spent 3 years in Berlin at art acade-
mies (1910–1913) and later continued her studies in New York. Inspired
by her visit to the Sonderbund retrospective in Cologne in 1912 Malfatti
started to incorporate elements by ‘‘contemporary artists such as the
Fauves.’’15 Writer Oswald de Andrade reflected in 1912, after a trip to
Europe, on the influences of African and Polynesian art on Picasso and
other European artists and was determined to confront this distortion of
the ‘‘Exotic’’ by his own anthropophagic concept. In 1928 he publishes
his Manifesto Antropófago that proposed the absorption of different
influences incorporating their strengths and resulting in an artistic
mixture, which would correspond to a Brazilian hybrid culture. This
concept, most probably inspired by Francis Picabia, temporary editor of
the French magazine Cannibale and ‘‘who Oswald de Andrade met in
Paris’’16 later on turned into a tool for a new generations of Latin
American art-critics in their efforts to distinguish Latin American
eclecticism from European mainstream theoretical approaches.
In the context of European-Brazilian interaction it is also possible to
cite the example of fellow writer Mário de Andrade who owned a col-
lection of the magazine ‘‘L’Esprit noveau,’’ founded in 1920 by Le
Corbusier and Ozenfant, from which he ‘‘extracted the bases of his
poetic theory’’17, in particular the programmatic reconciliation between
past and present, the irrationality of Dada and the psychological aspect
of surrealism. Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars who called out for a ‘‘Bra-
zilianization’’ of national culture on his visits to the country during the
1920s might be considered another source of inspiration. Although one
can therefore assume that important impulses for the emergence of
Brazilian modernism came from European experiences, either through
traveling or reading, it did not led to a simple takeover or copy of
existing avant-garde forms. Instead, the modernist movement devel-
oped, out of a confrontation with those artistic works and concepts, a
unique program and an artistic language that brought techniques from
cubism, surrealism or Dada into forms, which not only emphasize a
distinct artistic vision but to some extend may also be seen as an
alternative to the self-destructive Europe of World War I.
Since our purpose is to examine interrelations between Brazil and
Europe, it may be interesting to take a closer look at the facts that gave
birth to the legendary ‘‘Semana de Arte Moderna’’ of 1922. According
to contemporary Raul Bopp18, it all started when Darius Millaud,
former French cultural attaché to Brazil, published his impressions of
130 MICHAEL KORFMANN AND MARCELO NOGUEIRA

the country after returning to Paris. The result, ‘‘Souvenirs du Brésil’’

and ‘‘Notes sans musique’’ pleased a circle of Brazilian intellectuals in
Paris as being of a ‘‘primitive freshness.’’19 The widely spread feeling
that Brazilian art at that time was obsolete, backward and dryly aca-
demic and the fact that despite the visible beginnings of the industrial
age – above all in São Paulo – the country itself showed few indications
of a modernity in literature or painting gave a substantial impulse for a
‘‘refreshing’’ of the arts. ‘‘Give life to this graveyard, stir up the schools,
create something new and tear apart these cobwebs,’’20 demands Graça
Aranha, author and diplomat, in a conversation in Paris around 1913.
The first timid attempt for a renewal came with ‘‘The First Exposition of
Modern Art in Brazil, 1917–1918,’’ which took place in December 1917
and in which Anita Malfatti’s painting The yellow man (1915–1916)
caused harsh counter-reactions. In a further try to give the ‘‘esprit no-
veau’’ a wider forum, a group of artists – financially supported by Paulo
Prado, a rich farmer and coffee trader – rented the ‘‘Teatro Municipal’’
in São Paulo. The program of ‘‘The Week of Modern Art’’ contained
the exhibition of 84 artworks, among them 12 paintings of Anita
Malfatti, readings of innovative poems introducing verbal and
ungrammatical use of the Portuguese language as well as proclamations
from different manifestos. Furthermore, concerts were offered, such as
the one previously mentioned by composer Vila-Lobos, who aimed to
extend the classical music tradition by inserting new elements such as
percussion, a pulsating zinc sheet or popular folk-music themes. Inde-
pendent of whether one regards this event as an expression of a new
Zeitgeist or, like Marcia Camargos in her recent publication ‘‘Semana
de 22,’’ as a performance by an ‘‘elitist circle of high class friends,’’ it has
definitely turned into the – controversially discussed – point of depar-
ture for contemporary Brazilian art. For co-initiator Oswald de And-
rade it provided an astonishing experience, a forum against ‘‘bad taste’’
and grammatology – which continued to be attacked in magazines like
‘‘Klaxon’’ (1922–1923) – but produced few dividends in the arts itself.

