Cannibal Angels (Cultural History and Literary Imagination) 9781788740388, 9781788740395, 9781788740401, 9781788740418, 1788740386

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Cannibal Angels Transatlantic Modernism and the Brazilian Avant-Garde KennetH david JaCKson

Peter Lang

Cultural History and literary imagination ‘Kenneth David Jackson is one of the most prominent scholars devoted to Brazilian studies. A leading world researcher, David Jackson offers a groundbreaking contribution to the understanding of the Brazilian Avant-Garde, whose 100 years will be celebrated in 2022. A timely publication, this book will become a classic reference on the topic.’ – JJoão Cezar de Castro Rocha, State University of Rio de Janeiro Luís Madureira, University of Wisconsin–Madison ‘Cannibal Angels offers a timely and illuminating reconsideration of the Brazilian avant-garde and a rigorous examination of Brazil’s entangled historical and cultural connections with Europe. Developing around such fertile themes as voyage, portraiture, improvisation, and utopian primitivism, and anchored in a wide-ranging and deeply knowledgeable transatlantic perspective, this probing exploration of Brazilian modernism is certain to remain an essential reference text for years to come.’ – Professor Luís Madureira, University of Wisconsin–Madison In the first three decades of the twentieth century, artists, writers, musicians, and architects from both sides of the Atlantic interacted to create a modern style for Brazil. Their works shaped Brazilian national expression and self-definition for the twentieth century and into the present, with renewed relevance as Brazil plays an increasingly important role in global affairs. Artists such as Tarsila do Amaral and Roberto Burle-Marx are appearing for the first time in museums in the United States and Europe, along with the concept of antropofagia from the ‘Cannibal Manifesto’, a theory of cultural autonomy and a model for fusion, hybridity, and assimilation. This book offers a cultural history and interpretation of Brazilian modernism in the arts and letters, exploring how modernism depends on transatlantic negotiation and develops through interchanges between Brazilians and Europeans. Kenneth david Jackson is Professor of Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures at Yale University. Among his books are Machado de Assis: A Literary Life (Yale UP, 2015), Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa (Oxford UP, 2010), the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story (2006), and Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet (2005).

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Cannibal Angels

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY VOL. 33 EDITORIAL BOARD

RODRIGO CACHO, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE SARAH COLVIN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE KENNETH LOISELLE, TRINITY UNIVERSITY HEATHER WEBB, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Cannibal Angels Transatlantic Modernism and the Brazilian Avant-Garde Kenneth David Jackson

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jackson, K. David (Kenneth David), author. Title: Cannibal angels : transatlantic modernism and the Brazilian avant-garde / Kenneth Jackson. Description: Oxford ; New York, NY : Peter Lang, 2021. | Series: Cultural History and Literary Imagination volume 33 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019019937 | ISBN 9781788740388 Subjects: LCSH: Arts, Brazilian--20th century--Themes, motives. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)--Brazil. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)--Europe. | Modernism (Art)--Brazil. | Modernism (Literature)--Brazil. Classification: LCC NX533.A1 J33 2020 | DDC 700/.41120981--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019937 Cover image: Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu desenho capa. Photo by Kenneth David Jackson. Permission granted by the artist’s niece, Tarsilinha do Amaral. Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd. ISSN 1660-6205 ISBN 978-1-78874-038-8 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-039-5 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78874-040-1 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-041-8 (mobi) © Peter Lang Group AG 2021 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Kenneth David Jackson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

For Bete, angeli et anthropophagi qui seri tamen

 

Tarsila do Amaral, Anjos [Angels], 1924.

viii

Image 1:  Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.



Contents

List of Illustrations  xi Acknowledgements  xv Introduction to 100 Years of the Brazilian Avant-Garde  1 Chapter 1 A Guide to Cannibal Kulchur. A Brazilian Modern Art Extravaganza: Amorous Cannibals, Savage Utopias, Hallucinated Cities, Transatlantic Encounters  27 Chapter 2 The Modern Art Week of 1922  55 Chapter 3 The Cannibal Magazine and the Cannibal Manifesto  89 Chapter 4 Transatlantic Voyages: Ethnography, Aesthetic Landscapes, Sonorities  129 Chapter 5 Transatlantic Exchange: Brazilians in Europe / Europeans in Brazil  187 Chapter 6 Portraits and Self-Portraits: Angels with Banana-Leaf Wings  221

x

Contents

Chapter 7 Improvisation: Play and Excess  249 Chapter 8 Eating the Self: The Modernist Artist as Cannibal  277 Chapter 9 Legacy of a Transatlantic Avant-Garde  317 Bibliography  339 Index  373

Illustrations

Image 1: Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.  viii Image 2: ‘America’, detail from Matthäus Merian, Archantologia Cosmica, Frankfurt, 1638.  xvii Image 3: Tarsila do Amaral, Sketch for A Negra, in Blaise Cendrars, Brésil, des hommes sont venus, 1987. Permission for all of Tarsila’s works granted by her niece, Tarsilinha do Amaral.  xviii Image 4: Tarsila do Amaral, Sketch for Abaporu, 1928. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.  9 Image 5: Tarsila do Amaral, Shaded sketch for Abaporu, 1928.  25 Image 6: Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.  26 Image 7: Detail from ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, Revista de Antropofagia, 1928.  28 Image 8: Eiffel Tower from Rego Monteiro, Quelques visages de Paris, 1925.  31 Image 9: Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.  54 Image 10: Poster commemorating centenary of Brazilian independence, 1922.  60 Image 11: Tarsila do Amaral, A Negra, 1923. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.  66 Image 12: Heitor Villa-Lobos, orchestral score for Choro No. 10, subtitled ‘Rasga Coração’ and dedicated to Paulo Prado, published by Max Eschig, Paris, 1928.  75

xii

Illustrations

Image 13: Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu, 1928. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.  81 Image 14: Tarsila do Amaral, Sketch of Abaporu in ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, 1928.  82 Image 15: ‘Casa Modernista’ [Modernist house] by Gregori Warchavchik, São Paulo, 1928.  84 Image 16: Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia, 1929. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.  86 Image 17: Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.  87 Image 18: Banner of Revista de Antropofagia, 1928.  88 Image 19: Drawing by Tarsila do Amaral in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’  100 Image 20: Untitled drawing by Pagu, Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929. Permission for Pagu drawings granted by Leda Rita Cintra and heirs. Photos courtesy of Centro Pagu, Unisanta.  108 Image 21: Drawing by Di Cavalcante in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, March 31, 1929. Reproduced with permission from Elisabeth Di Cavalcanti Veiga.  109 Image 22: Tarsila do Amaral, Reproduction of Antropofagia in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929.  109 Image 23: Tarsila do Amaral, Drawing in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929.  110 Image 24: Tarsila do Amaral, Drawing in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929.  110 Image 25: Tarsila do Amaral, Drawing in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929.  111 Image 26: Oswald de Andrade, ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ in Revista de Antropofagia, 1928.  112

Illustrations

xiii

Image 27: Cover of reprint of Revista de Antropofagia, 1976.  126 Image 28: Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.  128 Image 29: Programme to receive transatlantic aviators in Rio de Janeiro, 1922.  133 Image 30: Tarsila do Amaral: Drawing for Oswald de Andrade’s Pau Brasil, 1925.  162 Image 31: Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.  186 Image 32: Villa-Lobos, orchestral score for tone poem Amazonas, published by Max Eschig, Paris, 1929.  196 Image 33: Josephine Baker and Le Corbusier, Fondation Le Corbusier.  214 Image 34: Josephine Baker, Museu das Artes do Rio.  216 Image 35: Group of Brazilian modernists traveling to Tarsila do Amaral’s exhibit in Rio, 1929.  218 Image 36: Tarsila do Amaral, Retrato de Mário de Andrade, 1922. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.  234 Image 37: Tarsila do Amaral, Retrato de Oswald de Andrade, 1922. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.  235 Image 38: Tarsila do Amaral, Manteau rouge, 1923.  236 Image 39: ‘I laughed slowly’, writing in the Perfect Cookbook of the Souls of this World, São Paulo, 1918–19.  248 Image 40: Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.  276 Image 41: Musical score of ‘Romance do Veludo’, in Revista de Antropofagia, 1928.  296

xiv

Illustrations

Image 42: Drawing by Pagu in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929. Photo courtesy of Centro Pagu, Unisanta.  300 Image 43: Di Cavalcanti, Drawing of Pagu with guitar in the magazine Para Todos 515, Rio de Janeiro, October 27, 1928, p. 24. The drawing accompanies a poem by Raul Bopp. Reproduced with permission from Elisabeth Di Cavalcanti Veiga.  301 Image 44: Tarsila do Amaral, Anjos [Angels], detail, 1924.  316

Acknowledgements

I have received the support of many writers, artists, and researchers experienced in the study of Brazilian modernism, both past and present, whose works have been an indispensable model and lesson, including Jorge Schwartz, Augusto de Campos, João Alexandre Barbosa, Alfredo Bosi, Luiz Costa Lima, Silviano Santiago, Walnice Nogueira Galvão, Flora Süssekind, Gênese Andrade, Heitor Martins, Leyla Perrone, Flávia Toni, Manoel Corrêa do Lago, Gérard Béhague, Gilberto Mendes, Willy Corrêa de Oliveira, Caio Pagano, Héctor Olea, Mário da Silva Brito, Arnaldo Saraiva, Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna, Aracy Amaral, and others named in the bibliography to whom I express my appreciation for their guidance and example. I acknowledge my intellectual debts to Jorge de Sena for his direction of my studies of Brazilian literature and in Brazil to Benedito Nunes and Haroldo de Campos for their guidance and exemplary studies of modernism. I owe thanks to the Benson Collection of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin for use of its extensive and rich archives, to the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale, to the Sterling Memorial Library, and to the MacMillian Center for International and Area Studies for a fellowship grant to support research on this project. I am especially grateful to Tarsilinha do Amaral for her interest in this book and for kind permission to reproduce works by her aunt, Tarsila do Amaral. Leda Rita Cintra and heirs of Patrícia Galvão generously gave permission to use her drawings. I also wish to thank poet Chris WallaceCrabbe for permission to quote from his poems ‘The Amorous Cannibal’ and ‘Eating the Future II’. Thanks also to Richard Zenith for his translations from Oswald de Andrade’s Pau Brasil. I wish to thank my editor Laurel Plapp for the patience, support, and encouragement that made this book possible, and to the general editors of the Cultural History and Literary Imagination series, Christian Emden and David Midgley.

xvi

Acknowledgements

Elizabeth Jackson, my companion in research, discussion of ideas, and travels throughout Brazil, has encouraged and followed the cannibal angels from the beginning as reader, advisor, and editor to whom this book equally belongs, as if it had always existed. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful for notification of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Image 2:  ‘America’, detail from Matthäus Merian, Archantologia Cosmica, Frankfurt, 1638.

Image 3:  Tarsila do Amaral, Sketch for A Negra, in Blaise Cendrars, Brésil, des hommes sont venus, 1987. Permission for all of Tarsila’s works granted by her niece, Tarsilinha do Amaral.

Introduction to 100 Years of the Brazilian Avant-Garde

Portugal vestiu o selvagem. Cumpre despi-lo. Portugal dressed the savage. He must be undressed. – Oswaldo Costa

This book is a cultural history and interpretation of Brazilian modernism in arts and letters with a critical perspective that demands a transatlantic point of view. In the period from the first decade of the twentieth century until the end of the 1920s, artists, writers, musicians, and architects from both sides of the Atlantic interacted to create a modern style for Brazil by mixing European and Brazilian materials and designs. This dynamic continued the interplay between Brazil and Europe that had defined the study and description of Brazilian civil and political society, nature, and indigeneity throughout the colonial period and nineteenth-century empire. The difference is that Brazilian modernists openly challenge dominant European influences through artistic proficiency and talent, perfected in studies with European artists; and they integrate regional, folkloric, Afro-Brazilian, and indigenous materials in their creations. Their works are important for their aesthetic independence or singularity, for being part of an international avant-garde, and because they shape national expression and self-definition for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Modernist works have renewed relevance today both because of transatlantic dialogues based on hybridity and assimilation, two primary features of Brazil’s social history, and by depicting their difference from Europe by giving a creative twist to received tradition. With its increasingly important role in global affairs, Brazil’s major artists, such as Tarsila do Amaral, are featured prominently in major museums in the United

2

Introduction to 100 years of the Br azilian Avant-Garde

States and Europe, and the central modernist concept of antropofagia, or ‘cannibalism’, occupies a central role in critical inquiry in international circles.1 Saulo Goveia notes that recent Anglo-American theories change antropofagia into a ‘[…] defying model of resistance that can be updated and used against Yankee cultural imperialism […] sometimes applied retroactively […]’.2 Antropofagia has become a widely adopted concept because it proposes a theory of cultural autonomy based on a model of fusion, hybridity, and assimilation: The drive to make the field of international relations “more global” has included a series of efforts by scholars in developing world countries to draw on regional, national or local experiences and thought so as to propose alternative perspectives. Brazilian anthropophagy can enhance this toolkit of theoretical perspectives by providing a distinctive take on cultural, social, economic and political encounters that is at once epistemologically unique and, on the other hand, aligned with other postcolonial enterprises in international relations theorizing. The metaphor of anthropophagy is exciting in part because it relies on humour, and specifically irony, to critique North– South epistemologies and worldviews, while acknowledging their seminal influence in Brazilian culture and hybridizing them with indigenous roots.3

1

2 3

For a thorough overview of antropofagia in recent international criticism, see Fabiano Seixas Fernandes, ‘Antropofagia, Brasilidade and Translation in Recent International Scholarship’, Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies 3 (2019), 1–24. . Examples of recent treatments include the edited volume of essays Eating Shakespeare: Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology (2019), featuring both Brazilian and European contributors, and the exhibit Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx at the New York Botanical Garden, June 8–September 29, 2019, coordinated by Edward Sullivan. Saulo Gouveia, ‘Private Patronage in Early Brazilian Modernism’, Luso-Brazilian Review 46.2 (2009), 92. Adriana Erthal Abdenur, ‘Devouring International Relation:  Anthropophagy and the Study of South-South Cooperation’, in Emma Mawdsley, Elsje Fourie, Wiebe Nauta, eds, Researching South-South Development Cooperation:  The Politics of Knowledge Production (Rethinking Development) (New York, London: Routledge, 2019).

Introduction to 100 years of the Brazilian Avant-Garde

3

It embodies a method of cultural interrelation and synthesis through metaphor.4 At the same time it raises the question of a primitivist, assimilative, and aggressive component of psychology and social organization, purportedly based on the practice of cannibalism by the Tupinambá: ‘By revisiting the image of the cannibal in the twentieth century, Oswald de Andrade is […] establishing a dialogue not only with the travel and captivity narratives of the early Americas, but also with these ancient cultural traditions’.5 The ritual of eating and assimilation, as universal, lies at the heart of antropofagia, which was launched in Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto, published in the first number of the 1928 Revista de Antropofagia (Cannibal Magazine). The context of this book is the wider import of the Brazil-Europe modernist exchange, which only began to be construed through patient research and retrospective accounts by Brazilian scholars some fifty years after the Week of Modern Art in 1922. A fuller picture of Brazilian modernism in its transatlantic context has often proved elusive or fragmentary, since it involves literature, visual arts, music, architecture, and landscape design, all of which are interrelated and mutually influential during this period. The critical concepts and perspectives proposed in this book are meant to contribute towards a new framework for a broader understanding of the transatlantic modernist exchange. Published in an ephemeral magazine, the Cannibal Manifesto was soon forgotten in Brazil and only republished after thirty-one years. One of the reasons for the neglect was its very humour, insouciance, and wry wit. International scholarship began only after the translations to Spanish (1978) and French (1984). After sixty-three years, the manifesto was translated to English and published in an academic journal. In the years since, the idea of antropofagia from Oswald de Andrade’s manifesto has been 4

5

For the implications for translation, see Rainer Guldin, ‘Devouring the Other: Cannibalism, Translation and the Construction of Cultural Identity’, in N.  Paschalis, M.-V. Kyritsi, eds, Translating Selves:  Experience and Identity between Languages and Literatures (London: Continuum, 2008), 121. Antonio Luciano de Andrade, Tosta, ‘Modern and Postcolonial? Oswald de Andrade’s Antropofagia and the Politics of Lasbeling’, Romance Notes 51.2 (2011), 219.

4

Introduction to 100 years of the Br azilian Avant-Garde

widely embraced by different fields and reinterpreted as a metaphor for modes of relationships, or as socio-political theory within the framework of postcolonial studies, among other readings, whether or not these applications were present in the original.6 The fields of translation theory and history of art in particular have adapted cannibalism as metaphor. A recent generalized presentation of the term is to be found in the book Tarsila do Amaral: Cannibalizing Modernism (2019), a critical retrospective of the artist’s career in a series of essays and images published by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). In light of scholarship citing the misuses of cannibalism in contemporary critical theory, and referencing the comprehensive anthology Antropofagia Hoje (Anthropophagy Today, 2011), this study returns to the original context of Oswald de Andrade’s antropofagia as an avant-garde construct to recover its meaning and reception.7 The vanguard humour, much of the hyperbole and witty invention and something of the absurd in Oswald’s manifesto, has been lost with time, as the openness of his concept begins to be diverted to different areas of thought. As an antidote to the unrestrained application of the concept, Michel Riaudel points out the farce, parody, excess, provocation, and even buffoonery of the cannibal escapade.8 Benedito Nunes adds the blend of controversial provocations, theoretical proposals, jokes, puns, derisive slurs, and philosophy.9 In that light, this book further aims to demonstrate the importance of the unorthodox Brazilian-European modernist experience to current comparative scholarship on modernism and modernist literature in global perspective. 6 7 8 9

For example, author Maryse Condé expands literary cannibalism to mean any attempt ‘to transcend national or cultural delineation’. See Charlotte Druckman, ‘Cooking the Books’, New York Times Book Review (December 22, 2019), 17. See C. Richard King, ‘The (Mis)uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Criticism’, Diacritics (Spring 2000), 106–23. Michel Riaudel, ‘L’anthropophagie, une singularité du modernisme brésilien?’ in Le modernisme brésilien, Sous la direction de Rita Olivieri-Godet et Maryvonne Boudoy (Paris: Université Paris 8, 2000), 40. See Benedito Nunes, ‘Anthropophagic Utopia, Barbarian Metaphysics’, in Mari Carmen Ramírz and Héctor Olea, orgs., Inverted Utopias:  Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven, CT and Houston, TX:  Yale University Press and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2004), 57.

Introduction to 100 years of the Brazilian Avant-Garde

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A distinctive dimension of the Brazilian avant-garde is significant participation by women in arts and letters. While artists Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral are well known, many other important figures deserve attention, from the tragic muse of Oswald de Andrade’s garçonnière, ‘Deise’ or ‘Miss Cyclone’ (Maria de Lourdes Castro Dolzani, 1902–19) to pianists Guiomar Novaes, Lucília Villa-Lobos, Madalena Tagliaferro, Maria Virgínia Leão Velloso, and Lúcia Branco da Silva; vocalists Vera Janacopulos, Elsie Houston, Bella de Andrada, and Pureza Marcondes; sculptors Adriana Janacopulos, Elisabeth Nobiling, and Maria Martins; artists Zina Aita, Helena Pereira da Silva and Regina Graz; author and political militant Patrícia Galvão (Pagu); and patron Olívia Guedes Penteado. Four essential works created in the 1920s guide and orient this cultural history, beginning with Heitor Villa-Lobos’ 1926 orchestral composition, Choro No. 10, with its clashing timbres, augmented instrumentation, and syncopated rhythms; the 1928 Revista de Antropofagia (Cannibal Magazine) with its theme of cannibalism, codified in Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ (Cannibal Manifesto); and the iconic image of a cannibal in the painting O Abaporu (1928) by Tarsila do Amaral. The Cannibal Magazine provides an important platform for social and political critiques and a programme of reform, relying on iconoclasm, humour, and satire. These individual works provide a broader conceptual framework for the creative activity that was generated by iconic exchanges among Brazilian and European artists, writers, and their ideas, travels, education, works, and contacts. In the arts, the Brazilians were educated in the European tradition before they discovered that they were equally heirs in their artistic practices to popular, folkloric, and musical traditions. The country’s rich cultural formation had been the subject of late nineteenth-century collections by Sílvio Romero, among others, who published volumes of popular songs, folk poetry, and ethnographic studies, particularly the Etnografia selvagem on Brazil’s ‘primitive races’.10 *** 10 See Sílvio Romero, Etnologia selvagem:  estudo sobre a memória ‘Região e raças selvagens do Brasil’ (Recife, 1875); Cantos populares do Brasil, 2 vols (Lisboa: Nova

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Introduction to 100 years of the Br azilian Avant-Garde

The presence of Brazilians in Europe and of Europeans in Brazil, as well as the intense interrelationships among them, energize modernism and stimulate its artists, writers, and musicians in the century’s first three decades. Literature and the arts, rather than politics or economics, shape the international view of Brazil, although the modernist artists were often financed by influential patrons or by state fellowships and officially supported by the diplomatic mission in France, where their presence was connected to their country’s national image.11 Patronage from the coffee aristocracy in São Paulo reveals important schisms within Brazilian society at the centenary of independence in 1922. Author and leader of the movement in São Paulo, Mário de Andrade, writes retrospectively in 1942 that the aristocracy that supported modernism, although they hated the modernists and the immigrant bourgeoisie, was already devouring itself self-destructively.12 That they supported the modernists, as Saulo Goveia perceptively observes, signals an incongruous attempt to extend their influence and control over high culture, and, it could be added, their influence in Parisian circles and with the diplomatic corps by supporting the presence of Brazilian artists in Europe.13 Modernist authors Patrícia Galvão and Oswald de Andrade would denounce the sexual and financial decadence of the coffee aristocracy in Galvão’s 1933 novel, Industrial Park, and in Oswald de Andrade’s 1937 play, O Rei da Vela (‘The Candle King’). Despite these criticisms and reservations, the support of patrons was essential for the education, development, and success of modernist artists, musicians, and architects. The complexity of Brazil’s interwoven historical and cultural relationship with Europe, juxtaposed to a renewed search for national expression, provides a catalyst for ideas, themes, and works of avant-garde artists,

11 1 2 13

Livraria Internacional, 1883); Estudos sobre a poesia popular do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Laemmert & Cia., 1888); and Etnografia brasileira: estudos críticos sobre Couto de Magalhães, Barbosa Rodrigues, Theophilo Braga e Ladislau Netto (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Clássica de Álves & Cia., 1888). Saulo Goveia analyses the overlooked role of patron Paulo Prado and his financial influence on development of modernism in Brazil; see ‘Private Patronage in Early Brazilian Modernism’, Luso-Brazilian Review 46.2 (2009), 90–111. See Mário de Andrade, O movimento modernista (Rio de Janeiro: CEB, 1942). See Saulo Gouveia (2009), 94.

Introduction to 100 years of the Brazilian Avant-Garde

7

whether European or Brazilian. The historical background suggests that for Europeans Brazil is always an exciting discovery, whereas for Brazilians Europe is an obligatory return. A main goal of the Brazilian modernists is to transform the historical transatlantic dynamic into international recognition of a Brazilian aesthetic in the arts with a high degree of originality, to be accompanied by theories with an independence of thought, challenging those received from Europe. Historian Emília Viotti da Costa worried that the strategy to gain international recognition replaced any desire by intellectuals to analyse social problems or to initiate reforms: ‘Very often the intellectuals’ commitment to reform was more an expression of their wish to “elevate” Brazil to the category of a civilized nation, than of their recognition of the structural needs of Brazilian society’.14 Works by Brazilian modernists share the wide appeal throughout the European avant-gardes of folk and musical traditions, travel and research in indigenous cultures and societies, and the ideal of national modernization in arts and ideas.15 In their works, intellectuals and artists apply their particular creative visions to shape the nature and definition of modernity for the twentieth century. They elicit international dialogue using Brazilian folk materials. Their intellectual and artistic programmes are full of tensions and contradictions that emanate from both sides of the Atlantic in confrontation. The subsequent alliances and conflicts strengthen works through hybridity and synthesis. For example, the modernists continue the tradition of study in Europe that had begun with the French artistic mission of 1816; they place indigenous and folkloric themes within accepted formal structures of Western art and music; their dedication to a national art is necessarily developed in international context and through contacts with the European avant-gardes, whether through travel or reading. The indigenous 14 Emília Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire:  Myths and Histories (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 197. 15 At that time there was little study or contact with indigenous peoples. The explorer Cândido Rondon (1865–1958) became the first director of the Indian Protection Service (SPI) circa 1912, and Edgar Roquette-Pinto (1884–1954) made recordings of the Nambiquara that he placed in the National Museum and documented in his book Rondônia (1916). Folk materials were considered part of national heritage and thus could be incorporated into the modernists’ artistic repertoire.

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Introduction to 100 years of the Br azilian Avant-Garde

and folkloric materials in their works largely come from books, aside from travel impressions in Brazil and the Americas. Theirs is the first generation to grow up after the abolition of slavery (1888) and proclamation of the republic (1889). Tarsila do Amaral and VillaLobos were born when the country was still a monarchy and slave society, and they grew up in a period of rapid change promoted by immigration and urbanization. Their adherence to modernism in the arts implies a sea change in their interaction with social structures and practices from the past. Questions of labour organization, women’s rights, patriarchal control of society, Catholic morality, and modernization occupy the pages of the Cannibal Magazine, whereas questions of inequality, social justice, prejudice, and racial hierarchy, although occasionally addressed, will only come to the forefront of political debate after three-quarters of a century. According to sociologist Florestan Fernandes, the modernists were victims of a moment of transition, attenuating their social criticism as part of a society that they could not renounce. Their dissatisfaction with the past was not strong enough to engender a future worth radical renunciation and struggle.16 Oswald and Tarsila, in particular, enjoyed deep financial resources tied to land and the plantation economy, as well as social ties with the aristocracy and high government officials. As a consequence, modernist innovations would be identified with the cultural policies of the State, its intellectual civil service, and the supporting aristocracy. In the context of the Week of Modern Art, multiple portraits of the national character in literature, art, and music gave prominence to regional folklore, Afro-Brazilian, and indigenous cultures, even if from an idealized and distanced perspective, and included them prominently in the national definition at a time when Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies were still illegal. These and other tensions produce powerful syntheses in art, music, and literature that bring folkloric, Afro-Brazilian, and indigenous materials into mainstream art. The broader modernist portrait of the national character supports the increasing attention being given today to the Brazilian avant-garde. 16 Fernandes, Florestan, A condição do sociólogo (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1978), 34–36. Quoted in Márcia Camargos, Semana de 22:  entre vaias e aplausos (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2002), 150–51. My translation.

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Image 4:  Tarsila do Amaral, Sketch for Abaporu, 1928. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.

*** The Brazilian modernists astonished themselves with the Modern Art Week of 1922 in São Paulo and delighted in every subsequent major work produced in the arts. The Week of Modern Art celebrated in the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo from 11 to 18 February 1922 was a focal point for a critical spirit seeking to redefine artistic values and stood as a symbol of a new expressive and interpretative effort by the Brazilian avant-garde. They were confident in their context as the primitives of a new era, in the words of Mário de Andrade,17 and many travelled to Europe to find their place in the world, with nothing to offer except their talent, their belief in themselves, and their desire to modernize their country. To a new sense of brasilidade (‘being Brazilian’) the young artists added a search for innovative and contemporary styles of expression, identified and defined 17 See the ‘Prefácio Interessantíssimo’ (Very Interesting Preface) to Pauliceia Desvairada (1922) (Hallucinated City): ‘Somos na realidade os primitivos de uma era nova’ (We are in reality the primitives of a new era).

