Michael Asbury
Two accounts on art in Brazil from the 50s to the 60s
10 March 2006
Source: Henry Moore Institute Online Papers and Proceedings
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Michael Asbury
Two accounts on art in Brazil from the 50s to the 60s
From the avant-garde to the favela
An interesting process of intellectual repositioning took place in Brazil between the late 1950s and the
early 1960s. The abandonment of many convictions that had been so fervently defended during the
1950s can be attributed, on the one hand, to a local political shift, the backlash to which would
ultimately lead to the military coup in 1964. On the other hand, within the field of art, a radical re-
evaluation of artistic practice, particularly within the constructivist-oriented groups, saw a questioning
of the autonomous nature of the work of art brought by various strategies that served to expand our
understanding of art's raison d'étre. I would also suggest that the shift, or 'radical leap' as Guy Brett
put it, goes beyond those artists that have become paradigmatic figures for contemporary Brazilian
art, namely, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. It includes figures such as Lygia Pape, Waldemar
Cordeiro and, most controversially, Ferreira Gullar.
Gullar had been the spokesman for the neoconcrete movement, publishing the group's manifesto in
1959, when he announced the dissidence from the concrete group in São Paulo, as well as publishing
other essays in the pages of the Jornal do Brasil, such as the 'Theory of the Non-Object'. However, by
1961 Gullar had disconnected himself from the neoconcrete movement, integrating the Popular
Centres for Culture in 1962 and being appointed their president the following year. These centres
were associated with the student union movement and their principle aim was to disseminate
knowledge of leftwing political ideology to the marginal sectors of society. This occurred
predominantly through theatre, music and poetry. Following his abandonment of the neoconcrete
group, Gullar re-positioned himself, seeing avant-garde practice as essentially elitist in nature and
becoming one of its most vocal critics. However, by negating the post-neoconcrete achievements of
artists such as Hélio Oiticica, which he claimed had gone beyond the field of fine art practice and
entered into the domain of culture, Gullar inadvertently confirmed the anti-art position proclaimed by
Oiticicia himself. Despite maintaining a deep respect for Gullar, Oiticica's project with regard to the
wider audience of art was nevertheless distinct from the CPC. During the early 1960s, Oiticica
proposed that transcendental experience could be achieved through colour, in other words not through
an overtly intellectual posture but by propositions that ignored social structures in society.
Although pertaining to local prerogatives, this transformation of the constructivist legacy was not
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solely specific to the Brazilian context as I will argue in second part of this paper. Already at their
inception, as Dawn Ades and recent exhibitions have brought to light, there was a proximity of
apparently antagonistic movements such as Constructivism and Dada: figures such as van Doesburg
and Sophie Tauber Arp come to mind in this sense. It could be argued that it was this thin line
between rationality and chaos, between aesthetic and expressive autonomy and positions of anti-
establishment rebellion that were brought to the surface at that particularly unstable socio-political
moment which was the early 1960s in Brazil.
In my catalogue essay for Henry Moore Institute’s exhibition Espaço Aberto/ Espaço Fechado:
Sites for Sculpture in Modern Brazil (2006), I focused on the sculpture prizes at the first Bienal de
São Paulo of 1951. This emphasis was in order to question the assumption that artists belonging to
the concrete art movements - the Ruptura group in São Paulo and Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro -
had been endorsed by the local art establishment. The advent of awards for sculpture being allocated
to both Max Bill (Fig 1) and Victor Brecheret (Fig 2) suggests instead that there was an interest in
international movements in art, yet it also emphasises the strong presence at a local level of an artistic
establishment based around the achievements of Brazilian Modernismo of the 1920s and 30s.
Moreover, while the concrete art movement of the 1950s would generally react against the legacy of
Modernismo, contrary to the general assumption, architecture was nevertheless far more complicit
with that tradition, having as a common source the purist aesthetic of Ozenfant and Jeanneret (Le
Corbusier). Max Bill’s denunciations of Niemeyer’s architecture in the early 1950s reveal the
distinctions that preoccupied the concurrent projects of concrete art and modern architecture in Brazil.
While concrete art saw its role as actively influencing the design of a new society, the purist aesthetic
adopted by Modernismo and modern Brazilian architects was essentially based upon symbolic
representation. In effect, the architecture as well as the art of Modernismo represented the ideal of a
modern nation rather than being a reflection of its modernisation. This transpired in architecture
through the references to the vernacular and the highly expressive use of elements that in their
monumentality could be assumed to be sculptural in character.