Anthropophagy

A new attempt to finally consolidate the authentic new Brazilian art

would take place some years later with Anthropophagy movement. The
different tones of European and Brazilian art can quite clearly be shown
by comparing the conceptuality of the term ‘‘man-eater.’’ The ‘‘canni-
bal,’’ historically a colonial metaphor for the legitimization of exercising
 AVANT-GARDE IN BRAZIL 131

power or, in Montaigne, a positive figure within his criticism of western

culture, also entered the inventory of Dada and early surrealism,
explicitly as the title of the Cannibale magazine temporary edited by
Francis Picabia. Hans Richter uses the same term to comment on the
relation between Dada and surrealism. ‘‘Surrealism has eaten Dada and
has digested it. Such cannibalistic methods are not rare in history. And
since surrealism had a good stomach, the qualities of the devoured
entered into the strengthened body of the survivor. Well done!’’21 An-
other known reference is the ‘‘Manifeste cannibale’’ read in darkness, by
André Breton at the great Dada soirée of the The´âtre de l’oeuvre, March
27, 1920. Here is an excerpt:
Money for ever! Long live money! The man who has money is a man
of honour. Honour can be bought and sold like the arse. The arse, the
arse, represents life like potato-chips, and all you who are serious-
minded will smell worse than cow’s shit. Dada alone does not smell: it
is nothing, nothing, nothing. It is like your hopes: nothing … like your
paradise: nothing … like your idols: nothing … like your politicians:
nothing … like your heroes: nothing … like your artists: noth-
ing … like your religions: nothing … Hiss, shout, kick my teeth in,
so what? I shall still tell you that you are half-wits. In three months
my friends and I will be selling you our pictures for a few francs.
In contrast to this aggressive and provocative tone and its intended
shock effect, the Brazilian Anthropophagy, despite initial tendencies for
word games – i.e. using Beste´tica instead of Este´tica – was above all
directed for a cultural synthesis or symbioses of diverse ethnical and
historical elements. Bopp22 gives us a detailed report of its first articu-
lation. The basic idea supposedly came to life during a restaurant dinner
in 1927 including painter Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade and a
group of friends. The discussion of the menu – frog or a veil – led to an
imaginary theory of frog evolution given by Oswald who quoted a fic-
tional scientist in order to prove that the human being descended from
frogs, whereupon Tarsila do Amaral summarized: If we consume frogs,
we are therefore almost cannibals. Other associations followed, like the
legendary history of Hans Staden, a German soldier who served as a
gunnery instructor in a coastal Portuguese fort before being captured by
Tupinamba warriors in 1552, a tribe described later by Staden as can-
nibal. Oswald then formulated the famous phrase ‘‘Tupy or not to tupy,
that’s the question.’’ A few days later, a work in progress by Tarsila do
Amaral was named after this idea: Abaporu or Anthropophogist in in-
dian tupi-guarani language. This painting turned out to be her most
132 MICHAEL KORFMANN AND MARCELO NOGUEIRA

famous work and in 1995 was sold for 1.5 million dollars at a New York
auction. The following programmatic text, also written by Amaral,
offers a basic outline of her anthropophagic conception.
We will descend into our obscure and dark Prehistory. To bring out
some of that immense atavistic source. Search the totemic annals.
Qatar race roots, with a psychoanalytic mind. From these reencount-
ers with our things, in a creative climate, we can reach to a new
structure of ideas. Solidary with the origins. To construct a Brazil in
our own likeness, of deep linkages. […] We will gather a generation.
To make a new ‘‘Social Contract.’’ The youth are disenchanted,
wasting time with cultural snobberies. It dried the soul in the
Cartesianism. Why Rome? We have mystery at home. The pregnant
earth. Voices accompany us from the distance.23
Consequently Macunaı´ma (1928), a novel by Mário de Andrade, ‘‘de-
vours’’ all kinds of texts and literary styles, quite close to the concept of
Frederic Jameson in regard to post-modernism to which he refers ‘‘as an
arbitrary cannibalization of all traditional literary styles.’’24 In the case
of Andrade, the irreverent literary incorporation includes elements of
the Amazon-myths, partially inspired – but without claiming scientific
ethnological accurateness - by the report From the Roroima to the
Orinoco (1924) of German researcher Koch-Grüneberg as well as ‘‘the
Cartesian order of space and time.’’25 The ‘‘hero without character’’, so
the subtitle of the novel, obviously reminds us of Musil’s conception in
Mann ohne Eigenschaften where he intended to compose a ‘‘human
being of quotations.’’26 While Musil spins a complex text tissue through
essayistic-intellectual references and reflections without a main gravi-
tational center, the characterless quality of Macunaima – only driven by
the wish to play with women and recover the stone Muiraquitâ given to
him by mother nature Ci – represents the main keynote. Andrade, a
musician himself, also referred to his novel as a rhapsody. Logical,
temporal as well as linguistic discontinuity and a stylistic mixture as a
result of ‘‘second hand writing, a discourse constituted from other, pre-
determined discourses’’27 mark his journey through the austere Brazil-
ian Northeast up to São Paulo with its streetcars, neon signs and trucks.
‘‘In the extreme fluctuations of the hero between omnipotence and being
a victim, objects of technology are mystified and demonized in an
arbitrary and absurd way and also, in contrast, human strengths and
qualities are being mechanized.’’28 On the linguistic level the classic
form of Portuguese language is dismantled into a ‘‘Brazilian’’ idiom
with strong Indian and African elements and syntactic liberating moves
 AVANT-GARDE IN BRAZIL 133

