3

1 Macumbeiros are macumba initiates in the West African religion brought to South

America by slaves (it is related to Caribbean Vodun). The Bantu-based word macumba can

be used in Brazil by nonpractitioners as a pejorative signifying witchcraft. (Translation

by the author) Lygia Fagundes Telles, “I Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna,” A Manhá,

Rio de Janeiro, July 15, 1951, as cited in the crucial history of the Bienal by Francisco

Alambert and Polyana Canhête, As Bienais de São Paulo, da era do Museu à era dos cura-

dores (1951–2001) (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2004), 37.

2 Lygia Clark, “A morte do plano” [The death of the plane], 1960, as translated in

Fundación Juan March, Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America

(1934–1973) (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2011), 444.

Country, now it’s time for art. Enough of being macumbeiros

or aspiring soccer players. Now, we’ll be given class artists!

LYGIA FAGUNDES TELLES ON THE OPENING

OF THE FIR S T B IENAL DE SÃO PAULO, 19511

. . . the plane is dead. . . . We have swallowed the

shards of this shattered rectangle and absorbed it.

LYGIA CL ARK , “THE DE ATH OF THE PL ANE,” 196 0 2

The fi rst biennial to emerge after Venice’s was founded by a “third

world” nation in the early Cold War. New Brazilian institutions proved

the replicability of the Venetian model, opening the fi rst São Paulo

Bienal in 1951 and setting off a cascade of other imitators. Still

anthropophagY in SÃo paulo'S cold war

caroline a. jones

© 2013 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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proliferating today, biennials seek city branding, urban development,

art world tourism, and a global cosmopolitanism that might transcend

banal nationalism and connect with an expanding world.3 Although

art history has viewed biennials in largely negative terms, this essay

argues that the São Paulo Bienal stimulated new aesthetic strategies

that became crucial to what we now think of as “global” contemporary

practice.4 My narrative requires a brief review of two phases of

Brazilians’ unique 20th-century modernity: first, the dialectic between

(indigenous/racialized) signs of Brasilidade and the Euro-American

avant-garde in Brazil before 1930 and, second, the turn against this

“Brazilianness” toward a cool geometric international style promul-

gated by the Bienal in the immediate postwar period.5 After this context

is established, I offer a close reading of artists’ and architects’ rejection

of this pure, technocratic abstraction in favor of antropofagia, a theory

of cultural “cannibalism” brought from an earlier Brazilian Modern-

ismo but transformed into an acutely conceptual and abstract tool.6

Brazil’s Bienal do São Paulo (SPB) presents a special case that con-

founds the standard history of this exhibitionary form as it emerged

from the logic of the 19th-century world’s fairs.7 Where world’s fairs

(and the Venice Biennale in their image) had required artists from the

margins to take up the international artistic language—but to speak

only of difference—the early SPB initially took up contemporary

abstraction in order to eradicate difference.8 The implications of that

3 See, e.g., Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).

4 Global is here meant to refer to the sophisticated intertwined economies connecting the

contemporary art world and its many markets, as distinguished from the category of “world

art”—a positivist dream of art history that would account for all culture from everywhere.

5 A note on my use of indigenous, here yoked to racialized—I mean to use these terms as

neutrally as possible, hoping to avoid the case in which any references to native South

Americans (in this case, Tupi Indians) or Afro-Brazilians collapse both into “national” or

“vernacular” categories. I also mean to avoid triggering indigenism/indigenismo, a pro-

grammatic component of Romantic-Latin American modernism wielding symbolic

tropes of the native in the late 19th/early 20th centuries (needless to say, these were not

the speech acts of actual indigenous people). And finally, indigenous is here distinguished

from indigeneity, which has lately come into use to designate the radical ontological differ-

ence and/or specific sociohistorical experience of native peoples.

6 Antropofagia, Portuguese for the practice of cannibalism (literally “man eating”), refers

to the powerful surrealist agenda announced by poet Oswald de Andrade in 1928 in the

“Anthropophagite Manifesto,” inspired by the paintings of his partner Tarsila do Amaral,

discussed below.

7 See Tony Bennett’s influential article “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4

(Spring 1988).

8 This argument is developed more fully in my Desires for the World Picture: The Global

Work of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

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institutional choice, and the return of an earlier antropofagia to contest

it, is my tale. I do not question existing periodizations or canons of

Brazilian art. What I hope to demonstrate instead are precise and

detailed ways in which the form of specific works of art and architec-

ture enacted transculturation, taking lessons from the ambitious stag-

ings of the Bienal to contest, and to change, the margins of modernity

for our time.9

Unlike its model in Venice, the São Paulo Bienal originated from

a museum, bringing with it a set of clear commitments announced at

the beginning: La Bienal do São Paulo Museu de Arte Moderna. Its

host institutions of modern art—first the São Paulo Galeria (1947),

then the Fundação (Foundation, 1948), and finally the Museu (1949)—

openly emulated their New York namesake, symbolically ratified in the

signing of a charter with MoMA President Nelson Rockefeller. A sug-

gestion of what this all meant for Brazilian artists is revealed by an

enthusiastic letter sent to the cosmopolitan collector tapped to be its

founding director, Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho. The letter

seems to be from the artist Cícero Dias, sent to Matarazzo in the sum-

mer of 1948:

As to my exhibition in Recife, . . . part of it is didactic, showing

the thinking of cubism, of abstract art, of construction in art, with

plastic Brazilian elements—with no romanticism and without pho-

tography of myself, Negroes and mulattos [negros e mulatos]. . . .

What if, in my small show of paintings, I start to announce your

movement of art there in São Paulo. . . . It’s necessary that all of

Brazil has a bit of a plastic revolution [um pouco de revolução

plástico] but with the aim of quality.10

9 The concept of “transculturation” was invented by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz

in 1940 as a specific rejection of the Anglo-American concept of “acculturation,” which

assumes simple assimilation of the dominated other into the hegemonic culture. For a

strong application of Ortiz in Latin American literary studies, see Ángel Rama, Writing

across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America, ed. and trans. David Frye

(1982; Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).

10 Cícero Dias, letter to “Ciccillo” Matarazzo, director, Fundação de Arte Moderna,

Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (henceforth Svevo/SPB

Archives),“Fundação de Arte Moderna, Executive Director, Correspondence Received”

folder. The dating and authorship of this letter are both based on my deduction, rather

than clearly identified on the document. A date of July is visible, and the folder bears an

inscription of 1949, but based on internal evidence, and on a previous letter more obvi-

ously from Cícero Dias to Matarazzo referencing similar matters and clearly dated June

1948, I suggest that this penciled letter is also from Dias and is dated July 1948.

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Eliminating “photography” of any bodies, particularly mixed-race

ones, Dias sets up the core dialectic Brazilian artists navigated and

articulates the necessary movement between its constructed poles:

Euro-derived modernism (the thesis = “thinking of cubism” and

“construction in art”), confronted by signs of indigenous Brasilidade

(antithesis = “plastic Brazilian elements”). It would take a critical

reinvention of antropofagia to bring the two together.

Setting the Scene

The dialectic Dias offers us was there from the start in São Paulo mod-

ernism, sublimation struggling against abjection in a country pulling

itself from colonialism (1822) and slavery (1888) during the last phase

of the industrial age. The sublimatory mode was articulated by diplo-

mat and intellectual José Pereira da Graça Aranha in an inaugural

address, “A Emoção Estética na Arte Moderna” (Aesthetic Emotion in

Modern Art), for the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) in

São Paulo on February 13, 1922. (The Semana would recur annually,

Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho signing the charter of the Museu

de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in the presence of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller

at the New York Museum of Modern Art, 1949. Photo by Leo Trachtenberg.

Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

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with great success, setting the terms for the recurring future SPB.)

Graça Aranha, well versed in Parisian modernism, followed with

an Apollinairean call for a “new spirit” (O Espírito Moderno) at the

Brazilian Academy in Rio on June 19, 1924—arguing for a subliming

of the spirits of the various races into the singular “soul” of an elevated

Brazilian culture.