The concretist artists and architects such as Niemeyer although working within the context of national
developmentalism, the hegemonic ideology of the period, were quite distinct in terms of their relation
to the issue of national identity. As Guilherme Wisnick, in a recent essay, noted, while Sigfried
Gideon suggested that this architecture ‘went beyond mere utility and demonstrated characteristics of
a new monumentality’, for Nicholas Pevsner Niemeyer was essentially anti-rational. Reyner Banham,
on the other hand, saw the new architecture as part of the modern movement; whether ‘functional or
not’ it represented the first example of a ‘national style within the modern movement’.
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The national character within architecture further emphasises its distance from the concretist artists.
As Wisnick argues, despite the fact that Banham was in effect reiterating Philip Goodwin’s
affirmation, in MoMa’s exhibition catalogue for Brazil Builds, 1943, the national character of
Brazilian architecture had already been elaborated during the 1930s by Lucio Costa himself. It was
indeed this discourse that re-emerged in defence of Niemeyer following the accusations by Max Bill
in 1953. Costa had raised the association with Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagite Manifesto of
1928, as a means of proposing an architecture that both appropriated the European aesthetic and
created a ‘‘pre-civilised’ past tradition to counteract the affectations of bourgeois academicism’. In
this sense, Brasília therefore possesses more affinity with Brecheret than with Max Bill.
Indeed, Brasília could be associated with the gaze of Brazilian modernists of the 1920s, who
‘discovered’ the vastness of their own country when accompanying Blaise Cendrars into the interior
states of Brazil. Recalling the novels of Guimarães Rosa, Wisnick states:
     Brasília emerges as an unnamed city in the two tales that begin and end the book Primeiras
     Estórias (first stories) [by GR], published in 1962. In both stories - where a boy is taken by
     his uncle to visit the construction site of a new city, with its artificial lake, engineers and
     machines - modernity’s eruption is accompanied by a continuous feeling of death. Since
     this nameless Brasília is not exactly a city, but rather the spectre of the modern yet to be
     accomplished, it represents a principle that, in spite of everything, was already present
     within the Sertão [wilderness], and which it does not contradict. For that constructive and
     destructive power that takes possession of space, that is blind towards the vegetation that it
     wipes out, is still the Sertão, other and yet the same, its fold.
Wisnik then elaborates how the Sertão is replicated even within the space of modernity:
     Yet despite its vocation to the modern, Brazil did not achieve modernity as such - this is its
     fundamental dilemma. The ultra-modern capital failed to civilise the ‘other’ Brazil, where
     archaic residues survived and redeveloped to such an extent that at certain moments they
     ceased to be residues and revealed themselves actually to be primordial conditions. Such
     was the case, for example, with the brutality and violence that the workers building Brasília
     were subjected to on site: the violence of the lawless Sertão was renewed rather than
     subdued by the modern city. Moreover, the spatial segregation that resulted from the
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     appearance of satellite cities around the Master Plan replicates the spatial structures
     characteristic of the social hierarchy of the traditional large estates and the power structures
     imposed by the political barons.
The inauguration of the new capital, together with the general political instability of the following
years, brought the realisation of the unavoidable presence of the ‘other’ Brazil. The spectre of this
‘other’ had indeed always been present in the shadows of the developmentalist project. With this
acknowledgement, it became increasingly apparent to many artists that the constructivist avant-
gardes could no longer ethically sustain an autonomous laboratory approach to aesthetic
experimentation. While it also became evident that developments that aimed at engaging with a
wider public, such as the Popular Centres for Culture, placed art at the service of political ideology,
and thus compromised the conceptual and intellectual complexity (not to mention quality) of creative
production. It was only following this moment of crisis, and indeed after the military coup of 1964,
when organisations such as the Popular Centres for Culture were outlawed, that a renewed interest in
Oswald de Andrade re-emerged. The firm convictions of the constructivist role within society gave
way to an ambivalent attitude in which an openness to outside influence was combined with
concerns and engagement with the other national reality, that of the marginalized sectors of society.
The experience of constructivism was not necessarily rejected, but was juxtaposed within a nexus of
cultural sources.
This took place not only amongst the 1950s generation, but throughout a broad section of cultural
producers emerging in the 1960s: we can think here of artists as diverse as Cildo Meireles, Antonio
Manuel, Ana Maria Maiolino, Antonio Dias and Arthur Barrio. The nativist themes of Brecheret, or
more precisely, Oswald de Andrade’s cannibalist metaphor, were combined with an awareness of the
geometrical rigor of Max Bill and the acknowledgement of the expressive possibilities of geometry as
outlined by neoconcretism.