away from the official grammar. The novel’s reception shows quite
clearly the ambivalent relationship of the literary critic towards artistic
innovations and the question of national identity: Andrade, initially
praised for his geniality and inspiration, later was harshly criticized
when his ‘‘second hand’’ method was discovered, reinforced by the
ironic remark of the author, that he had copied much more than that
which he had been accused of. With the rising of the Anthropophagism
critics turned to evaluate this as a positive procedure towards a hybrid
and just form of Brazilian culture. Newer analyses tend to withdraw
from the question of national identity and focus instead on the literary
qualities, which ‘‘sabotage the dominant discourse and question its
textual authority.’’29 While Moser points out the proximity to the
montage technique, Süssekind conceives its narrative structure as ‘‘cuts
under the influence of the cinema.’’30 This conception applies even more
to another novel, Serafim Ponte Grande, written by Oswald de Andrade
in 1929 but only published 4 years later. Haroldo de Campos, poet and
critic, called it a ‘‘big no-book.’’ Poems, dialogues, prose, diary entries
or travel impressions mold the textual varieties for eleven – almost
independent – chapters, which light up flashes from the life of the
protagonist, linked by his transgressions of bourgeois lifestyle and from
which he escapes on the ocean-steamer El Durasno, taking him,
according to Campos, into the utopia of the anthropophagic society.
As these examples may have shown, Brazilian art of the 1920s is –
similar to European avant-gardes – also about the dissolution of or-
ganic representation-structures, but in another context and with other
consequences. Avant-gardes in Europe emerge on one hand out of
rejection and in contrast to a materialistic, superficial and objective
representation. This results in an abandoning of concrete forms and an
emphasis on color and movement, an abstract ‘‘moving picture.’’ The
turn away from the concrete in search of an ‘‘inner nature’’ (Kandinsky)
through color and sound and consequently the loss of the mimetic
corresponds to the gain of an inner, higher ‘‘sphere’’ or ‘‘changes the
relation between things in such a manner, that a surrealistic quality is
attributed to them, a quality that does not lie in an immaterial hereafter
but in the middle of the world’’ and thus reveals the ‘‘unsuspected
fullness of our world.’’31 On the other hand, and almost as a counter-
movement, part of the European avant-garde explicitly imports ele-
ments from the industrialized world, its procedures, forms and
perceptions into the artworks. In comparison, Brazilian art of the 1920s
cannot be characterized by a denial of the concrete. It also does not
incorporate in any great scale topics of the industrial age. Rather it
134 MICHAEL KORFMANN AND MARCELO NOGUEIRA

combines artistic avant-garde techniques and concerns with a sus-

pended, hybrid form situated somewhere between present and mystical
prehistory. It is quite understandable that the intended inclusion of
historic, national and ethnic references cannot find its elements in a
universal technology while sources like Indian folklore, popular culture,
landscape textures and oral tradition offer much more promising
sources.

The Cinematic View

Nevertheless the narrative ‘‘cuts’’ in novels like Macunaima or Serafim

Ponte Grande can be seen within a literature conceived or at least
marked by cinematic procedures, a literature which ‘‘dialogues mali-
ciously with the new techniques and perception forms. It does not
mention the movies at every moment but it appropriates and redefines,
through writing, what is of interest.’’32 An explicit reference to cinema,
for instance, is given by Oswald de Andrade in his foreword to Pathe´
baby (1926) by Antônio Alcântara Machado, also editor of the maga-
zine ‘‘Revista de Antropofagia’’ (1928). In a telegram like, chopped and
rushed style the author relates his impressions of an 8-month trip
through Europe. Like the text itself, Oswald de Andrade writes his
preface as a telegram and characterizes the book as ‘‘cinema with a
smell.’’
As in literature and painting, one also finds in Brazilian films the
mergence of a broken-dynamic perspective and the historic-ethnical
aspect of Brazil and its landscape. Director Humberto Mauro, for
example, frequently combined experiments in rhythm, perspective and
light with regional coloration. Probably the most outstanding produc-
tion of Brazilian avant-garde film is Mário Peixoto’s Limite (1931), the
only movie to be finished by the director.
Already in 1896 film-shows are reported and soon the opening of
several cinemas. In 1906 the first Brazilian production hit the market
and one of the early commercially successful movies, a criminal case
called ‘‘The Stranglers,’’ was shown more than 800 times in Rio de
Janeiro alone. Actors hidden behind the screen frequently performed
the film dialogues. By 1920, approximately 400 films had been pro-
duced, partly based on novels, historic events or portraying regional and
local customs. The first film-award was granted in 1927 and 2 years later
silent movies started to be substituted by talkies. In the beginning the
soundtrack was pressed on records and played separately and only in
 AVANT-GARDE IN BRAZIL 135