The more abject mode came in a twofold blast from poet Oswald

de Andrade (born José Oswald de Sousa Andrade): a “Brazilwood

Manifesto,” published in a Rio newspaper on March 18, 1924, followed

by his “Anthropophagite Manifesto” in the short-lived artistic journal

Revista da Antropofagia (Review of Cannibalism) published in 1928. 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 elapsed since the ritual consumption of the

first European—bishop Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha—on the

Brazilian coast in 1556. Where Graça Aranha called for transcendence

of the local, de Andrade demanded an art built from it. While Graça

Aranha’s first speech was staged as an internationalist alternative to

the national celebrations of Brazil’s noisy centennial, de Andrade’s

rebuttal sought to dive below the rhetoric of nation to discover hybrid

forms at the cellular level—“cannibalism” as an indigenous commu-

nion or pagan transmutation of body and blood. We should emphasize

that this symbolic move was made by an elite; actual Tupi natives or

African-descended people were not making this art. Nonetheless,

Graça Aranha’s and de Andrade’s alternatives would preoccupy

Brazilian culture for decades. Certainly they haunted the Bienal, stag-

ing a dialectic between local needs and the “will to globality” that con-

tinues to be productive today, and not only for cultures in the putatively

global South.11

The two poles of early-20th-century Brazilian modernism that I

have brutally summarized here as “sublimatory” and “abject” were

both engaged with the European avant-garde (Graça Aranha and de

Andrade had come of age aesthetically in Paris, with Cubism and

Surrealism, respectively). And both were steeped in the plantation

culture of the agregado (“dependent”), characteristic of the São Paulo

11 For the “will to globality,” see Okwui Enwezor, Documenta XI (2002), 47. The global

“South” is a strategic essentialism utilized effectively in postcolonial theory, but it is

manifestly in flux, never more so than in the burgeoning economy of Brazil, first of the

“BRIC” cluster of rapidly developing formerly third world economies.

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region in particular, as Roberto Schwarz has explored.12 What changed

in the update of all this during the Cold War was Brazil’s rejection of

the need for “synthesis.” As the SPB made manifest, Brazil could sim-

ply be modern, with a coolly geometric and nonobjective art whose clos-

est correlative was “International Style” architectural modernism.

Here it is important to clarify the Cold War role of Nelson

Rockefeller (and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund more generally), diffi-

cult for most theorists of Brazilian culture to handle. Given the first

world/third world relation of refinement to extract (or “civilization” to

“standing reserve”), the Standard Oil scions had “natural” interests in

Latin America, and the Rockefellers had pursued these interests exten-

sively since the Great Depression, on both cultural and economic

fronts. Nelson Rockefeller (NAR) was able to convert them to national

U.S. priorities just prior to the Second World War; Brazil would prove

to be a key ally, as NAR had predicted. When approached by ambitious

Paulistas at the war’s end to support their hopes for a museum of inter-

national stature, NAR placed a significant donation of artworks at their

disposal—stipulating that the institution created to house them must

reflect “private initiative” rather than governmental interference.

Rockefeller’s gift even came with the requirement that the resulting

institution would need to be a “museum of modern art” equipped with

a private foundation and trustees that were representative of Brazilian

society (remarkably, advocating the inclusion of educators and union

leaders on the board, not simply industrialists).13

In other words, the emerging Museu had to be a Brazilian MoMA.

But if the model, New York’s MoMA, had only intermittently played a

role in biennial culture, its offspring in São Paulo would ultimately be

12 Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London: Verso, 1992),

27, 30.

13 To quote from the letter setting out the terms of a private museum for modern works

versus a government museum for historical art: “Será que alguem não persuadiria o

governo a se dedicar só à arte clássica, deixando a arte moderna à iniciativa particular de

Galeria?” (“Wouldn’t someone persuade the government to devote itself only to classical

art, leaving the initiative for modern art to the initiative of the private gallery?”) And, on

the “Museum of Modern Art,” “[T]ais obras de arte contemporânea deverão ser doadas

mais tarde ao Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, constituindo dação particular do

Snr. Rockefeller.” (“Such works of contemporary art will be donated later to the Museum

of Modern Art of São Paulo, the particular donation constituted by Mr. Rockefeller.”)

From the carbon copy of a letter dated July 23, 1947, and signed by Rockefeller’s agent

for things Brazilian, Carleton Sprague Smith, MoMA, sent to Carlos Pinto Alves of

the initial group seeking to found a museum. Svevo/SPB Archives, “Galeria de Arte

Moderna” folder.

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dwarfed by the Bienal it went on to create. I want to emphasize that this

is not an account of simple neo-imperialism or colonization. Matarazzo

and his Brazilian colleagues were active agents of their own Cold War

position and chose to embrace technocratic modernism at the expense

of many other agendas at home and abroad. In particular, Rockefeller’s

imbrication in the Museu founding the SPB did not determine the

Bienal’s specific geometric path beyond “negros e mulatos”; at home

NAR was an advocate for “primitive” art, and the artworks he donated

to São Paulo ranged from Léger to Chagall and Masson—Europeans

committed to forms of abstract figuration rather than nonobjective art.

We are thus dealing with a mesh of complex influences rather than a

one-way street. Aligning with Brazil’s “Estado Novo” (inaugurated by

President Getúlio Vargas in 1937 as the dictator’s ostensible “middle

way” between communism and home-grown Integralista fascism),

these Paulistas’ postwar cultural ambitions were deeply tied to their

economic interests.14 “Developmentalism” and “import substitution”

were explicit strategies, and Brazilians deployed them to generate cul-

ture as well as manufactured goods.

The first Bienal catalogue made all of this very clear. The organiz-

ers intended “to put modern art from Brazil not only in the discussion,

but also in lively contact with the art of the rest of the world” while

aggressively positioning São Paulo “to conquer the position of a world

artistic center.”15 The Bienal consolidated São Paulo’s young institutions

of modernism, offering both “import” (artworks from abroad) and

“export” (catalogues, exhibitions, prizes, publicity) operations; the

same administration that organized the city’s biennial would produce

“meaningful realizations” abroad (as the first Bienal catalogue put it)—

for example, they put together Brazil’s national representation for the

14 Vargas is credited with nothing less than the production of a new urban middle class in

Brazil, if only by “an ad hoc response to market conditions rather than an attempt to

change the economic bases of the system of power.” See the analysis by Fernando

Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America,

trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979),

90–93. The institutions I examine here were founded after the “bloodless coup” that

deposed Vargas, but his policies of developmentalism extended through the Dutra and

Kubitschek regimes.

15 “[A]o mesmo tempo que para São Paulo se buscaria conquistar a posiçao de centro

artistico mundial. Era inevitabel a referencia a Veneza.” Lourival Gomes Machado

(artistic director of the Bienal), introductory essay, 1 Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna

de São Paulo (October–December 1951), 15. Unless otherwise noted, all translations

are my own.

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25th Biennial in Venice (1950, another inspiration for the founding of

São Paulo’s own Bienal).

In the eyes of the painter Dias (whose given name “Cícero” is

surely appropriate to our allegorical tale), the avoidance of blacks and

mixed-race bodies as subjects was not to negate their role as givers of

artistic form.16 This artist would have been fully conscious of Picasso’s

Afro-Cubism; he himself had been living in Paris on and off since 1937

(initially as a minor employee in the Brazilian embassy), leaving only

when the German military rolled into town. A collaborator on Oswald

de Andrade’s avant-garde magazine Revista de Antropofagia, Dias was

one to talk about “negros e mulatos.” He had thought hard about how

everyday Africanisms and nativisms could be tapped for international

modernism, potentially to become Brazilian. But he could conceive of

this operation only in the terms of a still-figurative art. Dias’s flattery to

Matarazzo was a plea to exhibit artists (such as himself ) who already,

in their modernism (per Dias), “work closer to the primitives” (e.g.,

painted with the “purity” of the indigene or African rather than pol-

ished but flaccid traditionalism). The enemy was clear, and very local:

the 19th-century Brazilian academy in Rio, which had merely “pre-

pared the path for Kodak” (preparando o caminho da Kodak).

This last point confirms the geopolitical stakes that all understood.

Even as New York was inheriting the mantle of modernism from Paris

in the postwar period, American Kodak technologies were figures for

U.S. capital, business practices, and control of information in the mod-

ern age. To refuse to “prepare the way for Kodak” was to deny Brazil’s

fate as an importer of image protocols developed elsewhere. It was also

to refuse a position as a photo opportunity and friendly tourist destina-

tion for first-worlders (pushed openly during the war by Rockefeller’s

Office for Inter-American Affairs, which FDR approved in 1940 to fos-

ter friendly cultural and commercial ties between the United States

and “the Americans from the south”).17 But importantly, Dias’s opposi-

tion also signaled combat against the “Americanization” that Kodak

implied, pushing back at the onslaught of ready-made images and com-

modity culture that a truly Brazilian (bold, modern, abstract?) art might

16 Quotes in this section are all taken and translated from the previously cited letter from

Dias to Matarazzo, July 1948, Svevo/SPB Archives.