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by study with European avant-gardes. The question of what constituted a distinct Brazilian art has roots in nineteenth-century romanticism, where it was linked to nature and indigeneity, ingredients also absorbed by the avant-garde. Gonzaga Duque in A Arte Brasileira (1888) cited cosmopolitanism as the country’s main distinguishing feature, thereby negating the existence of a specific national school.18 In a celebrated essay published in New York in 1873, Machado de Assis identified national character in any kind of writing by Brazilian authors.19 It is this cosmopolitanism, the Brazilian as citizen of the world, that the modernist artists will imbue with specifically chosen national expressions. The works Brazilian modernists made are in the world’s museums today because of what they took from Europe and how they still remained themselves while there. Their presence and study in Europe bolstered the sense that the continent was still important, and Europe counts on Brazil even today to tell the story of its role in fostering modernism in the Americas, as evidenced by close academic and artistic ties and by major museum exhibitions.20 Brazilian modernist artists and intellectuals are the ‘cannibal angels’ who created and lived the reality of a tropical, primitive utopia at the service of modernization in the early twentieth century. The ‘cannibal’ reference is to Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Cannibal Manifesto, which has become a cultural frame of reference for the autonomy of culture in the New World and for the assimilation and reassessment of all that is external, while ‘angels’ is taken from the 1924 painting by Tarsila do Amaral, Anjos, here meant to describe artists and intellectuals who are dedicated to the utopian goal of changing and improving society, either by redefining nationality in a more comprehensive way through folklore, popular sources, and everyday life or by a commitment to political and social justice, documented by personal example and in literary critiques. ‘Angels’ further evokes the playful, cherubic 18

See the useful discussion in Rafael Cardoso’s study, ‘The Brazilianness of Brazilian Art: Discourses on Art and National Identity’ (2012). Gonzaga Duque would later promote modernist art in the journal Fon-Fon that he cofounded. 19 See Machado de Assis, ‘Notícia da atual literatura brasileira:  instinto de nacionalidade’, O Novo Mundo (March 24, 1873); (São Paulo: Agir, 1959), 28–34. 2 0 I am grateful to Seth Wolitz for discussion of these ideas.

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images of angels in sculptures spread throughout Baroque churches, especially those carved by Antônio Francisco Lisboa (Aleijadinho) in late eighteenth-century Minas Gerais. The avant-garde ‘angels’ are consumed by a desire for renewal, expressed with energy, inventiveness, explosive humour, and sheer brilliance of avant-garde play. ‘Cannibal Angels’, the terms combined, evaluates Brazilian production in visual arts, music, and letters from the perspective of its international dialogue and interplay with the European avant-gardes, as well as for the radical critiques of its alternative utopian vision of Brazilian culture. *** Characteristic of modernism as a whole is the promotion of a critical consciousness of national reality, accompanied by integration or incorporation of its most diverse elements: the Indian and the Portuguese, the piano and the berimbau, the jungle and the city.21 The ‘cannibal angels’ are the leaders in the arts and letters of a young, emergent early twentieth-century culture in need of a valid new identity. While they challenge and redefine the country’s identification with its past, the modernists are desperate to participate in the European avant-gardes so to catch up with talented creators who are the sign of the new.22 For this they will have to separate themselves from an attachment to land, family, and tradition, some by extensive reading and others by travel. The famous slogan from the cannibal manifesto referring to the indigenous Tupi-Guarani peoples, ‘Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question’ exemplifies their method and cultural focus. The European model is embraced, yet altered in a sense of discovery of its inherent instability and double meaning. Shakespeare is tropicalized, and the operation is disguised as a vanguard joke. Oswald’s manifesto presents a Tupi counterpoint to the romanticized, imported notion of the noble savage prevalent since romanticism. While mocking European concepts, 21 The single most comprehensive source on Brazilian modernism and its international connections is Maria Rossetti Batista, Os artistas brasileiros na Escola de Paris: Anos 1920 (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2012). 22 For a debate on the origins and meaning of antropofagia, see Heitor Martins, ‘Canibais Europeus e Antropófagos Brasileiros’, (1968) and Benedito Nunes, Oswald, Canibal (1979).

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the manifesto paradoxically takes the ‘point of view’ of the cannibal, who is oblivious to rhetoric or discourse, and thereby subverts formative European influences in intellectual life to elevate telluric primitivism as a world view.23 Oswald’s primitivism is highly literary, taken in differing measures from Hans Staden’s 1557 book describing his experiences as captive of the Tupinambá,24 from explorers in the jungles, and from European theorists such as James George Fraser, Sigmund Freud, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. According to philosopher Benedito Nunes, such a panorama rejects the rationalistic centre of European culture in order to stress the popular, ethnographic, and folkloric dimensions of Brazilian reality: For Oswald de Andrade above all, it was primitivism that would enable us to encounter in foreign artistic discoveries and inventions that mixture of ingenuousness and purity, of instinctive rebellion and mythical constructions that formed the psychological and ethnic foundation of Brazilian culture. (1979, 25–26)

In the 1920s the Brazilians are like all of the other international artists in Paris: they are breaking out, looking for urbanity, composer Heitor VillaLobos going for lunch with Prokofiev, artist Tarsila do Amaral inviting the French avant-garde for caipirinhas and feijoada. Satie, Brancusi, Cocteau dropping in, and the ever-present Cendrars. In Paris the cannibal angels devour its culture in high style; it is a grand ball and coming of age. Poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade captures the state of exuberance in an ironic quatrain of his poem ‘Flight’: ‘I’ll lose myself in a thousand orgies / Of Greco-Latin thought. / Museums! Statues! Cathedrals! / Brazil has only cannibals’.25 It is all an apprenticeship and a moment of confidence – Villa-Lobos composing some 100 pieces, organizing three major recitals in Paris’ best halls; artists Tarsila, Anita Malfatti, and Vicente do Rego Alessandra Santos presents the manifesto as a satire in Arnaldo Canibal Antunes (2012), 15. 24 Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen (True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America). 2 5 Carlos Drummond de Andrade, ‘Fuga’, Alguma Poesia (1930). Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this book are mine. 23

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Monteiro showing their paintings. Their Parisian moment bubbles with excess, allure, and aestheticism that was not meant to last; those years were to be the last dance with Europe as leading partner before the inevitable voyage back. The gravitational force that would bring them back to Brazil by 1930, according to Maggie Kilgour, was an extraordinarily persistent nostalgia, or perhaps they were feeling an ingrained Portuguese saudade linked to nationalism. A line by Oswald de Andrade: ‘Brazil is a federal republic full of trees and of people saying good-bye. Then everyone dies’.26 *** The story of their transatlantic voyages is both a quest motif, the search for an elusive goal of expression, and a pilgrimage to the distant sources of their hybrid culture. Throughout the colonial period, the Atlantic only augmented their differences from Europe, as noted by historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam: ‘Unlike the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, the Atlantic only emerged as a two-sided zone of interaction at the very end of the fifteenth century, and when it did so the two sides had very different weights, since they were clearly organized at the two ends of a political and imperial spectrum until at least the end of the eighteenth century’.27 As substitute cannibals, Brazilians are beginning to feast on their physical discoveries of the uniqueness of the land and on the physical bodies and facts of Brazil around them. They continue to improvise on these themes throughout their works, writing as if ‘just Brazilians of our time’, in Oswald’s phrase. Mário de Andrade declaims in verse: ‘I glorify the truth of things that exist’.28 Yet they initiate a rediscovery, in the phrase of historian Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda, and promote a definition of Brazilian character through awareness of the presence of indigenous cultures, by 26 ‘O Brasil é uma república federativa cheia de árvores e de gente dizendo adeus. Depois todos morrem’, Oswald de Andrade, ‘Recordação do País Infantil’, Serafim Ponte Grande (São Paulo: Globo, 2007), 64. 27 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Between Eastern Africa and Western India, 1500–1650: Slavery, Commerce, and Elite Formation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 61.4 (2019), 806. 28 Mário de Andrade, ‘Carnival Carioca’, Clã do Jaboti (1923): ‘Glorifico a verdade das coisas existentes’.

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juxtaposing the raw and the cooked, exclusion and incorporation, margin and centre, and history and ritual. The cannibalistic metaphor had come from Europe through Hans von Staden’s book, and its timeliness returned across the Atlantic to vanguard Europe through anthropological and artistic primitivism, for example, in Fraser’s Golden Bough, Cendrars’ Anthologie Négre, Marinetti’s ‘Il negro’, Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Picabia’s magazine and manifesto Cannibales, Lévy-Bruh’s La mentalité primitive, and Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Lévi-Strauss would arrive in Brazil in 1935, the origin of his celebrated book, Tristes Tropiques. From the manifesto: Law of Man. Law of the Cannibal. For the Brazilian avant-garde, after 1500 everything comes down to devouring. Antropofagia, an elastic and playful modernist metaphor of cultural cannibalism elaborated in the wake of Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto during the high phase of Brazil’s historical vanguard (1928–30), is now being discussed broadly as metaphor of the century, capable of re-centring the debate on art and ideas in the postcolonial sphere. Only anthropophagy unites us. Given new currency in the age of globalization since the 1990s, the cannibal idea is undergoing re-examination as a guiding cultural metaphor, particularly relevant to decolonization and the ascendency of plurality and diversity. João Cezar de Castro Rocha differentiates between anthropophagy as a vital theory versus an indiscriminate presentation and reception as a product: ‘Anthropophagy has become much more of a product than a theory of export. As a theory, it stimulates critical reflection on the asymmetries of globalization. As a product, its reach is reduced to an embarrassing self-exoticism’.29 In antropofagia, Western cultures take a lesson and see themselves through indigenous eyes. The banquet metaphor likewise has a pre-history, rooted in the scientific and cultural Darwinism debated in Brazil before the turn of the century, which could be said to prepare the ground for the modernist manifesto.30 29 ‘A antropofagia tornou-se muito mais um produto do que uma teoria de exportação. Como teoria, estimula uma reflexão crítica sobre as assimetrias da globalização. Como produto, seu alcance se reduz ao autoexotismo constrangedor’ (Facebook post, July 3, 2019). 30 See Roger Shattuck, Banquet Years:  The Arts in France, 1885–1918 (New  York: Doubleday, 1958).

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Machado de Assis provides an unexpected precursor for the cannibal humour and cultural parody of the manifesto in two major novels, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Quincas Borba. Machado ridicules universalist philosophies of his day when Quincas Borba, the mad philosopher who oscillates between the margins and centre of society, between madness and reason, expounds his great theory of ‘Humanitism’. The amoral devouring of the individual by the species that lies at the heart of Quincas’s grand philosophy – to the victor the potatoes – is but a small step away from the modernist manifesto’s absorption of the sacred enemy. In a column for the series Bons Dias!, Machado de Assis humorously considers the implications of inventing Brazilian terms for phrases imported into the language from French, which in one case could lead to anthropophagy: ‘I have eaten and will continue to eat filet de boeuf, certainly, but with the idea in mind that I’m eating sirloin, but the same could not be said for bouchées de dames, for example, because mouthful of ladies gives the idea of anthropophagy, because of the misconception of the word’.31 Some seventy years after Oswald de Andrade’s cannibal manifesto, the theory of antropofagia is being revisited as if all along it had been recognized as one of the century’s controlling metaphors, capable of joining postcolonial theory to contemporary art and cultural studies. In 1998 the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro mounted an exhibition, Antropofagia: Releituras (Anthropophagy: Re-readings) based on artefacts underlying the national cultural metaphor, while hosting an international conference charged with re-evaluating the meaning of the manifesto in the 1990s. Almost simultaneously, the most distinguished art exhibition in Latin America, the XXIVth Art Biennial of São Paulo, chose antropofagia as the theme of the continent’s last major art exhibition of the century. It proved to be a bold choice of exceptional density, historical depth, and conceptual innovation. A spirit of radical revision took over the Biennial: instead of catalogues, the exhibition produced four books informed by historical concept and

31

‘Tenho comido e comerei filet de boeuf, é certo, mas com restrição mental de estar comendo lombo de vaca. Nem tudo, porém, se presta a restrições; não poderia fazer o mesmo com as bouchées de dames, por exemplo, porque bocados de senhoras dá ideia de antropofagia, pelo equívoco da palavra’ (7 March 1889).

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theory. Antropofagia was chosen as the Biennial’s theme because it relates Brazil both to its origins and to Western culture within a framework of dialogue and plurality. It joins vanguard innovation with cultural emancipation. Antropofagia transfers the focus of art history from its European centre to a Brazilian reality. The XXIVth Biennial Art exhibit constituted a moment of reflection on cultures, identities, and subjectivities in the context of the constructive and destructive ambivalence of antropofagia. Thus, before its centenary, antropofagia was already the recognized theory of the century in Brazilian arts and letters. *** The Cannibal Manifesto’s very ambivalence, idiosyncrasy, elasticity, and ambiguous language – in 52 aphorisms – have rendered it adaptable to a number of contemporary theoretical and ideological positions, from transculturalism and hybridity to Orientalism, subaltern studies, and even to the internet, described by Patrick Tonks as a ‘cannibal network’.32 Adriana Abdenur finds its major contributions in understanding international hybrid forms, addressing power asymmetries, and questioning Western-centric biases in a ‘critical devouring and creative assimilation of cultural products or ideas’.33 Additionally, she considers it applicable to international diplomacy and to North-South relations, since its artistic and intellectual processes are bilateral, part of a ‘multidirectional, global phenomenon’. 34 Yet the manifesto is notoriously difficult to define:

32 Patrick O’Reilly Tonks, ‘Cannibal Routes: Mapping the Atlantic as a Network of Appropriations’, Ph.D. Diss., University of Michigan (2013), 219. The thesis includes a major chapter on Oswald de Andrade’s novel Serafim Ponte Grande. 33 Adriana Erthal Abdenur, ‘Devouring International Relations:  Anthropophagy and the Study of South-South Cooperation’, in Emma Mawdsley, Elsje Fourie, and Wiebe Nauta, eds, Researching South-South Development Cooperation (London: Routledge, 2019), 2. 34 Camila Maroja, ‘From São Paulo to Paris and Back Again: Tarsila do Amaral’, Stedelijk Studies 9 (2019), 10.

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It has proliferated into an exasperating polysemy: sometimes it is the name of a concept approximating that of hybridity or transculturation, it is also the name of a style, of a theory, of a philosophy, of a deconstruction of all theory, of a political praxis redeploying the colonial discourse of the cannibal for purposes of decolonization, the name for a dislocation of traditional subjectivity, or simply the title of a painting.35

Anthropophagy started with what Abdenur calls ‘the process whereby Brazilian cultural elites digested European modernism while affirming indigenous cultural sources’.36 Carlos Jáureguy is more blunt in his assessment: ‘The cannibal sign in the Antropofagia of the late 1920s was an aesthetic gesture of a peripheral cultural elite that claimed a vernacular difference (national culture dressed as cannibal) in order to participate in modern global times, “synchronizing the watch” of the national culture, as Andrade put it’.37 At its onset, anthropophagy was neither nationalist nor revolutionary, since it commingled external influences with local or indigenous ones and sought international recognition of Brazil’s synthetic modernity; by incorporating a transatlantic viewpoint, it remained equidistant from periphery and centre.38 For contemporary viewers, at a distance of almost 100 years, Brazilian modernist art raises troubling issues of race, class, and appropriation.39 Yet the manifesto was always complex. Its elusive language and theoretical malleability belonged to a playful aesthetic declaration of indigenous and modernist independence. And for Flora Süssekind, the manifesto was Aarnoud Rommens, ‘Antropofagia: Fleshing out the Image’, Academia.edu, The University of Western Ontario, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, n.d., Web. (07 November 2013), 1. 36 Abdenur (2019), 1. 37 Carlos A. Jáuregui, ‘Untitled review of Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil, ed. and trans. Niel L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier’, Luso-Brazilian Review 47.1 (2010), 222–23. 3 8 Kalinca Costa Söderlund, ‘Antropofagia:  A Highly Critical “ArrièreGarde” Modernism in 1920s Brazil’, RIHA Journal 0132 (15 July 2016), 10. URL:  . 39 Sara Roffino, ‘Why MoMA’s Exhibition of Towering Brazilian Modernist Tarsila do Amaral Misses the Mark’, Artnet news (March 1, 2018). 35

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notably ‘an imperious self-satire’.40 Its 52 aphorisms read like a series of clever illuminations. Abdenur senses its caricature both of the ‘civilized’ and the ‘enlightened’ in its assimilation and subjugation of European social philosophy to indigenous ideas.41 Perhaps the manifesto’s notable freedom of composition and association can be linked to Tarsila’s and Oswald’s position in the late 1920s as intellectual outsiders, Brazilians in Paris, who were viewing their country with ironic detachment. They lived as well at a comparable distance from national folklore and local traditions, which they researched in books. In the sense of anthropologist James Clifford, they are travellers in the 1920s for whom participant observation brings ‘[…] a kind of hermeneutic freedom to circle inside and outside social situations’.42 They occupy a ‘space in between’, in the theory of Silviano Santiago, neither wholly Brazilian nor European.43 The dense referentiality of the manifesto can be traced to the satirical assimilative technique invented in fiction by author Machado de Assis, who cited hundreds of European sources or antecedents in his novels that he adapted with humour and wit into Brazilian reality. Machado revived and popularized a mode that Claude Rawson, in his broad study of literary cannibalism in historical world cultures, identifies as fundamental satire.44 The manifesto’s iconoclasm, insouciant humour, and linguistic play are limitations for theorists looking for a consistent or coherent platform. If anthropophagy had been a doctrine, even an unorthodox one, its loose manner of presentation would have added to its limitations. In its day, in a country where abolition came only in 1888, a year before the end of 40 Flora Süssekind, ‘Satire and Temporal Heterogenity’, in Mario J. Valdés et al., eds, Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 256. 41 Abdenur (2019), 1. 42 James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, eds, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), 100. 43 Silviano Santiago, Space-in-Between:  Essays on Latin American Culture, Ana Lúcia Gazzola, ed., Ana Lúcia Gazzola, and Wander Melo Miranda, intro., Tom Burns, Ana Lúcia Gazzola, and Gareth Williams, trans. (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2001). 44 Claude Rawson, ‘Cannibalism and Fiction: Reflections on Narrative Form and “Extreme” Situations’, Genre X (1977), 669.

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empire, anthropophagy could be seen as ‘a counter-movement to the patterns of interaction that led to colonial power and racist thinking’; it was an attempt through satire to subvert the system to which the modernists belonged.45 From current perspectives, however, its inversion of the colonial structure did not succeed in removing or repositioning it, a critique developed by Luís Madureira: the manifesto uses Europe in order to resist and alter European presence in a former colonial world; it employs logic to defend a telluric world of spirit and immanence.46 Yet the manifesto’s permanent contradictions may be counterbalanced by the very fragmentation of its language and thought, built with interruptions, silences, and spaces between each line, supporting association of ideas.47 As an aesthetic performance, its lack of self-awareness, its distance from indigenous cultures, and even its ‘threatening’ message to Parisian avant-gardes form part of its lasting appeal and interpretive flexibility. Overshadowed by the great texts of the West, as Madureira suggests, the manifesto is nevertheless thought to be an elastic and grandiose response,48 one whose avant-garde qualities would require almost half a century to be recovered, recognized, and explored. *** The chapters of this book address the theme of transatlantic modernism, a negotiation of American and European identities and expressions that culminates for Brazil in the Cannibal Manifesto and counts on exemplary figures and works. Our interpretation, which is the intellectual and critical grounding of the book, is built on selected themes and metaphors meant to reveal the meaning and importance of the modernist BrazilEurope exchange. The first major theme selected is the voyage, consisting of geographical and ethnographic travels that shape the modernist period

5 Tonks (2013), 142. 4 46 Luís Madureira, ‘A Cannibal Recipe to Turn a Dessert Country into the Main Course:  Brazilian Antropofagia and the Dilemma of Development’, LusoBrazilian Review 41.2 (2005), 107–08. 47 Rommens (2013), 16. 48 Haroldo Bruno, ‘Do Risco que tem a Antropofagia de Converter-se em Autofagia’, Novos estudos de literatura brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1980), 258.

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as well as artists’ voyages. As art historian Diana B. Wechsler asserts, ‘[…] the notion of travel is key in order to rethink the history of modern art, especially in the first decades of the twentieth century’.49 Constant travel, reaching its zenith in the 1920s, creates a momentum and enlarges the space for the alliance of music, painting, and poetry. Since oceanic travel has been the mode of contact with Brazil ever since the voyage of Cabral in 1500, the modernists’ voyages both contrast with and continue previous kinds of mapping and voyaging. The first air crossing of the South Atlantic in 1922 by Portuguese aviators Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral recapitulates Cabral’s iconic voyage of discovery; Blaise Cendrars’ 1905 travel on the Trans-Siberian railway is repeated in 1934–35 by Patrícia Galvão (Pagu) on her round-the-world voyage. Ronald de Carvalho surveys the Americas in travels to the Caribbean, United States, and Mexico in the early 1920s that produced his volume of poetry encompassing the American continents, Toda a América (1926), in the same year that Villa-Lobos composed Sul América for piano. These travels include many of the prominent figures of the modernist age in Brazil’s arts, letters, and sciences (Villa-Lobos, Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Rego Monteiro), as well as prominent Europeans in Brazil (Arthur Rubenstein, Darius Milhaud, Blaise Cendrars, Le Corbusier, Marinetti, Josephine Baker, Lévy-Strauss). Carvalho provides a conceptual framework by contrasting the ‘profound disquietude’ of early European voyages to the superficial disquietude of distance and velocity of modernist travel. A related conceptual frame views modernist travel in the 1920s in the light of pilgrimage, quest, and utopia. By voyaging to Paris or to Brazil, the Caribbean or Mexico, the artists share qualities with the idea of pilgrimage to centres of faith, knowledge, and discovery where they can recast the quest motif into a transformative search for their personal fulfilment and national modernity. The second chosen conceptual theme is portraiture and self-portraiture, both literal and metaphorical. Currents such as re-writing the discovery, prominent in the Pau Brasil manifesto and poetry, redraw national 49 Diana B. Wechsler, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Cubism and New Art: Latin American Itineraries’, Art in Translation 3.1 (2011), 77.

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self-portraits, as do poems meditating on Brazil’s past by poets Manuel Bandeira and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Modernist artists produce self-portraits in abundance; one of the main activities of this generation is depicting itself. Strolling photographers and Kodaks abound. Portraiture corroborates the emphasis on present time as a break with the past, as well as reaffirms close contacts among the modernists as a generation, exemplified by Tarsila do Amaral’s portraits of Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. Portraiture also involves depictions of a revised definition of Brazil, whether seen in field labourers in Portinari’s Café (Coffee) or in the stylish young women in Di Cavalcanti’s Cinco Moças de Guaretinguetá (Five Young Women from Guaretinguetá). Tarsila’s iconic A Negra (The Black Woman) of 1923 enters into another dimension as a transformative national self-portrait as an Afro-Brazilian woman in an indigenous pose and setting, whose identity and body prefigure the cannibal movement and metaphor. Márcia Castro points out its connection to Tarsila’s self-portrait, Manteau rouge, also from 1923, with arms folded across her chest: ‘In its shallow sense of depth, reduced palette, clean lines, and voluminous shapes, Manteau rouge showcases the early stages of the signature mature style Tarsila would employ in A Negra’.50 The painting may also be seen as a transformative self-portrait of the artist, rethinking canvases by Léger, as documented by Alexandre Eulálio in A aventura brasileira de Blaise Cendrars. Writing for Artnet News, journalist Sara Roffino criticizes the 2018 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for missing the opportunity to answer questions about Tarsila’s legacy and relevance today. She mentions that Tarsila was a ‘lighter-skinned urbanite from elite social contexts – those with political, social, and economic capital’, and thereby raises a question of cultural appropriation, explicitly from Europe yet also from indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures. Whether reaction to this exhibit in 2018 is influenced by these preoccupations is Roffino’s point. Is A Negra a forced labourer? Roffino thinks that Tarsila’s ideas on race and class changed after the economic depression of the 1930s, a view not 50 Márcia Castro, ‘Both Paulistsa and Parisian:  Racial Thinking in A Negra’, in Adriano Pedrosa, ed., Tarsila do Amaral:  Cannibalizing Modernism (São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2019), 54–67. Exhibition catalogue essay.

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present in her major works of the 1920s. The views of the modernists on slavery are unknown since they do not write on the subject, although its sufferings are dramatized in some poems of Oswald de Andrade’s Pau Brasil; they could have been similar to Joaquim Nabuco’s in My Formative Years (Minha Formação, 1900), however, where he remembers the depths of the relationships across class and race, speaking of former slaves with deep affection and admiration as an abolitionist. Roffino criticizes the organizers of the exhibit for their attention to formal characteristics of her art rather than to the social and political background. These and other critiques illustrate differences in North American and Brazilian cultural perspectives and how difficult it is from today’s climate in New York to view this painting as a positive contribution to Afro-Brazilian culture, or to accept its prominent role as one of the innovative sources of national definition in art. The third theme is improvisation, play, and humour. Oswald’s 1918–19 scrapbook O Perfeito Cozinheiro das Almas deste Mundo (Perfect Cookbook of the Souls of this World) reveals the passionate episode of Oswald and Miss Cíclone (Cyclone), a young student from the interior, through annotations, objects, and post cards left by frequenters of Oswald’s garçonnière; whereas Tarsila’s travel scrapbook, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2018, is a recreation of the 1920s through tickets, receipts, notes, and collected miscellany from her travels in the period. The voyage, carnival fantasy, artistic persona, regional stereotypes, and the ethnic immigrant are main ingredients of a humorous self-portrait of Brazil’s early twentieth-century modernity. It is comic largely because of the juxtaposition of such disparate characters, speech, and social practices in one national space. Improvisation characterizes one of the synthetic musical forms of popular street music called choro in its melodic line and rhythmic variations. Led by flutist-saxophonist Pixinguinha,51 the Afro-Brazilian group ‘Oito Batutas’, from 1919, performed choros at the Shéhérazade Club in Paris from January to July 1922. Villa-Lobos composed his fourteen choros in Paris, incorporating folkloric materials and carnival percussion instruments into 51

Alfredo Viana da Rocha, Jr. (1897–1973), composer, flutist, and saxophonist specializing in choro.

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Western musical forms, involving a major change in the orchestra through improvisation by incorporating popular genres, instruments, and rhythms. The final major focus selected for the book is primitivism and utopia, in which the mechanism is both assimilation by ethnography, travel, or artistic and intellectual incorporation. The two themes lead to a radical change in Brazil’s political and social organization and its national self-definition. The cannibal theme centres on Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 manifesto, a vanguard statement and clever adaptation of the primitivist metaphor that affects the artists themselves, who hinge their identity as international artists on their ingenuous nativist and nationalist agenda. Cannibalism, ultimately, has little to do with evocation of the historical indigenous ritual; its purpose instead is to showcase Brazilian primitivism created by contemporary urban artists and writers in the spirit of the European avant-gardes for international consumption as a form of modernity, for which antropofagia is primarily an avant-garde manifesto. Ethnographic landscapes and sonorities form part of the Brazilian intellectuals’ transatlantic presentation of themselves in a primitive mode, related to the ballet in artistic works and performances calculated to reflect Brazil’s indigenous cultures, regional folklore, and the vast Amazonian interior. The perceived innocence, simplicity, and cultural hybridity of everyday Brazilian urban life is projected as a positive corollary of such primitivism. The sonorities of the choros of Villa-Lobos performed in Parisian concert halls present to the European avant-garde a different kind of ethnographic, primitive expression, with ‘Amazonian’ themes and percussion instruments taken from urban carnival and samba. The idealized and utopian past theorized in the manifesto is an artistic façade meant to enchant Europe and promote a revisionist self-description, which is the illusion that supports the modernists’ abstract presentation of themselves as ‘primitives’ on the stages and in the galleries of the international avant-gardes. Among the flaws in critical interpretations of antropofagia cited by Fabiano Seixas Fernandes is ‘[…] uncritical acceptance of artists’ own claims about their accomplishments, lack of analytical attention to cultural products which could either support or counter those claims’ (2019), 21. Their illusion makes possible a posture, a performance, and the production of a number of significant works, perhaps because of the

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very contradictions that it sustains. The modernists are offering to Europe a folkloric and indigenous Brazil very distant from their own education, travel, urbanity, and identity. They are actors, intermediaries, enchanting Europe with Brazilian cultural expressions, often far from their own experience. One of the hidden consequences of this strategy is to risk being diluted and consumed by assumed identities and by the regressive utopia that they invented, as the exciting moment of confluence loses its peak of relevance and meaning to artistic surfeit, economic collapse, and political ideology at the end of the 1920s. In Brazil, other artists and musicians will develop and perform the popular traditions that the modernists first incorporated in their works, without the transatlantic character of the originals. In the 1960s, Haroldo de Campos was one of the first scholars to recognize and revalue the previously overlooked contribution of Oswald de Andrade and antropofagia. For the next thirty years, he would continue to describe the significance of the manifesto for modernism as a cultural force: Antropofagia is the basic philosophical proposition, the cultural force par excellence, the founding legacy of Brazilian modernism. A brutalist form of deconstruction, avant la lettre. By means of devouring, which is polemical (that is, critical) and anthological (that is, selective in the sense that the cannibal only consumes the valiant enemy, capable of providing nutriment from the marrow), the taboo is transformed into totem. The excluded third party, the ex-centric, by means of the cannibal ritual, appropriates what is of interest from the egocentric culture of the oppressor to practice a kind of Eucharist of the excommunicated. It is the kind of counter conquest of which Lezama Lima speaks. A ‘marxillary’ quick bite. A critical-anthological chewing of otherness that produces creative difference in the cannibal’s shamanistic caldron. (October 5, 1998)52 52 ‘A antropofagia é o filosofema básico, o operador cultural por excelência, o legado fundante do modernismo brasileiro. Uma forma brutalista de “desconstrucionsimo”, avant la lettre. Atravésda devoração, que é polémica (isto é, crítica) e antológica (isto é, seletiva, no sentido de que canibal só devora o inimigo valoroso, capaz de fornecer-lhe o nutrimento do tutano), o tabu se transforma em totem. O terceiro excluído, o ex-cêntrico, através do ritual antropofágico, apropriando-se do que lhe interessa na cultura egocêntrica do opressor, pratica uma espécie de festim eucarístico dos ex-comunicados. É a “contraconquista”, de que fala o cubano Lezama Lima. O coup des dents marxilar. A mastigação críticoantológica da outridade, que produz a diferença criativa no caldeirão xamânico do antropófago’.