The transition from the optimistic 1950s to the radical 1960s thus produced an interesting paradox. If
modern architecture associated itself, through the notion of Anthropophagy, with the representation of
the Brazilian character and constructivist-oriented artists rejected such views embracing a more
internationalist perspective, the demise of the utopian dream of a modern nation associated with the
construction of Brasília, brought a renewed interest in Oswaldian ideas amongst sectors of the artistic
community. However, no longer was the figure of the threatening savage the metaphoric currency. It
was the criminal, the delinquent, the urban threat that emerged as cultural hero during the 1960s.
Brazil’s other, had become a city dweller.
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Retracing the internationalism of post war constructivism
Guy Brett has suggested that the 1956 exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in
London, although belonging to a different historical moment, could offer an interesting comparison in
terms of its ‘vision of a ‘future’’ with Oiticica’s environmental proposition at the same gallery in
1969. In fact, it is interesting to view such disparate events as cultural products related through a set
of common concerns and influences, which affected diverse groups of artists around the world
following the Second World War.
In an article from 1960 entitled ‘A Significação de Lygia Clark’ (‘The Significance of Lygia Clark’),
the art critic Mário Pedrosa commented on what he perceived as the decadence sculpture was
experiencing at that moment. From the early modernists, he remarked, great sculpture had arisen from
developments quite distinct from the domain of painting. The decadence was therefore, in his opinion,
a symptom of sculpture’s return to a position of submission to painting. It is interesting that one of the
first examples of such decadence given by Pedrosa was the ‘post-Henry Moore group’ in England,
whose work he had previously seen as very promising. However, as the work of Eduardo Paolozzi,
one of its younger members, demonstrated, the group had, according to Pedrosa, reached a point of
exhaustion.
Pedrosa disassociated Clark’s work from what he saw as the ‘decadence’ of international sculpture.
Positing Clark in opposition to such a condition of dependency, he claimed that her work stemmed
from a personal and profound process of discovery. It is somewhat ironic that hers was a process that
began with painting. Nevertheless, it was the breaking away from the picture frame that had allowed
the work to ‘move’ towards the viewer, to invite his/her participation. Pedrosa associated such a
development with statements made by Gabo and Pevsner where they affirmed their ‘conviction that
only spatial constructions would touch the heart of the future human masses.’
Although not in total agreement, Pedrosa was certainly aware of Ferreira Gullar’s arguments
expressed in the neoconcrete essay ‘Theory of the Non-Object’ of 1959 central to which (as Donald
Judd would observe in ‘Specific Objects’ six years later) was the increasing difficulty in
distinguishing categories such as painting and sculpture. How the critic contextualised such an
ambivalence underwent a shift between 1960 - when he made his historical reference to Pevsner and
Gabo’s spatial constructions in relation to Clark’s work - and 1966 when he evoked the
‘transcendence of the pictorial plane into the social space’ in order to define Hélio Oiticica’s work as
postmodern. Pedrosa’s assertiveness with regard to the emancipation of Brazilian art is thus a
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product of this shift.
In other words, Oiticica’s encounters with Brazilian popular culture through his experiences of samba
at the Mangueira shantytown provide a social context for the formal innovations Pedrosa had
previously observed in the work of Lygia Clark. Oiticica’s achievement, the underlying subject of
Pedrosa’s 1966 essay, was to create a syncretic relationship between the high ideals of constructivist
formalism and the popular extravagance of carnival, through the possibility of a common experience
of colour. Central to Pedrosa’s distinct critique of Clark’s work in 1960 and later of Oiticica’s work in
1966, was the appearance of Pop Art.
The Brazilian concrete artists’ interests in mathematics, information theory, graphic design and
science in general, are surprisingly close to those of the Independent Group (IG) in Britain, also active
during the 1950s. The IG was a loose association of artists, critics, architects and historians that
converged during that decade around the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), and are usually
associated with the emergence of Pop Art in Britain.
Beyond the preoccupation with form and a mathematical basis for composition, concrete art possessed
an innate openness to new scientific processes and fantasies, communication theories and their
consequences or applications (mass advertising or publicity methods and language). It is perhaps not
coincidental that many of the artists and poets involved in concrete aesthetics in Brazil became
variously engaged in publicity and advertising. In this context one could consider Décio Pignatari’s
1987 statement: ‘Today I see concrete poetry as a form of pop art’.