the 1930s, as result of the forced industrialization by the estado novo,

film became a more solid industry equipped with studios and labora-
tories permitting more complex techniques such as the integration of
sound onto the film. Despite its early popularity, the perception of film
as an aesthetic medium only emerges during the 1920s. One of the
theoretical forums was the periodical ‘‘Cinearte,’’ founded in 1926 but
newspapers also gave cinema considerable attention. Journalist and
poet Guilherme de Almeida wrote a daily column (Cinematographos) in
the ‘‘Estado de São Paulo.’’ In an article published on august 9th 1927,
he inserts
the cinema, the art of scene in movement, in the center of an artistic
aesthetic project that, more in tune with the new changes that the new
industrial society had provoked in the rhythm of daily life of the city
of São Paulo, privileges the speed, the action, the youth and the
puerility, the adventure, the good-humor and the diversion, to sum
up, the ‘‘new’’ in opposition to what is commonly considered ‘‘old,’’
static, slow, and sad.
He therefore enthusiastically celebrates the premiere of ‘‘São Paulo –
Symphony of the Metropolis’’ by Kemeny and Lustig (1929), a film
inspired by the Berlin production, as a ‘‘wonderful advertisement for the
new, industrialized Brazil,’’ while his critic-colleague in Rio de Janeiro
consider it, despite some ‘‘some original images, well photographed and
pleasant to watch,’’ a pitiable copy of the original Ruttmann film. ‘‘As a
documentary it does pay off. As a rhythmic film it is even worse.’’33
Parallel to the consolidation in the public sphere, cinema establishes
itself as a commercially promising industry. Film-corporations like
Cine´dia (1930), Brasil Vita film (1934) and Sonofilmes (1937) arise and
directors start to protrude and be recognized for their individual vision.
Certainly Humberto Mauro has to be considered as one of the most
important and influential directors of that time. Between 1925 and 1974
he made 13 movies as well as more than 300 short films. Due to his very
impressive visual shots he became a major reference for filmmakers of
the cinema novo in the 1960s, especially for Glauber Rocha. ‘‘To Brazil
Mauro means as much as John Ford means to the USA, Jean Renoir to
France or Rossellini to Italy: to each new generation, his work becomes
more current, his films show more evidence, like a matrix for the Bra-
zilian imaginary of the 20th century.1’’34 Essentially more experimental
and radical is Mário Peixoto (1908–1992), whose only film Limite, a
silent movie from 1931 and basically realized as a one-man project,
turned into a monument of Brazilian avant-garde work. Walter Salles
136 MICHAEL KORFMANN AND MARCELO NOGUEIRA

Jr., at the moment maybe the most internationally successful Brazilian

director and producer – also founder of the Arquivo Mário Peixoto in
Rio de Janeiro – considers it the best and most beautiful national film
ever shot. Peixoto also wrote poetry (i.e. Munde´u in 1931) and in 1933
published his only novel, O Inútil de Cada Um. He continued to write
for the rest of his life, working on scripts for film projects that were
never realized, essays on cinema, and fiction, including at greatly ex-
panded version of his 1933 novels in six volumes.
Different projects show the growing interest in both film and direc-
tor/author. In 2002 Sergio Machado launched a documentary called
Onde a Terra Acaba (At the Edge of the Earth), using the title of a film
Peixoto started but due to quarrels with the production never com-
pleted. Saulo Pereira of Mello has recently began to publish research
that will culminate in eight books dedicated to Mário Peixoto including
the celebrated article on Limite supposedly written by Eisenstein but
forged by Peixoto to silence the skeptics, three unpublished essays on
film and the diary he maintained as a student in Europe, during the
twenties, a time that marked his aesthetic formation decisively.
Coming from a wealthy Brazilian family, Peixoto had a Euro-
pean education in the 1920s and was clearly receptive to the modern-
ist, avant-garde artistic movements, particularly influenced by the
legacy of French avant-garde movies as well as German expression-
ist films such as Metropolis by Fritz Lang or Sunrise, Murnau’s
first American movie, along with the examples of Soviet montage.
In 1929, Peixoto was visiting Paris when he was struck by a power-
ful illustration he saw on the cover of a French magazine, a
woman’s face staring at handcuffed hands in the foreground. The
haunting image inspired Peixoto to write a scenario for the projected
film in one night. Back in Brazil, he tried to hire movie directors Ad-
hemar Gonzaga and Humberto Mauro, but since both had other
engagements, he took on the direction himself. The narrative concerns
three shipwrecked people, two women and a man adrift in a small boat
on the open sea. In a series of flashbacks, they reveal to each other their
stories and what they were trying to escape from when they took flight
on the ship while in the end all are engulfed by the ocean. Continually,
Peixoto focuses on huge close-ups of objects and faces, includes wide
shots of landscapes and the sea, and utilizes throughout unusual com-
positions and camera movements. His approach is often abstract and
surrealistic, evident from the second shot in the film recreating the image
on the magazine cover of the staring woman and the man’s handcuffed
hands.
 AVANT-GARDE IN BRAZIL 137

Limite technically broke entirely new ground in thematics as well as

in its elaborate, innovative symbolism and narrative construction. With
the help of cameraman Edgar Brazil, who also worked for Humberto
Mauro, special equipment was built to Peixoto’s requirements for his
dynamic use of camera movement. ‘‘In order for the camera to follow
the actors as they walked without swaying, it was placed on a kind of
litter carried by four porters who synchronized their steps with those of
the players. A wooden crane activated by ropes was also devised, en-
abling the camera to film the action on the ground from a lofty
perch.’’35 The musical score included compositions by Erik Satie,
Claude Debussy, Alexander Borodin, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky,
César Franck, and Sergei Prokofiev. The film first exhibition took place
in 1931 but the film’s premiere showing was coldly received by most
critics, public and distributors alike. It was screened again in Rio in
January 1932, but failed to find a distributor. Limite disappeared from
public view, but word of its qualities spread in experimental film circles.
Only in 1978, after a time consuming frame by frame restoration of the
original copy it returned to receive widespread acclaim and recognition.
Comparably radical aesthetic positions as present in Serafim Ponte
Grande or Limite only returned into Brazilian art scene with the
experimental poetry in the 50s.
Towards a Brazilian Concrete Poetry Movement