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A concluding contemporary perspective involves the museums. Seen from today’s perspectives, the principal visual works of the Brazilian avantgarde have entered international collections and concert halls, gaining a status and narrative approaching mythological proportions. The critical and theoretical frames in this study aim to illuminate some of the unexpected historical continuities of modernism, portray its travels, and critique the complex legacy of its ideals and contradictions.

Image 5:  Tarsila do Amaral, Shaded sketch for Abaporu, 1928.

Image 6:  Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.

Chapter 1

A Guide to Cannibal Kulchur. A Brazilian Modern Art Extravaganza: Amorous Cannibals, Savage Utopias, Hallucinated Cities, Transatlantic Encounters

[…] the savage, too, From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep Guesses at Heaven – Keats ABELARDO I – We’re an avant-garde tale. A case of advanced bourgeoisie […] ABELARDO II – In a medieval country! – Oswald de Andrade, The Candle King I am a fiction in revolt. – Carlos Drummond de Andrade To gnaw a bone – human if possible, mother, father, sister, uncle or cousin, lover, wife, child, grandchild enemy or even friend or the neighbour in front, or a picture in the paper, or someone entirely unknown – a bone. – Jorge de Sena, ‘Ballad of Gnawing on Bones’

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Cannibal Angels and Modern Art in Brazil To close his daring ‘Manifesto antropófago’ (Cannibal Manifesto), published in the Revista de Antropofagia (Cannibal Magazine, on pp. 3, 7) in the opening issue in May 1928, author Oswald de Andrade created a new calendar for Brazil by celebrating the devouring of the Portuguese Bishop Sardine (Pero Fernandes Sardinha, 1496–1556), aptly named for a staple of Portuguese cuisine.

Image 7:  Detail from ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, Revista de Antropofagia, 1928.

The bishop was devoured in July 1556 by the anthropophagous Tupispeaking Caetés peoples, who lived near the mouth of the São Francisco River, as the first bishop in Brazil was sailing back to Portugal. With this final touch of linguistic and historical black humour, Oswald’s manifesto proposed an alternative origin for Brazil, now to be called by the indigenous name for the country, Pindorama, whose history would be dated not from its discovery by the Portuguese in 1500, rather from the date of the ritual devouring of the European prelate. Oswald would later joke that ‘the greatest philosophical problem is not ontological, it is ODONTOlogical’. With Bishop Sardine selected to be the manifesto’s sacrificial victim, the transatlantic nature of the manifesto is firmly established, since the bishop was departing for Lisbon when captured by the Caetés. Part challenge to European primitivism, part continuation of Europe’s self-critique, part debate rejecting Brazil’s history of adventurers and Jesuits, the manifesto imaginatively inverts colonial history to propose a national culture in counterpoint to European voyages of discovery and colonization. The

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manifesto conceives of Brazilian history as a series of routes and voyages, reminiscent of the Portuguese voyages of expansion in the sixteenth century, synthesized in a section of the manifesto that repeats a theme word seven times: ‘Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes’. Oswald’s manifesto about cannibalistic banquets, described in the sixteenth century by Hans Staden and Jean de Léry, is marked by dining on Europeans, who are reclassified as prime material for local consumption. In the manifesto, the discovery of Brazil by Fernão Álvares Cabral in 1500 is overturned and replaced by the vitality of the country’s costal indigenous cultures, as Oswald humorously imagined in a poem: erro de português       mistake in Portuguese Quando o português chegou   When the Portuguese arrived Debaixo duma bruta chuva   In a heavy rainstorm Vestiu o índio. Que pena! Fosse  He dressed the Indian. What a shame! On uma manhã de sol, o índio tinha a sunny morning, the Indian would have despido o português.     undressed the Portuguese. (1925)

Following Oswald’s poem, the manifesto ‘undresses’ the Portuguese, with the aim of replacing the country’s history of colonization with a nationalist popular culture that reverses the bases and nature of its institutions for the tropics: ‘Because the undressed Indian is the perfect image of ingenuousness, of sincerity, or true justice. It means the expulsion of all the adornments that were left (by the Portuguese)’.1 European arrivals are to be assimilated by Brazil’s indigenous past, rather than the reverse, as an antidote to 400 years of national formation. In their travels to Europe, when placed in an avant-garde context shaped in dialogue with African art, the Brazilians participate in a spirited revolt alongside the European avant-gardes,2 following ideas of ethnographers and psychologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The modernist group of cannibal angels – writers, artists, musicians, and architects – is intent on rewriting the country’s history and reforming 1 2

See the 2nd ‘dentition’ of the Cannibal Magazine, no. 4. Andrew Hammond, ‘ “The Unending Revolt”: Travel in an Era of Modernism’, Studies in Travel Writing 72 (September 2003), 169–89.

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its colonial inheritance. The development and projection of a nationalist and revisionist cultural critique that will culminate in the Cannibal Manifesto depends on contacts and exchanges over time with Europeans, to whom the Manifesto and the metaphor of cannibalism are addressed, and on books published by foreign explorers and early ethnographers. The Brazilian avant-garde consists of a loose assembly of individual writers and artists who speak for the whole country by synecdoche and whose goal is to build an international context and reception for their art, while shaping a new theory of nationality.3 While studying and traveling abroad, mostly in Paris but also in Rome, Naples, Florence, Milan, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, and New York, they incorporate local materials – colloquial speech, folk traditions, cuisine, music, dance, and indigenous cultures – into both established and new techniques and forms. The first example of the devouring of Europe by a Brazilian modernist artist is found in the story told to readers in Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s virtually unknown book of drawings of ten famous sites in Paris, Quelques visages de Paris (1925) (Some Views of Paris),4 depicted in a style using minimal iconic signs drawn from world cultures: graphic symbols for living spaces, bridges, water, and leaves of trees.5 The drawings inscribe an American world of virgin forests onto the cosmopolitan city, subjecting the city to reinterpretation through Amazonian and Marajoaran graphic symbols. The Eiffel Tower, for example, becomes a butterfly floating over water.

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4 5

The force for national modernization is at the same time attenuated, as Tom Winterbottom asserts, by a ‘deep memoralizing tendency’ and ‘melancholic nostalgia’ for an entity perceived as yet incomplete, absent, or unstable. See A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro After 1889 (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 16. This important counter-discourse is a subcurrent present throughout modernism. Made available in a fac-simile of the 1925 edition in Jorge Schwartz, ed., Do Amazonas a Paris:  as lendas indígenas de Vicente do Rego Monteiro (São Paulo: edusp: Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, 2005). The symbols are presented in the introduction to P. L. Duchartre’s collection of Brazilian folk tales, Légendes, Croyances, et Talismans des Indiens de l’Amazone (Legends, Beliefs and Talismans of the Amazon Indians) (Paris: Tolmer, 1923), illustrated by Rego Monteiro.

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Image 8:  Eiffel Tower from Rego Monteiro, Quelques visages de Paris, 1925.

In his ‘Word to the Reader’, Rego Monteiro invents a fictitious trip to the Amazon and comically displaces the status of Paris as modernist centre of the arts by exploiting the indigenous theme with humour and exaggeration: One day, an indigenous chief left the virgin forest and traveled in disguise to Paris. After a few days, growing tired of so much magnificence, he returned to his hut. On one of my last trips to the interior of the Amazon, I had the good fortune to meet him. He spoke in confidence about his impressions of Paris and, at the same time, gave me some sketches made in loco, that I collected under the title: Some Views of Paris.6 6

‘Un jour un chef sauvage laissant la forêt vierge vint à Paris incognito, après un petit séjour, blasé de tant de grandeurs il retourna à son ôca (home)’.

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The drawings ostensibly by the Amazonian chief convert ten Parisian locations into primitivist drawings using semiotic symbols, accompanied by short poems in Gothic script: Notre Dame, Tour Eiffel, Trocadéro, Viaduc D’Austerlitz, Pont de Passy, Sacré Coeur, Concorde, Louvre, Jardin des Plantes, and Arc de Triomphe. In this case, the ‘savage’ is at once chief of a tribe, artist, cultured tourist to Paris, and an art-nouveau decadent who renders the city’s monuments in the style of primitivist symbols, a code enabling the Amazonian viewer to understand the form and function of the Parisian landmarks, even though the book is prepared for European readers. Once back in the Amazon, the chief reputedly passes them on to the wandering artist Rego Monteiro, author of the ingenious and imaginative prefatory note. Jorge Schwartz, editor of the facsimile edition, observes that ‘In Quelques visages de Paris, the artdéco/marajoara designs of the chief who visits Paris parody the Kodaks of the globe-trotting avant-garde’ (2005). Rego Monteiro’s book is a striking illustration of anthropophagy three years before the manifesto. Exchanges made possible by multiple voyages of Brazilians to Europe and of Europeans to Brazil address the mutual dependence of national and cosmopolitan arts in the modernist age, at a time when artists from across world geography – Catalonia, Russia, Romania, Italy, the United States, Japan, Brazil, and Portugal – come into close contact during a decade or more in Paris. In her book on Brazilian artists in Europe, Márcia Camargos describes thirty-three painters and musicians who travel to Europe with scholarships from the Pensionato Artístico do Estado de São Paulo from 1912–30.7 Others receive support from the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes and the Instituto Nacional de Música in Rio de Janeiro. To apply the cannibal metaphor, many of these artists begin by devouring their country’s historical past and culture from a creative standpoint. They return to the age of discovery and colonial chronicles as a point of origin from which to

Dans un de mes derniers voyages à l’intérieur de l’Amazone, j’ai eu l’heureuse fortune de le connaître.



Il m’a confié ses impressions sur Paris, en même temps que quelques croquis pris sur place, lesquels j’ai réunis sous le titre de Quelques Visages de Paris’. Márcia Camargos, Entre a vanguarda e a tradição: os artistas brasileiros na Europa (1912–1930) (São Paulo: Alameda, 2011), 134; 308.

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redraw and reshape the country’s cultural history, while studying in Europe, by a process of retelling, turning it inside out, challenging European sources and institutions by inventing a primitivist Utopia. Through their presence in Europe, as will be confirmed by the Cannibal Manifesto, categories of core and periphery are overturned and colonial dominance is superseded by the cannibal banquet. Cannibalism in the Brazilian avant-garde serves the function identified by Maggie Kilgour as ‘a means of demystification, a satirical weapon which literalizes in order to expose the dark truth under our ideals’.8 The point is to show European artists who are fascinated with primitivism Brazil’s potential in its difference from European civilization. In the sphere of art and culture, critic Mário Pedrosa argues that the avant-gardes of peripheral countries try too much to keep up with novelties rather than turn internally towards existential autonomy. In a 1977 exhibit, Alegria de viver, Alegria de criar (Joy of living, Joy of creating), Pedrosa arranges objects made by indigenous peoples that had found their way into European museums, as well as some recordings of indigenous music made in the 1920s, to emphasize their inherent artistic qualities as a form of cultural reparation, to de-mystify them. In an essay on Villa-Lobos, Pedrosa posits primitivism as a primary Brazilian characteristic: Nowadays Brazil continues to find itself at a primitive stage. But its primitivism is not a matter of fashion; nor is it due to this conscious, healthy search for renewal, for rejuvenation of sources for which European intelligence, too tired and too charged with culture, has felt such a deep need. Our primitivism is simpler and less refined; it is quite simply a historical period in our process of growth and development.9

The artists search for a primal Brazil that can stand as a fountain of universal practice, a counterpoint to the discovery of African art by Europeans, exhibited in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, and the basis for making a claim for Brazilian arts in Europe that will lead 8 9

Maggie Kilgour, ‘The function of cannibalism at the present time’, in Frances Barker, Peter Hilme, Margaret Iversen, eds, Cannibalism and the Colonial World (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998), 238–59. Mário Pedrosa Primary Documents, Glória Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff, eds, Stephen Berg, trans. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 230.

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to increased international standing, distinction, and recognition.10 Their search is made easier by its very freshness and novelty. Of the avant-garde techniques that he encountered in Paris in 1923, Oswald decides that primitivism is more suited to their efforts: It went better with us. We were more barbarous and primitive. The other ones would oblige us to take attitudes to which we were not accustomed. So we looked for ways to continue the movement started by Mário in Pauliceia Desvairada. I thought about Brazil. My first reaction was against the falsifiers. Nothing to remind us of Greeks or Romans, no ready-made formulas. What could our country be called, as something primitive? And I found this solution – Pau Brasil – the first material exported that gave the name to the country. Poetry also ought to be that way: POETRY FOR EXPORT AGAINST IMPORT (the first time anyone had this idea). We would no longer receive rather send far away our pure, primitive, original, and simple thoughts. Ours, really ours, ours.11

In his 1926 book of poetry Clã do Jaboti (The Tortoise’s Clan) Mário likewise declares that Brazil belongs to him:  ‘I am Brazil because it is my graceful expression / Because it is my languorous sentiment / Because it is my way of earning money, of eating and of sleeping’.12 Given their desire to remap the geography of discovery and colonization, the Brazilians change the nature of transatlantic travel through the spatial distribution of modernity and modernism.13 In a poem mapping 10 In 1944, seventy Brazilian artists sent works to the Royal Academy of Arts in London to be sold to benefit the Royal Air Force, including paintings by Tarsila, Di Cavalcanti, and Portinari. Of these works, twenty-four have been reassembled for a retrospective in 2018 titled ‘The Art of Diplomacy:  Brazilian Modernism Painted for War’. The curator comments that ‘Brazil wanted to play a bigger role on the world stage’. See Javier Pes, ‘The Brazilian Embassy in London Reboots a Show of Modern Art That Wowed the City in Wartime’, Art Net News (April 3, 2018). 11 Interview, quoted in Dulce Salles Cunha, Autores Contemporâneos Brasileiros (1951), 46. 12 ‘Brasil que eu sou porque é a minha expressão muito engraçada / Porque é o meu sentimento pachorrento / Porque é o meu jeito de ganhar dinheiro, de comer e de dormir’. 13 See Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘One Hand Clapping: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Spatio-Temporal Borders of Modernism’, in Maria Irene Ramalho Sousa

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his existence, Murilo Mendes measures his life by the cardinal points of the compass: ‘I am bounded on the north by my feelings, on the south by fear, on the east by the Apostle St. Paul, on the west by my education […]’ (‘Mapa’). The European voyages to Brazil are a primary reference, however the Brazilians are mainly interested in the return voyage to bring back their new works, transmuted into a modern variant of the world voyage of discovery and exchange of goods. The Brazilians’ ally in Paris, Blaise Cendrars, traveller and globetrotter par excellence, had already connected poetry with voyages to New York (1912), on the Trans-Siberian railway (1913), and to Panama (1918). By drawing on Brazil’s vast interior for materials to be perfected and displayed through their own voyages to Paris, the modernists contribute to a model of ethnographic and geographic poetry that they see in Cendrars’ wide travels and in the dynamic of the avant-garde movements in general. They expand the global framework, such that concepts of centre and periphery become commingled. Hybrid forms blend or transplant indigenous and traditional materials into the language of high modernism. By repeating Brazil’s long tradition of study of the arts in Europe, modernist travel takes on the nature of a circular voyage of discovery. As painter Di Cavalcanti remembers: We are all […] tied to Europe by readings that impressed us. Our letters, our science, our customs are all captive to Europe, and no one will be able to remove the constant mark of the European spirit from America so soon […] From childhood I deeply felt the mark of French things. My family cultivated French taste to an extreme, and when I knocked on the door of old Lutécia (in Paris), it was as if I had arrived at a house that I already knew to visit a family friend.14

Travel becomes a pilgrimage, or spiritual journey, although to the secular spaces of artistic innovation and creativity. What sustains their journeys as a form of pilgrimage is their transformative purpose, the search for possibilities currently beyond their capacity to create, the development of higher artistic powers, the strength to go beyond ordinary limits, to seek Santos and António Sousa Ribeiro, eds, Translocal Modernisms:  International Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 11–40. 14 Di Cavalcanti, Viagem da minha vida (1955), 130.

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illumination, and like Stephen Dedalus to become the artificers of their national culture. On leaving her home state of Ceará for the first time as a young woman, the character Guta in Raquel de Queiroz’s novel The Three Marias is confident in her pursuit of knowledge and the changes to be gained from the voyage itself: My soul was like that of the soldier in the folktale of Pedro Malasarte who abandons everything, sets out with his knapsack on his shoulder, experiences hunger and persecution, walks covered with dust and weariness through strange cities governed by cruel and crafty kings, all plotting his downfall. He, however, a slave to his desire to “see”, to “know”, confronts all things, continues eternally in search of the impossible surprise, of things never seen, journeying always ahead, beneath the sun and through peril.15

The rite of pilgrimage strengthens the artists’ commitment and their role in representing their society.16 With the recent appearances of Brazilian artists in world museums, their contribution to repositioning modernism points to a path capable of synthesizing the colonial, postcolonial, and global worlds. Their works form a local and global symbiosis, expressing a national and transatlantic character simultaneously, shaped both by encounters with indigenous national cultures, viewed as poetics, and coordinated with the artistic techniques of the European avant-gardes.17

Brazil / Paris Point Counter Point The 1928 novel by Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, supplies a contemporary theoretical social and literary model for the Brazilians’ relationship

1 5 Raquel de Queiroz, The Three Marias, Fred P. Ellison, trans. (1963), 69. 16 See Eric Cohen, ‘Pilgrimage and Tourism:  Convergence and Difference’, in E. Alan Morinis, Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood, 1992), 59. 17 On art and the question of global/local in the installations at Inhotim, see Maurício Barros de Castro, ‘The Global/Local Power of the Inhotim Institute:

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with the continent, more particularly to France and to a lesser extent Portugal, because of historical and cultural ties that the manifesto challenges and on which it also depends. Huxley’s title applies to the modernists in that their works follow a comparable design in responding to concepts and practices of European origin that lie at the core of Brazil’s legal, religious, and cultural life. By recounting the interrelationships among a discrete set of characters, whose actual identity can easily be surmised, Huxley’s novel parallels the inner circle of the Brazilian avant-garde. They are a cohesive, small coterie, an assemblage from different regions of the country collected in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, and a generation born in the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, with few exceptions. Some are struggling students and artists who endure years of preparation, others supported by personal fortunes or by patrons. Their interaction, including the Modern Art Week, fits Ezra Pound’s characterization in A Guide to Kulchur of ‘mainly highbrow discussions of ideas among small groups of consciously superior persons’.18 Because of conservative public reaction in Brazil against them, the modernists are inevitably the audience for their own works, sometimes as subjects of portraits, or portrayed as literary characters by name or allusion. Raul Bopp’s long poem Cobra Norato concludes by inviting his colleagues to join him in the Amazon in an unpunctuated string of recognizable names (‘Bring […] Augusto Meyer Tarsila Tatizinha I  want people from Belém from Porto Alegre from São Paulo’), and Mário de Andrade writes verses describing Oswald’s Cadillac in which he patrols the city searching for the next modernist poet (‘[…] in the gentle blue-green Cadillac of illusion, Oswald de Andrade passes by / hunting geniuses in the midst of the throng!’).19 Tarsila describes the ‘Group of Five’ (with Anita Malfatti, Oswald, Mário and Menotti del Picchia) as a ‘bunch of crazy people shooting off in all directions in Oswald’s green Cadillac’.20 In Patrícia Galvão’s 1933 proletarian Contemporary Art, the Environment and Private Museums in Brazil’, AM Journal 15 (2018), 161–72. 18 See A Guide to Kulcher (1970), 30. 19 ‘[…] na Cadillac mansa e glauca da ilusão / passa o Oswald de Andrade / mariscando gênios entre a multidão!’ 20 ‘grupo de doidos em disparada por toda parte no Cadillac verde de Oswald’.

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novel Industrial Park, the author is the character Otávia (‘Otávia doesn’t waste a moment. She reads. It’s a book of propaganda’.), while Oswald is Alfredo (‘Alfredo Rocha reads Marx and smokes a Partagas in the rich apartment of the downtown hotel’.). Galvão paints a satirical description of the modernist salon hosted by ‘Dona Finoca […] old patroness of the new arts’, an unflattering depiction of patroness Olívia Guedes Penteado, who is wearing an off-the-shoulder gown by French fashion designer Jean Patou, among white tuxedos, silk shirts, and topaz cufflinks. ***

An International Avant-Garde This generation of Brazilian artists works to modernize and promote national arts in an international context. They recapitulate the wellestablished relationship in the arts between Brazil and Europe, with its unavoidably close and almost exclusive relation to Paris, where everything was ‘amazing, fabulous, unprecedented!’21 When pianist Magdalena Tagliaferro performed in São Paulo in 1940, Mário de Andrade spoke of Paris as if he knew it well, although he had never visited Europe: ‘He cited monuments and streets of Paris better than a Parisian and he loved France like his own country’. In her visits to Belém and Manaus, the pianist noted that the intellectuals had fabulous libraries brought from France, never having visited Rio de Janeiro.22 In his letters from Brazil circa 1890, Max Leclerc noted that men of culture were imbued with French spirit, the bookstores were full of French books at the service of French ideas.23 In the short story by Machado de Assis, ‘Trio em Lá Menor’, the twentyseven year old suitor Maciel forgets that he is speaking French: ‘At times 2 1 Di Cavalcanti, Viagem da minha vida (1955), 134, ‘espantoso, fabuloso, inédito!’ 22 Magdalena Tagliaferro, Quase Tudo … (Memórias), 79. 23 See Max Leclerc, Cartas do Brasil, Sérgio Milliet trad. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1942), 103, 161.

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he forgot himself and spoke French; perhaps it wasn’t forgetfulness, but on purpose; he knew the language well, expressed himself easily and one day formulated the ethnological axiom – that there are Parisians everywhere’.24 Speaking about access to indispensable publications as late as 1955, the modernist writer Patrícia Galvão recognized that ‘the strainer of everything we know is still Paris’.25 In Santos in the 1950s the Bazar Paris remained a polished and serious bookstore with all the latest editions, attracting writers and men of letters from the whole country, including the elegant ex-president Washington Luís.26 The avant-garde inherits a century of intense study and travel between Brazil and France. The French Artistic Mission that arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1816, led by Joachim Lebreton, included the painter JeanBaptiste Débret, who documented the most important scenes of Brazil of his day published in three volumes of engravings, titled Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Brésil (1834–39), thereby establishing a European origin for the depiction of Brazilian reality. The precursor of a national school of fine arts, the mission provided a lasting model for artistic training and taste. The growing tension between the use of native materials and international techniques in artistic practice implanted by the French Mission persisted as a central question for the Brazilian avant-garde to debate. Intellectual Sérgio Milliet, educated in Geneva, judged that international artistic modernism was a mistake, in that ‘great cultural centres have a specific non-exportable climate, what is produced in them loses its coherence elsewhere:’ We understand when at the beginning of our modernism Di Cavalcanti and Tarsila adapt their Brazilian colours, their sensualism, and their primitivism to the teachings received in Paris. The style was successful, however the provincial ambition to be “à la page” gave us a production without originality, without its own character. 24 ‘Às vezes esquecia-se e falava francês; pode mesmo ser que não fosse esquecimento, mas propósito; conhecia bem a língua, exprimia-se com facilidade e formulara um dia este axioma etnológico — que há parisienses em toda a parte’. 25 Patrícia Galvão, ‘Teatro Mundial Contemporâneo I – Bertold Brecht’, Diário de São Paulo (3 July 1955). 26 See Márcia Costa, De Pagu a Patrícia, o último ato (São Paulo: Dobra Editorial, 2012) 41. Costa is citing Adelto Gonçalves from ‘Narciso de Andrade, o poeta do vento e das maresias’, in Narciso de Andrade: poesia sempre (Santos: Unisanta,  2006).

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Chapter 1 A reaction is required […] a literary exploration of regional themes, but profoundly, free from “isms” and searching for our colours and forms.27

Ethnographic landscapes and sonorities form part of the Brazilians intellectuals’ transatlantic presentation of themselves in a primitive mode, a performance calculated to reflect a synthesis of indigenous cultures, regional folklore, and the vast Amazonian interior. This presentation was practiced in the Malerische Reise in Brasilien (Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil, Paris, 1827–35) by German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas and in the Brésil pittoresque (1859–61), with photographs by Victor Frond and text by Charles Ribeyrolles, translated into Portuguese by Machado de Assis.28 Frond’s photographs of plantation life and work point directly to the ethnographic and indigenous conceptions of the modernists, who to the contrary of Frond wish to promote the idea of innocence, simplicity, and cultural hybridity of everyday urban life as a corollary of such primitivism in the interior. In the vision of poet Raul Bopp, this synthesis would produce a more authentic expression of the Brazilian: We, sons of the Great Snake! In a land where the Indian speaks to the land, where people believe in a stick of rue behind the ear and in cachaça for Saint Onofre? Exactly. We long for that tasty Catholicism, with dances for the Congo king and roasted peanuts of Saint Benedict. It’s a Brazilian faith that sustains us, naïve and lyric, without any scholastic theology or rationalism.29

The sonorities of the Choros of Villa-Lobos performed in Parisian concert halls presented to the European avant-garde a recognizable ethnographic expression using Amazonian themes and percussion instruments from urban carnival and samba. While far removed from the evocation of historical indigenous rituals, mentioned by Bopp, these themes and instruments were very effective to showcase Brazilian arts for international consumption as a primitivist vector of modernity. 2 7 Sérgio Milliet, De ontem, de hoje, de sempre (São Paulo, Martins, 1960), 123. 28 Le Brésil pittoresque ou Brasil pitoresco  – histoire, description, colonisation, accompagné d’un album de photos, panoramas, paysages et costumes de Victor Frond (Paris: Imprimerie Lemercier, 1861). 29 Edgar Cavalheiro (1944), 19.

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In Paris, the idealized and utopian past theorized in the manifesto became only an artistic façade meant to enchant Europe and promote a revisionist national self-description, which was the basis for the illusion that supported the Brazilian modernists’ own abstract presentation of themselves as ‘primitives’ on the stages and in the galleries of the international avant-garde. For Bopp, Brazilians ‘walk barefoot searching for myths, Indians, macumba ceremonies, tajá plants, the great minhocão worm, the uirapuru’.30 Shortly after arriving in Paris, Tarsila wrote to her family in April 1923 about her potential as a painter: I feel ever more Brazilian: I want to be the painter of my land. How I thank the fact I spent all my childhood on the farm estate. The memories of this time become increasingly precious to me. I want to use art to be the little peasant girl of São Bernardo, playing with straw dolls, just like in the last painting I’ve been doing … Don’t think this Brazilian trend in art is frowned upon here. Much the opposite. What people want here is for each one to bring a contribution from his or her own country. That explains the success of the Russian ballets, the Japanese engravings and black music. Paris is fed up with Parisian art.31

The Europeans themselves were open to the return of an Edenic concept of Brazil, remembering that the idea of Utopia in Thomas More’s book was brought to Europe by the Portuguese sailor Raphael Hythloday and that Montaigne’s essay ‘Des cannibales’ followed his meeting with a Tupinambá in France. The new urban cannibals were offering to Europe an indigenous, interior, and folkloric Brazil very distant from their own Europeanized education, travels, urbanity, and identity. In the Paris concert halls Villa-Lobos invented a national image that the Parisians expected to hear: wild, exotic, virginal, with primitive nature and rhythms.32 One of the consequences of their re-invention of themselves is eventually to be diluted and consumed by their inverted Utopia,33 as the exciting

3 0 31 32 33

Edgar Cavalheiro (1944), 24. Cited in Amaral (1986), 76. See Guérios, 13. See Mari Carmen Ramirez and Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: The Avant-Garde in Latin America (2004).