17 For Brazilian views of the agency, see Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 29ff., and

Antonio Pedro Tota, O imperialismo sedutor: A americanização do Brasil na época da

segunda guerra (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000).

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hope to hold at bay. Dias knew that Matarazzo cared

deeply about these questions.

By the time of his writing, Dias had shifted in

his own work from Chagall-like, faux-naïve village

scenes to hot Picassoid surrealism, as reflected in

his Seated Woman with a Mirror from a few years

earlier (1942). Refusing “representation” and Kodak

academicism, such a painting can be located in the

center of the vanguard of the day, exactly as “provin-

cial” as Jackson Pollock around that time, who was

then moving (as New York art writer Clement

Greenberg put it in 1943) “through the influences

of Miró, Picasso, Mexican paintings, and what not”

to “come out the other side . . . painting mostly with

his own brush.”18 In other words, Dias’s abstraction

had rejected the Mexican model of internationalism,

but was still far from the cool, geometric style that

would announce itself at the Bienal in 1951. What

happened in that crucial interval to tip the scales?

Dias’s pictorial and epistolary celebration of “a little revolution”

suggests part of the story and hints at how “revolution” (or the

left in general) was being reconfigured in the Brazilian Cold War.

Communism as such had been held at bay by Vargas’s counterrevolu-

tionary government in the 1930s, but homegrown fascism had risen in

that same period (often with the support of German nationals foment-

ing the occasional coup against Vargas’s government). Vargas’s decision

to join the Allies was in response to these infiltrations; with the emer-

gence of the “neutral” general Gaspar Dutra in 1946, Brazilians con-

templated the possibilities of “neutral” cultural forms. As in so many

countries in the immediate postwar period, the fraught politics of figu-

ration (circulating among academicism, fascist realism, and the social-

ist agenda of the “Popular Front”) propelled artists to seek another way.

Younger artists increasingly saw even surrealist figuration as mired in

the past.

The drive to innovate was also fed by the delirious desire of

Brazilians in the late 1940s for an intensification of the progress

18 Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Marc Chagall, Lyonel Feininger, and

Jackson Pollock,” Nation, November 27, 1943, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays

and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 166.

Cícero Dias, Seated Woman with a Mirror

(Mulher sentada com espelho), 1942.

Oil on canvas, 21.25 ∞ 18 in. Coleção

Gilberto Chateaubriand, MAM/RJ.

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of modernization, humiliatingly interrupted by the Depression

(during which the bottom fell out of the coffee market, taking agregado

culture and the Semana with it) but back on track after the Allies’ roar-

ing appetite for Brazilian rubber. Could the country continue to boom

after the war? The United States had canceled all its official “brother-

hood” initiatives as the war ended, so the question was up to the

Brazilians. Industrial development and self-determination were

explicit goals.

Stimulated directly by the Bienal, a movement emerged to capture

this urgent postwar pragmatism: Concretismo. Embracing the nonob-

jective forms of an international l’Art Concret/Kunst Konkret, it was

coolly geometric, claiming the legacy of the imploded Bauhaus.

Paradoxically, this latest import seemed to circumvent the long strug-

gle between European “form” and Brazilian “content” (perhaps by

finessing “content” altogether), presenting an entirely new option for

the Semanaistas. Especially when embracing Oswald’s “Brazilwood”

antropofagia, they had depended on figurative imagery for their proj-

ect, as Tarsila’s illustration for the 1928 manifesto made clear. But the

Brazilian art world had expanded since the 1920s, and artist collectives

(some spawned by the Semana and others ostracized by them) had a

Tarsila do Amaral, drawing for the painting named Abaporu (“man that

eats people” in Tupi), by Oswald de Andrade, used to illustrate his

“Manifesto antropófago” (Cannibal Manifesto) in 1928.

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19 These ostracized modernisms included the Grupo Santa Helena, forming in the 1930s as

“proletarian artists,” and the Sociedade Pro-Arte Moderna (with the unfortunate acro-

nym SPAM) and Clube dos Artistas Modernos (CAM), both founded in 1932 to push the

Semana goals into real politics. The Club of Artists and Friends of the Arts (Clube dos

Artistas e Amigos da Arte) formed later, in 1945.

20 Repeating exhibitions mounted by these groups included the May Salons held in São

Paulo from 1937 to 1939, along with the first Salon of Art at the National Industrial Fair

in Rio de Janeiro in 1941. See Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 24.

21 As Marcio Siwi notes in a paper delivered at the 2009 congress of the Latin American

Studies Association, the Belgian curator Léon Degand may have been the primary inspi-

ration for Matarazzo’s own turn from staid academic painting (which filled his collection

early on) to the radical experiments of post-Cubism. See Siwi, “U.S.-Brazil Cultural

Relations during the Cold War: The Making of Modern Art Museums in São Paulo,”

accessed August 2011, lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/ilassa/2007/siwi.pdf.

22 Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the

Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

role to play in the turn to abstraction.19 Themselves sponsoring repeat-

ing exhibitionary structures, these groups’ commitments split between

the figurative pathos of the proletariat and practical industrial design—

the latter reinforcing the Concretism that would announce itself in that

first Bienal.20

The agons of early Brazilian modernism were restaged by the new

SPB institutions, but as vanguard teleology rather than dialectics.

Setting that up was the exhibition Matarazzo was preparing when he

received Dias’s letter, planned for the Museu de Arte Moderna’s inau-

guration in 1949: Do Figurativismo ao Abstracionismo (From Figuration

to Abstraction). Given the history I have summarized above, this could

be metaphorically understood as “from bodies with their inevitable

color and labor relations, to a sublimated geometry that can include

us all.” The very syntax set up a trajectory and implied the correct evo-

lution; moving forward was the only option for a contemporary mod-

ernizing country such as Brazil.21 Here Matarazzo, coming from an

industrial family whose share of the national economy was larger than

Rio’s and São Paulo’s combined, had significant stakes in the pace of

Brazilian progress; in this regard he was Rockefeller’s peer.

concretiSmo

In the United States, at Rockefeller’s MoMA, Alfred Barr had famously

set up the teleology the Brazilians were staging, with a split between

“non-geometrical abstract art” and “geometrical abstract art”; art writer

Clement Greenberg would work hard to enforce the general turn

against figuration after the war.22 But if there was agreement that

abstraction signified progression, there was no consensus about what

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kind of abstraction should rule the visual arts (the proliferation in Paris

of vanguard “isms” such as Tachisme, Informel, Nouveaux Realisme, etc.,

suggests the problem). Thus Brazil is striking for the apparent consen-

sus that formed among the administrators, artists, judges, and critics

contributing to that first Bienal: abstraction would be ruled neither by

existentialist tropes of European Informel nor by the expressive, ideo-

logical “freedom” of what Greenberg was calling “American-type paint-

ing.” Instead, the austere geometries of International Style modern

architecture, itself a European synthesis of the “classical” South and

the “gothic” North, seemed to provide the appropriate model. But

where New York’s MoMA would locate this branch purely in the

Bauhaus and architecture, the Brazilians took it deep into the visual

arts, and took it South.

Antonio Maluf’s handsome screen-print posters for the first Bienal

set the tone with a set of concentric rectangles that deploy a subtle

architectural illusion in a flat, planar composition. In one version the

Alfred Barr, Jr., diagram reproduced from the cover of Cubism

and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1935).

© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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rectangles are printed on cream-colored stock in earthy colors: mustard

yellow and brownish black. The figure is nonobjective, yet triggers an

optical illusion in which the innermost rectangles appear to recede and

the outer ones advance toward us. Above this quasi-architectural ele-

ment (a window or doorway perhaps), modernist sans serif fonts pro-

claim the Bienal in reddish orange. As if coding for the schizophrenia

of the Brazilian context (would Concretismo connect Brazilians to an

earthly substrate, or to the foreign origins of this movement?), the

same design also exists in the “primaries” of European constructivism:

bright red, blue, and yellow, with a silvery gray typography.23

23 In addition to the ones illustrated here, versions also exist in red (with black and white

lettering and yellow and burnt orange rectangles) and blue (with lettering and rectangles

in white).

