Modern art in Brazil has a kind of official birth date. It was in February 1922 that the Municipal Theatre in São Paulo staged Modern Art Week. This staging of events in various fields was the result of joint efforts by intellectuals, poets and artists patronized and sponsored by the so-called Coffee Barons, the great merchants whose fortunes derived from the cultivation and/or export of coffee.
A participant and major supporter of Modern Art Week (as of all the progressive intellectual movements of the ensuing decades) was the poet and critic Mário de Andrade, who in 1942 referred to it as an “essentially destructive” movement. But it was not really this. Certainly it also had its iconoclastic side, but it built far more than it destroyed.
Internet: <http://www.mre.gov.br> (with adaptations).