With the blind enthusiasm of youth, we believed concrete

poetry would save the world.
Augusto de Campos
The contribution of the Noigandres group to Brazil in the cultural as-
pect and the myths that surrounded them were celebrated in the 50th
anniversary of the foundation of the group which took place in São
Paulo in 2002. Exhibitions, books and an album were released at the
time. In a more accurate analysis it is exactly the year of 1953 that
stands as the starting point for most of the events that converge in the
determination of the movement that was to be delineated a few years
later. It is important to notice that the first manifesto self-entitled
Concrete Poetry, written by Oyvind Fahlström (Manifest for konkret
poesie), was published in Sweden in 1953 – although it was a consid-
erably different approach, not having the characteristics of the concrete
poetry as idealized by the Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer in
Switzerland and the Noigandres group in Brazil. In the very same year
the first book of concrete poetry, entitled Konstellationen, was released
138 MICHAEL KORFMANN AND MARCELO NOGUEIRA

by Gomringer, although it was not called concrete poetry then. In

Brazil, Augusto de Campos wrote poetamenos the ‘‘first systematic
collection of concrete poems,’’ as it was often called by the members of
the movement, in the first semester of the same year.
It is not possible to think of concrete poetry in Brazil without con-
sidering the city of São Paulo, the Noigandres group and more specif-
ically its members Décio Pignatari, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos,
who were the tutors of the movement. It is true that the movement had
many participants such as José Lino Grünewald, José Paulo Paes,
Ronaldo Azeredo, Ferreira Gullar . . . but all of them followed the steps
taken by the three founders of the Noigandres group, joining them at a
time the theoretic base of the movement was already being shaped or
even established.
The 10 years between the first and the last of the five publications
named after the group cover Concretism at its decisive moments: its
elaboration, defense and eventual decline as a movement of neo-avant-
garde and subsequently evolving according to each poet’s own experi-
mental vein.
Few years after the modernist revivifying hullabaloo in the 1920s, a
new generation of poets gradually appeared that was quite different
from their predecessors. Emphatically intimists and of a classicistic
nature, they claimed themselves ‘‘The Generation of 45.’’ New criticism,
Rilke, Eliot and many other English language authors became a refer-
ence to these poets, who made use of the press, conferences and
publications by the Poetry Club to express themselves. The new poets –
identified as ‘the newcomers’ – were welcomed by the Poetry Club which
was responsible for the first publications of several of them. Just before
they left the Club, Décio Pignatari whose first book was entitled O
Carrossel and Haroldo de Campos with Auto do Possesso were a few of
the names published by the Poetry Club in 1950. Augusto de Campos,
who had some of his poems printed in periodicals of the time, was to
have his first book published in 1951 by the Maldoror Editions, an
evident author’s homage to the mysterious French-Uruguayan poe`te
maudit Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont, since the edition
was financed by him and his brother Haroldo (the epigraph to one of
the poems in this book, Canto Primeiro e Último, was also extracted
from Ducasse’s work).
The role architecture played in Brazil, especially in the 1940s and
1950s is very important in order to understand the urban mentality in
the big conglomerates such as Rio de Janeiro and, more specifically for
the purpose of this article, São Paulo. The Brazilian architecture was
 AVANT-GARDE IN BRAZIL 139

characterized by the classicistic eclecticism, as a result both of the

constant trips of the representatives of a wealthy agricultural class –
looking forward to reproducing in a tropical country the buildings they
had seen in Europe36 – and the numerous migratory masses that arrived
in the turn of the 19th-century (specifically in São Paulo, the massive
entry of Italian immigrants is noteworthy); it is only in the 1930s, with
the effort of the then young architect Lúcio Costa and the historical visit
of the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier to Brazil in 1936, that
Brazilian architecture as such will become effectively representative.
The building of the Ministry of Education and Health in 1943, which
was to become a landmark and is considered the beginning of the
transformation in Brazilian architecture, was the result of the visit of Le
Corbusier and his work with a group of Brazilian architects, headed by
Lúcio Costa and including Oscar Niemeyer, who was then making his
debut. The Brazilian architecture caught the attention and inspired
international interest.
Following the building of the Ministry, Niemeyer was to obtain both
national and international recognition as the great revelation of the
Brazilian architecture, developing a very particular language that
emphasizes the plasticity without giving up the rational components in
his compositions. After the success of his creative project for the
Pampulha complex, ordered by Juscelino Kubitschek, who was then the
mayor of the city of Belo Horizonte, in the early 1940s, and a great
number of other projects, in 1955, Niemeyer puts an end to what is
known as his first phase, identifiable by the daring shapes and structural
research. The new phase, more mature and characterized by its sim-
plicity and the use of geometrical forms, leads to the urban architectural
apotheosis of Brası́lia.
With the slogan of ‘‘50 years of progress in 5,’’ Juscelino Kubitschek
was elected president of Brazil and assumed his position in January
1956, determined to construct a city that was to become the new capital
of the country. Niemeyer was in charge of the project and with Lúcio
Costa’s Pilot Plan for the city of Brası́lia (March 16 1957), the whole
country went through a progressive fever, nurtured by the public power.
When speaking specifically of the city of São Paulo it is important to
mention that due to the industrial boom in the 1930s it became the
center of one of the largest migratory movements in the 20th century. In
1920, the city had a population of 580,000 inhabitants and in 1950 the
number increased to 2,198,096, according to intercensal count. In the
mid 1940s, the city went through a real state boom never seen before. In
that scenario, Vilanova Artigas became a prominent architect, creating
140 MICHAEL KORFMANN AND MARCELO NOGUEIRA