Antonio Maluf, two versions of Poster for La Bienal de São Paulo of the

Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, 1951. Left: Lithograph, 37 ∞ 25 in.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Museu de Arte

Moderna de São Paulo. Right: Offset, 36.5 ∞ 24.75 in. Private collection.

Reproduced from Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America

(1934–1973) (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2011), 167, 170.

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Maluf was a significant choice, awarded the commission in a con-

test judged by a committee that included Matarazzo and “proletarian”

printmaker Livio Abramo.24 Trained as an engineer and industrial

designer, Maluf became a celebrated participant in “Art Concret,” as

launched by de Stijl architect Theo van Doesburg in 1930 and brought

to Latin America by Argentinean poet Edgar Bayley, among others.25

Significant for our story, Concrete Art was tirelessly promoted by ex-

Bauhäusler Max Bill, who organized a first international exhibition

of the style (in neutral Switzerland) in 1944. Flattening the legacy

of the Bauhaus (which had been saturated with spirituality and primi-

tivism from its first manifesto through Kandinsky and Klee), Bill’s

Concretism was a kind of aesthetic Esperanto, a way of superseding the

noxious localisms of the European scene in favor of a transcendental

discourse of universal mathematical form. Initially, it was associated

with socialism; as Bayley argued for his Argentinean readers in “On

Concrete Art” (published in the local organ of the Communist Party),

representational art must be replaced by Arte Concreto “because repre-

sentation in art is the spiritual image of classist social organizations.”26

The leftist tenor of geometric abstraction was fueled in the global

South by the diaspora of leftist abstractionists driven with their

families out of Europe by fascism—as, for example, in the case of

Slovakian-born Gyula Kosice, who founded both an Argentinean jour-

nal dedicated to geometric abstraction (1944) and a branch of interna-

tional Concrete Art resonating with Bayley’s parallel movement in

poetry (1946).27 What distinguished the somewhat belated Brazilian

uptake of l’Art Concret/Kunst Konkret/Arte Concreto was one crucial

move, by which concretism would be associated, literally, with “con-

crete.” Via International Style architecture and its predilection for rein-

forced concrete as a building material, Concretismo became affiliated

with pragmatic production rather than elite aesthetics. Its European

24 See correspondence between Abramo and Matarazzo, Svevo/SPB Archives, box 1/08

Diretoria Executiva (executive director Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho).

25 See Edgar M. Bayley, “Sobre arte concreto,” in Orientación, the “órgano central del

Partido Comunista” (Buenos Aires, Argentina) no. 327 (February 20, 1946), translated

into English as “On Concrete Art,” in Fundación Juan March, Cold America, 422.

26 Ibid., 422.

27 Born Fernando Fallik (April 26, 1924) in Košice (Slovakia), Gyula Kosice was brought to

Argentina as a very young child in 1928 and chose to take the name of his city of origin

rather than his patronymic. He studied at the art academy in Buenos Aires, founded the

journal Arturo (with Joaquín Torres-Garcia, one issue) to promote geometric abstraction

in 1944, and later became an active proponent of kinetic art.

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borrowings and leftist pedigree were ideologically massaged to con-

form to the urgencies of modern development in Brazil. As Brazilian

scholars have recently proclaimed, “The principle guiding the entire

production of Antonio Maluf, from the design for the first Biennial

poster to the present, is the concept of the development equation.”28

Concretismo was how development took visual form.

Development, emblematized by hard, geometric edges and archi-

tectonic composition, was the central obsession of the Paulistas forging

the Bienal, and concrete (in all of its senses) was its abstract metaphor

and material semiotic. It is not coincidental that this came together in

São Paulo. The posters, people, papers, networks, buildings, and art-

works promoting the Bienal emerged from a city that had historically

dominated the Brazilian heartland and ruled its industries of extrac-

tion (coffee no less than rubber) but had played a “provincial” role to

Rio’s more French, therefore “international,” history. Understood to be

peripheral and sluggish (as one Paulista curator wrote to his counter-

part at the New York MoMA in 1947, “Unfortunately, everything in

Brazil takes time: you talk there in terms of weeks, and we talk in

terms of years. Don’t be shocked.”), São Paulo would be willfully trans-

formed by ambitious “Paulistas” to lead Brazil into contemporaneity.29

Pace postcolonial theorist and poet Ferreira Gullar, the “specific

angle” of this history from the undeveloped South was not a singular

gaze.30 With Maluf’s multiple posters (and the more biomorphic but

still nonobjective cover he designed for the accompanying catalogue),

the Bienal orchestrated several agendas while signaling that it was

following the teleology set out in the Museu’s inaugural show. As

critics recognized, even the Brazilian section of that first Bienal would

be seen to feature or privilege tendências abstrato-geométricas (the

abstract-geometric tendencies) with artists such as Ivan Serpa, Almir

28 Regina Teixeria Barros and Taisa Helena P. Linhares, Antônio Maluf, Arte Concreto

Paulista ([São Paulo?]: Ed. Cosac + Naif, 2000), 13.

29 Carlos Pinto Alves, director of Galeria de Arte Moderna and initially also director of its

Fundaçao (Foundation) prior to Ciccillo Matarazzo, writing to Carleton Sprague Smith

(a Brazilian expert in New York who often acted for NAR whether on behalf of the

Rockefeller Foundation or MoMA business), August 4, 1947, Svevo/SPB Archives,

“Galeria de Arte Moderna, Diretoria, Correspondence” folder.

30 “Might there be a specific angle from which history can be seen in the underdeveloped

countries?” Ferreira Gullar, Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento (ensaios sobre a arte) (Rio de

Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1969), 21, as translated in Mari Carmen Ramirez and

Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004), 329.

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Mavignier, Maluf himself, and Abraham Palatnik. (Notice the

emergence of Eastern European names in the place of the largely

Portuguese Semanaistas, those descendants of colons and agregados.)

Although the old heroes of 1920s Modernismo were still on view, they

would now be part of an explicit comparison codified in the Bienal’s

awards. As it turned out, national awards went to abstracting but still-

figurative works, while international awards favored the nonobjective.

Controversially, the national painting award went to an Italian

immigrant, Danilo Di Prete (reputed to be a favorite of Matarazzo), for

his small, inconsequential still-life Limãos (Lemons). All agreed with

the merits of the national sculpture prize given to Victor Brecheret’s

O Índio e a Suassuapara (The Indian and [in Tupi] the Fallow Deer).

Brecheret’s earlier “deco” figuration from the 1930s had now evolved

toward an Arp-like modernist abstraction, still based on biomorphic

forms but difficult to read as “indigenous” without the cues provided

by its title. Endorsing this work of residually figurative Brasilidade, the

jury was enforcing technical standards of achievement; an abstract

sculpture by a Brazilian (Franz Weissman, Cubo Vazado [Emptied Cube],

1951) was discounted because of its obvious soldering marks, causing

Victor Brecheret, O Índio e a suassuapara (The Indian and the Fallow

Deer), winner of first prize for national (Brazilian) sculpture at the

first Bienal, 1951. Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Universidade de

São Paulo. Reproduced from Jorge Schwartz and Elizabeth Power,

Brasil, 1920–1950: Da antropofagia a Brasília: MAB-FAAP Museu de Arte

Brasileira (São Paulo: Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, 2002), 61.

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the artist to sputter, “No one had taken into

consideration that it had not been made

in Switzerland, but in Belo Horizonte!”31

“Switzerland” here is an open reference to

the advantages possessed by developed coun-

tries, specifically those leading to the Bienal’s

prestigious international sculpture award,

given to a fully abstract work by the Swiss

Bauhäusler and “Kunst Konkret” popularizer

Max Bill. As art historian Michael Asbury the-

orizes, the jury’s odd decision to split awards

between biomorphic Brazilian artworks and

geometrically abstract international ones

emphasized the abyss that separated

those who still held Modernismo as the

locus of national culture from a hitherto

timid young generation of artists and

intellectuals interested in the rationalist

possibilities for art in the post-war era.32

Asbury reports the comments of Brazilian poet Décio Pignatari recall-

ing the jury’s “main concern was with the international prizes . . . the

Brazilians were left to divide their share of the cake according to their

own taste.”33 The “timid” young rationalists nonetheless got a huge

boost from Bill’s international sculpture prize, which forced a pointed

contrast between Brecheret’s biomorphic narrative of Indian hunters

and Bill’s hard-edged stainless steel abstraction, Tripartite Unity (1947).