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moment of confluence loses its peak of relevance and meaning to artistic surfeit, economic collapse, and political ideology at the end of the 1920s. The Cannibal Manifesto as a national document draws on Oswald de Andrade’s contacts in Paris in the 1920s, his relationship there with artist Tarsila do Amaral, and his dialogue with European avant-garde writers and artists. The Brazilian couple, admiringly called ‘Tarsilwald’ by Mário de Andrade, made twelve transatlantic voyages between 1923 and 1928, whether together or separately, on ships of the Royal Holland, the Royal Mail, the Anchor Norway Heritage, and the Hamburg Sud lines. They also travelled to Senegal, Spain, and Portugal, to Italy, and on a five-week excursion to Greece and the Middle East, setting out from Marseille in 1926 sailing on the Lotus. Their principal companion in Paris, Swiss-French poet Blaise Cendrars, whom they receive in Brazil in March 1924 for a visit to colonial baroque sites in Minas Gerais, is a pivotal figure and key to their contacts with gallery owners and publishers in Paris.34 Oswald’s manifesto dialogues with the equally iconic painting by Tarsila, the Abaporu, presented to Oswald as a birthday present on January 11, 1928. When Oswald and poet Raul Bopp first saw it, they recognized the figure as a cannibal and named it in Tupi for ‘man who eats’. Since Tarsila’s painting evolved from her study with French painters Albert Gleizes, André Lhote, and Fernand Léger, while absorbing painterly influences as diverse as the Douanier Rousseau, Cezanne, Renoir’s Le Baigneuses, and Rodin’s Le Penseur, the Abaporu also cannibalizes European visual arts. The cannibal is Oswald’s cleverest disguise, for a traveller who confessed to dressing up as a Turk in costume parties on board transatlantic liners. It is his witty variation on and challenge to the primitivism then in vogue in Paris, where he and Tarsila reside for long periods during the 20s. Cannibalism is Oswald’s cultural frame of reference for the reassessment of the dialectic between what is external and internal in national history and culture, and for that reason alone his manifesto and his arguments are necessarily reflexive and transatlantic. He compresses Brazil’s history 34 For a detailed account of Cendrars’ visits to Brazil, see Jérôme Michaud-Larivière, Aujourd’ hui, Cendrars part au Brésil, Alexandre Eulálio, Aventura brasileira de Blaise Cendrars, and Aracy Amaral, Blaise Cendrars no Brasil e os modernistas.

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into a sequence of maritime arrivals and departures. With his manifesto’s attack on foreign encroachment and its defence of an original indigenous national culture, in the figure of a sixteenth-century cannibal reproduced from historical chronicles of resistance, he places himself on the side of the angels of the Lusophone maritime empire, with the utopian goal, seen previously in the seventeenth-century poet Gregório de Matos, of releasing Brazil from its colonial background so as to change and improve society, whether by redefining nationality in a more comprehensive way through folklore, popular sources, and everyday life; by reconstituting national history; or by reforming its politics and society. Oswald is said to be motivated by ‘a profound anxiety and desperate protest against the injustices of society […]’.35 As if anticipating the angelic side of the programme to reform national culture, in 1924 Tarsila paints Anjos (Angels), nine angels with hands folded in prayer, and in 1927 artist Antônio Gomide paints an art-nouveau watercolour of three angels playing violin.36 The manifesto is the creative synthesis and revisionist programme of all of Oswald’s writings, travel, and intellectual critiques in a decade of voyaging. *** The Brazilian avant-garde produces new hybrid models of cultural interaction that inject popular and folkloric motifs and multicultural content into common European forms in the visual arts and literature. Brazilian musical style in this period is a fusion of dance forms – the Afro-Brazilian lundu, the Portuguese modinha, the waltz, polka, tango, and habanera – that introduces unfamiliar percussion instruments and harmonies into Western musical styles and dance rhythms. Musicologist Gérard Béhague suggests that the first example of formal fusion is to be found in the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1860s. Composer Alexandre Levy likewise fuses classical forms with 35 36

Alceu Amoroso Lima, Companheiros de Geração (Rio de Janeiro, José Olympio, 1971), 256–57. Having left Brazil for Geneva in 1913 at age 18, Antônio Gomide returned to Brazil twice for short visits, 1918–19 and 1926–27. He had moved to Paris in 1921, led a bohemian life with Maryon, and by 1924 was in contact with Brecheret, Di Cavalcanti and other Brazilian artists until 1929.

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folk and popular rhythms, showcasing this technique as an expression of nationalism in the 1890 ‘Suite Brasileira’. The association of a syncretic style with nationalist music was reinforced by Villa-Lobos in his own ‘Suite populaire brésilienne’ originally composed in 1912.37 Since the late nineteenth century, hybrid and multicultural musical forms have been widely accepted in Brazil as new models of cultural interaction:38 ‘With his particular genius, Villa-Lobos creates a new and unmistakable style, whose main aesthetic-musical characteristic is the brilliant fusion of popular and native themes into European musical structures. He achieves the fusion of local colour and classical technique with the ease of an authentic vocation, considered to constitute his genius’.39 Chiquinha Gonzaga composes thousands of waltzes, polkas, tangos, lundus, maxixes, fados, quadrilles, mazurkas, choros, and serenades. Ernesto Nazareth introduces African rhythms into his tangos and, like Marcelo Tupinambá, composes more than a thousand popular songs. The choro or chorinho, for example, with its lively rhythms, full of virtuosity and improvisation, is adapted by Villa-Lobos in Paris and integrated into different Western musical forms with added instrumentation. Villa-Lobos astonishes French composers and audiences in the Parisian concerts in 1924 and 1927 with Brazilian instruments, rhythms, and popular or indigenous themes, played in an impressionistic style similar to Debussy’s. While his hybrid style is immediately recognized as Brazilian in Rio de Janeiro, in Paris, awash with jazz and the fox-trot, its reception is more ambiguous, and Villa-Lobos complains to Tarsila and Oswald about the difficulty of convincing Parisian audiences of its authenticity: It is not easy to universalize any Brazilian setting in a sincere way from an artistic point of view. You cannot imagine the care necessary to distinguish our true music from jazz, since both are the result of a black African melopeia, and the foreign 3 7 38

39

Heitor Villa-Lobos, Suite populaire brésilienne, pour guitar (Paris: Eschig, 1955). David Hesmondhalgh, ‘International Times: Fusions, Exoticism and Antiracism in Electronic Dance Music’, in Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, eds, Western Music and Its Others (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2000), 280–304. See Alceu Amoroso Lima, Companheiros de Viagem (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1971), 139.

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auditorium only recognizes originality based on who advertises most. In the meantime, long before the first fox-trot appeared, for three centuries Brazil had already been singing and dancing to that same popular rhythm. (Amaral, 2003, 271–72)

Canvases such as Anita Malfatti’s Tropical (1917) and Lasar Segall’s Lagartixas (1924) bring to life a lush tropical background that enriches the schools and techniques of their European models. Their stylized representation of tropical vegetation is both a reflection of Henri Rousseau’s primitivism and a precursor of the Tropicalia movement some four decades later. Huxley’s title further applies to the close personal relationships in the long residence and study in Europe that underlies and prepares the works, intellectual programme, and the nativist or primitivist counter currents of the Brazilian avant-garde as a group. *** Scholar Alice Gambrell applies the term ‘insider-outsider’ to describe investigators with appropriate credentials who travel to familiar sites to perform their professional activities.40 The term adds a subtler connotation to Huxley’s title, when applied to Brazilians artists and writers who had spent considerable time with their counterparts in Paris, whether for study or performance, where they had come to express an identity aimed to shock and amaze the international avant-garde, thereby gaining for them international prominence and acceptance. At the invitation of the Brazilian ambassador to France, Luís Martins de Souza Dantas, Oswald delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne on May 11, 1923, later published under the title ‘L’Effort intellectual du Brésil contemporain’ in the Revue de l’Amérique latine, and the Brazilians attended a dinner given by the ambassador for the French artistic and literary avant-garde. His guests are Jean Giraudoux, Cendrars, Léger, Lhote, Milhaud, Jules Romains, and the Brazilians Tarsila, Oswald, Rego Monteiro, and Brecheret.41 The extended residence of a large number of Brazilian artists and patrons in Paris during the 1920s corresponds to Gambrell’s process of 40 See Alice Gambrell, Woman Intellectuals, Modernism and Difference: Transatlantic Culture, 1919–1945 (1997). 41 See Marta Rossetti Batista (1972), 200–01.

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‘self-nativizing’, leading to identification of the outsider with the insider, in this case of the Brazilians with members of French avant-garde circles. The satirical devouring of Bishop Sardine in Oswald’s Cannibal Manifesto is aimed to shock and amuse the Parisian avant-gardes, as is the earlier publication of his most important book of poetry, Pau Brasil, printed in Paris in 1925 at the press used by the surrealist poets, Au sans pareil, with a preface by Cendrars and illustrations by Tarsila. Cendrars had published Feuilles de route at the same press in 1924, the poems written during his first voyage to Brasil, likewise illustrated by Tarsila. To promote Brazilian themes in her paintings, Tarsila’s first two solo exhibits go up in the Galerie Percier in 1926 and 1928, under the influence of Léger’s geometrical cubism. With her famous luncheons in Paris, Tarsila brought Brazilians together with major figures of the French and international avant-gardes. Poet Charles Bernstein describes the dynamic as interplay between the external and internal that underlies the modernists’ programme, and also the metaphor of cannibalism: Cannibalism is a way to deal with what is external. While related to both translation and assimilation, cannibalism goes further: when you eat that which is outside, ingesting it so that it becomes a part of you, it ceases to be external. By digesting, you absorb. (Bernstein, 2016, 159)

In the 1928 Cannibal Manifesto the European legacy is consciously absorbed, altered, and re-exported as Brazilian art and thought. Significantly, it redefines the transatlantic relationship from the point of view of the Brazilians, who would be described in a seminal essay by poet Haroldo de Campos as ‘ex-centric, new barbarians’ who, like cannibals, devour and assimilate European raw materials.42 Radicalizing Oswald’s European ‘point counter point’ after half a century, Haroldo de Campos’ essay, ‘The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe Under the Sign of Devouring’, alerts Europe to Brazil’s intentions and charts the radical and threatening position occupied by artists and writers of the Americas

42 Haroldo de Campos, ‘Da razão antropofágica: Europa sob o signo da devoração’, Colóquio/Letras 62 (Julho 1981), 10–25.

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in the presence of European paradigms. As if to enhance the warning to Europeans, Haroldo publishes his essay in Lisbon.

From Ethnography to Cannibalism Oswald de Andrade is not the only cannibal in the Brazilian avant-garde, however with the manifesto he becomes the last and most notorious one. His cannibalism is the culmination of an essential trajectory in national and modern arts inspired by ethnographers, explorers, and by other modernists, rather than by any actual contact with indigenous peoples or life in the interior. Cannibal Magazine Number 8 (December 1928) quotes from Nicolau Badariotti’s tale of a dialogue with indigenous peoples in Mato Grosso, published in Exploração no Norte de Matto Grosso. Região do Alto Paraguai e Planalto dos Parecis.43 Badariotti’s assertion that he talked with the Parecis about Europe is a prototype for later tall tales of Amazonian encounters by Villa-Lobos, Rego Monteiro, and Mário de Andrade: Sometimes I sat on a stone or tree trunk surrounded by thirty or forty Indians. I told them things about Europe trying to explain what I meant with images. They thought that Brazil was the whole world. They were surprised to hear that beyond the great ocean there was Europe, divided into many countries with different languages, etc. They signalled the height of their admiration with a loud burst of laughter.44

In Rio de Janeiro, Paul Claudel, the French ambassador, wrote the lyrics for the ballet L’ homme et son désir (1917), with music by Darius Milhaud, 3 São Paulo, Escola Typographica Salesiana, 1898. 4 44 ‘A’s vezes assentava-me sobre uma pedra ou sobre algum tronco de madeira rodeiado de trinta ou quarenta indios. Contava coisas de Europa procurando explicar-me por meio de imagens. Eles imaginavam que o Brasil fosse todo o mundo; admiravam-se pois ouvindo dizer que além do grande rio (oceano) existia a Europa dividida em muitos países de línguas diferentes, etc.; o cúmulo de admiração era significado por sonora gargalhada’ (Badariotti 1898), 69.

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who commented that the scene is the Brazilian forest, where the strange night begins to fill with movements, cries, and luminosity.45 Written in Brazil and scored for voice, instruments, and percussion, the ballet was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on June 6, 1921. More than ten years before the manifesto, Villa-Lobos had composed his Danças Africanas ou Dança dos Índios Mestiços (Characteristic African Dances) for piano in three movements titled ‘Farrapós, Dança dos moços’, ‘Kankukús, Dança dos velhos’ and ‘Kankikis, Dança dos meninos’, each characterized as an indigenous dance, or ‘Dança Indígena’, from Mato Grosso. The subtitle, ‘Índios Mestiços’ (miscegenated Indians) refers to the incorporation of African elements through miscegenation. The first dance was performed by Lucília Villa-Lobos on February 9, 1915, and the set was performed as an octet (string quintet, flute, bugle, and piano) at the Modern Art Week. The Philadelphia Orchestra presented an orchestral version in November 1928, while the third dance was later recorded by Arthur Rubenstein for Victor. Béhague points out that indigenous elements in Villa-Lobos’ compositions are not a significant source for his music, since they are too unfamiliar and too far removed from the culture to be considered national. Aside from field recordings made by Edgar RoquettePinto, archived in the National Museum,46 Villa-Lobos found Amerindian melodies in books.47 The Danças Africanas are perhaps related to Alberto Nepomuceno’s Dança de Negros, the first composition to carry this title. Myth and folklore play major roles in the invention of a national indigenous and timeless past. The Amazon is firmly established as a central theme of Villa-Lobos’ music in the 1917 orchestral ballets, Amazonas and Uirapuru, although these will not be performed until 1929 and 1935,

5 Notes sans musique (Paris: René Juilliard, 1949), 75–91. 4 46 The Museu National burned to the ground in 2018, destroying most of its collections. 47 See Gérard Béhague, The Beginnings of Musical Nationalism in Brazil. Sources of Amerindian melodies are Jean de Lery, Histoire d’un voyage en la terre du Brésil; Spix and Martius, Reise in Brasilien; Barbosa Rodrigues, Pacificação dos Crichanás and Poranduba Amazonense; Karl von den Steinen, Unter der Naturvölkern Zental-Brasiliens; and Nicolas Badariotti, Exploração no Norte de Mato Grosso.

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respectively. Brazil’s foremost folklore scholar, Luís da Câmara Cascudo, described the legend of the uirapuru bird (Cyphorhirius arada), literally ‘painted bird’, whose song makes all the other birds of the forest stop to listen.48 A widespread belief of indigenous pajés (curers) as well as urbanized Brazilians of the interior is that the bird will bring happiness and fortune to whoever possesses it, whether in a cage or buried beneath the doorstep. A characteristic of the legend of the uirapuru is its melody, seductive above all others, so that it is thought of as a bird that is not a bird. In other versions of the legend, a human has been transformed into the bird after death, including the legend of a youth transformed by the god Tupã so that he can sing to his beloved, who has been denied him by her father. In the first annotation in the field of the melody of this ‘tune-playing bird’ in mid-nineteenth-century, Richard Spruce noted that its clear metallic sounds are just like musical instruments, sung in short phrases containing all the notes of the scale, and repeated some twenty times, also changing keys to a major fifth above. Its song is thought to be magical, like a singer who is improvising.49 The flute plays the uirapuru’s song in Villa-Lobos’ orchestral composition. Continuing the primitivist theme, Villa-Lobos’s Três Poemas Indígenas (Three Indigenous Poems for piano and voice with the movements ‘Canide Iune’, ‘Teirú’, and ‘Yara’) and the ‘Canções Indígenas’ (Indigenous Songs with movements ‘Pai do Mato’, ‘Ualalocê’, and ‘Kamalalô’) are composed in Paris in 1926. From the time of the two ballets, Villa-Lobos is recognized as ‘an unending source of rhythms and sounds, torn from our jungles, from our birds, from our popular quatrains, from the depth of our nature and our people’.50

48 Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro, 5.a ed. revista e aumentada (São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1979). 49 Musical notation, perhaps the source for Villa-Lobos, is found in Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes, I, edited and condensed by A. R. Wallace (London:  MacMillan, 1908), 101–02; and in Gastão Cruls, Hiléia Amazónica (Rio de Janeiro, Companhia Editora Nacional, 1944); 2nd ed. (1958), 183–87. 50 See Alceu Amoroso Lima, Companheiros de Viagem (Rio de Janeiro, José Olympio, 1971), 139.

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Villa-Lobos’ symphonic poems anticipate the work with Amazonian legends and stories illustrated by artist Vicente do Rego Monteiro in the Légendes, Croyances, et Talismans des Indiens de l’Amazone, Adaptations de P. L. Duchartre, Paris, 1923 (Legends, Beliefs and Talismans of the Amazon Indians). This illustrated collection of indigenous legends played an especially important role in the current of primitivism and indigenism, following the ballet with the same title that Rego Monteiro produced in Rio de Janeiro in 1920. Considered to be a mixture of Amazonian imagery with Art Deco modernity, the ballet was repeated in Paris in 1925 at the Champs-Elysées Theatre with the dancer François Malkovsky.51 Scholar Jorge Schwartz considers that ‘the dialectic of national and cosmopolitan, a permanent tension of our modernism, finds in this work one of the most exuberant examples of the period’.52 The Amazonian legends collected by the artist are the result of reading and intense research at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro and the Parisian Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. Containing the myth of the origin of the Amazon and the stories ‘La Muiraquitan’, ‘Caapora’, ‘Couroupira’, ‘Uiara’, ‘Ikamiabas’, ‘Mani-Oca’, ‘La Lune’, ‘Iaci’, and ‘Le Bain de Fortune’, Duchartre’s collection of legends speaks directly to many of the episodes and characters that will appear in Mário de Andrade’s novel, Macunaíma (‘Boiúna Luna’, ‘Carta pras Icamiabas’, ‘A velha Ceuci’, ‘Muiraquitã’). In 1930 Oswald names his second son ‘Rudá’, after the legend of ‘Prière a Ruda’: ‘Quand celui qu’elle aime est parti au loin […] Quand l’absence et le regret mordent le coeur de la jeune fille, il faut qu’elle invoque Ruda à ce moment où le soleil se couche et la lune s’éléve dans le ciel’. In Rego Monteiro’s art-nouveau illustrations, Schwartz sees an exoticism emanating from the highly ornamented and detailed designs of Marajoaran ceramics and baskets from the island of Marajó at the mouth of the Amazon. Amerindian geometrical design will become the principal source of Rego Monteiro’s style. 51

52

See Cynthia Garcia, ‘Art Deco Dualist: A consideration of the career of Francophile and Brazilian master Vicente do Rego Monteiro’, Newcity Brasil:  Visual Art Culture of São Paulo and Beyond, July 25, 2017. The performance is based on the 1923 book by French folklore specialist Pierre-Louis Duchartre with illustrations by Rego Monteiro. Jorge Schwartz, ‘Apresentação’, Do Amazonas a Paris.

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After the massive concert of his compositions in the Salle Gaveau on December 5, 1927, (with Vera Janacopulos, A. Van Barentzen, T. Terán, l’orchestre Colonne, l’Art Choral, 250 performers), Villa-Lobos granted an interview to Lucie Delarue Mardrus,53 in the form of a story of the composer’s capture by cannibals in the Amazon. Sent on a mission to collect the folklore of the virgin forest, the young composer, she reports being told, was captured by ‘savages’ and, while a captive, came to know their impressive music. While searching for his missing dog, without anyone to rescue him and tied to a tree, his musical brain recorded their rhythms and chants, while he waited to be eaten during three days that the tribe observed funeral ceremonies. Saved by Amazon women, he filled his compositions with those rhythms and modulations. Thanks to the composer’s terrifying experience, this Amazonian music could now be heard in the Salle Gaveau in three Indian poems sung by Vera Janacopulos. Above all, the chorus and orchestra in the sensational Choro No. 10 produced sounds in which the reviewer perceived the agonizing three days of savage music. Mardrus concludes her review by remarking that, in an age of the jazz-band, to hear new rhythms from unknown instruments was a winning combination. Villa-Lobos enhanced his personal experience in the Amazon as fantasy. Having accompanied an artistic company to Manaus as a cellist, sometime between 1908 and 1912, he later claimed to have crossed the Amazon and Xingu rivers in the interior by canoe, in another of his exaggerations aimed to present himself as a national musician.54 In conversations with Rubenstein in 1917, Villa-Lobos likewise enhanced his biography with stories of his youth that Rubenstein though sounded like Jules Verne, as the composer presented himself as having discovered the ‘secret soul of Brazil:’ ‘I listened to the voices of the savages of the Amazon. I was living for weeks in the jungles of the Mato Grosso to catch the tunes of the caboclos. I was often in grave danger, but I didn’t care’ (1980, 92). 53 Published under the title ‘L’aventure d’un compositeur:  Musique cannibale’ (The Adventure of a Composer: Cannibal Music) in L’Intransigeant (Mardi, 13 Décembre 1927), 1. 54 See Paulo Renato Guérios, ‘Heitor Villa-Lobos and the Parisian Art Scene: How to Become a Brazilian Musician’, David Allen Rodgers, trans. Mana, vol. 9, no. 1 (April 2003), 81–108.

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Rego Monteiro and Villa-Lobos met frequently with Oswald and Tarsila in Paris from 1923–26, and the December 1927 concert preceded the manifesto by five months. The manifesto’s humour, imagination, satire, and wit follow in the path of the artist and composer’s clever tales of cannibalism, employing indigenous arts for the conquest of Paris. Rego Monteiro’s books and Villa-Lobos’ concert review are essential precursors to reading and understanding the iconoclastic humour and magical inversions in the Cannibal Manifesto, its intended audience, and its witty cultural alternative at a crossroads: ‘Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question’. One can almost hear the Parecis burst out laughing.

Image 9:  Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.

Chapter 2

The Modern Art Week of 1922

1922 and the Week of Modern Art The year 1922 has been cast as a pivotal year in literature, a veritable dividing line in history, because of the publication in February of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses by Sylvia Beach in Dijon, France, and in the October issue of The Criterion of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, on which he had received editorial comments from Ezra Pound in Paris the year before.1 A global perspective might include Herman Hesse’s (Nobel Prize 1946)  Siddhartha and Stefan Zweig’s Brief einer Unbekannten (Letter from an Unknown Woman). In poetry, Maples Arce’s Andamios interiores (Interior Scaffolding), César Vallejo’s Trilce, and Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’. Also in 1922 Virginia Woolf publishes Jacob’s Room and the short story ‘Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street’, Rilke writes the last six Élegies de Duino (Duino Elegies) and the Sonnets à Orphée (Sonnets to Orpheus), Jean Cocteau’s ‘Antigone’ opens at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in Montmartre with settings by Picasso, music by Arthur Honegger, and costumes by Coco Chanel. At the invitation of patron Sydney Schiff, Proust, Joyce, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Picasso, Satie, and Clive Bell dine together in Paris on May 18. For other writers, the year 1922 was a time to return to creative ideas. Goldstein notes that in 1922 Woolf renewed a character in The Voyage Out (1915), Forster returned to the abandoned manuscript that would be A Passage to India, and Lawrence started Kangaroo. 1

For a panorama of world literary events in 1922, see Kevin Jackson, Constellation of Genius; 1922: Modernism Year One (2012). For English literature in 1922 see Bill Goldstein, The World Broke in Two (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2017).

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Well before 1922 Brazilian artists and writers were living in Europe, preparing for their careers as modernists. Sculptor Adriana Janacopulus and musician Vera Janacopulus, sisters, had been educated in Paris since childhood. Adriana would exhibit in the Salon d’Automne in 1922 and Vera perform in concerts of Villa-Lobos. The painter and ecologist Toledo Piza is likewise educated in Paris from childhood, as was painter Silva Bruhns. In 1913, Piza began to study in the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, and in 1922 he was in São Paulo for a solo exhibition in March. Experience and study in Europe played a valued role in preparation of the arrival of the Brazilian avant-garde, substituted when necessary by those who cannot go abroad, as happened with Mário de Andrade, by reading, the amassing of library collections, and purchase of art works. Sérgio Milliet remembers the importance during the années folles of encounters in clubs or circles, such as his visit in Paris to the club ‘Le Boeuf sur le toit’ with Oswald de Andrade. In São Paulo before the Modern Art Week young modernists meet in the literary salons of Paulo Prado and D. Olívia Guedes Penteado.2 After the Week they split into the avant-garde ‘Klaxon’ group, which meets in Tácito’s office or at the Vienense pastry on the Praça da República, and the more nationalist ‘Verde Amarelo’ group that meets at the ‘Correio da Manhã’ editorial offices.3 The antropofagia group may have begun with the organization of the Terra Roxa e Outras Terras journal.4 In Brazil, 1922 becomes a decisive year for modern art solely because of the promise and creative challenge of the Modern Art Week, which 2

3 4

Frequented by Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), Luiz Aranha (1901–87), Couto de Barros (1896–1966), Tácito de Almeida (1889– 1940), Giulhereme de Almeida (1890–1969), Menotti del Picchia (1892–1988), Victor Brecheret (1894–1955), Di Cavalcanti (1897–1976), Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959), Anita Malfatti (1889–1964) and, from Rio de Janeiro, Ronald de Carvalho (1893–1935) and Renato Almeida (1895–1981). Formed by Plínio Salgado, Cassiano Ricardo, and Menotti del Picchia, among others. See Sérgio Milliet, Diário Crítico (1981), 255–56. Formed by Paulo Prado, Couto de Magalhães, Antônio de Alcântara Machado, Raul Bopp, Osvaldo Costa, Geraldo Ferraz and Oswald de Andrade.