a style that was exclusive to the city and that would become more and
more influential in the coming years identified as ‘Brutalismo Paulista’.
As Yves Bruand has written:
In the impasse of the post Second World War years, Artigas cast
aside the (wrightian) ideal of freedom, which was considered
incompatible with the fast development for unindustrialized coun-
tries, trying to find aesthetics based on the present time, revolutionary
technical possibilities and rigid discipline which he found necessary as
guidance to progress for undeveloped regions.37
Artigas was to have a strong influence on the students of the School of
Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, 1955 being
the apex of this tendency.
The poets of the concrete poetry movement found themselves in-
serted in this society and thus tried to restructure language following the
technological advancement they were seeing, with an obsessive search
for a ‘‘structure’’ that would permeate their work. Their most famous
manifesto, the Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry published in March 1958,
in the Noigandres magazine 4th edition, is a reference to the project for
Brası́lia, mentioned earlier. Décio Pignatari announced in 1956 through
an article published on ad – Architecture and Decoration (20th edition)
that the group was starting its ‘‘controversial phase’’ after concluding a
research on the internal ‘‘structure’’ of the poem, that owed much to the
experience of poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Ezra Pound, in
order to determine ‘‘the plans for cleavage in the internal mechanics.’’
According to Pignatari, the ‘‘problem of movement, the dynamic
structure and the qualitative mechanics’’ are the main features of the
Concretism, and he assures the ‘‘urgent need for an intimate approach
with architecture.’’ For him, the ‘‘abolition of the verse brought prob-
lems of space and time (movement), which are common both to visual
arts and architecture, to the concrete poetry.’’ For the movement he was
proposing, ‘‘all of the visual manifestations were of interest.’’ It should
not come as a surprise that these poets found more support in architect-
oriented publications. It is important to notice that the coverage of the
1st exhibit of National Concrete Art, in 1956, was published as a
complement to the ad magazine number 20.
Despite the primarily plastic characteristics of the movement of
concrete poetry, music remained as a constant reference in the research
carried out by the poets. Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen
were considered to follow a similar evolutionary line to the one they
tried to create in poetry with Mallarmé, Pound, Joyce, cummings and
 AVANT-GARDE IN BRAZIL 141

finally themselves, as a consequence of the ‘‘evolution of forms’’ they

praised in their theoretic writings. These composers were constantly
mentioned in their essays and manifestos written in support to the
project and also constant was the contact they kept with international
composers as well as the Brazilian avant-garde composers.
The German musician Hans-Joachim Koellreuter, a São Paulo res-
ident, introduced the dodecaphonic music in Brazil, and in the early
1950s created and directed the Free School of Music, being responsible
for putting the poets in contact with a circle of people who were
interested in the aesthetic trends in contemporary music. Augusto
himself wrote about his first encounter with the then 29 year-old Pierre
Boulez.38 When visiting the Free School for a series of conferences, in
1954, Augusto, Haroldo and Décio had a long conversation of four
hours with the French musician at the apartment of the artist Waldemar
Cordeiro. Bulez who was already recognized as the leader of the French
serialist composers,39 became over the 1950s, together with his former
serial technique professor R. Leibowitz, the main revisers to Webern’s
work. The fact that the French composer was known for his interest in
literature, specially Mallarmé and e.e. cummings, was already a point of
great importance to the group of young poets from São Paulo. It is said
that a few poems from poetamenos were read to the guest.
The poetamenos series, written between January and July of 1953,
was the first effective attempt in the search for the ‘‘structure,’’ which
was to become so important for the movement that it preceded, and
became the turning point in Augusto de Campos’ work as well as for his
colleagues. Six polychromatic poems were written with the three pri-
mary colors (blue, yellow and red) and the three secondary colors (or-
ange, purple and green) alternatively, establishing or breaking words
apart in an irregular pattern, making use of linguistic codes from six
different languages, including Greek, Latin, Italian, German, English
and Portuguese, in a display that had obviously been well planned in
advance.40 This polyphony of colors divides the poem in different cells
which seem to speak for themselves. These poems are primarily visual
and the verbal elements are fragmented and constantly arranged in such
a way as to make it possible for the reader to take different reading
paths (horizontal, vertical and transversal). Sentences, words, syllables
and letters are isolated by irregular spacing among them and the blank
spaces represent the pauses and intervals that characterize Webern’s
work.
In his introductory text to the poetamentos series, Augusto de
Campos evidences the matrices used in his creation, finding in Un Coup
142 MICHAEL KORFMANN AND MARCELO NOGUEIRA