It is no coincidence that the funding for this prize had been provided

by industrialists: Premio Federação das Industrias de São Paulo.

Here is where we imagine Matarazzo playing a role, allowing a

bifurcation to form between gently modernized locality (Brecheret’s

Tupi deer and Indian) and international art/capital (the industrialists’

Max Bill, Tripartite Unity, 1947, winner of first prize for

international sculpture at the first Bienal, 1951. Stainless steel,

47.875 ∞ 34.75 ∞ 38.625 in. Museu de Arte Contemporanea da

Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil.

31 See Caroline Lewis, “Brazilian Sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds,” Culture

24, February 7, 2006, accessed April 2012, http://www.culture24.org.uk/places%20

to%20go/yorkshire/leeds/art33920.

32 Michael Asbury, “The Bienal de São Paulo: Between Nationalism and Internationalism,”

in Espaço Aberto/Espaço Fechado: Sites for Modern Brazilian Sculpture (Leeds: Henry

Moore Foundation, 2006), 75.

33 Décio Pignatari, “Desvio para o concreto,” Folha de São Paulo, Caderno Especial 2 (May

2001): 12, as translated and cited by Michael Asbury, “Bienal de São Paulo,” 77.

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award for Bill’s steely geometry). Biennials (and world’s fairs) were

invented to stage such comparisons, and their pointedness was sharp-

ened in the Brazilian case by local desires to go with economic develop-

ment in a pell-mell rush to the future. NAR could collect folk art and

leave modernity to his staff at MoMA; “Ciccillo” would need to take a

more active role.

Bill’s sculpture was an emblem for Brazilians to conjure with,

summoning the aspirational vortex that the Paulistas brought to their

world picture. Its Unity (split into a nicely Christological three before

rejoining itself as “tripartite”) was based on the geometry of the

Möbius strip. Patinated in highly polished stainless steel and installed

for full perambulatory viewing, Bill’s Möbial form instantiated tech-

nocracy’s promise to “unify” the “surface” of differences into a single

dynamic form. For Brazilians, it also confronted viewers with a

demand for vertiginous reorientations. As the modernist poet Murilo

Mendes enthused in a local paper, “the viewer could move and move

and move” around the sculpture, “and have the same surprising

sensation”—a feeling of surging exhilaration echoing in his cosmopoli-

tan tagline claiming “the world was at the Trianon,” where the Bienal

was then on view.34

If Bill’s modern sculpture now seems banal in its tasteful abstrac-

tion, twisting smoothly on its pedestal (just waiting to be scaled up for

countless corporate plazas in the 1970s), it is important to emphasize

that in 1951 Paulistas could project on it a careening new universe—

with their own mobility and imagination supplying the velocity for

revolution. Important for my argument is the capacity for this kind of

nonobjective art to symbolize the progressive eradication of class and

racial difference (as Bayley had made explicit)—while paradoxically

serving capital as a metaphor for development and modern corporate

identity. Bill’s emphasis on mathematics could facilitate either move,

as his 1936 manifesto stated clearly:

Concrete art is ultimately the pure expression of harmonious mea-

sure and law. It orders systems and uses artistic resources to give

life to these orders. . . . It strives for universality.35

34 Emphasis added. Murilo Mendes, “Sugestões da Bienal,” Diario Carioca (December 2,

1951), as paraphrased and quoted in Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 43.

35 This translation of the German is offered by the Daimler Corporation’s collection data-

base, accessed March 2012, http://collection.daimler.com/sammlung/werke_bill_e.htm.

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If “Konkret” art meant universal “law” and “order” for this Swiss artist

(despite the play of meanings in the various languages into which it

was translated), the moving bodies of Brazilian viewers would put

difference once again in play (“the viewer could move and move and

move”).36 This is significant for the anthropophagic transvaluation of

Concretismo that would follow in the wake of the Bienal, together with

the transculturation of norms that has proved so crucial for the critical

praxis of contemporary artists today.

Bill’s geometries were taken up immediately after the Bienal, as

a small group of artists came together at the Modern Museum in São

Paulo in 1952 to present their work along with a manifesto (in sans

serif red, lowercase letters) announcing “ruptura”! This Brazilian

“Concrete Art” and its rhetoric of rupture was already different from

Bill’s conciliatory, Bauhaus-inflected geometries. It demanded that art

depart from the old naturalism and its surrealist biomorphs, but called

openly to “previous knowledge for its judgment” and asked viewers to

consider it a “medium of deducible knowledge of concepts.”37 This

emphasis on concept would prove to be significant.

Concretism had an attractive aura of progressivism (resonating

with the leftist politics of its first introducers). Bill’s Unity would have

resonated with the “unity of knowledge” movement coming out of the

ruins of Red Vienna and the shambles of the Weimar Bauhaus.38 Yet

as we’ve seen, this progressivism could be stripped of its left agenda

and simply signify progress, serving the procapitalist pragmatists of

the “Rockefeller” Bienal. These ironies would have been evident to

Brazilian intellectuals, such as crucial Trotskyist critic Mário Pedrosa.

But what other options were there? Stalinism and fascism had revealed

the corruptibility of a “people’s” (figurative) art. As Pedrosa saw it, this

first Bienal effectively confirmed the teleology of the museum’s 1949

“figurative/abstract” show. “Real modernists,” in Pedrosa’s account,

pursued the path of abstraction set out by the revolutionary Russian

36 This phenomenology is also distinctive for Latin American kinetic art—work that was

made with motors and gears in the North relied in the South on moire patterns and scin-

tillations produced by a mobile viewer.

37 “Ruptura manifesto,” published on the occasion of the 1 Exposição do Grupo Ruptura

(Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, 1952), translated in Fundación Juan March, Cold

America, 436.

38 For the philosophical origins of the “unity” movement and its materializations at the

Bauhaus, see Peter Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural

Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990): 709–52.

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Suprematists; like Alfred Barr, Pedrosa saw this as its own unique

genealogy, in contrast to contemporary artists who carried the wilted

banner of the School of Paris, those “bastards of Picasso, Matisse, or

Braque” whose still-figurative canvases were going nowhere.39

But if Pedrosa was willing to see real progress in the anointing

of Max Bill, other committed leftists were not giving up so easily.

Communist architect Vilanova Artigas penned an astonishingly

incisive critique in the leftist daily Hoje (Today), “The Bienal: An

Expression of Bourgeois Decadence”:

[T]he Biennial will create among us a comprador (shopper) class

for abstract art, a class that already appears in the “sharks” who

have linked their names to the prizes. This comprador class and the

government understand the importance of so-called modern art.

They will create a market for artists who will thereby have their

problems solved as long as they paint what buyers want, that is,

as long as they paint like the Biennial.40

Shockingly accurate in his prediction, Artigas anticipates one aspect

of our present biennial culture, in which gallerists’ publicity budgets,

illy coffee, the Soros Foundation, regional planning authorities, and

federal culture ministries all drive our global art world. But Artigas

failed to calculate the sheer power that such global cultural forces

could offer, and how, in the hands of specific artists, it could be bent

toward critique.

The “shark” in Artigas’s criticism was a consistent symbol for capi-

talists in the Brazilian imaginary, also appearing on a placard waved by

leftist protesters during the Bienal’s opening: “um charuto a menos

para o tubarão, e um pão a mais para o bancario” (“one less cigar for

the shark, and one more loaf for the banker”)—an effective summary

of neoliberalism’s transfer of funds from one elite to another.41 But

again, the leftist opposition paled in the face of right-wing academi-

cians who roused some two hundred members of their Associação

39 Mário Pedrosa, “The First Bienal,” as cited in Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 42.

As cited, the quote reads, “Há também os bastardos de Picasso, Matisse ou Braque: são

os Pignons, Birollis e outros Capaillés.” It seems that Capaillés is a typo, substituting for

an original meant to refer to Jules Cavaillès, a French painter who participated in the 1951

São Paulo Bienal (thanks to scholar Pedro Erber for this decoding).

40 Vilanova Artigas, “A Bienal: Expressão da decadência burguesa,” Hoje, São Paulo, August

12, 1951, cited in the original Portuguese in Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 46.