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featured exhibits, performances, lectures, and readings on February 13, 15 and 17 at São Paulo’s Municipal Theatre. Participating in the Modern Art Week are artists Zina Aita, Di Cavalcanti, Ferrignac, John Graz, Anita Malfatti, Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Yan de Almeida Prado, and Antônio Paim Vieira; sculptors Victor Brecheret, Wilhelm Haarberg, and Alberto Martins Ribeiro; architects Antonio Moya, Georg Przyrembel, and Hildegardo Velloso; musicians Ernani Braga, Guiomar Novaes, and Heitor Villa-Lobos; and literary people Guilherme de Almeida, Tácito de Almeida, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Graça Aranha, Manuel Bandeira, Ronald de Carvalho, Menotti del Picchia, and Plínio Salgado. These young artists and writers were very seriously engaged with the event, as Di Cavalcanti tells in an anecdote: One night in the Theatre bar, René Thiollier asks me with his heart on his sleeve, –Di, are you sincere about all those crazy dolls of yours? –Absolutely sincere! We are all sincere’, I replied respectfully. –Even Oswald de Andrade. –Yes! And René Thiollier, the elegant René Thiolliet, gave out a delicious and very Parisian: –Merde alors!5

The programmes are dedicated largely to the music of Villa-Lobos, punctuated by lectures and readings. The third night is entirely musical. The programmes start with a lecture by senior diplomat and writer José Pereira da Graça Aranha on ‘Aesthetic Emotion in Modern Art’ and poetry readings by Guilherme de Almeida and Ronald de Carvalho. Ronald lectures on ‘Modern Painting and Sculpture in Brazil’, between four performances of compositions by Villa-Lobos.6 Villa-Lobos mixes folk melodies 5 6

Emílio Di Cavalcanti (1955), 122. Second Sonata for cello and piano, performed by Alfredo Gomes and Lucília Villa-Lobos; Second Trio for violin, cello, and piano, performed by Paulina d’Ambrósio, Alfredo Gomes and Fructuoso de Lima Vianna; ‘Valsa mística’, ‘Rodante’ and ‘A Fiandeira’, with Ernani Braga, piano; and Three African Dances

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with indigenous and Afro-Brazilian materials in European forms, such as the sonata and dances. Pianist Ernani Braga adds Eric Satie’s parody of Chopin’s funeral march from Embryons desséchés. Controversy intensifies on February 15 with the reading of new poetry and prose by a group of eight writers led by Menotti del Picchia. Pianist Guiomar Novaes soothes the audience by juxtaposing compositions of VillaLobos with Debussy. Artists, sculptors, and architects exhibit their works in the theatre lobby,7 where Mário de Andrade gives a lecture on modern art to a shocked public that comes armed with fruit. After intermission, a lecture on poetry by Renato Almeida precedes three short pieces for voice and piano (‘Festim’, ‘Solidão’, ‘Cascavel’ with Frederico Nascimento Filho and Lucília Villa-Lobos), followed by Villa’s Quartetto Terceiro (String Quartet No. 3, 1916). Villa-Lobos’ music fills the full programme on the third evening: the Piano Trio No. 3 for violin, cello, and piano; three Historietas by Ronald de Carvalho set for voice and piano (Lune d’octobre, Voilà la vie, Jouis sans retard, car vite s’ecoule with Mário Emma and Lucília Villa-Lobos); the Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano (Paulina d’Ambrósio and Fructuoso Vianna); and three pieces for piano performed by Ernani Braga (Camponesa Cantadeira, Num berço encantado, Dança Infernal). The Quarteto Simbólico (Symbolic Quartet) for flute, saxophone, celeste, harp with offstage women’s chorus ends the programme with the suggestive modernist subtitle ‘Impressions of Mundane Life’. The success of Modern Art Week is a function of its scandal and negative reception by a city of less than a million inhabitants, populated since 1890 with the arrival of large numbers of Italian immigrants. The use of an Italo-Paulista dialect and the division of the city into bourgeoisie and working proletariat is documented in Patrícia Galvão’s 1933 novel, Parque Industrial (Industrial Park). The city’s wealth depends on coffee plantations, and the Modern Art Week is made possible only through the financial backing of Paulo Prado, other coffee barons, and D. Olívia (‘Farrapos’, ‘Kankukus’, and ‘Kankikis’) arranged for octet (violin, viola, cello, flute, bugle, piano). 7 Architects Antônio Moya, Georg Przirembel; Sculptors Victor Brecheret, W. Haarberg; Artists Anita Malfatti, Di Cavalcanti, John Graz, Martins Ribeiro, Zina Aita, J. F. de Almeida Prado, Ferrignac, Vicente do Rego Monteiro.

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Guedes Penteado, two principal patrons of young artists and writers, both in Brazil and in Paris, and sponsors of modernization. The presentations at the Municipal Theatre can only be considered modern in the context of the provincial city and the genius of the presenters, yet the week marked a revolutionary moment, in the opinion of Patrícia Galvão, ‘the 10 days that shook the world of Brazilian literature’ and ‘a provincial reflex of the greatest revision in the arts to take place in the world and in history’.8 The most striking examples of modern style at the theatre are in visual arts and music. Anita Malfatti shows some of her expressionistic portraits, now widely known, including O Homem Amarelo (The Yellow Man) that provoked scandal during an exhibition in 1917. Jeering and catcalls ensue when Ronald de Carvalho reads the poem ‘Sapos’ by Manuel Bandeira, with its imitation of a frog’s croak. The event, however, does reflect accurately the state and limitations of modernism in Brazil at the time, where a small group of people are engaged in working towards a common goal of modernization. Mário de Andrade considers the promises and restrictions of Modernism when he writes that ‘[…] the modernist movement, eminently critical by nature, seemed to imply a great consequent evolution in culture, however that did not happen’.9 The contributions of the Week to artistic modernization at the time did gain in importance for their association with the centenary of political independence, commemorated in a National Exposition from September to December in Rio de Janeiro, as well as improvements in urban planning and design in the capital. Two prominent Art Deco hotels designed by the French architect Joseph Gire were constructed for the Exposition, the Hotel Glória and the Copacabana Palace, and the Morro do Castelo, a hillside in the downtown district, was levelled and the earth used to prepare the Santos Dumont airport. 8

9

See Patrícia Galvão, ‘Contribuição ao julgamento do Congresso de Poesia’, Diário de S. Paulo, Domingo, 09 de maio de 1948. […] 22 é um marco revolucionário […] 1922 são os 10 dias que abalaram o mundo na literatura brasileira […] 22 foi o nosso reflexo provinciano do maior movimento de revisão nas artes que se produziu no mundo e na história’. Mário de Andrade, Aspectos da música brasileira (São Paulo: Martins, 1962), 29. ‘O movimento modernista, eminentemente crítico por natureza, parecia implicar numa grande evolução ulterior de cultura, mas tal não se deu’.

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Image 10:  Poster commemorating centenary of Brazilian independence, 1922.

Major Works: 1922–1929 With the Cannibal Manifesto, Oswald can claim the role of the leading and consummate transatlantic cannibal of Brazilian modernism. The year 1928 is to be the culmination of six years of modernist exuberance. The period from 1922 to 1928, spilling over into 1929 and the early 1930s, produced the movement’s most significant and enduring works, which are a permanent legacy of the spirit of the Week and all related to the

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Cannibal Manifesto, which unites them all under an ingenious theory in 1928. Each work is a major contribution to the international avant-gardes as well as an essential contribution to avant-garde arts and literature in Brazil.10 Significant works immediately followed the Modern Art Week. In 1922 Mário de Andrade published his most inventive book of poetry, based on a stroll through his native city of São Paulo, Pauliceia Desvairada (Hallucinated City). The following year, Tarsila do Amaral painted A Negra in Paris, a seated figure against background of horizontal bands of colour. With Afro-Brazilian and indigenous features set against an abstract geometrical background, A Negra is the first of three magisterial paintings of the 1920s, along with the Abaporu and Antropofagia. Memorialist Pedro Nava observes that the antropofagia movement found its best expression in art: ‘[…] in painting it found a seriousness and tragic tone that made of Antropofagia 1929, Negra 1923, Floresta, Sono and Abaporu the most ferocious canvases of our Art […] Keep in mind that some of those painting are prophetic and antecede the Manifesto itself’.11 In 1924 Oswald wrote his first manifesto, the ‘Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil’ (‘Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry’), followed by an accompanying book of poetry, Pau Brasil, structured as an inverted chronology of the history of Brazil in nine sections, beginning with the discovery and ending with his contemporary arrival from Paris at the port of Santos. That year poet Manuel Bandeira published Ritmo Dissoluto (Dissolute Rhythm), notable for creating in contrasting timbres an onomatopoetic language of the berimbau, an AfroBrazilian musical instrument used to accompany capoeira arts. In 1925 Villa-Lobos composed his massive Choro No. 10, in the words of Marcel Beaufils a veritable symphony for orchestra with percussion instruments and mixed choir. With the chant sung by the chorus based on a motif from the Pareci tribe, this work is considered by musicologist Eero Tarasti to fit the spirit of Oswald de Andrade’s ‘theses of anthropophagy’. On 10 11

These works contradict the thesis of Wilson Martins in The Modernist Idea (1970) that Brazilian modernism produced no great works, even in the terms he desired. Pedro Nava, Beira-mar. memórias 4 (2003), 207. ‘– já a sua expressão em pintura tinha uma seriedade e um tom trágico que fazem de Antropofagia 1929, da Negra 1923, da Floresta, de Sono e de Abaporu das telas mais ferozes da nossa Arte’.

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January 11, 1928, Tarsila finished the Abaporu, now considered one of the iconic paintings of the century and a source for the manifesto. In its third number in July, the Revista de Antropofagia printed Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s intriguing and mysterious poem, ‘No meio do caminho’ (In the Middle of the Road), that problematizes past and present just as the manifesto does internal and external, through an existential dilemma. The architect Gregori Warchavchik, who arrived in Brazil from Russia in 1923 after studying in Italy, built a ‘Casa Modernista’ (Modernist House) using reinforced concrete and tile with tropical landscaping in the first example of modern architecture in Brazil; it opened in 1928 on Rua Santa Cruz in Vila Mariana district of São Paulo. To close the year, in seven intense days in December, Mário de Andrade composed his pan-folkloric novel, Macunaíma, steeped in legend and folklore, with its own cannibal theme. Finally, Tarsila painted the apotheosis of the school of anthropophagy with the canvas Antropofagia, which features the figures of A Negra and Abaporu brought together against a stylized and enhanced topical background. Alongside the Cannibal Manifesto, these major works, described more in detail in the following pages, are the culmination of a movement beginning after 1912, crystallizing around the Modern Art Week of 1922 and reaching its maximum development in contact with the international avant-gardes in Europe.

Pauliceia Desvairada Mário de Andrade’s Pauliceia Desvairada (Hallucinated City), a complex work that came out six months after the Modern Art Week in São Paulo, transforms the theme of the strolling poet observing his city into a self-consciously avant-garde composition overflowing the boundaries of genre and the norms of discursive description. Beginning in the dedication, author Mário de Andrade emotionally dedicates the book to his master, Mário de Andrade. After an epigraph taken from a sixteenthcentury Portuguese author, the ‘Extremely Interesting Preface’, narrated as a confession and creed, follows as an essay on modern art that both

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creates and extinguishes the school of Hallucinism. Although Mário never left Brazil, the Hallucinated City reflects his wide reading and the international dimensions of his collection of books on literature, arts, philosophy, music, and ethnography.12 As does the later Cannibal Manifesto, Mário’s work also returns to origins: he describes São Paulo as a wild jungle where he sings alone like a ‘Tupy strumming a lute’; he writes ‘Brazilian’ and seeks originality, without wishing to make any disciples; and he promises to found yet another school in the next book. Readers who understand him ‘already have a key’ and should not need the preface, so convincingly presented. Towering over his own work, the poet weeps, sings, laughs, and bellows his energy, grand melody, and musical harmony. Scholar Benedito Nunes describes the work as movement of change: […] a lyrical voyage in the tense and contradictory space of São Paulo […] where the new begins to exceed the old, where peoples of various nationalities mix their speech, just as they have been mixed together, in the poems, the poet’s personal history and the historical memory of the Tietê River […] now alongside wide asphalted avenues, shaking streetcar tracks, and cars paid with profits from coffee […] while the seigneurial class of plantation owners abandons its old habits and changes into a financial bourgeoisie.13

Mário’s eclecticism is shown by the theorists quoted in the preface, which sketches a wide panorama of transatlantic visual arts and literature in a jumbled stream of references:  Delacroix, Whistler, Raphael, Ingres, El Greco, Debussy, Palestrina, Bach, Whitman, Mallarmé, Verhaeren, Marinetti, Watteau, Taine, Rodin, Beethoven, Musset, Virgil, Homer, 12 Mário de Andrade’s library is now incorporated into the collections of the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros at the Universidade de São Paulo. 13 ‘[…] uma viagem lirica no espaco tenso e contraditório de São Paulo em via de transformar-se na grande cidade industrial sul-americana, onde o novo começa a sobrepujar o velho, onde gentes de varias nacionalidades misturam os seus falares, tal como se misturariam, nos poemas, a história pessoal do poeta e a memória hist6rica do Tiete […] que agora acompanhava largas avenidas asfaltadas, trilhos de elétricos (bondes) trepidantes e automóveis pagos com os lucros do caf6, enquanto […] a antiga classe senhorial dos fazendeiros paulistas metamorfoseia-se, abandonando os seus antigos hábitos, em burguesia financeira’ […] (Nunes, 1984).

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Hugo, Pythagoras, Heine, Renan, Wagner, Freud, Orpheus, Amphion, Cocteau, and Gourmont. The preface further names personalities of the time whose may no longer be familiar, including film critic Jean Epstein, famous for his adaptation of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’; Zdislas Milner, a Polish-French poet; Gorch Fock, a German poet who perished in the Battle of Jutland; French composer Georges Migot; French illustrator Emile Bayard; Italian musicologist Amintore Galli; and French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot. The theme of the preface is the artist’s absolute subjective independence, his freedom from grammar, tradition, and practice. The book begins with twenty-two poems that present a series of scenes from the city seen by the strolling poet, an urban narrator and critical observer of the ‘hallucinated’ spaces and behaviour of its citizens, as if each poem and space belonged to Mussorgsky’s Pictures in an Exhibition (1874). Like a troubadour, the poet strolls down São Bento street, and his poems trace a map of the city: São João Avenue, Arouche Square, Paissandú square and Marshall Deodoro Street. He passes by streets and neighbourhoods: Anhangabaú, Consolação, Cambuci, Ipiranga, Higienópolis, and Bom Retiro. On his city stroll he stops by some of the best-known locations in town, the Trianon, the Grand Hotel Rotisserie Sportsman, the Carlton Hotel, the Weisflag Typography, Alves bookstore, and the Cosmos store. The poet’s critical gaze reflects on spaces and landmarks that separate the bourgeoisie from the proletarian immigrants, who live in the sectors furthest from downtown. Although the poems are centred in the map of São Paulo, Mário compares the city to London and Paris and cites the influence of international literary and musical figures: Edgar Allan Poe; Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsarvina from the Ballets Russes; Futurist composer Luigi Russolo; Henry Bourdeau, conservative Catholic writer from Savoy; and Jean Cocteau, among others. In the final section, the work suddenly metamorphosizes from narrative portrait to musical performance. Mário adds an unorthodox finale, an ‘oratorio’ for soprano and three choruses titled ‘Enfibraturas do Ipiranga’ (‘Moral Fibrature of the Ipiranga’), a culminating imaginative synthesis in the form of a musical composition, meant to be performed in a city landscape with competing choruses and symphony orchestra. The ‘oratorio’ is

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an apotheosis and performative epilogue in which the entire population of São Paulo is assembled in choruses around the Municipal Theatre, site of the Modern Art Week, in the nearby Anhangabaú Valley under the Viaduto do Chá (Tea Viaduct), where they are grouped by age, status, and wealth. The narrator of the earlier poems is transformed into a soprano, whose solos lament the ideological positions and hierarchies of the choruses. In a gran finale, the city becomes spectacle. The ‘profane oratorio’ performs an urban theatre of aggression and madness, ruled by a Shakespearean citation, Ophelia’s exclamation when she becomes aware of Hamlet’s madness, ‘O, Woe is me, to have seen what I have seen, to see what I see!’ In São Paulo, the gigantic choruses assembled in Anhangabaú, voicing competing opinions of opposing social classes and ages, mutually challenge and insult each other in their lyrics. The four groups face off musically: the renowned and established writers, the millionaires and bourgeoisie, the workers and the poor, and patriotic youth. Each group receives a designation similar to those of sports clubs or craftsmen. The choruses are named Orientalismos convencionais (conservatives, a full chorus assembled in the gardens surrounding the Municipal Theatre), As Senectudes Tremulinas (millionaires and bourgeois, on the balconies of well-known landmarks), Sandapilários indiferentes (workers and lower classes, on the Viaduto do Chá), and Juvenilidades Auriverdes (young nationalist rebels, in Anhangabaú park). The model for the grand choral competition is Richard Wagner’s opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), in which the young tenor, Walter von Stolzing, referenced by Mário, must win the singing competition among the artisans of Nuremberg on St. John’s Day to win the hand of the youth, Eva Pogner. Mário transfers that competition from Nuremberg to São Paulo and brings it up to date socially. In the oratorio, the final lullaby sung by ‘My Madness’ (soprano), while promoting unending Peace, repeats Schopenhauer’s aesthetic that influenced Wagner’s opera, which is the noble awareness of the consequences of vanity and suffering. The poet-soprano dominates his hallucinated city, balancing his far-reaching critiques with the pride of dominating the city as its artist-poet and social consciousness: ‘This enormous pride of being São Paulo-wise!!!’ (‘Este orgulho máximo de ser paulistamente’). Nonetheless, at the end of his song,

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one hears an enormous derision coming from the city’s uncomprehending windows. With its neologisms, forced rhymes, satire, and presentation of articulate scenes of the city assembled in as in a ballet, an art exhibit, or movements of a symphonic poem, Hallucinated City marks Brazilian avant-garde expressionism in literature.

Image 11:  Tarsila do Amaral, A Negra, 1923. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.

A Negra (The Black Woman) The cross-legged woman fully occupies the large canvas, 100 X 81.3 cm, with her drooping right breast extending over her leg. A tropical background is suggested by a band running obliquely from the upper right corner and extending out of sight behind the seated figure, providing a modernist design to represent nature. A  large body contrasts with a

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smaller head, with enormous lips superimposed and eyes set obliquely in deep sockets. The figure is naked, yet the pose is natural and addresses the viewer directly, with a presence that overwhelms the space. The painting mixes ethnographic primitivism with portraiture and modernist geometry. In a late essay, Tarsila mentions a possible origin of the figure from a photograph kept in an album of a worker at a family fazenda, or the artist’s childhood memory of having seen older females who had been slaves.14 The portrait, nevertheless, repeats the shape of three figures in canvases by Léger, with whom Tarsila was studying in Paris, contemporaneous with her sketches and immediately preceding the painting. Alexandre Eulálio comments on these sources in detail:  the Femme allongée (charcoal, 1922), Trois Femmes (charcoal, 1922), and study for Le Grand Déjuner (1923).15 The study, in which a large seated and featureless female figure fully occupies the canvas, against a geometrical background, could almost be superimposed onto A Negra. Tarsila’s painting follows two earlier drawings in pencil and India ink, successively adding shape and colouring to the seated figure of imposing size. In the painting, coloured stripes of different dimensions in the background give a hint of perspectivism, however the only allusive object is a diagonal banana leaf that cuts through the painting. The figure’s right leg crossed over the other accompanies the drooping left shoulder, creating a corporeal rhythm, while the soil on which the figure sits, of a complementary tobacco colour, is repeated in a triangle to the right and behind the figure, avoiding any realistic perspective. The image first appears as an illustration on the 1924 cover of Cendrars’ poems, which Eulálio considers a lyrical and impetuous version of the painting. With the suggestion of a tropical background in a deep green band, A Negra could be taken for one of the ‘miscegenated Indians’ described by Villa-Lobos in his Danças Africanas (African Dances) of 1915. In the abstract figure art historians see the reflection of Cezanne’s bathers in Les Grandes Baigneuses, although Tarsila had been following Léger’s costume 14 Slavery ended in Brazil in 1888. Tarsila was born in 1887, thus she is speaking of a female worker on her father’s plantation who was formerly a slave. 15 Alexandre Eulálio, ed., A aventura brasileira de Blaise Cendrars (1978), 86–95.

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designs for the ballet on African themes, La Création du monde, premiered on October 25, 1923 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Eulálio confirms the effect on the painting of stage settings by Léger for the ballet, drawing on African forms and ritual objects reproduced in dark colours. More than the designs themselves, Eulálio sees the influence in Tarsila’s thinking of Cendrars’ Anthologie Nègre, the masks and fetishes of the Ballet Suédois, and the intensity of the presence of African themes found throughout Paris. A Negra is in this context a dramatic reproduction of traditional African statuary that is part of the essentially artistic enthusiasm for African art in Paris to which the Brazilians could contribute. At the time of Tarsila’s first solo show at the Galerie Percier in Paris in 1926, she finds the reception by French critics to miss its bold exoticism.16 Eulálio argues that to the extent that Tarsila is recalling the black women of her childhood, she ‘demystifies’ their subservient role under the paternalistic regime by identifying A Negra as a telluric figure, in a daring gesture of validation and recognition on a formal level.17 For Eulálio, Tarsila discovers in the familiar figure an expression of violence and telluricism for which she is unprepared, and the shock opens a path for her art to venture further into the interior, making the iconic Abaporu and Antropofagia paintings possible. Notwithstanding the artist’s belated attempt to relate the painting to her own local context, this iconic canvas should be considered to be an adaptation of Léger’s geometric forms in the context of African sculpture, to which Tarsila added a single reference to Brazil in the banana leaf rising behind the seated figure. Art historian Camila Maroja evaluates the poem’s effect in 1923 as ‘a Brazilian theme legible to the European avantgarde’, presented with avant-garde aesthetics and interpreted at the time as an abstraction, or as the embodiment of primeval forces, assigning a cultural role to Afro-Brazilians through lenses of primitivism and miscegenation.18

16 See José Severiano de Rezende, ‘L’Éxpedition Tarsila’, Gazette du Brésil 4, 30 (June 17, 1926), 1–2, quoted in Stephani D’Alessandro, ‘A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy’ (2017), 54. 17 Alexandre Eulálio (1978), 91. 18 Camila Maroja, ‘From São Paulo to Paris and Back Again: Tarsila do Amaral’, Stedelijk Studies 9 (2019), 5.

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Manifesto da Poesia Pau Brasil (Manifesto of Brazilwood Poetry) Oswald de Andrade sets out the criteria for his nationalist programme in his first avant-garde manifesto, the ‘Manifesto da Poesia Pau Brasil’ (‘Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry’), which came out in the Correio da Manhã in São Paulo on March 18, 1924, before it was printed in the Revista do Brasil in April. The manifesto is a direct consequence of Oswald’s first prolonged stay in Paris in 1923, where he lectured at the Sorbonne on the work of young Brazilian artists and writers. A much-reduced version of the manifesto is included in his first book of poetry, Pau Brasil. The two publications establish the ‘Pau Brasil’ style in painting developed in Paris by Tarsila do Amaral from 1924 to 1927. Evidence of the French-Brazilian hybrid is conveyed in the 1924 painting Carnaval em Madureira, which reproduces a geometrical structure resembling the Eiffel Tower occupying the middle of a Brazilian village’s carnival celebration. Although it is one of the founding documents of modern cultural identity, the manifesto was not republished in Brazil until 1952 and after more than half a century was translated to Spanish in 1978, to French in 1979, and to English in 1986. All of these translations were in journals available only in library collections.19 In some thirty short prose sections the manifesto outlines an aesthetic and literary programme, a modernist identity based on culture and language of the present moment, mixed with a critique of the colonial past, raising issues that will become radicalized in the cannibal scenario of the second manifesto. The Manifesto of Pau-Brazil Poetry turns life in Brazil into an aesthetic of brilliant colours, giving examples of its candid innocence: the green, blue, and gold of carnival, favelas, and Afro-Brazilian cuisine; streets full of acrobats and poetry that is ‘sentimental, intellectual 19

‘Manifiesto de la poesía “Pau Brasil” ’, Revista de Cultura Brasileña 47 (out. 1978), 55–59; ‘Manifeste de la poésie Bois-Brésil’, Jacques Thiériot, trans., Europe-Revue Littéraire Mensuelle 57.599 (March 1979), 38–50; ‘Manifesto of Pau-Brazil Poetry’, Stella de Sá Rego, trans., Latin American Literary Review 14.27 (January–June 1986), 184–87.

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ironic, and ingenuous’. For the Manifesto, the Brazilian experience serves aesthetic meaning alone: lines, colours, and volumes. A state of innocence is connected to local originality: ‘Pau-Brasil Poetry is a Sunday dining room with birds singing in the condensed forests of cages, a thin fellow composing a waltz for flute and Mary Lou reading the newspaper. The present is all there in the newspaper’. Brazil’s botanical riches and the collections of the National Museum are to be balanced by practical schools of geometry, algebra, and chemistry, such that innovation will put an end to imported knowledge by producing turbines, factories, mills, and skyscrapers. As a critical document, the manifesto calls for a reaction against the ‘invader subject’. A hint of the cannibalism to come can be seen in the call to eliminate academic conformity and the ‘indigestions of erudition’. Misfortunes are attributed to the Portuguese, who instilled a politics of domination and a social class they educated, which includes the modernists themselves. The manifesto introduces the mechanism of inversion of Brazil’s imagined original state after the ‘invasion of everything’: officialdom, legal advisors, academic conformity, ceremonial robes, economic profiteering. The manifesto places Brazil and Brazilians in a new ‘in-between’ situation, between the forest and its shamans as a natural inheritance, on the one hand, and a scientific education on the other, meant to replace the culture of the ‘invader’ with technical progress, originality, and a national poetics – ‘barbarous, credulous, picturesque and tender’ – on the dual base of the forest and the school. This duality prepares the direct confrontation with Europe to come in the Cannibal Manifesto.

Ritmo Dissoluto (Dissolute Rhythm) Considered to be untranslatable for its intimate dependence on onomatopoeia and paronomasia,20 Manuel Bandeira’s poem ‘Berimbau’ brings Amazonian vocabulary and folklore into the mainstream as the musical and oral substance of modernist poetry. The poem explores the changing 20 Manuel Bandeira, This Earth, That Sky, Candace Slater, trans. (1989) 31.

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timbres of an accompaniment to Amazonian folk tales by the berimbau, which is an Afro-Brazilian percussion instrument with a single string stretched by a wooden bow, with a gourd resonator, played by striking the string with a stick and producing different tones by altering the resonating length of the string. The berimbau is more commonly used to in the art of capoeira and was popularized internationally in the composition ‘Berimbau’ by Baden Powell in 1963. Bandeira is playing on the interrelationships of cultures by mixing the timbres of the berimbau with Amazonian vocabulary and folkloric legends of the mestizo interior. The poet relies on legends researched by folklorists Sílvio Romero and Câmara Cascudo and popularized in the oral tradition and in printed collections, many that had been illustrated by Rego Monteiro in 1923 and that would soon be incorporated by Mário into his novel Macunaíma. In the poem, Bandeira invokes the figure of the Saci, a mischievous youth said to have lost a leg in capoeira fighting and who wears a red cap symbolizing magical powers of picaresque disruption. Along with the link to capoeira, the poem is drawn from Amazonian and caboclo myths and vocabulary. According to the myth of the boto (dolphin), the aquatic mammal turns into a prince on full-moon nights and impregnates young women who live along the shore, becoming the father of all illegitimate births. The myth was popularized through the musical composition of Waldemar Henrique, ‘Foi boto, Sinhá’, first performed in Belém do Pará in 1933.21 Bandeira’s aim in the poem, repeated in Macunaíma, was to compose a ‘pan-folkloric’ fantasy, uniting Afro-Brazilian, Amerindian, and Iberian materials, cited by Câmara Cascudo as the origins of local legends.22 Bandeira makes the language doubly strange, first by the poem’s play with timbre and secondly by its unfamiliar and sonorous indigenous vocabulary, imported into the Portuguese language. The following terms appear in the poem as musical sound as much as signifiers, along with five active verbs, bulir, chamar, uivar, sair and bater (tremble, call, howl, leave, 21 Isabela de Figueiredo Santos, ‘Lendas amazônicas de Waldemar Henrique, um estudo interpretativo’, Dissertação de Mestrado, Belo Horizonte, Escola de Música da UFMJ, (2009), 16. 22 Luís da Câmara Cascudo, ‘Mitos brasileiros’, Cadernos de Folclore 6.5 (Rio de Janeiro: MEC-FUNARTE, 1976).

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and hit). These verbs and the hypnotizing repetition of vocabulary build a sense of movement, allowing the reader to imagine the constant vibration of the sounds of the berimbau. aguaçais – swamp aguapé – aquatic plant boto – river dolphin (Inia geoffrensis) Cruz, canhoto! – saying that dispels malign spirits or bad luck Cussaruim – popular form for devil Iara – water mother, mermaid, seductress igapós – flooded forests Japurás – river in the Amazon basin maloca – ancestral long house in the Amazon mameluca – daughter or Amerindian and European Purus – river in the Amazon basin quebranto – illness caused by the evil eye Saci – A one-legged black or mulatto youth who smokes a pipe and wears a magical red cap known for his mischievous tricks.

BERIMBAU Os aguapés dos aguaçais Nos igapós dos Japurás Bolem, bolem, bolem. Chama o saci: – Si si si si! – Ui ui ui ui ui! Uiva a ira Nos aguaçais dos igapós Dos Japurás e dos Purus. A mameluca é uma maluca. Saiu sozinha da maloca – O boto bate – bite bite … – Foi o boto! O Cussaruim bota quebrantos. Nos aguaçais os aguapés – Cruz, canhoto! – Bolem … Peraus dos Japurás De assombramentos e de espantos.

