TITLE: “Modern Art in Brazil - Old and New Narratives”
ABSTRACT:
In 2022, Brazil celebrated the bicentennial of its independence and the centennial of the so-called Week of Modern Art, which took place in São Paulo of 1922. The latter has been canonized in Brazilian art historiography as the milestone of the country's Modernism. This is a process which had its apex during the making of the Brazilian art system (and market for contemporary art) in the early 1970s, in parallel to the Military Dictatorship that somehow domesticated the artists and critics involved in the fostering of Modern Art in the country.
A series of initiatives, from publications, cycle of lectures, to exhibitions in the framework of its centennial, attempted to reevaluate the Week of Modern Art's legacy, while prospecting new narratives for Brazilian Modernism outside the central axis of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
In this lecture, some of the issues raised by this recent revision of Brazilian art historiography will be tackled in the light of the debate of the renewal of the discipline of art history, on the one hand, and the new trends in Brazilian contemporary art, on the other.
MINIBIO Ana Gonçalves Magalhães:
Ana Magalhães is a Brazilian art historian, curator, and Full Professor of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). She is an expert in the visual arts of the 20th century, focusing on a transnational approach of Modernism, more specifically in the exchange between Italy and Brazil. She was invited to teach at the University of Florida, the University of Hamburg, the Università degli Studi di Milano, the Université Paris 8 - Saint Denis, and the University of Vienna. She was a Guest Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, in Los Angeles and a curatorial researcher at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome.
Among her publications are the catalogs Classicismo, Realismo, Vanguarda: Pintura Italiana no Entreguerras [Classicism, Realism, Avant Garde: Italian Painting between the Wars] (1st edition, 2013; 2nd edition, 2018), Um Outro Acervo do MAC USP. Prêmios-Aquisição da Bienal de São Paulo, 1951-1963 [Another Collection of MAC USP. Acquisition Awards of the São Paulo Biennial, 1951-1963] (2019), and the books Classicismo Moderno. Margherita Sarfatti e a Pintura Italiana no MAC USP [Modern Classicism. Margherita Sarfatti and Italian Painting at MAC USP] (2016), and Boccioni no Brasil. Reavaliando Formas Únicas da Continuidade no Espaço e sua História Material [Boccioni in Brazil. Revaluating Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and Its Material History] (2022).