de De´s, by Mallarmé, in some of the proposals by Marinetti and in the

ideographic conception by Ezra Pound, the instruments to achieve the
idea of Klangfarbenmelodie, as Webern conceived it (German term
composed of the words tone/color/melody).
It is important to notice that Mallarmé thought of his ‘‘throw of the
dice’’ as a ‘‘score in which various voices overlap in a polyphony of
words.’’ In his poem, five or six texts permeate each other, spread on the
pages of the open book. Marinetti, on the other hand, in his manifest
written in 1913 ‘‘Destruction of syntax,’’ according to Augusto,41 pro-
poses the use of four or five different colors and twenty different char-
acters in one page, if necessary, and freedom for the line reading
direction (vertical, oblique …) substitution of punctuation marks by
musical and mathematic symbols (which in fact can be seen in his
introduction to the series: [).
About the ideographic logic, which was to give the poets the space
outline for the poems, Augusto was to try to put into practice the
reading the Noigandres group had been doing – from 1949 on they had
been working on Ezra Pound’s writings and in 1953 they would contact
the American poet, which would lead to a great diffusion of his work by
the concrete poets in Brazil. The idea that ‘‘in the process of composi-
tion, two things joined together do not create a third one, but suggest a
fundamental relationship between them’’ was the legacy Ernest Fe-
nollosa had left Pound. That concept brought them back to Mallarmé
and the structure he created, in which ‘‘the whole is more then adding
the parts or something qualitatively different from each component.’’42
In a text on Ezra Pound, written in the mid 1960s, Augusto summarizes
‘‘the great contribution the concrete poets glimpsed in Pound’s work
(…) was the application of the ideographic method, as a consequence of
overcoming the linear discursive logic of the verse.’’43
But the fundamental element of Augusto de Campo’s series, the idea
of Klangfarbenmelodie should be credited to the Austrian composer
Anton von Webern. Created by Arnold Schoenberg in 1911, the
‘‘melody of timbres’’ refers to the fragmentation and distribution of the
same sound block by different tone color instruments (different sono-
rous colors). The sequence in which the different instruments play and
silence subsequently the same note creates a melody through that
movement and the change in tone color. Webern went even further,
making the ‘‘melody of timbres’’ the structural element, expanding the
concept of tone difference to an entire musical phrase, with different
notes, and not only to the schoenbergian block. Webern is responsible
for the Klangfarbenmelodie, defined by Augusto as a melody continu-
 AVANT-GARDE IN BRAZIL 143

ously switching from one instrument to another, constantly changing its

color. That would mean ‘‘the instruments alternatively play fragments
of the melody, which should not sound as fragments but as a continuous
melody.’’44 Augusto de Campos tried to do the same in his series of
poems by using different colors on its letters, suggesting different voices.
In 1952, Nagib Elchmer owned a record store called Stradivarius on
Ipiranga Avenue. In his establishment it was possible to find the latest
records, imported from Europe, specialized books and catalogs, making
anything available. Three member of the Noigandres group bought a
great number of records that year, including the opera Villon by Ezra
Pound, recordings by Schoenberg, Cage, Berg, Varèse and Webern.45
The latter had his work revised on the book Introduction à la Musique
des Douze Sons, by René Leibowitz, who was earlier mentioned, refer-
ring to Pierre Boulez. Leibowitz was responsible for the first recordings
of Webern (two LPs with selected pieces) released in 1950, which Au-
gusto had reportedly bought in 1952.
The first public presentation of the poetamenos series took place
during the V International Vacation Course Pró Arte in Teresópolis,
Rio de Janeiro, in January 1954. In November 1955, three poems were
presented (lygia fingers, eis os amantes e nossos dias com cimento) in the
Arena Theatre, in São Paulo. It featured readings by two and four
people, conducted by Diogo Pacheco and the poems were projected in
color slides. There are also recordings of his poems, such as dias, dias,
dias, by Caetano Veloso, extracted from the book Caixa-Preta, and
readings by the author such as the album Poesia e´ risco, a partnership
with his son, the musician Cid Campos. These recordings are of great
interest although in most of them the readings are done by one person
alone and then rearranged thus contradicting the idea of different tone
colors, which would require different voices.
Despite the original will to create poetry that could reach the masses,
making use of the industrial reproduction, apart from Décio and Har-
oldo’s first publications, their work was self-supported and the editions
were small scaled and out of reach for most of the public in general. The
first edition of poetamenos featured in the second Noigandres magazine, in
February 1955, was of 100 copies, due to the high cost of colorprinting at
that time. On the 20th anniversary of the series in 1973, the self-supported
second edition of 500 copies was released. There was a period of 26 years
in which the poetamenos series was completely inaccessible commercially
for it was only in 1979 that a publishing house brought his work into light
in a book called VIVA-VAIA (which includes most of his production from
144 MICHAEL KORFMANN AND MARCELO NOGUEIRA

1949 to the date it was launched). There have been few editions of VIVA-
VAIA (three until the present time) none over 1500 copies.
The members of the Brazilian Concretism remain very controversial
with passionate followers and fierce detractors. Avant-garde arrived late
in Brazil and for that reason the scream of the concrete poets was heard
much louder than in other countries – the stone-pit of Concretism has
already been dynamited, rocks remain everywhere, but they do not fall
on readers anymore, there is only the echo half a century after the
explosion.