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BERIMBAU The plants in the swamps Of the flooded forests of the Japurás Tremble, tremble, tremble. Call the saci: si si si si! – Ui ui ui ui ui. The Iara water sprite howls In the swamps of the flooded forests Of the Japurás and Purus rivers. The mameluke is mad. She left the longhouse alone – The river dolphin strikes – bite bite … It was the dophin! The Dirtydevil casts the evil eye In the swamps of the flooded forests Left-handed cross! – They tremble – river gorges of the Japurás From hauntings and frights.

Pau Brasil (1925) (Brazilwood) The poems of Oswald de Andrade’s Pau Brasil (Brazilwood) exemplify the modernists’ historical and geographical syntheses. The book is divided into nine sections titled ‘History of Brazil’, ‘Poems of Colonization’, ‘São Martinho’ (a plantation), ‘RP1’ (the ‘Rápido Paulista’ train), ‘Carnaval’, ‘Lovers’ Secretary’, ‘Light Company Poles’, ‘Routes to Minas’, and ‘Brazilian Lloyd’ (ships). The history of Brazil section consists of lines excerpted from the letter of discovery by on-board scribe Pero Vaz Caminha dated May 1500 and other founding chronicles, given a new ironic or satirical context and presented as ready-made poems. The Brazilwood poems are characterizations in miniature of themes in the national history portrayed in concise snapshots. The chronological sequence of sections following the country’s history ends with a return voyage from Paris by the

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author himself, who steps off the ship at the port of Santos, keeping his happy memories of Paris out of sight of the customs agents. Thus, the whole history of Brazil is rewritten to culminate in the present moment of avant-garde innovation. Oswald calls his book a cancioneiro, or songbook, using the title given to Portuguese collections of fourteenth century verse by Iberian troubadour poets. Haroldo de Campos considers the poems to be a reduction and radical devouring of the past, out of which Oswald constructs a new language based on the ready-made, the image, and a language of inventive spontaneity.23 Brazil’s rich ethnic background – ‘natural, picturesque, ingenuous’ – appears as an innocently discovered poetic object to be captured in snapshots by the poet as strolling photographer. Just as Mário de Andrade strolled through São Paulo, Oswald de Andrade strolls through all of Brazilian history. A sharper poetic strategy is the creation of minimalist images, unifying concrete structure with thematic synthesis: The poem ‘Along the line’, for example, fixes the poetic instants of a train passenger’s observations of the landscape: along the line    longo da linha Coconut trees    Coqueiros By twos    Ao  dois By threes    Aos  três By groups    Aos  grupos Tall     Altos Short     Baixos.

Cultural criticism becomes a matter of discovery, close reading, and participation by the reader in a poetic synthesis of reality. The reader and the strolling photographer are one: ‘Freezer of hearts / Underneath blouses’ […]. The reimagining of a timeless national origin supplied material for dramatic and musical enactment, illustrated in the early symphonic repertoire of Villa-Lobos in the tone poems Amazônia and Uirapuru. Ballets, such as La Création du monde, composed by Darius Milhaud with libretto by Blaise Cendrars, both of whom developed profound connections with Brazil, drew on Brazilian scenarios, such as those evoked in Oswald’s poetic journey across Brazilian cultural history. 23

Haroldo de Campos, ‘Uma poética da radicalidade’, in Oswald de Andrade, ed., Pau Brasil, 2.a ed. (São Paulo: Globo, 2003), 7–72.

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Image 12:  Heitor Villa-Lobos, orchestral score for Choro No. 10, subtitled ‘Rasga Coração’ and dedicated to Paulo Prado, published by Max Eschig, Paris, 1928.

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Choro No. 10 Villa-Lobos adapts the style of street musicians called choro for a series of works from 1920 to 1928. Composed in Rio de Janeiro in 1926, Choro No. 10 is the most fully symphonic of his choros, containing the rhythm, dynamism, and full instrumentation of an Amazonian ‘Rite of Spring’. It was performed before two well-known tone poems composed earlier, the Amazonas and Uirapuru. His synthesis in these compositions of music and instruments from the country’s diverse regions and traditions produces a pan-Brazilian mosaic:  ‘[…] not just carioca, not just from the south, but a pan-Brazilian who succeeded in comprehending the most distant Brazils, from the most distantly gaucho to the most distantly Amazonian’.24 Alejo Carpentier describes the dilemma of Villa-Lobos as an American composer: One must not forget that those who have taken up the arduous task of making American-universal art are tilling virgin soil. Everything here is open for experimentation, still to be known […] One has to weigh the right amount of traditions, choose the richest folkloric elements, leave aside personal feelings to create the right technique. Our composer knows anguished and dilemmas that European composers don’t have. The desire ‘to find the universal in the details of the local’, as Unamuno wished, keeps him on the tight wire at the border between the local and the universal. On one side the rhythms of his native land, full of lyricism in a raw state that needs channelling. On the other are the eternal questions about the mode of expression and métier […] of pure music.25

The subtitle of Choro No. 10, ‘Rasga o coração’ (Heartbreaker) is a reference to a poem by Catulo da Paixão Cearense that was first used for lyrics, before being substituted by an indigenous chant. Choro No. 10 is premiered for Brazilian president Washington Luís with the composer conducting on November 11, 1926 at the Teatro Lírico in Rio de Janeiro and repeated in Paris the following year on December 5 at the Salle 24 Gilberto Freyre, ‘Villa-Lobos Revisitado’, Lecture at 1982 Villa-Lobos Festival, quoted in Guérios (2003), 13. 25 In Villa-Lobos e Carpentier (1991), 37–38.

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Gaveau. About fifteen minutes long, the composition is for orchestra and mixed chorus (piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, strings, with an expanded percussion section that includes instruments used in the Brazilian carnival:  2 timpani, flat-faced gong (tam-tam), tambourine, drum (tambor), wooden drum (caxambu), 2 friction drums (puítas), muted drum (surdo), notched hollow cylinder with scraper (reco-reco), metal and wood rattles (chocalhos), piano, and harp). Its second section adds a full mixed chorus using a text and melody from the Parecis in western Mato Grosso, collected by explorer Edgar Roquette-Pinto in 1912. The single motif that is repeated throughout the work is taken from the song Mokocê-cê-maká, subjected to an indefinite rhythmic repetition by the chorus. A similarity with Uirapuru is the flute motif, which recalls the song of another rare bird of the Amazon, the Azulão da Mata (Cyanoloxia brissonii). The piece depends on colour, dynamics, and thick instrumentation presented in a collage, with its main elements repeated rather than developed; the use of an original indigenous motif creates a powerful rhythmic and dynamic effect. Notwithstanding the difficulty of classifying the composition, Eero Tarasti considers it to be more French than any other of Villa-Lobos’ orchestral compositions.26

No meio do caminho (In the Middle of the Road) In July 1928 from the provincial capital of Belo Horizonte the young poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade sends a concise poem of only ten lines to Oswald de Andrade’s cosmopolitan São Paulo Cannibal Magazine, where it is published prominently on the first page of the third number in bold type.

26

Eeno Tarasti, ‘The Choros: A New Form of Composition?’, Heitor Villa-Lobos: The Life and Works, 1887–1959 (Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland, 1995), 123–27.

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Chapter 2 NO MEIO DO CAMINHO No meio do caminho tinha uma pedra tinha uma pedra no meio do caminho tinha uma pedra no meio do caminho tinha uma pedra. Nunca me esquecerei desse acontecimento na vida de minhas retinas tão fatigadas. Nunca me esquecerei que no meio do caminho tinha uma pedra tinha uma pedra no meio do caminho no meio do caminho tinha uma pedra. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD In the middle of the road there was a stone there was a stone in the middle of the road there was a stone in the middle of the road there was a stone. I will never forget that happening in the life of my exhausted retinas. I will never forget that in the middle of the road there was a stone there was a stone in the middle of the road in the middle of the road there was a stone.

Although Carlos Drummond’s poem was not written to be a manifesto for the cannibal group, ‘No meio do caminho’, with its captivating concision and repetition, immediately gained the status of an emblem of avantgarde primitivism and, like the intruding stone, one of its most enduring literary objects. The short poem, through the materiality and mystery of the stone, embodies permanent contradictions, paradoxes, and tensions at the nucleus of avant-garde thought and language. Its theme is the encounter of such linked oppositions as transitoriness and permanence, immanence and transcendence, freedom and determinism, the common and the magical, separation and unity. Drummond’s stone draws at once on experience, geometry, and teleology. ‘In the Middle of the Road’ is both an announcement and memoir, the narration and astonished recollection of an undefined yet decisive happening or circumstance of

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incalculable consequence. The narrator meditates on a fait accompli, a material allegory of existence, that is simultaneously exterior and interior, mysterious and obvious, simple and complex, combining its classical, allegorical referent with modernist constructive simplicity. The poem is itself an avant-garde paradox or riddle, since its minimalist vocabulary announces an enormous stone, a full aesthetic inventory of avant-garde poetics contained in an impervious and strange boulder. The stone is a kind, omniscient, and undisturbable being with the power to disrupt, hypnotize, and devour the logical or visible world of the observer. The poem is constructed with elements placed in dialectical tension. The negative presence of the stone, whether interpreted as chance or magic, contrasts with the single strongly affirmative colloquial verb, ‘tinha’ (‘there was’), fatally repeated seven times. Highly visual, the poem constructs a geometry or iconography, in terms of discourse, that confronts line with sphere. Interpreted thematically, the poem reads as a microcosm of symbolic experience exhibited through allegory and sign. At the same time, the poem enchants through the incantatory repetition of a single repeated phrase, reflecting surprise, disbelief, and difference. The road, comparable to discourse itself, usually read allegorically as duration and extension, is fragmented by repetitive segments that both interdict and replace linear time and movement with circularity. Viewed from the present, the stone can be seen as an emblem of modernism’s contradictory historical and aesthetic reality, or in its occult sense as a talisman of avant-garde poetics, comparable in status to Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu, the cannibal on canvas who formally occupies the landscape of national primitivism. Treating a mystery comparable to the dilemma presented in Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, written five years earlier, Drummond’s poem expresses modernism’s profound teleological conflicts, yet in the paradoxical form of a search for authentic meaning and identity by negative means, what Timothy Reiss terms a ‘discourse of regressive infinity’ (Reiss, 1982). Aesthetically, out of the vast poetic production of Brazilian modernism, this text stands out as a maximum representative of avant-garde poetics because of the extreme economy used to construct an epic narrative in miniature, a streamlined ‘grand récit’ that gives positive form to an aesthetic of philosophical questioning and negation.

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The presence of the stone, witnessed by an astonished and experienced observer-narrator, is first an unforgettable event that brings life to a stop, a word featured in another poem by Drummond: ‘STOP. A vida parou, ou foi o automóvel?’ (‘STOP: Life stopped, or was it the automobile?’). At once immanent and transcendent, the stone is more primal than the act of observation and thus alters the nature of time and space. It is strange and not contemporaneous. It occupies and impedes both the middle of the road and an a-temporal nonspecific space. The narrator conveys his surprise in the realization that the stone is not contingent, that it does not depend on the road, the observer, the event, or time, but is the natural force and manifestation of an omniscient and intervening supernatural power. Carlos Drummond’s stone also embodies, for it is a body, the modernist dilemma of culture versus nature. The stone’s natural primitivism stands in mute but eloquent testimony to immanent forces and forms of nature and instinct. It is permanent contradiction, unanswerable being beyond language, conveying at once the impenetrable stoniness of its denial of transcendence, on the one hand, and the ‘negative epiphany’, in Paul Mann’s term, of its unmistakable, energizing message. It is a regressive utopia springing from the origins to disrupt linearity and chronology with its existential challenge of chaos and alienation. The poem’s three internal participants – the observer-narrator with his retinas and cumulative life experience, the road, and the stone – suddenly come together in a dramatic landscape, the setting for a theatre of teleological and ethical allegory, suggesting a contemporary recasting of Gil Vicente’s early renaissance play, ‘Auto da Alma’ (‘The Soul’s Journey’). The narrator’s experience, past and future, is put at risk because of his awareness of the stone and the implications of its challenging and impeding presence. The scene is philosophically and artistically shocking to the observer because its meaning is achieved through a reversal of nature, or defiance of nature, as the stone occupies a man-made space and challenges his purposes, confronting linearity of thought and experience. The poem’s hypnotic effect captures its full meaning with the numbing circularity of repetition and inevitability.

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Image 13:  Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu, 1928. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.

Abaporu The second of Tarsila’s three major paintings, the Abaporu, 85 X 73 cm, is the most internationally known and renowned. For the March 2011 visit to Brasília by then President Barack Obama, the painting was displayed at the Casa da Alvorada, residence of the Brazilian president, on loan from its home in the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, as Brazil’s most iconic work of art. In the painting is a nude figure seated on the ground, a tiny head near the top of the canvas and an enormous foot occupying the lower right quadrant. The head is leaning on a tiny left arm. Tarsila described the painting as ‘a monstrous figure, immense feet, seated on a green plain, her bent arm resting on a knee, her hand supporting the full weight of her

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miniscule head’.27 If that posture is reminiscent of Rodin’s The Thinker, the primitive figure is paradoxical, since the cannibal manifesto rejects ideas in favour of instinctual behaviour. The foot and right hand are placed over a green stone or mound on which the figure is balanced with parabola hips, to emphasize the telluric qualities of the strange indigenous figure, ‘in contact with the soil’, as the text of the manifesto reads. In the background is a stylized tropical nature, a green cactus with two arms and a flower, or sun that is represented by a slice of pineapple against a light blue sky as background. In the lower left corner is the date, January 11, 1928 and in the lower right the artist’s name in capital letters. Five previous line drawings of different sizes anticipate the canvas, although lacking its strong colours. In Abaporu V the figure and the cactus are shaded with lines, perhaps suggesting the effects of tropical sun. A small line drawing appeared as an illustration of the Cannibal Manifesto in the Revista de Antropofagia.

Image 14:  Tarsila do Amaral, Sketch of Abaporu in ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, 1928. 27 See Edgard Cavalheiro (1944), 24. ‘[…] uma figura monstruosa, pés imensos, sentada numa planície verde, o braço dobrado repousado num joelho, a mão sustentando o peso pleno da cabecinha miníscula’.

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Modernist House / Casa Modernista In 1923, Russian architect Gregori Warchavchik arrived in São Paulo, a city almost without professional architects, from studies and contacts in Europe. In June 1925 he published the first article on modern Brazilian architecture in Il Piccolo, written in Italian, emphasizing rationality in construction. He questions, ‘Will our children find the same harmony in the latest kinds of cars and airplanes, on the one hand, and the architecture of our houses? […] The character of our architecture, as in other arts, cannot be a style only for us, its contemporaries, but also for succeeding generations’.28 The Casa Modernista, Warchavchik’s first house, was begun in 1927 and finished in the first months of 1928. A review in the Diário Nacional (June 17) commented on its use of the elements of construction themselves, the composition of volumes, the distribution of surfaces, of openings, and the character of materials that supports a play of form and light. Warchavchik himself described the house in an interview in the Correio Paulistano (July 8): This construction of mine on R. Santa Cruz is the first attempt of its kind in Brazil. I think that I was able to create a kind of rational house, comfortable, of pure utility, full of air, light, and joy […] [I]‌nspired by the enchanting Brazilian landscapes I tried to create a kind of architecture adapted to this region, climate, and also to the old traditions of this land. Alongside straight lines, precise, vertical and horizontal that make up the main element of modern architecture in the form of cubes and planes, I used those decorative and characteristic colonial tiles, and I believe I was able to design a very Brazilian house, perfectly adapted to the climate. The tropical garden surrounding the house has all the richness of typical Brazilian plants.

Oswaldo Costa, radical editor of the 2nd ‘dentition’ of the Cannibal Magazine, praises Warchavchik for picking up the essential of the colonial style, ‘[…] to launch the bases of a purely Brazilian architecture, or better, tropical, such that it adapts to the conditions and circumstances of the environment […], climate, temperament, tradition, customs, etc’..29 In a visit to the residence in 1929, accompanied by Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfatti, John Graz, and other dignitaries, Le Corbusier declared See Geraldo Ferraz, Warchavchik e a introdução da nova arquitetura no Brasil: 1925 a 1940 (São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 1965), 21. 29 Ferraz (1965), 60. 28

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that Warchavchik should represent Brazil at the International Congress of Modern Architecture in the third congress in Brussels, along with the largest number possible of modern Brazilian architects.30 Today the Casa Modernista is a museum belonging to the City of São Paulo.

Image 15:  ‘Casa Modernista’ [Modernist house] by Gregori Warchavchik, São Paulo, 1928.

Macunaíma Written in one week, Mário de Andrade’s novel is a virtuosic interplay between folkloric mythology and fantasy set in the Amazon. Macunaíma is based on a work of anthropological research in Roraima and Orinoco areas by German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg from 1911 to 1913, published as a volume of cosmic myths, heroic legends, and animal fables of the Taulipand and Arekuná Indians of the Brazilian Northwest. Research by 30 Ferraz (1965), 29.

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folklorist Câmara Cascudo explains that ‘Macunáima’ (accent on the diphthong) was considered a divinity among indigenous tribes of the Roraima plateau in Brazilian Guiana. The creator of land and plants, Macunáima descended to earth down a tree, converting its branches into all species of animals. Over time, with the convergence of indigenous legends, Macunáima became a picaresque hero of magical adventures known for his cleverness, instinctive mischief, and joyous irreverence.31 Mário calls him a ‘hero without any character’ and in the same spirit draws widely on folk materials from around the Americas. His character Macunaíma, born fullgrown in the Amazon jungle, ‘son of the fear of the night’, journeys to São Paulo in pursuit of a magic stone, the muiraquitã, stolen by the giant maneater Piamã. Haroldo de Campos in his book Morfologia do Macunaíma (Morphology of Macunaíma) studies the novel as a structural folktale, following Vladimir Propp’s theories. Macunaíma is cast between hero and antagonist in his own adventures, which revolve around the erotic violation and transgression of norms and the quest for a magic elixir. For critic Pedro Nava it is a Rabelaisian work, incrusted with Portuguese cantigas, popular poetry, peninsular legends, profane slang, and neologisms, Amerindian folklore, lines from Camões, Machado de Assis, and from erotic Bocage. It is a cultural stew fermenting an immense and prodigious anecdotal tale that retains the status of a rhapsodic national anthem.32 Departing from the myth of Macunáima, Mário uses other collected legends to forge a pan folkloric epic fantasy that he called a ‘national rhapsody’. Macunaíma’s adventures carry him from the Amazon to São Paulo, in an inversion of the voyages that Mário made to the Amazon region in 1927. The novel freely adapts folk themes, indigenous vocabulary and legends of the Americas to tell its story, in the same manner that compositions of Villa-Lobos incorporate Amazonian sounds, rhythms, and textures. The author uses indigenous words to as a distinguishing feature of Brazilian prose fiction. The novel describes his new speech as ‘half song and half bee’s honey, possessing the treason of unknown fruits of the jungle’. Nevertheless, even Mário’s Amazon cannot escape a connection with Europe: in the final scene the reader learns that Macunaíma’s story is told by a parrot, before it flies off to Lisbon. 31 Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro (São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1979), 452. 32 Pedro Nava, Beira-Mar, memorias 4 (1978), 193.

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Image 16:  Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia, 1929. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.

Antropofagia Tarsila’s painting Antropofagia (1929) is the third of her trilogy associated with the theme of cannibalism, three paintings that art historian Luis Pérez-Oramas calls an ‘emblematic series of transformations’. The largest at 126 X 142  cm, Antropofagia unites the two previous figures from A Negra and the Abaporu against a more luxuriant and dense dark green tropical background. In the light blue background is the sun, represented by an orange slice. Behind the tropical foliage is a small red vertical band, suggestive of an unidentifiable structure. In Antropofagia the Abaporu figure is reversed, with the large foot to the lower left of the canvas, still sitting with hips touching the green mound. The head is curved towards the centre of the painting, and the left arm is extended to touch the knee. The Negra figure is seated behind the Abaporu, however with her drooping breast extending over its lower leg. Her right leg passes under the Abaporu’s leg and her large foot occupies the lower right corner of the canvas. In this painting, the heads of the two

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figures have no features at all. All of the body areas are smooth, with the nipple of the breast being the only distinguishing body feature. The two large legs, the two feet, and the drooping breast dominate the foreground, although in this painting the tropicalized background engulfs the figures. The towering and uneven shapes of the enormous cacti and fronds produce an effect of estrangement as well as exuberance. The figures are intertwined and at rest against the primitive jungle landscape. ***

Image 17:  Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.

Image 18:  Banner of Revista de Antropofagia, 1928.

Chapter 3

The Cannibal Magazine and the Cannibal Manifesto

  ‘Here comes our food jumping along’

The Cannibal Magazine appeared in São Paulo in ten numbers from May 1928 to February 1929. The first ‘dentition’, in the format 33 X 24 cm and a scant eight pages, was followed by a separate second ‘dentition’ consisting of sixteen single full pages in the Diário de S. Paulo newspaper from March to August 1929.1 The first ‘dentition’ received limited attention, and the second was all but forgotten. Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto in Number 1 will not be republished in Brazil for thirty-one years. Notwithstanding the manifesto’s current international fame, it was first translated to Spanish only after fifty years, to French after fifty-six and to English after sixty-three. One of the reasons is the ephemeral nature of the Cannibal Magazine, Brazil’s exceptional status within Latin American and international literary cultures, and the isolation of the Portuguese language. Oswald de Andrade’s greatest sin, for poet Augusto de Campos, was to have written in Portuguese: Had he written in French or English, or even Spanish, his Antropofagia would have been enthroned in the constellation of ideas by such original and unorthodox 1

The complete Revista de Antropofagia is available from the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin at the University of São Paulo: .

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Chapter 3 thinkers as McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller […] John Cage (Diary: How to Improve the World) or Norman O. Brown, who in Love’s Body (1966) revived themes of Freudian cannibalism and Bachofen’s matriarchy’. (1976, 7)

A central reason that antropofagia faded into the background and was forgotten for half a century, however, is that by the end of the 1920s the intense creative interplay with the French avant-garde, the presence of Brazilian artists in Paris, and their mutual fascination with primitivism came to an abrupt end, when with the world economic crisis the Brazilians returned home to face a long period of isolation under the Vargas regime. All were obliged to change direction in their works, adapting to the social and political realism that would last until the end of the war in 1945. The secondary reason is the lack of critical perspective. Modernism would not be considered seriously by literary historians as an organic period of the arts for some forty years, and antropofagia was initially viewed as the insouciant, rebellious, and satirical tract that it was in the Cannibal Magazine. When the manifesto and antropofagia were rediscovered by the São Paulo concrete poets in the early 1960s, they were defended in Haroldo de Campos’ influential essay, ‘Da razão antropofágica:  Europa sob o signo da devoração’ [On Anthropophagic Reasoning: Europe under the Sign of Devouring], as an autochthonous declaration of a new creative centre by ‘new barbarians’ of the Americas, more vital than Europe’s.2 Near the end of the 1920s, the Cannibal Magazine provided a philosophical and theoretical platform consonant with the cannibal devouring of the Parisian avant-gardes, which became an indelible part of modernizing Brazil. The cannibals mounted a radical attack from the periphery for the repossession and control of national culture, at the same time that they faced their own regressive Utopias, instances of displacement, loss, estrangement, death of paradise, ravishing of the body, and loss of self. Their desire for joining self-expression with national realization would develop after 1928 into a social platform of radical primitivism affecting law, philosophy, and politics. The main focus for this programme is the Cannibal Magazine, particularly the 2

Haroldo de Campos, ‘Da razão antropofágica: a Europa sob o signo da devoração’, Colóquio:  Letras 62 (July 1981), 10–26; ‘The Rule of Anthropophagy:  Europe under the Sign of Devoration’, Maria Tai Wolff, trans., Latin American Literary Review 14.27 (January–June 1986), 42–60.

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second ‘dentition’ that until now has received very little critical comment. Scholar Haroldo Bruno finds a more political agenda, although with a similar iconoclastic presentation in the second ‘dentition’: One can see a relative uniformity and theoretical definition in the second “dentition”, although no one moment is distinguished by clarity and objectivity. In a kind of declaration of principles in the first number, it proclaims an open orientation, an elasticity of connections that lasts until the end in the same heterodox spirit. Generally, the political orientation was anarchy and the aesthetic agitation, which could not lead to the production of a coherent work.3

National character had, after all, been viewed as absence, something yet to be formed, tainted by its subservience to cosmopolitan models. The Magazine initiates what Suely Rolnik calls ‘a line of flight from European culture [in Brazil] […] bringing down the division between colonizers and colonized by choosing to eliminate exteriority’,4 eating Europe as antropófagos, ‘cannibals’. They are fuelled by the energy and pleasure of innovation and aesthetic discovery, which they pursue with verve and comic brilliance, attempting to create a postcolonial modernity using play, theatre, humour, violence, and satire.

The First ‘Dentition’ The Cannibal Magazine’s first ‘dentition’ is directed by 27-year-old writer Antônio de Alcântara Machado, under the management of poet and 3

4

‘É na segunda “dentição”, aliás, que se pode apontar uma relativa uniformidade e definição teórica, embora não apresente nenhum momento que se tenha distinguido pela clareza e objetividade de intenções. Numa espécie de declaração de princípios, no primeiro número, proclamava uma liberdade de orientação, uma elasticidade de compromissos, que perduram até o fim e que não passavam de heterodoxia próxima ao informe. De modo geral, o aspecto político terminou em anarquismo, e o estético em agitação, a que não respondeu a produção duma obra coerente’. Suely Rolnik, ‘Subjetividade antropofágica’, (1998), 128–47. Also Catrin Seefranz, Tupi talking cure (2013).

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ambassador Raul Bopp, then 30  years old, run from 13, Rua Benjamin Constant, 3rd floor, room 7 in the centre of São Paulo. The Magazine is composed as an open literary review full of poetry – page one carries the poem ‘Manhã’ by Mário de Andrade. His celebrated novel Macunaíma is introduced in No. 2, an issue that features poems by other modernist poets – Augusto Meyer, Abguar Bastos, Guilherme de Almeida. Mário’s ethnomusicological study of an Iberian ballad, ‘Romance do Veludo’, a study of the Tupy language by conservative nationalist Plínio Salgado, and a column on Japanese immigration by Silvestre Machado appear in later numbers. There are drawings by Rosário Fusco (No. 3) and Antônio Gomide (No. 4)  and studies of regional folklore by Câmara Cascudo, Augusto Meyer, and Mário de Andrade. Northeastern novelist José Lins do Rego contributes a page on being a Brazilian writer. More content comes from the Northeast and Minas Gerais regions than from São Paulo. For contributor Rosário Fusco, an editor of the magazine Verde from Cataguazes, Minas Gerais, as for many readers, the cannibal pose was a light-spirited, humorous posture, in the spirit of a column by Álvaro Moreira in which he imagines the arrival of the Apostle Saint Thomas in Bahia. When the Saint forbids the locals from eating meat, they threaten to eat him, and he is saved only by his speed in swimming to an uninhabited island off shore. The comic stance of the magazine is redoubled by poet Manuel Bandeira’s ironic ‘invitation’ to devour a music critic. The column ‘Brasiliana’, always found on the last pages, consists of ready-mades culled from local newspapers across Brazil and presented with dry wit in a mixture of comedy, amazement, and ridicule. Augusto de Campos describes the column as ‘newspaper announcements, lines from novels, speeches, birthday cards, announcements, circulars, “ready-made texts” that bring out […] the imbecility in every-day conventional language’:5 [LITERATURE Subtitle of a news item published in the Gazette of Sergipe, Aracaju on 9-14-1928:

5

Augusto de Campos, ‘Revistas Re-vistas’ (1975): ‘[…] as notícias de jornal, trechos de romances, discursos, cartões de boas festas, anúncios, circulares – textos “ready made” que denunciam […] a imbecilidade através da linguagem cotidiana e convencional’.