The work of Waldemar Cordeiro, spokesman for the concrete artists in São Paulo, who produced
some of the most powerful exchanges with Gullar during the 1950s, is demonstrative of the trajectory
between concrete art and pop. Arriving during the 1960s at what he described as Pop-creto,
Cordeiro’s shift is a significant indication that the ‘radical leap’ that Brazilian artists took between the
1950s and the 60s was not an isolated event, restricted to the particular genius of figures such as Clark
and Oiticica. In both examples - Brazil and Britain - the constructivist tradition, and in particular the
precepts of concrete art, seem to have been central to the shift towards popular and mass culture.
Pedrosa himself suggested that the new cycle brought by postmodernism (the replacement of the
purely artistic by the wider concept of culture) was arrived at thanks to the concretist and
neoconcretist production, leading to the conclusion that Brazilians were no longer merely followers
but precursors. For Pedrosa, it was art’s involvement with the wider world that indicated its
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postmodern condition. This referred to a transferral from the constructivist preoccupation with form
as an autonomous artistic activity, to the abandonment of form - or indeed the object - and the
adoption of a cultural engagement with the events in mass media, music, in short, culture at large.
The emergence of Pop Art in Britain is intrinsically associated with the exhibition This is Tomorrow
at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. The exhibition was concerned with the idea of a synthesis of the
arts and comprised of a number of distinct ‘spaces’ devised by groups of artists, architects and in
some cases art critics. Many of these spaces would in fact be described today as installations.
Although the Pop emphasis is usually placed upon Group 2 (Voelcker-Hamilton-McHale) with its
installation that drew upon mass media imagery, the exhibition as a whole was demonstrative not of a
common aesthetic or theory, but of the diverse elements and influences expressed by the groups and
their individual members.
Although eleven years apart, Oiticica’s installation Tropicália for the exhibition Nova Objetividade
Brasileira (Brasilian New Objectivity), at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio, 1967, and the installation
Patio and Pavilion by This is Tomorrow Group 6, Smithson-Henderson-Paolozzi, are to varying
degrees concerned with the precariousness of human existence. The former is an expression of the
reality of underdevelopment, the latter of the spectre brought by the cold war: that of imminent
annihilation. The Cold War angst expressed in Group 6’s Patio and Pavilion, whereby civilisation
was under the threat of modernity itself, marked a shift from the notion of modernity embraced by the
Festival of Britain. In this sense, it is possible to compare it to Tropicália, which recalled the
condition of underdevelopment in the aftermath of the developmentalist era, responsible for the
creation of Brasília. In both cases, there was the presentation of a number of re-evaluations of the
relationships between art, architecture and society at large. The respective exhibitions also marked the
collision of art historical tendencies consensually seen to be irreconcilable such as Dada,
Constructivism, Pop, and Art Brut.
The initial concept for This is Tomorrow had been conceived by Groupe Espace. Their proposal
having been rejected was later re-evaluated and re-submitted by Theo Crosby and a group of
individuals some of which were associated with the Independent Group. The fact that the project,
albeit in a re-evaluated form, went ahead is indicative of a certain proximity of interest. This is
confirmed by Banham’s emphasis on the issue of the synthesis of the arts and Alloway’s review of
John McHale’s exhibition in André Bloc’s Journal Aujourd’hui: Arts et Architecture. Bloc had been a
central figure in the formation of the Groupe Espace that arose out of a crisis within the Salon des
Réalités Nouvelles. The crisis was not dissimilar to the two tendencies contained within
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Neoconcretism, defined by Ronaldo Brito as an aesthetic laboratory of form and a radical questioning
of art’s raison d’etre. The antagonism within the salon was described by Felix Del Marle in
correspondence to Jean Gorin:
    You see, there are two tendencies that without being hostile to each other, they are
    nevertheless, in spirit as in manifestations, totally different [...]. On the one hand, the object
    tendency, a tendency of manifestations that I would call ‘gratuitous’ coming from Calder,
    Moholy, etc. And then there is ‘ours’, the architectural tendency, rational, with all the
    important and fatal and happy consequences on the social plane par excellence. So sooner
    or later we will quit the objects for an architectural section.
The similarity of these points with Oiticica’s tenets for a new art in the catalogue essay of the Nova
Objetividade exhibition are perhaps not so coincidental. Oiticica had defined Brazilian New
Objectivity as a tendency that aimed at (1) a synthesis of the arts; (2) the abandonment of easel
painting; (3) the integration of colour within space. Such intersections of seemingly distinct
tendencies were also present within the scope of interests of the IG. Lawrence Alloway wrote for
instance on Victor Pasmore and the establishment of the ideals of concrete art in Britain.