41 Svevo/SPB Archives, “Press Clippings” folder.

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Paulista de Belas Artes to lament the “fake artistic credo” of the mod-

ernist Bienal, which they found “anti-Christian, anti-Brazilian, and

anti-Latino.” In the recollection of Pignatari (then a young student

in the crowd, eventually a force for concrete poetry), elite Paulistas

ignored these slings from both left and right, enjoying being in the

spotlight of what was being constructed as the political and aesthetic

center, “drinking, laughing, and chatting in the hall, doubtless not

even hearing [Matarazzo’s opening] speech.”42

But if the right could be ignored, the battle among leftist intellec-

tuals was more serious since it contested the Bienal’s narrative of

progress itself. Fought openly in the press, the battle limned the con-

frontational structure of Cold War global politics, as Pedrosa’s riposte

to Artigas made clear. Dubbing the call for working-class art a demand

from “Stalinist Creole scribes” who “parrot the Kremlin bureaucrats,”

Pedrosa minced no words, titling his essay in the daily newspaper “The

São Paulo Bienal and the Communists.”43 (Since he was one, he could

criticize.) Echoing arguments that will be familiar to historians of

American art from Alfred Barr’s multiple-editioned What Is Modern

Painting?44 (ten copies of which had been ordered in the late 1940s

for the São Paulo modern art museum’s bookshop, presumably on offer

right next to the Bienal catalogue), Pedrosa drew the evolution from

Malevich to contemporary nonobjective art as a single progressive line.

Uncompromising abstractionists had been protected by Lenin’s rev-

olutionary state, Pedrosa argued, but were now branded by Kremlin

Stalinists as “degenerate” and “bourgeois.”45 Pedrosa’s use of “degener-

ate” here is particularly savvy, calling up for any educated reader the

dark side of European fascism. Brazilian intellectuals were participat-

ing in the same Cold War as Europe and the United States, where art-

ists such as Adolph Gottlieb could protest that he and his New York

colleagues were black sheep, “neither white enough nor red enough” to

escape from attack by “both the right and the left.”46 What was left of

42 Décio Pignatari, “Desvio para o concreto,” Folha de S.Paulo, May 20, 2001, as quoted in

the original Portuguese by Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 41.

43 Mário Pedrosa, “A Bienal de São Paulo e os comunistas,” Tribuna da Imprensa (1951

[month and day not given]), cited by Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 46.

44 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., What Is Modern Painting? (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943).

45 Pedrosa, “A Bienal de São Paulo.”

46 Adolph Gottlieb, speaking at the Museum of Modern Art on May 5, 1948, in a talk titled

“On Unintelligibility,” in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics. An Anthology, ed.

Clifford Ross (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 53.

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Trotskyism in New York, as in São Paulo, argued for independence

from the requirement to paint figures. It argued, in short, for

abstraction.

Pedrosa pushed this argument further in his introduction to

an exhibition of Brazilian art staged in explicit response to the first

Bienal. Opening in Rio in April 1952, the show celebrated Brazilians’

embrace of abstraction against the enduring proponents of figurative

representation for whom art was “a prime instrument of education,

but stripped of its autonomy.”47 For Pedrosa, the excitement of the only

real alternative—the global arena of international abstraction—was

palpable:

The artistic environment is now one of effervescence. Gone is the

suffocating lethargy! Artists begin to fight for their ideas, and for

their aesthetic convictions. Excellent! [Now we can make] a kind of

reassessment of the situation, after the watershed that was our first

Biennial.48

The following January Pedrosa would serve on the jury of Rio’s I

Exposição Internacional de Arte Abstrata, confirming the teleology

of the now global drift.49

The capacity to terminate parasitic Modernismo and cement the

turn to developmentally sound Concretismo was thus endorsed by Rio,

as it would be in the second Bienal. Matarazzo, nothing short of a fund-

raising genius, got himself appointed as commissioner to the city of

São Paulo for the celebration of its four hundredth anniversary. With

the influx of these bursaries (and after an abortive plea to NAR and the

U.S. Chamber of Commerce to join in his architectural adventures),

Matarazzo could commission physical infrastructures for the Museu

and the Bienal, making manifest the new Brazilian subject of moder-

nity, modernism, and modernization.

47 Mário Pedrosa, “O momento artistico” (1952, published in 1953), anthologized in Otilia

Arantes, ed., Academicos e modernos, (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo,

1996), 243, as cited in Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 49.

48 Ibid.

49 Alambert and Canhête list the opening as January 20, 1953; other sources (notably, the

chronology in Fundación Juan March, Cold America) list the opening as February 20,

1953. The second edition of the Bienal would open in December, with a triumphant set

of buildings by Oscar Niemeyer (about which more below).

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modulor modernS

The rapidity of Brazil’s uptake of abstract modernism was breathtak-

ing, inverting the earlier apologies (“you talk there in terms of weeks,

and we talk in terms of years”), as Bill’s Concrete Art carried the top

prize in that first, 1951 Bienal, the 1952 Ruptura manifesto in São Paulo

announced Brazilians’ break with Modernismo, and the 1953 abstrac-

tion show in Rio confirmed the geometric trajectory. In the analysis of

scholar Michael Asbury, the “Rupture” group wanted to be “associated

with the transformation of the nation itself through its emphasis on

the creation of objects in the world, as opposed to abstracting forms

from it.”50 Complicating art historians’ desires to see modernists as

avant-gardes perennially alienated from power, the Brazilians satisfied

their Cold War “non-aligned” objectives with an international Concrete

Art that could connect “with the non-figurative tradition without sub-

jecting itself to the North American model.”51 And the Brazilians’ dis-

tance from Concretism’s European origins could allow for some very

creative misreadings of the international doctrine. The more that Swiss

Concretist Max Bill cited Albers, for example, the more Brazilian Mário

Pedrosa would cite Malevich. For both, Brazil would be the place where

the interrupted trajectory of modernity could be “completed,” realizing

the dreams that a divided Europe had crushed under its violent boots.

As plans for the 1953 Bienal were yoked to the 1954 celebration of

São Paulo’s quadricentennial, Matarazzo’s architectural dreams for a

“Palace of the Arts” took shape. Ultimately resulting in several struc-

tures, the Bienal’s functions would be concentrated in the Centennial’s

Pavilion of Industry, which later served as headquarters for the Bienal

offices and site of the biannual show. Sited in a swampy bit of land that

had been deeded by the government for the Centennial (Ibirapuera

Park, “ibirapuera” being a Tupi word signifying either the aprodecia

tree or the “rotten wood” associated with this humid territory), the new

modernist structures began to take shape. Painted luminously white

but punctured with syncopated windows or louvers, they expressed the

extraordinary vision of a team of transculturating designers, among

them lead architect Oscar Niemeyer, architect Hélio Uchôa, structural

engineer Joaquim Cardozo, and landscape designer Roberto Burle

Marx.

50 Asbury, “Bienal de São Paulo,” 78.

51 Ibid.

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The art in this Bienal was no match for the exciting architectural

complex, still in progress as the exhibition opened. Known colloquially

as the “Guernica Bienal” for the inclusion of Picasso’s antifascist mas-

terwork, it was more historic than polemical. Perhaps the ebb in polem-

ics was because Sérgio Milliet was a more moderate artistic director;

perhaps it was Niemeyer’s capacity to make the case more concretely.52

52 Sérgio Milliet da Costa de Silva was affiliated with NAR and Cold War alignments even

during the Second World War. In an important book he published during the war, Milliet

informed Brazilians about North American art, drawing explicit and invidious compari-

sons between the United States and Soviet Union. Alambert and Canhête cite Milliet

regarding U.S. leadership of “free” art production (my translation): “Today, anywhere in

Oscar Niemeyer and team, Pavilion of Industry, designed for the

quadricentenary of the city of São Paulo, completed in 1954, serving in

its parallel existence as “Pavilion Ciccillo Matarazzo” for the São Paulo

Bienal and its administrative headquarters. Reproduced from Oscar

Niemeyer, Alan Weintraub, and Alan Hess, Oscar Niemeyer Buildings

(New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 169. Photograph © Alan Weintraub.