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The most beautiful “geishas” with eyes of black velvet will fill the alamedas of the ‘Theophilo Dantas’ park with the sumptuous grace of their bellowing “kimonos”.6

Quotes from interior newspapers reveal ingenuous simplicity and cultural estrangement. The excerpt ‘Democracy’ quotes a telegram from Fortaleza about the stopover of the emperor, S. A. D. Pedro de Orleans e Bragança, on a transatlantic voyage: Going back on board, a black stevedore named Vicente Fonseca, coming out of the multitude, embraced the emperor saying, “Know that opinions have changed but hearts have remained the same”.7

A telegram from Curitiba tells that Juvenal Manuel de Nascimento, expostal worker, invited all his friends and relatives to a party, where he was jovial and announced a surprise. To the general shock, he touched a cigar to a package of dynamite, killing Juvenal and gravely wounding his wife and all who had accepted the fatal invitation. ‘Brasiliana’s’ ready-mades prepare the social theatre of playwright Nelson Rodrigues. *** The theoretical and historical basis for antropofagia begins in an introductory column by Alcântara Machado, ‘Abre-Alas’, the title of a popular carnival song. It is the cannibal, not the Indian, who is father of the Brazilians and the ‘beginning of everything’: Not the Indian […] The cannibal eats the Indian and also eats the so-called civilized: he is left licking his fingers, ready to swallow his brothers. Modern experience works that way (before: against the others; after, against the others and ourselves too) […] Cordial mastication has already begun.8 6 LITERATURA

Sub-titulo de uma noticia publicada pela Gazeta de Aracajú, 14-9-28

‘Lindissimas “geishas” de olhos de velludo negro encherão as alléas do parque “Theophilo Dantas” da graça sumptuosa dos ‘kimonos’ esvoaçantes’.

7 8

‘Na volta para bordo, um preto catraeiro, de nome Vicente Fonseca, destacando-se da multidão abraçou o príncipe dizendo: “Fique sabendo que as opiniões mudaram mas os corações são os mesmos” ’. ‘Não o índio […] O antropófago come o índio e come o chamado civilizado: só ele fica lambendo os dedos. Pronto para engolir os irmãos. Assim a experiência

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On the last page, Oswaldo Costa, who leads the intellectual development of the cannibal concept throughout the magazine, posts a synthetic programme of action: ‘The Portuguese dressed the Indian. He must be undressed’.9 Costa presents antropofagia as a theory of liberation and a reversal of colonial civilization, coming after four centuries of slavery, with the formula and slogan: We want man who does not doubt, without even the presumption of the existence of doubt; naked, natural, cannibal. Four centuries of cow meat! Horrors!10

The vein of satirical humour continues in a column in No. 4 (August 1928) that universalizes the idea of devouring, flesh before fowl: ONLY ANTHROPOPHAGY? NO. ORNITHOPHAGY TOO. Anthropophagy won. There’s no restaurant of any class that does not have tasty human flesh on its menu. The Slaughterhouse Academy of Letters is deserted. The academics have almost all been devoured. And, to avoid any lack of food, we’ve arranged something to follow human flesh. Which is, for example, ornithophagy. And the food that used to come jumping along will come flying. Let’s eat that sabiá that sings in the palm trees. Let’s eat the doves in the dovecote. Let’s eat ‘Albatroz, Albatroz, eagle of the ocean …’ And long live ornithophagy. Sabiá, dove, juriti, albatroz and all others, just for food. To fly there are airplanes … moderna (antes: contra os outros; depois: contra os outos e contra nós mesmos) […] Já começou a cordial mastigação’. 9 ‘Portugal vestiu o selvagem. Cumpre despi-lo’. 10 ‘Nós queremos o homem sem a dúvida, sem sequer a presunção da existência da duvida: nu, natural, antropófago. Quatro séculos de carne de vaca! Que horror!’

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And as for king of the ocean, Lindbergh is enough, until the day he is devoured too.11 JOHN OF TODAY

In No. 6 (October 1928) the sarcastic humour is directed at positivism, the nineteenth-century creed imported from France that put the slogan on the Brazilian flag, ‘order and progress’: THE MAN WHOM I ATE BIT BY BIT He was bothering me so much that I already had barbeque in mind. Once he mentioned ‘Love as a principle’. I though a quote like that deserved a bite. And I sunk my teeth in him. Then he came out with ‘Order as a basis’. I was so indignant that I bit him again. Suddenly, when out for a walk with him, I heard from his mouth ‘Progress as an end’. That was too much! I tore the flesh of that ‘citizen’ with my teeth. Now he’s all white because of the whiteness of his skeleton. 11

ANTROPOFAGIA SÓ. NÃO. ORNITOFAGIA TAMBÉM. A antropofagia venceu. Não ha restaurante que se prese que não faça figurar em seu menu a saborosa carne humana. O Matadouro Academia de Letras está deserto. 0s acadêmicos foram quase todos devorados. E, para não haver falta de comida, arranjemos um sucedâneo á carne humana. Que seja, por exemplo, a ornitofagia. E a comida, que vinha pulando, virá voando. Vamos comer esse sabiá que canta nas palmeiras … Vamos comer as pombas do pombal águia do oceano … E viva a ornitofagia. Sabiá, pomba, juriti, albatroz e tudo mais, só para comida. Para voar ha o aeroplano … E,para rei do oceano, chega Lindenberg, até o dia em que seja devorado também. JOÃO DO PRESENTE

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Chapter 3 I ate all his flesh and left only the reddened tongue in the whiteness of the skull. I left the tongue on purpose. Now I want to see if he has the courage to say ‘Live for others, live without secrets’. If he says that, he’ll die like a fish: through the mouth. The poor guy is a positivist, and maybe that’s why his flesh was ready to be eaten. And I ate it.12 JOHN OF TODAY

This line of humour is carried over into No. 6 of the second ‘dentition’ (April 1929): WHY I EAT (The Indian was the sane one. It was the Indian who was a man. It is the Indian who is our model). The Indian was the sane one. […] The Indian didn’t have police, wasn’t repressed, or nervous, didn’t have social order bureaus, or feel shame in being naked, or class struggle, 12

O HOMEM QUE EU COMI AOS BOCADINHOS Ele me amolava tanto que eu já o tinha de olho para um churrasco. Uma vez ele falou em ‘Amor por principio’. Eu achei que uma citação dessa merecia uma dentada. E ferrei-lhe os dentes. Outra vez saiu-se com ‘A ordem por base’. Eu me indignei tanto que mordi-lhe de novo. De uma feita, passeando com ele, ouvi de sua boca ‘O progresso por fim’. Era demais! Rasguei a carne do ‘cidadão’ a custa de dentadas. Agora ele anda branquinho por causa da brancura do esqueleto. Eu comi toda carne d’ele e somente deixei a língua avermelhando na alvura da caveira. Eu deixei a língua de propósito. E quero ver se ele tem coragem de me dizer ‘Viver para outrem, viver ás claras’. Se ele disser, então morrerá como peixe: pela boca. O coitado é positivista, e talvez por isso estava com a carne mesmo no ponto de ser comida. E eu comi. JOÃO DO PRESENTE

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or white slave traffic, or Ruy Barbosa, or the secret ballot, or pride in Brazil, not being an aristocrat or bourgeois or low class. Why would that be? The Indian wasn’t monogamous, nor did he want to know which were his legitimate children, nor did he think that the family was the cornerstone of society. Why would that be? After people from outside came (why?) such different people (why would that be?) everything changed, everything got spoiled. Not so much at the beginning, but it kept sinking in, sinking in. Now it’s much worse. The time has arrived for the ‘anthrophophagic descent’. We’re going to eat everything again from the beginning.13 MARXILLAR

*** The first ten numbers of the Cannibal Magazine include significant literary and visual content and feature four poems by master poets of modernism on the front pages of their respective issues. Manuel Bandeira’s ‘Noturno da Rua da Lapa’ (No. 5) (Nocturne on Lapa Street) evokes the 13

PORQUE COMO (O índio é que era são. O índio é que era homem. O índio é que é o nosso modelo.) O índio não linha polícia, não tinha recateamentos. nem moléstias nervosas, nem delegacia de ordem social, nem vergonha de ficar pelado, nem luta de classes, nem tráfego de brancas, nem Rui Barbosa, nem voto secreto, nem se ufanava do Brasil, nem era aristocrata, nem burguês, nem classe baixa. Porque será? O índio não era monógamo, nem queria saber quais eram seus filhos legítimos, nem achava que a família era a pedra angular da sociedade. Porque será? Depois que vem a gente de fora (porque?) gente tão diferente (porque será) tudo mudou, tudo ficou estragado. Não tanto no começo, mas foi ficando, foi ficando. Agora é que está pior. Então chegou a vez da ‘descida antropofágica’. Vamos comer tudo de novo. MARXILLAR

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spirit of Poe and the departed Lenore to describe a sense of loss for a world that passed with the strains of the new anthem of the Republic, followed by horror and estrangement in the invasion of his street by a monstrous flying creature. From this unmistakable sign of death or unavoidable disaster the poet sees no escape: NOTURNO DA RUA DA LAPA A janela estava aberta. Para o quê, não sei, porém o que entrava era o vento dos lupanares, de mistura com o eco que se partia nas curvas ciclodais, e fragmentos do hino da bandeira.   Não posso atinar no que fazia: se meditava, se morria de espanto, ou -se vinha de muito longe.   Nesse momento (oh! porquê precisamente nesse momento?) é que penetrou no quarto o bicho que voava, o articulado implacável, implacável!   Compreendi desde logo não haver possibilidade alguma de evasão. Nascer de novo também não adiantava. – A bomba de flit! pensei comigo. É um inseto.   Quando o jacto fumigatório partiu, nada mudou em mim, os sinos da redenção continuaram em silencio, nenhuma porta se abriu, nem fechou. Mas o monstruoso animal FICOU MAIOR. Senti que ele não morreria nunca mais, nem sairia, conquanto não houvesse no aposento nenhum busto de Palas, nem na minh’alma, o que é pior, a recordação persistente de alguma extinta Lenora.   [NOCTURNE ON LAPA STREET   The window was open. Why, I don’t know, but it let in wind from the brothels, mixed with the echo coming from cycloid curves, and fragments of the national anthem.   I can’t imagine what I was doing: if meditating, dying of fright, or arriving from far away.   That was when (oh! Why precisely at that moment?) a flying creature penetrated my room, a relentless, relentless buzzing!   I immediately realized there was no possibility of escape. To be born again also wouldn’t help. – The flit insect spray! I thought to myself. It’s an insect.   When the fumigating jet started, nothing changed for me, the bells of redemption stayed silent, no doors opened, or closed. But the monstrous animal GREW BIGGER. I thought it would never die, nevermore, or leave, as long as there was no bust of Pallas in my room, or in my soul, what is worse, the persistent memory of some extinct Lenore.]

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Murilo Mendes’ poem ‘Republic’ (No. 7) is a satire on the proclamation of the republic in 1889: R E P Ú B L I C A Deodoro todo nos trinques bate na porta de Dão Pedro 2.o. Seu Imperadô, dê o fora que nós queremos tomar conta desta bugiganga. Mande vir os músicos. O Imperador camarada responde Pois não meus filhos não se vexem me deixem calçar as chinelas podem entrar à vontade. Só peço que não me bulam nas obras completas de Vitor Hugo. (RIO DE JANEIRO)     [R E P U B L I C Deodoro all dressed to the nines Knocks on the door of Dão Pedro 2nd Mr. Emper, get lost cause we’re gonna take charge of this thingamajig. He calls for the musicians. The Emperor jolly fellow replies Of course, my children don’t worry yourselves let me put on my slippers come in make yourselves at home. I only ask you not to mess with my complete works of Victor Hugo.] MURILO MENDES

Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s ‘Anecdota da Bulgária’ (No. 8) captures the manifesto’s black humour: ANECDOTA DA BULGARIA Era uma vez um czar naturalista que caçava homens. Quando lhe disseram que também se caçam borboletas e andorinhas, ele ficou muito espantado, e achou uma barbaridade.

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Chapter 3 (BELO HORIZONTE)     CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE   [BULGARIAN ANECDOTE Once upon a time there was a naturalist czar Who hunted men. When they told him that additionally they hunted butterflies and swallows, he was very shocked, and considered it a barbarity.]

***

Image 19:  Drawing by Tarsila do Amaral in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’.

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Another Quick Bite: The Second ‘Dentition’ The Cannibal Magazine spills over into 1929 in its 2nd ‘dentition’, which radicalizes the cannibal agenda as an agent for profound critique and change in society and law. After its first ‘dentition’ of ten numbers, each with eight pages, the magazine continues as a single page in a 2nd ‘dentition’ of sixteen numbers in the Diário de S. Paulo, ceded by editor Rubens do Amaral. In the new format, editorialist Oswaldo Costa clearly states its aim to revolutionize Brazilian life:  ‘The anthropophagic descent is not a literary revolution. Nor social. Nor political. Nor religious. It is all that at the same time’.14 The second ‘dentition’ is a significant radicalization of the cannibal programme, its columns signed with a flood of clever pseudonyms. Perhaps because of the fancifulness of its revolutionary programme, it has been little studied, whether in the context of modernist ebullience or of socio-political reform. In an introduction to the only facsimile edition in print, poet Augusto de Campos calls it ‘a counter newspaper within a newspaper’.15 Campos considers the magazine to be a neglected essential work of literary and political modernism, ‘the most unknown and without a doubt the most revolutionary of our Modernism’.16 Its second phase supplements and completes the first ‘dentition’, comprising what Campos calls ‘[…] the most consistent formulation in our Modernism’.17 The demoniac and the angelic sides of cannibalism emanate from the explicit recipes in the second ‘dentition’, endorsing the engagement and promotion of national artistic intelligence and creative consciousness, which were paramount goals of the 14

Japy-Mirim, ‘de antropofagia’, 2 ‘dentição’, N.o 2 (23-3-29). ‘A descida antropofágica não é uma revolução literária. Nem social. Nem política. Nem religiosa. Ela é tudo isso ao mesmo tempo’. Concerning the leading role played in the radical position of the second ‘dentition’ by Oswaldo Costa, see the study by Carlos A. Jauregui. 15 Revista de Antropofagia, ‘Introduction’ (1976), 5. ‘[…] um contrajornal dentro de um jornal’. 16 ‘[…] a mais desconhecida, e sem dúvida a mais revolucionária do nosso Modernismo […]’. 17 ‘[…] a formulação mais consistente que nos deixou o Modernismo’.

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movement’s versatile writer, musician, folklorist, and intellectual Mário de Andrade,18 although with a more radical programme than he supported. Its extreme satires, personal insults – such as the headline ‘miss macunaíma’ – and negative reviews of Mário and Paulo Prado led them to break with the group. In six columns under the title ‘On Anthropophagy’, Oswaldo Costa and Oswald de Andrade develop and expand its core concepts, which are essential for an understanding of the theory, programme, and impact of the movement as a whole. The first essay (March 17, 1929) introduces the phrase ‘biological man’, or man in a state of nature, to guide its political theories: ‘We are against fascists of any kind and also against Bolsheviks of any kind. Whatever is favourable to biological man we will consider good. And ours’ (No. 1).19 Departing from the implied acceptance of Rousseau’s state of nature, Costa links legislation to creation of taboos and recommends that formal education fall in line with man’s biological nature, in which anthropophagy is an example and condition of exogamy: ‘What is anthropophagy? The absorption of the environment. The transformation of taboo into totem’. The metaphor of consumption is applied to revolutionize economic theory: As for Marx, we consider him one of the best “romantics of Antropofagia”. We are certain that he erred when he explained the economic problem under the term “means of production”. For us what is interesting is “consumption” – the aim of production. Simply. From there, our theory (reply to other theories) is adverse possession against property (No. 1).20

18

Mário de Andrade, ‘O Movimento Modernista’ (1942), In: Jorge Schwartz (org.), Brasil 1920–1950: da Antropofagia à Brasília (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2002). 19 ‘Nós somos contra os fascistas de qualquer espécie e contra os bolchevistas também de qualquer espécie. O que nessas realidades políticas houver favorável ao homem biológico, consideraremos bom. É nosso’. 20 ‘Quanto ao Marx, consideramo-lo um dos melhores “românticos da Antropofagia”. Temos certeza de que ele errou quando colocou o problema econômico no chavão dos “meios de produção”. Para nós o que é interessante é o “consumo” – a finalidade da produção. Simplesmente. Daí a nossa teoria (resposta a outras teorias) da posse contra a propriedade’.

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In the second essay (March 24, 1929), Costa separates the new world politically from the old, even from its revolutionary currents: Lenin’s refrain – bread, peace and liberty – does not interest us. Bread we have. Liberty we want, not peace. We want liberty to eat the peace. Like bread […] Therefore not the rationalist justice of Rousseau, or the sacred justice of Catharina de Sienna, as the French Catholics desire, but justice of the wooden club. Wood on heads. You ate my brother, now I eat you. And the joy of confirming. There comes my food hopping along! (No. 2).21

Their goal, detailed in Costa’s columns and in the series ‘Moquem’ (‘Grill’), is to remake Brazil in a non-Western mould: Anthropophagy has identified the conflict between cannibal Brazil, the true one, and the other Brazil that only carries the name. Because in Brazil one must separate the European elite from the Brazilian people. We’re on their side, against the former. With the mameluke,22 the dissatisfied European, of the adventurer taken with the Indian, and against catechism, against royal mentality, against Western culture, against the governor, against the scribe, against the Inquisition. This is the way that we must construct the Brazilian nation (No. 2).23

The third essay (No. 4, April 7, 1929) presents historical and social arguments to support three main points in the manifesto. On the first point, Costa returns the key concept of discovery of the country in 1500, which 21 ‘O refrão de Lenine  – pão, paz e liberdade  – não nos interessa. Pão temos. Liberdade queremos, não a paz. Queremos liberdade para comer a paz. Com pão […] Portanto, nem a justiça racionalista de Rousseau, nem a santa justiça de Catharina de Sienna, como querem os católicos franceses. Mas a justiça do tacape. Pau na cabeça. Você comeu meu irmão, agora quem te come sou eu. E a alegria de constatar: Lá vem a minha comida pulando’! 22 ‘Mameluco’ in Brazil refers to Amerindians held and trained by the Portuguese as agents in the conversion and pacification of their peoples. 23 ‘A antropofagia identifica o conflito existente entre o Brasil caraíba, verdadeiro, e o outro que só traz o nome. Porque no Brasil há a distinguir a elite, europeia, do povo brasileiro. Ficamos com este, contra aquele. Em função do mameluco, do europeu descontente, do bom aventureiro absorvido pelo índio, e contra a catequese, contra a mentalidade reinol, contra a cultura ocidental, contra o governador, contra o escrivão, contra o Santo Ofício. E assim havemos de construir, no Brasil, a nação brasileira’.

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is finally to be substituted by Oswald de Andrade’s antropofagia. Its source is the ‘barbarous and entirely new’ painting by Tarsila do Amaral, and it deserves high consideration as the most profound in libertarian ideas and unique to come along in four centuries of national existence. The second point is that anthropophagists are neither modernists nor primitivists: ‘What we want is simplicity itself. Not a new code of simplicity’. The objection is against systematization, for example, against the canon of beauty and in favour of ‘natural, ugly, brutish, rough, barbarous, illogical beauty’.24 In philosophy, the argument is not against religion, rather against dogma. Brazilian religion, Costa affirms, is unchangeably syncretic: Rituals of macumba and of midnight mass belong to the same faith. Little saints with monastic garments and muiraquitã charms. If you want, we can even add more Brazilian saints: Our Lady of the Cobras, Saint Anthony of the Sad Girls, Virgin Mary of Jungle Fevers […] Communion itself, in the final analysis, is nothing more than an act of cannibalism hidden in a symbol.25

The third point is that Brazil must return an earlier state in which instinct predominates: The reaction of landscape against time. Native against imported. Simplicity against artificiality. Natural light against philosophical shadows […] spontaneous sensations against morals, discipline and the system.26

In a comment pertinent to the utopian and never-ending voyage against society at the conclusion of the novel Serafim Ponte Grande, as will be 24 ‘O que se quer é a simplicidade e não um novo Código de simplicidade’; ‘a beleza natural, feia, bruta, agreste, bárbara, ilógica’. 25 Cabem na mesma fé os rituais da macumba e da missa do galo. Os santinhos do escapulário e a muriquitã. Pode-se até, se vocês quiserem, aumentar o santoral brasileiro: Nossa Senhora das Cobras, Santo Antônio das Moças Tristes, Virgem Maria das Maleitas […] A própria comunhão, em última análise, não é mais do que um ato de antropofagia acorvardada num símbolo. 26 ‘[…] reação da paisagem contra o tempo. Do nativo contra o importado. Da claridade natural contra a sombra da filosofia […] Da sensação espontânea contra a moral, a disciplina, o Sistema’.

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seen, under antropofagia the country’s ports will be closed by a simple nationalizing process, which is assimilation: ‘Only anthropophagic communion will solve the problem of formation of Brazilian language and Brazilianize Brazil. Without clothing. Without artifices […] Aggressive. Barbarous. Like the land itself ’.27 Even the reference to ports has an historical basis, since D.  João VI opened them for the first time in 1809; closing them now becomes a patriotic and anti-Portuguese manoeuvre. Costa goes further, ‘We are constructing a Brazilian Brazil, no matter whom it hurts or who complains. All the old spheres of imported civilization will be impiously broken by us, until the last vestige of them disappears from our land’ (2nd ‘dentition’, no. 8).28 His column ‘Moquem’ [‘Grill’] continues the joke by inventing a series of five courses in a cannibal dinner service: ‘Aperitif’, ‘Hors d’oeuvre’, ‘Main course’, ‘Desserts’, and ‘Expresso’. The fourth essay (May 15, 1929, No. 9), signed by Oswaldo Costa, also clarifies positions in the manifesto. The main point is that antropofagia is not a romantic decal of the Indian: We will continue the Caraíba tradition interrupted by the discovery […] Cunhambebe and the Caetés who ate Bishop Sardine […] Against mental servitude. Against colonial mentality. Against Europe […] We don’t want Wagner, we have mosquitos. We don’t want literature, we have wasps and hummingbirds […] Nietzsche, what for’?29

27 ‘Só a comunhão antropofágica resolverá o problema da formação da língua brasileira e do Brasil brasileiro. Sem roupagens. Sem artifícios […] Agressiva. Bárbara. Como a propria terra’. 28 ‘O Brasil brasileiro é que estamos construindo, doa a quem doer, se queixe quem quiser queixar. Todos os velhos quadras da civilização importada será por nós quebrados impiedosamente, até que desapareça deles em nossa terra o ultimo vestígio’. Segunda ‘dentição’, No. 8. 29 ‘Continuamos a tradição caraíba interrompida pela descoberta […] Cunhambebe e os caetés que comeram o Bispo Sardinha […] Contra a servidão mental. Contra a mentalidade colonial. Contra a Europa […] Não queremos Wagner, temos mucuins. Não queremos literatura, temos vespas e beija-flores […] Nietzsche, para que’?

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The savage will save Brazil by fighting against:  ‘False culture, false art, false morals, false religion, everything will disappear, eaten by us with the greatest ferocity’.30 The facetious summary argument is that antropofagia is the only system that will remain after all the ink in the world for writing has disappeared. In other words, antropofagia is an instinctual basis for culture, drawn from Fraser and other early twentieth-century ethnographic studies of world societies. In No. 14, the fifth essay (July 11, 1929), signed TAMANDARÉ – written by Oswald de Andrade – is aimed against colonial mentality in terms of antropofagia’s anticlericalism, opposing ‘four centuries of Jesuit repression’, and as an expression of the nation’s youthful spirit. Oswald looks out across eight million kilometres of Brazilian interior without commanders, officials, scribes or governors-general and sees only an Indian holding a club, symbol of antropofagia’s revolt against imported culture, especially against conventional and hypocritical morality. In the ‘very liberal lands of the Americas’, Oswald’s platform is synthesized to six points: ‘Freedom of thought; sexual freedom; the courage to die casting a curse on the enemy’s lands; the justice of the club; no repression; the strongest’.31 The total rejection of Christian virtues is put in terms that mock a Father Superior, who says ‘This way of life is no good. Let’s put an end to it’. His request is answered when ‘antropofagia came along and ended it totally’.32 The final essay ‘On Anthropophagy’ in No. 15 (July 19, 1929) describes some theses for social and juridical reform ready to be put forward at a planned ‘First Brazilian Congress of Antropofagia’ – which never occurred – here revealed just as Tarsila, Oswald, Anita, Pagu, Elsie Houston, Benjamin Péret and other travellers arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the Pedro II Docks for Tarsila’s first art exhibit at the Palace Hotel on July 30. The 30 ‘[…] a falsa cultura, a falsa arte, a falsa moral, a falsa religião, tudo desaparecerá comido por nós com a maior ferocidade’. 31 ‘Liberdade de pensamento. Liberdade sexual. A coragem de morrer rogando praga no campo do inimigo. A justiça do tacape. Nenhum recalcamento. O mais forte’. 32 ‘Não nos serve este modo de vida. Vamos acabar com isso’; ‘Veio a antropofagia e acabou mesmo’.

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new platform is to be sent on to the Senate and House of Deputies for civil and penal reorganization. The list of reform measures, including reorganization of the population and political representation, includes: ‘I – Divorce; II – Informed maternity; III – Sentences that fit the delinquency; IV – Abolition of indirect inheritance laws; V – Tribal organization of the state. Representation by classes. Division of the country by technical populations. Senate and House substituted by a Technical Council of the Executive; VI – Individual arbitration in all cases of private law; VII – Nationalization of the press; VIII – Suppression of the academies, to be substituted by research laboratories. (Other theses will be included later)’. The second ‘dentition’ comes to an end (No. 16, August 1, 1929) at the close of the decade, with a review of Tarsila’s art exhibit, which is also the story and summation of the modernists’ adventures in Paris. The newspaper ‘O Paiz’ quotes the comments on the exhibit by ‘an anthropophagist from São Paulo’, doubtlessly Oswald de Andrade: – Rio de Janeiro is going to discover Tarsila and with her the precise sensation of a marvellous enchantment. Tarsila is the greatest Brazilian painter. None before her achieved that plastic force – admirable as invention and realization – that only she possesses. Nor has anyone so well understood the savagery of our land, the barbarous man who is any one of us, the Brazilians whom we are eating, will all possible ferocity, the old imported culture, all the concepts, in sum, with which the West through the cunning of the catechism, poisoned our sensibility and thought. Tarsila’s painting is one of many forms of reaction against this nefarious “spiritual conquest” […] Her exhibit is our first great battle. It is our first great offensive.33

33

– O Rio de Janeiro vai descobrir Tarsila e vai ter com essa descoberta a exata sensação de um maravilhoso encantamento. Tarsila é o maior pintor brasileiro. Nenhum, antes dela, atingiu aquela força plástica – admirável como invenção e como realização – que ela só possui ente nós. Nem também nenhum penetrou tão bem quanto ela a selvageria de nossa terra, o homem bárbaro que é cada um de nós, os brasileiros que estamos comendo, com a ferocidade possível, a velha cultura de importação, a velha arte imprestável, todos os preconceitos, em suma, com que o Ocidente, através das manhas de catequese, nos envenenou a sensibilidade e o pensamento. A pintura da Tarsila é uma das muitas formas de reação contra essa nefanda “conquista espiritual” […] A sua exposição é a nossa primeira grande batalha.

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*** The second phase continues the high level of literature and visual arts, carrying poems by Oswald de Andrade, Raul Bopp, Augusto Meyer, Ascenso Ferreira, Eneida, Benjamin Péret, four poems by Murilo Mendes dated ‘Rio 1929’: (‘Canção do Exílio’, ‘Cartão Postal’, ‘Vocação’, ‘Nova Cara do Mundo’), and Manuel Bandeira’s poem ‘Berimbau’.34 The young soon-to-bemilitant Patrícia Galvão (Pagu) contributes her first cartoon-drawings (2nd ‘dentition’, nos. 2, 8, 11), which will continue in the 1931 O Homem do Povo.

Image 20:  Untitled drawing by Pagu, Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929. Permission for Pagu drawings granted by Leda Rita Cintra and heirs. Photos courtesy of Centro Pagu, Unisanta.

Modernist artists Di Cavalcanti (2, no. 3) and Cícero Dias (2, no. 13) give drawings, along with four by Tarsila do Amaral (2, nos. 1, 6, 13, 14) and reproductions of two paintings from the 1929 exhibit, Antropofagia (2, no. 15) and Floresta (2, no. 16). 34 Republished from the 1924 book Ritmo Dissoluto.