Notes

1. See Ronaldo Britto, Sete Ensaios sobre o Modernismo (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte,
1983).
2. See Jorge Schwartz, Vanguardas Latino-Americanas (São Paulo: Edusp, 1995).
3. Other critics like Lucia Helena in Modernismo Brasileiro e Vanguarda (São Paulo:
Ática, 2000) or Gilberto Mendonça Teles in Vanguarda Europeia e Modernismo
Brasileiro (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2000) insist on two different conceptions and therefore
also maintain the semantic differentiation of Brazilian modernism versus European
avant-garde.
4. Alfons Knauth ‘‘Die lateinamerikanische Avantgarde.’’ Ringvorlesung vom
12.1.2000 an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Available: ProQuest; ADDRESS:
http://www. ruhr-uni-bochum.de/niels.werber/Avantgarden/Knauth/ (May 28,
2002), p. 17.
5. Ferreira Gullar,Vanguarda e Subdesenvolvimento (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização bra-
sileira, 1978).
6. Ferreira Gullar, Indagações de hoje (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1989), p. 17.
7. Ferreira Gullar, ‘‘Da Vanguarda a retanguada?,’’ Journal de Brası´lia, 30 July 1993,
sec. B, p. 2.
8. Ferreira Gullar,Vanguarda e Subdesenvolvimento, p. 66.
9. The shortsightedness of such a simplifying ideological approach is pointed out by
Philadelpho Menezes, A crise do passado (São Paulo: Experimento, 1994).
10. Ferreira Gullar,Vanguarda e Subdesenvolvimento, p. 35.
11. Ibid., p. 75.
12. Annateresa Fabris, ‘‘Modernidade e vanguarda: o caso brasileiro,’’ in: Modernidade
e Modernismo, ed. Annateresa Fabris (São Paulo: Mercado de Letras, 1994), p. 15.
13. Dietrich Scheunemann, European Avant-Garde. New Perspectives (Amsterdam-
Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), p. 9.
14. See Flora Süssekind, Cinematógrafo de Letras (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
1987).
15. Stephanie Dahn Batista, ‘‘Nichts in der Welt ist ohne Farbe.’’ Tópicos, 14 January
2001, p. 28.
16. Carlos Rincón, ‘‘Avantgarden in Lateinamerika,’’ in: Wolfgang Asholt and Walter
Fähnders, Der Blick vom Wolkenkratzer (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000 ), p.
213.
 AVANT-GARDE IN BRAZIL 145

17. Gilberto Mendonça Teles, Vanguarda Europeia e Modernismo Brasileiro (Petrópo-

lis: Vozes, 2000), p. 31.
18. Raul Bopp, Movimentos modernistas no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: São José, 1966).
19. Ibid., p. 15.
20. Raul Bopp, Movimentos modernistas no Brasil, p. 15.
21. Hans Richter, DADA - Kunst und Antikunst ( Köln: DuMont, 1978), p. 201.
22. See Raul Bopp, Movimentos modernistas no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: São José, 1966).
23. Raul Bopp, Movimentos modernistas no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: São José, 1966), p.
97.
24. Frederic Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’’
New Left review, 1/146 (1984), p. 65.
25. Horst Nitschack, ‘‘Macunaı́ma und Serafim Ponte Grande: Literarische Dekom-
position der Wirklichkeit als Subversion ihrer Macht,’’ in: Christoph Strosetzki
Zwischen Ideologisierung und Ausgrenzung (Rheinfelden und Berlin: Schäuble Ver-
lag, 1996), p. 99.
26. Walter Moser, ‘‘Eigenschaftslos, charakterlos: Zitatenmontage und die Frage des
Subjekts,’’ in: Maximilian Barck Herzattacke (Schöberg: Berlin, 1992), p. 120.
27. Ibid., p. 129.
28. Horst Nitschack, ‘‘Macunaı́ma und Serafim Ponte Grande: Literarische Dekom-
position der Wirklichkeit als Subversion ihrer Macht,’’ p. 101.
29. Ibid., p. 108.
30. Flora Süssekind, Cinematógrafo de Letras (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
1987).
31. Peter Bürger, Surrealismus (Darmstadt: Wiss, Buchges, 1982), p. 153.
32. Flora Süssekind, Cinematógrafo de Letras, p. 48.
33. Maria Inez Machado Borges Pinto, ‘‘O cinematógrapho e a ilusão espetacular da
São Paulo moderna.’’ Available: ProQuest; Address: http://www.mnemocine.-
com.br/cinema/historiatextos/mariaines2/ (June 14, 2002), p. 48.
34. Sheila Schvarzmann, ‘‘Humberto Mauro e a constituição da memória do cinema
brasileiro.’’ Available: ProQuest; ADDRESS: (June 15, 2002), p. 3.
35. William M. Drew ‘‘Mário Peixoto (1908–1992).’’ Available: ProQuest; Address:
http://www.gildasattic.com/peixoto.html/(November 9, 2000), p. 3.
36. See Yves Bruand, A arquitetura contemporânea no Brasil (São Paulo: Perspectiva,
1981).
37. Ibid., p. 295.
38. Augusto de Campos, Música de Invenção (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1998).
39. See K. Marie Stolba, The development of western music (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1998), p. 636.
40. João Bandeira, Grupo Noigandres (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify/Centro Universitário
Maria Antonia – USP, 2002), p. 16.
41. Augusto de Campos, Teoria da Poesia Concreta (São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades,
1975), p. 20.
42. Ibid., p. 23.
43. Ibid., p. 23.
44. Augusto de Campos, Música de Invenção, p. 253.
45. Ibid., p. 213.