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The modern logic of Concretism became explicit, even as the Bienal

consolidated its ideology—what Milliet described as “nota introdutória

uma análise hisórica da arte moderna” and its unassailable “espírito de

liberdade.”53

If we concur with most scholars that Concretismo was intended

to mark Brazilians’ independence from North American models, we

need nonetheless to acknowledge that the ideology of “freedom” Milliet

invoked as the history of modern art was remarkably similar to that

shared by Barr and the Rockefellers’ MoMA. In fact, Rockefeller him-

self had reported to Paulistas on the essential link between democratic

freedom and the freedom of art when he came in July 1950 to speak at

the festive ceremony inaugurating the other museum in São Paulo—

the traditional survey museum (metaphorical “Met” to the “Modern”

he had been involved in founding the year before). In his prepared

speech for the Museu d’Arte’s belated inauguration, NAR had praised

the private civic initiatives that had founded it, and then quoted liber-

ally from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration of the New York

MoMA in 1939. FDR, per NAR, stated,

The conditions for democracy and for art are one and the same.

What we call liberty in politics results in freedom in the arts. . . .

That is why this museum is a citadel of civilization.54

Niemeyer’s architecture would code “freedom” very differently.

The Bienal complex in Ibirapuera Park opened in stages beginning

with the Bienal exhibition and quadricentenary in 1954. Certainly,

the astonishing modules, forms, and spaces produced by Niemeyer’s

team had one immediate result: when the President-to-be Juscelino

Kubitschek (elected in 1955) saw them, he hired much the same team to

build Brasilia, a new national capitol, from scratch. The essential idea

the world except perhaps in Russia, painting is well protected from the government and

has admirable prospects for renewal and for research open to artists.” Sérgio Milliet,

A pintura norte-americana: Bosquejo de evolução da pintura nos EE. UU. [sic] (São Paulo:

Martins, 1944), 31, as cited by Alambert and Canhête, As Bienais, 30.

53 “An introductory note with historical analysis of modern art and its spirit of liberty.”

Sérgio Milliet, “Introduçao,” II Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (São Paulo:

Fundação de Arte Moderna, 1953), xvii. The historical coverage included Picasso, Italian

Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, and a curiously marginal Hodler show imported

from Switzerland.

54 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as quoted by NAR in “Address by Nelson A. Rockefeller at the

inauguration of the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo on July 5, 1950,” Rockefeller Archives,

NAR RG 4, box 122, folder 1192.

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of the Niemeyer plan was a set of pavilhãos or pavilions (but perma-

nent), linked by a covered walkway or marquise. The pavilions were

made of reinforced steel and concrete fitted with variations on the glass

curtain wall, elegant statements of International Style modernism; the

Pavilion of Industry that became the Bienal headquarters exemplifies

one scholar’s description of “sober structures veiling adventurous inte-

riors.”55 The contrast between the staid rectangular geometries of the

exterior and the almost delirious interior sets up my larger claim:

Niemeyer’s architecture (and of course Burle Marx’s landscaping) is

important for the revival of antropofagia that would emerge with a

vengeance in the visual arts.

A sometime collaborator with the Swiss-born architect Le

Corbusier (they are listed as the two leads on the 1947 United Nations

Building in New York), Niemeyer is seen to have adapted Corbusian

building modes (reinforced concrete) to curved and parabolic shapes;

these gave a pronounced uniqueness to Brazilian modernism (anointed

by New York MoMA in an exhibition titled “Brazil Builds” in 1943)

but were minimized in the core buildings of the Bienal complex.

Nonetheless, Niemeyer’s constant pushback against Corbusier is well

Oscar Niemeyer and team, interior view of the Pavilion of Industry

(where the São Paulo Bienal is held). Reproduced from Oscar

Niemeyer, Rupert Spade, and Yukio Futagawa, Oscar Niemeyer

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 170.

55 Styliane Philippou, Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 2008), 168.

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documented, forming the Brazilian architect’s mythos.56 For my pur-

poses, I want to emphasize his departure from Corbu’s Modulor,

a “universal” metric developed by the avatar of International Style

modernism—published in 1950 and deployed around the world.57

Outside and inside the pavilions’ exteriors, Niemeyer subtly

torqued the techno-rationality of both Corbu and Concretismo to

produce a subliminal anthropophagy for Cold War Brazil.58 Key to my

argument is the oft-neglected Grande Marquise (marquee, or covered

walkway) of the Bienal complex. An open-air, free-form structure, it

covered the crowds during the second Bienal’s delayed inauguration

Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, India, holding his design for the new

capital and a model of the Modulor man, ca. 1951. Photograph

Pierre Jeanneret, Fondation Corbusier. © FLC/ADAGP.

Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris), Le Modulor, 1950.

© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/

F.L.C. Reproduced from Figure 22 of The Modulor: A Harmonious

Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture

and Mechanics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968 edition), 65.

56 Niemeyer had come to prominence as a wunderkind in the Corbusier-led team designing

the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Health in 1936 (Rio, finished in 1942). For a

standard account, see the book by CIAM architect Stamo Papadaki, Oscar Niemeyer

(New York: G. Braziller, 1960).

57 The English version of the second edition of Modulor is subtitled A Harmonious Measure

to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 1968). Modulor was chosen by Corbu to mingle the words module and nombre

d’or, the latter a reference to the golden mean (golden section, golden ratio) of classical

Greek architecture. My thanks go to Nicola Pezolet for his dissertation chapter on this

material; see his “Spectacles Plastiques” (PhD diss., MIT, 2012).

58 The association of Niemeyer with antropofagia has been argued most forcefully by

Philippou, Oscar Niemeyer. Philippou’s indispensable text on Niemeyer does not make

the particular formal argument I have posed here, however. The author notes reluctantly

in a footnote, “Niemeyer, however, never referred explicitly to Antropofagia” (11n16).

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Artists’ award at Second Bienal de São Paulo under the marquise by

Oscar Niemeyer and team, Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, 1953/1954.

Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

Left: Oscar Niemeyer and team, aerial view of the Bienal complex.

Reproduced from Styliane Philippou, Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of

Irreverence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 166.

Right: Visitor’s map for the São Paulo Bienal, shown upside down

from its usual orientation to reveal Niemeyer’s “anti-Modulor.”

Collection of the author.

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(postponed to December to join with the quadricentenary), showcasing

this feature’s capacity to shelter both luminaries and hoi polloi from

rain and summer sun. Connecting the upright modernist slab buildings

with biomorphic horizontality, the marquee’s smooth expanse begs to

be read in counterpoint to Concretismo and International Style ortho-

doxy, weaving around Burle Marx’s key tropical plantings, and in some

cases even punctured to incorporate them. What is striking upon seeing

the layout of all the Niemeyer structures in their relation to each other

is the walkway’s configuration as it was finally built, clearly evident in

aerial views and in the map routinely handed out to Bienal visitors.

As constructed, Niemeyer’s marquee forms a Corbusian “Modulor

Man,” but with difference, not universalism, at its core. Corbu’s “mod-

ule” had modernized classical Vitruvian proportions (narcissistically

utilizing a body that was erect, white, European, and male), alluding to

the thinly veiled discourse of divinity by which Western architecture

had always accrued its power, in an upright frontal figure stretching

from the ground plane to the cosmos (and intended by Corbu to be

planted wherever modernism could establish itself). But Niemeyer’s

modulor—which would have dramatically outlined itself in the final

plans authorized by Matarazzo and the centennial building commit-

tee—was shockingly prone. Anthropophagically digesting modernist

architectural materials while proclaiming its relation to the earth and

to what Niemeyer fantasized as “the body of the beloved woman, . . .

full of curves, like the mulattas painted by . . . Di Cavalcanti,” Nie-

meyer’s modulor was flattened, stretched, and distorted, its sprawl-

ing aegis connecting to deeply local substrates.59 If the reference to

Semanaista Emilio Di Cavalcanti is old-fashioned, betraying Niemeyer’s

link to Modernismo rather than to younger artists’ developing critiques

of Concrete Art, its determination to index “difference” is what is

salient here. The populism of Niemeyer’s “canopy-in-motion” is func-

tional to this day, allowing visitors to the park to circulate and see into

the buildings free from admission fees or museum protocols, a fact uti-

lized by Olafur Eliasson to democratize access to his contribution to the

1998 Bienal (which extended out of the Bienal building, through the

59 From Niemeyer’s “Poem of the Curve” (O poema da curva), cited by Philippou in conjunc-

tion with the first of the architect’s free-form marquises, this one at the dance hall he

designed in 1940 for the resort at Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, in the Brazilian state of

Minas Gerais—whose commissioner was none other than Juscelino Kubitschek, then

the local mayor.

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glass, and into the park, under the marquee).60 Sinuous in its enor-

mous body outline, yet club-footed and given a massive “head” formed

by the Pavilion of the Arts (dubbed “Oca,” the Tupi word for home),

Niemeyer’s giant modulor mulatta was irrevocably tethered to the

Brazilian terrain and strategically open to its landscaped jungle.