The date of Alloway’s publication on British abstraction is pertinent since it occurred in the midst of
IG activity, 1954. Alloway had therefore published, two years prior to This is Tomorrow, an important
survey on abstract art in Britain entitled Nine Abstract Artists: Their Work and Theory. He stated that
after the Second World War, those artists who had originally pioneered abstraction in Britain had
‘either become romantics or, like Nicholson and Hepworth, at least tired of their thirtyish purity’. The
revitalisation of geometric abstraction during the 1950s was interpreted by Alloway as a consequence
of the influence of Max Bill’s concepts of concrete art on Pasmore and his group.
One could assume that Alloway’s position on abstraction and concrete art as issues of central
importance would change substantially during the following years, particularly with the increasing
interest in popular culture among IG members. However, in 1957, one year after This is Tomorrow,
Hamilton and Pasmore organised a collaborative project entitled An Exhibit, which would contradict
such assumptions. Like Ivan Serpa in Rio de Janeiro, Pasmore acted as a great disseminator of ideas
about abstraction through his teaching and collaborations. Such was the case of An Exhibit, an
environmental exhibition (exhibited twice with some variations) that has a certain resemblance with
Oiticica’s Núcleos installations being composed of ‘floating panels’ arranged throughout the gallery
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space at right angles to each other and placed at different heights. Alloway described An Exhibit as
follows:
     A fuller degree of physical participation than is obtainable with separate works of art
     tempts the constructivist to dream of public monuments. An Exhibit is a way of accepting
     the limited conditions of an exhibition and overcoming them to make a drama of space that
     involves the spectator.
Most astonishing of all was Alloway’s article on McHale, entitled L’Intervention du Spectateur (The
Intervention of the Spectator). The article posits as central to twentieth-century art history and theory
the developments of kinetic sculpture. Alloway described the intervention of the spectator as follows:
     We can say that the artist maintains a long distance control over the constructions because
     he does the initial work, however, after doing so, all effective decisions are taken by the
     spectator. The play of forms, open or closed, free surfaces or shattered, colours apparent or
     hidden, etc., all these are under the responsibility of the spectator.
All these coincidences between the interests of British and Brazilian artists are not only unconnected
but, in the British case, did not even influence subsequent artists and critics. Guy Brett, for instance,
has noted that neither he, nor the group involved with Signals Gallery (responsible for the initial
dissemination in Britain of Brazilian artists such as Sérgio Camargo, Oiticica and Clark), were aware
of the Independent Group’s engagement with the notion of spectator participation. Although Brett had
begun his career as an art critic writing for the Arts Review, a journal that had also received
contributions by Alloway, by the 1960s the IG had not yet been studied in any detail. It was then
referred to primarily by ex-members, who naturally emphasised their previous role within the
development of Pop. Brett has mentioned that he was aware of such exhibitions as Growth and Form,
but it was the continental European exhibitions on abstract art that attracted his attention. Similar to
the case in Brazil, each generation had in this sense to re-invent itself, based upon the impositions of
the dominant culture.
Brett and those involved with Signals Gallery were interested in continental developments such as the
Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) and in particular artists such as François Morellet.
GRAV had been a participant in a series of Biennials organised by Nouvelle Tendance. The latter was
the product of the collaboration between Matko Mestrovic, Bozo Bek, and the Brazilian Almir
Mavignier. Mavignier had taken part in the emergence of abstraction in Rio together with Mário
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                                                                                                                      10
Pedrosa, Ivan Serpa and Abraham Palatnik.
To raise the similarities of two obviously separate responses to the socio-cultural transitions between
the 1950s and 60s, serves the purpose of emphasising that Brazilian ‘Constructivism’ was not a
provincial example of artists responding to long-gone events in Europe, but on the contrary, that they
were independently engaged in issues which were at the core of avant-garde movements around the
world. One could conclude therefore that the emergence of North American Pop Art, overshadowed
the fact that the British and Brazilian versions of Pop Art shared a constructivist inheritance. By
attempting to claim precedence over the dominant North American model, the Independent Group
essentially undermined the complexity and richness of their production during the 1950s. The
opposite occurred in Brazil were historical analysis has valued the constructivist inheritance often at
the expense of the diversity of movements that followed.
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