Antropofagic with a subtle vengeance, it offered a new hybridity

for an increasingly global culture.

coda: antropofagia and the hand that feedS

Niemeyer never openly acknowledged the pull of that most powerful

theorization of colonial trauma, antropofagia, but I’ve argued that his

work subversively invoked that discourse and rendered a silent formal

critique of techno-rationalist abstraction (biting the hand that feeds).

Not coincidentally, I submit, antropofagia would soon be openly revived

in the Brazilian art world by Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and a raft of

others. This forms a late-1960s coda to my account, joining an epilogue

in which the São Paulo Bienal itself became a target of global boycott

(1969) in protest against the Brazilian dictatorship’s increasing repres-

sion, with diasporal Latin American artists gestating their own concep-

tual “Contrabienal.”61

Those protests occluded the debt younger artists and antropofagia

bore to the Bienal, debts of opposition that first began to stir against

Concretismo (the Bienal’s anointed style) in a Neoconcretismo mani-

festo offered by poet and theorist Ferreira Gullar in 1959. The stated

objective was for artists to pollute concrete abstraction’s “dangerously

extreme rationalism” and reengage with “the expressive potential they

feel their art contains.”62 For artists such as Lygia Clark (a signatory)

60 Olafur Eliasson, The Very Large Ice Flow (1998), contributed to the twenty-fourth SPB,

whose theme explicitly invoked antropofagia. Eliasson’s work consisted of a large ice rink

that extended past the wall of the pavilion and into the park, where Paulistas enjoyed it by

just sitting on it and melting spots into its smooth surface. “Canopy-in-motion” refers to

the earlier Niemeyer marquise at the Baile dance hall in Pampulha, considered a model

for this one; see Philippou, Oscar Niemeyer, 101.

61 For an account of American-based boycotts of the Bienal over the years, see James

Green, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in

the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 124ff. For the 1971–72

Contrabienal, see the description of Luis Camnitzer (a participant) in Conceptualism in

Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007),

240–41.

62 Ferreira Gullar, “Manifesto neoconcreto” [Neoconcretist manifesto], Jornal do Brasil

(Rio), March 22, 1959, translated into English and published in Fundación Juan March,

Cold America, 442.

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and Hélio Oiticica (a younger artist who later joined), the conceptual-

ism of Neoconcretismo was a given. It could operate on an interna-

tional stage only because that stage had constituted itself through

national representation at biennials—through Venice (where Clark

had shown consistently since Brazil was first represented), and through

the bracing contest of the São Paulo Bienal.

With the antropofagic aegis of Niemeyer’s architecture metaphori-

cally protecting me, I assert that there would be no sense of the differ-

entiated “audiences” (not universals) that had to be strategized by these

artists and architects without the decade and a half of the Bienal’s

prize-giving apparatus behind them.63 This is the significance, for me,

of Oiticica’s considered transformation of his installation Tropicália—

reconfigured from its 1967 premiere at the modern museum in São

Paulo for London (as Eden), or infusing the “Babylonests” he build

during his exile in New York. Ditto the manipulable, dialogical object

created by Oiticica and Lygia Clark in 1966, Diálogo de Manos, which

mightily impressed the young student Yve-Alain Bois (making a pil-

grimage to Clark’s Paris studio after seeing her work in the 1968

63 Not detailed here is the longer story of the architectural awards at the Bienal, where

ex-Bauhaus director Walter Gropius was anointed and pronounced Brazil the nation

most hospitable to modern architecture in 1953.

Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Diálogo de manos, 1966. Photograph by

Sascha Harnisch. The World of Lygia Clark Cultural Association.

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Venice Biennale). As Clark engaged him in the necessary collaboration

to activate this “object,” Bois recalls,

[O]ur two right hands joined in opposite directions, each in one

of the loops of a little Möbius cloth ribbon (elastic, there again)

and by joining or releasing them, we experienced the resistance

of matter. . . . Lygia then told me about the beginning of the Neo-

concrete movement in Brazil [in 1959], her own polemical starting

point—that of breaking with the universalist claims of geometric

abstraction. . . . She had turned one of Max Bill’s most captivating

sculptures, draped in its marmoreal autonomy, into the support

for an experiment aimed at abolishing any idea of autonomy.64

Returning us to Bill’s Tripartite Unity of 1948–49 in confrontation

with its cannibalizer, Bois’s recollection of the 1966 Diálogo allows us

to see the transvaluation of “Concrete” values. The substitution of

hands in “elastic” for Bill’s engineered form entangles mathematical

universals with the abject. “Elastic” is made so by Brazilian stuff,

boiled sap of the rubber tree, still harvested by people, exported to fac-

tories in the North, and woven with other fibers to make cloth stretch in

biomorphic, uncanny, skin-like ways. Diálogo literally weaves together

the threads of the Brazilian economy (the foundational rubber indus-

try), mobilizing it with “manual” labor, while wittily asserting its con-

ceptual linkage to Möbius (and, more broadly, geometric abstraction

tout court).

Delving into the deeper context of Diálogo’s conversion of steel to

rubber targets the cruel strategies of multinational capital in its relation

to indigenous knowledge. Ever since Brazilian rubber trees were taken

in the 19th century by the British for seeding in their more tractable

colonies in India and Southeast Asia (not to mention the brutal devel-

opment of a different species of rubber in the Belgian Congo), the met-

aphor of botanical aboriginality (recall the “Brazilwood” for which the

country was given its European name) was put into question. But by

this same argument, we can see the clever transitivity of Clark and

Oiticica’s material critique—equally readable (as rubber, at least, if not

as “neo-Concrete”) in Malaysia, Kolkota, or Kinshasa. Where Oswald

de Andrade had imagined “Brazilwood” to assert a deep vernacular,

64 Yve-Alain Bois, introduction to Lygia Clark, “Nostalgia of the Body,” October 69

(Summer 1994): 86.

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a younger generation could formulate, from another once “Brazilian”

substance, a globalized argument for embodied resistance to technoc-

racy. Contemporary installations of the flaccid rubber Möbius cuff

(which we visitors are forbidden to manipulate) do not capture the

accomplishment of Diálogo as the 1966 photograph records it—

performative, as in so much contemporary art.

In the twists and turns of this essay, I have argued that the dream

of an object- or image-based universalism fueled the uptake of geomet-

ric abstraction via the São Paulo Bienal. The style was not imposed

by Northern capitalists such as Rockefeller, who had only the vaguest

ideas of the artistic stakes on the ground in Brazil; it was embraced by

Paulistas as the vehicle of progress in its manifestly “international”

form. Crucial to my argument, this form of abstraction represented a

liberation from (figuring) the difference of actual bodies, while enter-

ing the unmarked category of the normative.

This (Western, Platonic, Cartesian, Kantian, Corbusian) dream

could not hold. Perhaps most provocatively, I have argued that within

the very belly of ostensibly Corbusian “International Style modernism,”

Roberto Burle Marx’s landscape design in dialogue with Niemeyer’s

Marquise do Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, Brasil. Photograph © Pedro Kok.

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the worm was turning, in Oscar Niemeyer’s subtle abjection of the

modulor. Not just a formal riposte, Niemeyer’s move was also an ecol-

ogy, the newly horizontal modulo-mulatta literally encompassing the

indigenous jungle Burle Marx shaped for Ibirapuera Park.65 Clark and

Oiticica also effected an ecology. Like the dialogue between sinuously

deployed concrete and native tree, their dialogue of hands in rubber

leveled Concretismo in a desiring-production maneuver of incredible

wit, provoking our contemplation of the art system itself. Savagely hon-

oring its targets by devouring them, antropofagia always results in new

growth—Brazilian development countercolonizing the global art world.

acknowledgmentS

I thank the anonymous ARTMargins reviewers for their constructive

criticisms; thanks also to the archivists at the Rockefeller Foundation

and at the Archives of the São Paulo Bienal. My research in the Bienal

archives was immeasurably helped by my Brazilian research assistant

Deborah Magnani; Mariel Villeré assisted with Niemeyer materials.

Scholars Robin Greeley, José Gatti, and Pedro Erber have all been

crucial for my continuing education in things Latin American.

65 See Fabiola López-Durán, “Eugenics in the Garden,” PhD dissertation, Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, 2009.