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Image 21:  Drawing by Di Cavalcante in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, March 31, 1929. Reproduced with permission from Elisabeth Di Cavalcanti Veiga.

Image 22:  Tarsila do Amaral, Reproduction of Antropofagia in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929.

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Tarsila’s drawing in No. 1 presents the Abaporu figure alone, with its foot to the left as in Antropofagia:

Image 23:  Tarsila do Amaral, Drawing in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929.

No. 6 is a variant of Antropofagia presenting all its main features:

Image 24:  Tarsila do Amaral, Drawing in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929.

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No. 13 contains Tarsila’s ‘anthropophagic animal’, seen in other drawings, also called the folkloric ‘Saci-Pererê’, in the background, with large plants in the form of voluminous cylinders rising in the foreground, along with one of the large variegated leaves from Antropofagia.

Image 25:  Tarsila do Amaral, Drawing in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929.

Journalist Geraldo Ferraz tells how the page came to an end, cancelled by the editors who wanted something more ‘Coca-Cola’, thus the last and most radical document of the Brazilian avant-garde came to an end. Rego Monteiro would bring a traveling exhibit of European paintings in 1930, under the title ‘The School of Paris’. Their show in São Paulo also included some paintings by Tarsila for sale, however her canvases would not be seen again by the public in an individual exhibit for another quarter of a century. ***

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Image 26:  Oswald de Andrade, ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ in Revista de Antropofagia, 1928.

Cannibal Kulchur in the Manifesto The Cannibal Manifesto opens as a humorous parody of European political manifestos with the declaration ‘Only anthropophagy unites us’, aimed as a satire at the last line of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’ The Cannibal Manifesto’s slogan and wittiest line, ‘Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question’, has been deconstructed and interpreted by critics as a cannibalization of Shakespeare.35 Its fields of reference are indeed far ranging, crossing Hamlet – through an allusion to the Indianism dear to romantic nationalism that inspired intellectuals after independence – with a proposal that Tupy be Brazil’s official language in place of Portuguese, with the purpose of ridding the country of linguistic vestiges of colonial domination.36 The refined wit of See Maria Eugênia Boaventura, A Vanguarda Antropofágica (São Paulo:  Ática, 1985). 36 Oswald had access to the Tupy grammar published in the sixteenth century by Ruiz de Montoya. He incorporated a poem in Tupy into the ‘Manifesto da Poesia 35

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the slogan resides, however, in the crossed images: a cannibal delivering a soliloquy on ontological doubt, confusing the Shakespearean ‘to be’ with a local homophone; or an urban, elite intellectual practising ritual cannibalism on the European colonizers of Brazil, who are in all likelihood family relations. While the manifesto is currently being read as a political and cultural theory, it begins in the comedy and wit of satire, caricature, and avant-garde parody. Journalist Oswaldo Costa, who appears in the 2nd ‘dentition’, ends his review of four centuries of colonial servitude with the exclamation ‘Four centuries of cow meat! The horror’! Through humour, the manifesto highlights the contrast between exaggerated, legalistic rhetoric, imitating classical and European oratory, and the popular speech of a syncretic culture. The critique caricatures senior statesman Rui Barbosa:  ‘a top hat in Senegambia’. In the Pau-Brazil poetry, Oswald praises colloquial speech: Dê-me um cigarro      Give me a cigarette Diz a gramática       Says the grammar  book Do professor e do aluno    Of the teacher and student E do mulato sabido      And the wise mulatto Mas o bom negro e o bom branco But the good black and good white Da Nação Brasileira      Of the Brazilian Nation Dizem todos os dias      Say every day Deixa disso camarada     Cut it out friend Me dá um cigarro       Gimme a cigarette.

Convoluted rhetoric had been elevated in the Brazilwood Manifesto to the status of a national ill, the pain of excessive erudition conveyed through the assonance linking dores, pains, to doutores, academic doctors:  ‘Country of anonymous pains, of anonymous doctor law school graduates’. Critic Roberto Schwarz theorizes that cultural imitation of Europe has always been inevitable in Brazil, such that authentic national characteristics can only be derived by subtracting imitation.37 The high Pau Brasil’ (‘Brazilwood Poetry Manifesto’) of 1924, taken from O Selvagem, by Couto de Magalhães. 37 See Roberto Schwarz. ‘Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination’, in John Gledson, trans., ed., Misplaced Ideas (London: Verso, 1992), 1–18.

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degree of originality found in the manifesto’s parody of European models would suggest, to the contrary, that comedy and national identity form a strong and positive bond that feeds on imitation, through symbiotic and isomorphic relationships, to develop one of its most striking characteristics. National character is more authentic the more imitative and absorptive, since that is its historical nature. By returning to indigenous and cannibal origins, the Cannibal Manifesto is the culmination of a critical examination of society and culture by an avant-garde circle that discovers their country’s indigenous and folk themes in the context of Brazilian history and European fascination at the time with primitivism.38 It invents a pre-colonial Utopia of Pindorama that eschews the ills of the West, with special reference to critiques of Freud and Keyserling. The manifesto maintains that the indigenous societies of Pindorama possess cultural and legal traditions that preceded those brought and implanted by Europe: We already had justice codification of vengeance. And science codification of magic […] We already had Communism. We already had surrealist language. The Golden Age […] But we never allowed the birth of logic among us […] In the country of the big snake.39

The manifesto replaces the founding document of discovery by Caminha with a vanguardist flash, an idea that suddenly appeared to Oswald de Andrade like the Brazilian coastline to Portuguese navigators:  ‘It was neither invented nor imported. It was discovered, right here, by Oswald de Andrade’.40 Oswald conceived of the manifesto taking the side of the cannibal Caetés in resistance to Europe and the Portuguese, proclaiming that henceforth, European arrivals would be devoured and re-exported 38 On Caliban as hero of The Tempest, see Emir Rodríguez Monegal, ‘The Metamorphoses of Caliban’, diacritics (September 1977), 78–83. 39 Tínhamos a justice codificada da vingança. E ciência codificação da magia. […] Já tínhamos o comunismo. Já tínhamos a língua surrealista. A idade de ouro […] Mas nunca admitimos o nascimento da lógica entre nós […] No país da cobra grande. 40 In N.o 4, Revista de Antropofagia, segunda ‘dentição’.

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through a dynamic of fierce independence and the intimate assimilation of cannibalism: ‘Plague of the so-called cultured and Christianized peoples, it is against them that we are acting. Cannibals’.41 The modernist cannibals are rebels, willingly self-destructive intellectuals whose attack on Brazil’s European heritage is the fruit of a radical self-critique, itself originating in Europe, of the kind that anthropologist James Clifford described as ‘an attack against the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness’.42 Their programme proposes immediate separation of Brazil from its European inheritance through a ritualistic cannibal banquet in which everything European will be consumed. Benedito Nunes details their attack against the colonial enemy: Antropophagy is a catalytic term that mobilizes numerous negations into one, a pitiless symbol for the practice of cannibalism. A blend of insult and sacrilege, it is a surrogate for a verbal attack on an immaterial, protean, and multisided enemy. Among this enemy’s many aspects are the remnants of the repressive, politicoreligious, and burdensome colonial baggage on which Brazilian civilization was founded. Its legacy is a patriarchal society with established models for behaviour and messianic expectations, with intellectual rhetoric that mimicked the metropolis and succumbed to foreign ways, as well as nativism that sublimated the failure of being colonized by imitating the customs of the colonizer.43

As Sérgio Milliet reflects on the action to free artistic and moral renovations: ‘We had to break everything, destroy, kill, bury, cremate’.44 The aim is to shock the Parisian avant-gardes with Brazil’s joie de vivre and primitivist originality.

41

‘Peste dos chamados povos cultos e cristianizados, é contra ela que estamos agindo. Antropófagos’. 42 See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 45. 3 See Benedito Nunes, ‘Anthropophagic Utopia, Barbarian Metaphysics’, in Mari 4 Carmen Ramírz and Héctor Olea, orgs., Inverted Utopias:  Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven, CT and Houston, TX:  Yale University Press and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2004), 57. 44 Edgar Cavalheiro (1944), 240.

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The Brazilian avant-garde searches for creative originality in indigenous cultures, in natural law, and in its resistance to patriarchy.45 It claims a happiness and spontaneity in these cultures that counters well-known theories of repression in Western societies: ‘Antes dos portugueses descobrirem o Brasil, o Brasil tinha descoberto a felicidade’. [‘Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness’.] Writing from Manaus on February 5, 1905, author Euclides da Cunha sent a poem to Machado de Assis capturing the simplicity of life in the interior: Nestas choupanas da roça   De aparência tão tristonha,   Mora, às vezes uma moça   Gentilíssima e risonha.   

In the shacks on the farm Of such a very sad appearance, There lives, at times a young woman Very refined and smiling.

E o incauto viajante    And the unwary traveler Quase sempre não descobre   Almost Always fails to discover A moradora galante    The graceful resident De uma choupana tão pobre.   In such a poor shack. E passa na sua lida    And he goes on with his chores Para a remota cidade,    To the distant city Deixando, às vezes, Perdida   Leaving, at times Lost Num ermo, a Felicidade …46   In the wild, Happiness …

Even though based on sixteenth century chronicles, the modernist cannibal has been interpreted as neo-romantic, given that indigenous cultures had been in vogue after independence in 1822 in nineteenth-century romantic literature, notably expressed by Antônio Gonçalves Dias in his poem ‘I-Juca-Pirama’ and by novelist José de Alencar in three novels identified as Indianist, especially the classic Iracema (1865), a poetic idyll translated by Isabel, Lady Burton into Victorian English. Iracema gives 45 For the expression ‘inverted Utopias’, see Mari Carmen Ramírez and Hécto Olea, Inverted Utopias: The Avant-Garde in Latin America (New Haven, CT and Houston, TX: Yale University Press and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2004). 46 ‘Carta Euclydes da Cunha a Machado’, Correspondência de Machado de Assis, Tomo V-1905–1908, Coord. Sérgio Rouanet, Ed. Rev. com. Irene Moutinho and Sílvia Eleutério (Rio de Janeiro, Academia Brasileira de Letras, 2015), 8.

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rise to a legend of Brazilian identity from the encounter of the Portuguese adventurer Martim with the telluric maiden Iracema. Scholar Fernando Cabral Martins notes that the performative side of the vanguard carries the romantic mixture of biography and art to its ultimate consequences, which in antropofagia is its mythical aura, creation of an autonomous aesthetics and of theatrical representation in the scenario of the tribe.47 What distinguishes the avant-garde is that rather than presenting the Indian as a tragic or self-sacrificing character in a drama or opera, as in Carlos Gomes’ O Guarany, first performed in 1870 at La Scala in Milan, the modernists retrieve the Indian from historical chronicles as a figure in a cultural argument. Oswaldo Costa explains: Anthropophagy is not a romantic cut-out of the Indian. It is not a lyrical distortion of the Indian. It tore the shirt of Portuguese sentiments and the beads of catechism off the brave Tupy of literary fiction. It made him naked again, as he should be.48

Costa insists, Anthropophagy has nothing to do with romantic Indianism. To the Indian son of Mary, brother of the Most High, to the Indian degraded by catechism that Couto de Magalhães tells us about, we oppose the cannibal who devoured the catechism and told Hans Staden not to bother him, because it was delicious. The Indian, naked.49

Oswald confirms the reaction to romanticism:  ‘What we wanted was the rebellious Indian, the primitive Indian, the complete Indian’.50 In his poetic stroll through the city of São Paulo in 1922 composing the poems of Pauliceia Desvairada (Hallucinated City), when Mário de Andrade 47 Fernando Cabral Martins, ‘Produtos românticos, nós todos …’ in Suplemento Literário de Minas Gerais 1373 (julho-agosto 2017), 35–37. 48 A antropofagia não é um decalque romântico do índio. Não é a deformação lírica do índio. Ela arrancou do bravo tupy das ficções literárias a camisa dos sentimentos portugueses e as missangas da catequese. Botou ele novamente nu, como convinha. 49 A antropofagia nada tem que ver com o romantismo indianista. Ao índio filho de Maria, ao índio irmão do Santíssimo, ao índio degradado pela catequese, de que nos fala Couto de Magalhães, opomos o canibal que devorou o catequismo e disse para Hans Staden que não o amolasse, porque era gostoso. O índio nu. 50 ‘O que queríamos era o índio rebelde, o índio primitivo, o índio-índio’. Quoted in Dulce Salles Cunha (1951), 49.

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defines himself as ‘a Tupy strumming a lute’, he invokes an instrument introduced to medieval Iberia by the Arabs. The Manifesto claims that indigenous religion, philosophy, and social organization, although little researched or understood at the time, are superior to those imported by Europeans: ‘Without us, Europe would not even have its poor declaration of human rights’. By contrasting different presentations of cannibalism in fiction, the topic of a broad analysis of European literatures by Claude Rawson,51 the manifesto suggests that cannibalism is first an exotic romance, supplying prurient fascination for its urban readers, before centring substantively on the arguments of Montaigne in his essay ‘On Cannibals’, which judges indigenous cannibalism to be preferable to the oppression and atrocities committed throughout history by so-called civilized conquerors. By marshalling the humour, parody, and insouciance of the avant-garde, Oswald erases the county’s European institutions and historical development and counteracts their effects with the universal example of Brazil’s legendary and timeless indigenous past, considered to be the very source of nationality. As poet Raul Bopp writes in a letter from Berlin, ‘the Brazilian needed to be integrated into the assemblage of universal reality’.52 Local happiness substitutes imported repression. To achieve this goal, Oswald imports a strain of utopian thought mixed in the manifesto with the imaginative recovery of an idealized earlier time of indigenous cultures on the coast of the New World, which could be applied to change the circumstances of the present for the better and project an improved society into the future.53 The manifesto illustrates some principal features of literary and artistic modernism in its imagined return to primitive origins by compressing historical time, inverting the discovery by the Portuguese fleet of Cabral in 1500, and by rewriting or reimagining three centuries of colonization for the purpose of reordering national culture. The founding documents of the discovery are subsumed into the cultures of a legendary, mythical 51 5 2 53

Claude Rawson, ‘Cannibalism and Fiction: Reflections on Narrative Form and ‘Extreme’ Situations’, Genre X (1977), 667–711. See Edgar Cavalheiro (1944), 25. See Patrícia I. Vieira, States of Grace (Albany: SUNY University Press, 2018) for a discussion of Braziian utopian visions.

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past through a process of historical and corporeal assimilation. Moreover, to complete the inversion of the European presence, the way of life of the indigenous and cannibal inhabitants is proclaimed to be innately superior to European law and religion, said to be imposed on Brazil, absent the flaws, decadence, repression, and exhaustion of the West. Those deficiencies in Western culture were being denounced by contemporary European thinkers such as Max Nordau, Oswald Spengler, and other social analysts.54 Indigenous Brazil, vast and timeless, will supply all that the West lacks, as if it were the utopian island drawn on the frontispiece of More’s Utopia (1516),55 or the desert island of Robinson Crusoe (1719). The return to the age of discovery allows for an expanded geographic vision, a re-mapping of the maritime world viewed as a complete entity, extending from the voyage of discovery to the present, made modern because it conceives of the world as a picture of a geographical and historical totality.56 The Cannibal Manifesto, following the dialectic of manifestos, enumerates a long list of positions pro and con, proposing self-evident truths and denouncing others in a tone of ridicule and satire. Its opposition to legal, economic, and cultural antecedents – which can be classified as religious, historical, psychological, and philosophical – is an avant-garde position that lays the foundation for new principles and radical changes of the day. In a series of short phrases, beginning with the word ‘against’, the Manifesto critiques all of the following: religion, rejecting catechisms; the baroque figure of Antônio Vieira, S. J. for his transatlantic role in commerce; missionaries; inquisitions; and José Anchieta, S. J. who took a prominent role in converting indigenous peoples in the mid-1500s. It opposes history based on European voyages, scholarly figures, and the misrepresentation of indigenous cultures. The manifesto takes a position against monogamy,

54 See Max Nordau, Entartung (Degeneration, 1892); Oswald Spengler Der Untergang des Abendlandes:  Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte  (The Decline of the West: Outlines of a Morphology of World History, 1918–22). 55 Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia. 56 See Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), 14, 189.

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imported ideas, antagonistic sublimations, and oppressive social reality. It opposes some central values of Brazilian intellectual and political society of the time: cultural memory, social hierarchies, and the hegemony of European knowledge. Some of these critical ideas were revived and expanded by mid-twentieth century cultural theory, as in Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) or Norman Brown’s Love’s Body (1966). On the positive side, the Manifesto favours a programme based on the metaphor of cannibalism as totem, following its underlying principal of assimilation and cultural re-education. It proposes a return to the qualities of indigeneity, as it understands them, in its slogan ‘Tupy, or not Tupy’ and favours a natural world thought to lead to a golden age of Eros. It favours instinct, signs, and charts over ideas. The Manifesto even claims to form the basis for political revolution, part of a sequence that it extends from Villegagnon, the French revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the Surrealist revolution to Herman von Keyserling. Addressing social problems in the poem ‘Manhã’, printed on the Cannibal Magazine’s first page, Mário de Andrade describes his travels through the North and wishes that he had walking by his side ‘Lenin, Carlos Prestes, Gandhi, one of those!’ While the Manifesto ridicules Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and his studies of primitive mentality,57 it accepts arguments of Keyserling against the mechanization of Western culture and in favour of the indigenous peoples as redeemers of culture.58 The Manifesto accepts both technical progress and an indigenous spirit of discovery. As counter point to the ills of Europe, it takes the stance of Luis Buñuel’s avenging angel of resistance: We want the Carib revolution, […] the golden age announced by America, […] the necessity of the anthropophagic vaccine to balance the meridian religions, […] measuring progress by catalogues and television sets, […] absorption of the sacred enemy.59 Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), translated as How Natives Think (1926), La mentalité primitive (1922), translated as Primitive Mentality (1923), and L’ âme primitive (1927), translated as The Soul of the Primitive (1928). 58 Oswald may have read about Keyserling in Alceu Amoroso Lima, ‘Keyserling’, Estudos 2.a Série, Rio de Janeiro, Terra de Sol, 1928, 287–92. See Daniel Faria, ‘As meditações americanas de Keyserling’, Vária História 29.51 (set.-dez. 2013), 905–23. 5 9 Queremos a revolução Caraíba […] A  idade de ouro anunciada pela América […] Necessidade da vacina antropofágica. Para equilibrar contra as religiões 57

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The counter point ends with a juxtaposition of social ills and the promise of their eradication to remove European presence from the land of Pindorama: Against social reality, dressed and oppressed, registered by Freud – reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitution and without penitentiaries in the matriarchy of Pindorama.60

Sources of Cannibal Kulchur The intellectual effort of writers, artists, and musicians associated with the Magazine is based on study and research, a dimension often hidden in their works. Theirs is a cosmopolitan primitivism, coming from libraries, books, and drawings, taken from a national ethnography and botany of indigenous peoples and vegetation. In São Paulo, Mário de Andrade amassed a substantial library covering the arts, literature, and folklore, as did folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo in Natal. Oswald’s manifesto is replete with references to European historical figures, writers, and researchers:  Montaigne, Rousseau, Goethe, William James, Freud, Serge Voronoff, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Keyserling. To understand the manifesto requires notes, first supplied by Benedito Nunes for his French translation, to identify its multiple references. The description of the devouring of Bishop Sardine used by Oswald to date his manifesto, for example, is described in detail in Simão de Vasconcellos’ Chronica da Companhia de Jesu no Estado do Brasil (Book II, p. 183), published in 1663 and reprinted in 1865.61 The short poem in Tupy in the manifesto comes from José Vieira Couto de Magalhães’ O Selvagem, II, Origens, Costumes, Região de meridiano […] A fixação do progresso por meio de catálogos e aparelhos de televisão […] Absorção do inimigo sacro. 60 Contra a realidade social, vestida e opressora, cadastrada por Freud – a realidade sem complexos, sem loucura, sem prostituições e sem penitenciárias do matriarado de Pindorama. 1 Vasconcellos, Simão deVasconcellos, Chronica da Companhia de Jesu de Estado do 6 Brasil, Livro II, 17, Livro I, no. 114 (1663), 102.

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Chapter 3 114. ‘Nesta necessidade de obreiros, acudio o Ceo, com a chegada de Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, primeiro Fispo do Brasil, q trouxe consigo alguns Sacerdotes, Conegos, & Dignidades, paera formar sua Sé & Igreja Cathedral nesta cabeça do Estado, na fórma que tocámos no prinipio do anno de 1550, onde só reparámos no anno que pellas rezoens ahi dittas aueriguamos ser este, & não aquelle. Foi este Prelado Varaõ insigne em leetras, & virtude, affamado Prégador de seus tempos: estudára na Vniuersidade de Paris, onde se agradouou de Doutor: foi mandado á India cõ o officio de Vigario geral, & pello bem que nelle se houve, mereceo ser eleito Bispo do Brasil, por elRey D. João o Terceiro. Era dotado de grande zelo do service de Deos, & das almas, & nelle tinão posto os olhos, & esperanças os moradores de sua Diecesi. Se naõ que enuejoso o inimigo commum do bem das almas, traçou como se reduzisse a breues annos sua vida cõ morte deshumana, de que no anno de 1556 tocaremos hua breue noticia. Livro Segundo, da Chronica da companhia de JesV do Estado do Brasil (1663), 172 14. Naõ posso deixar de contar aqui (supposto que repugne a penna) o successo mais triste, que sté estes tempos virão as partes do Brasil, & choráraõ os Portugueses delle. Foi este o naufragio, & morte cruel de Dom Pdero Fernandes Sardinha Bispo primeiro deste Estado, & dos que cõ elle nauegauaõ. Chegára este grande Prelado á Bahia de todos os Santos, cabeça de sua Diecesi, no prinicipio do anno de 1552  & procedéra com o zelo, & aceitaçaõ que naquelle anno tecámos:  até que no presente em q imos (naõ sei se chamado do Ceo, se do Rey:  dizem alguns, que da melhoria das almas) se embarcou pera Portugal em companhia de Antonio Cardoso de Barros Prouedor mór que for a do Estado, & de outras pessoas nobres, que leuauão familias de mulheres, & filhos. Deraõ á vela nos primeiros de Iunho, & hauendo nauegado quatorze dias, armouse contra ells o Orizonte com fera tempestade de v˜etos de trauessia enuoltos em escuridaõ, trouoens, & relampagos, taõ furiosa, que logo se deraõ por perdidos, pordque distaua perto a terra, & não podia onctrastar a nao a furia dos mares. Mandou sererar o Piloto o pano, & quãdo quizeeraõ lancer fewrro ao mar (remedio unico de suas esperanças) tendo a amarra entre mãos, lauou o conuês tal pancada de mar, que levou consigo ancoras, & amarras, & faltou pouco que não leuasse os pobres nauegantes. A tudo se achava presente o sãto Prelado, & v˜edo as poucas esperanças que restavão de vida (porq ja hiaõ auistando as praias, & pera ellas leuvuão a nao como conjurados agoras, ventos, & mares, que batião furiosamente o costado) posto de joelhos, depois de exclamar ao Ceo, começou hüa pratica aos cõpanheiros, por˜e não acabou, porque foi atalhada com confusaõ de vozes, & alaridos dos tristes nauegantes, q viaõ a nao ir descaindo sobre hü disforme penedo qu por entre as nuuens, & relampagos então mal diuisauão, mas logo conhecéraõ ás claras, indo dar sobre elle, & fazendo miserauel naufragio, nos baixos chamados de Dom Francisco, por outro nome Enseada do Porto dos Franceses, altura de dez graos & hum quarto, entre dous rios o de S. Francisco, & outro por nome Cururúig, a 16 de Junho do corr˜ete anno (1663), 183. 15. Porèm aqui (ò fereza de coraçõens humanos!) quando os ventos, mares, & penedos deraõ como perdaõ aos affligidos naufragantes, saindo a terra, huns a nado, outros em o batel, todos debilitados, quase no vltimo alento, a maõs de saluagens chamados dos Caétes, que naquella paragem habitauão, acabàraõ

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as vidas com naufragio muito mais deshumano. Em vendo estes o destroço da nao do alto de sduas serranías, descéraõ ás praias, & aguardando alli fingiraõse amigos, mostrando compadecerse de seu estado, leuáraõnos a hospedar a suas pequenas coupana, fizeraõ fogo, trouxeraõ mantimento, alentáraõ os corpos debilitados, mas com cautela atreiçoada, porque fizeraõ no mesmo tempo auiso a seus circunuezinhos pera o que hauiaõ ode obrar, & veremos logo. O curacao do homem he leal, & mais em occasio˜es de tanto aperto. Nunca se deraõ por seguros os pobres Portugueses:  olhauão pera os hospedes, pareciaõ-lhes feras tragadoras, pera os quintaes de suas pousadas, viaõ rumas de ossos, caueiras de mortos, sinaes dos muitos que tinhaõ comido, insignias prezadas de seu esforço, & valentia. Elles em quantidade innumeraueis, os nossos poucos, os mais mlulheres, & meninos, desarmados, & alguns sem camisa, assi como o mar os deixàra. Faziaõ da necessidade virtude, cariciauão os qu conhecião por mortaes inimigos, mostrauãolhes sinaes de agradecimento debaixo de tão fundados arreceios. 16. Despediraõse vltimam˜ete de seus hospedes, & foraõ segindo o caminho q ells lhes mostraraõ a fim de seu engano. Eis q chegãdo ao descuberto das praias, jüto a h˜u rio, q de força hauião de passar, sa˜e de em boscada chusmas de ferozes saluag˜es, atroãdo aqllas enseadas cõ seus costumados alaridos (menos bastaua pera h˜u exercito tão fraco.) Cairão logo desmaiadas mulheres, &u criancas com vista tão terriuel. Dos homens poucos podiao terse em pé: fizerão aquella gente fera dos peitos imoueis aluo de suas frechas, & das cabeças proua de suas maças, sem Resistencia algüa. Hião matando huns, & outros carregando, qual caça do matt opera fazer banquetes a toda a sua gente. Oo tigres Hircanos! Que crueldades vossas naõ viraõ hoje estas auaras praias? Nem choros das crianças, nem abraços das mays, nem despedidas tristes dos desposados, pays, & filhos, commouianõ aquelles peitos duros. As mais tenras ciranças tomauaõ pelo braço, & despedaçauaõ em hum penedo, & às mays que as chorauaõ, abrião a cabeça, ou rasgauaõ os peitos com faco˜es de paos duros. Não chegou aui a crueldade do tempo de hum Herodes, ou a de hum Diocleciano. 17. Resta porem o caso mais triste. Tinha passado o rio em balsa o Prelado, & estava v˜edo da outra parte toda esta tragedia sanguinolenta, ouuindo os alaridos dos lobos feros, & os balidos das ouelhas mansas, que a seus dentes acabauão, & padecia outras tantas lançadas em seu curacao: quando pregado com os olhos no Ceo, & consultando o que faria, saîrão do mar ás ribeiras do rio multidayo dos mesmo saluagens nadadores, que em busca delle, & dos que o levarão, tinão passado. Significárãolhe estes por acenso, que era aquelle o grande Prelado dos Portugueses, Sacerdote consagrado a Deos, que hauia de tomar vingança de seus excessos. Não penetraua porem cousa algüa tão duros coraçoens: derão dom h˜ua maça no santo Prelado, abrirãolhe a cabeça pello memio. O mesmo fizerão aos companheiros, & leuárãonos pera pasto prezado de seus ventres, & seus ossos por insignia de tão grande façanha. E este foi o fim do primeiro Bispo do Brasil Dõ Pedro Fernandos Sardinha. 18. O lugar onde foi morto este virtuoso Prelado he tradiçãõ commüa que nunca mais vio em se fermosura, ou ornato algum natural, porque vestindose antes de erua, u de aruoredo, focu dahi em diate esteril, escaluado, & seco, quaes

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Selvagem, one of the first books of ethnographic and folklore studies from 1876. Oswald Costa derived his geo-political map of the Amazon from Henrique Américo Santa Rosa’s História do Rio Amazonas (1926). When Oswald and poet Raul Bopp searched for a name for Tarsila do Amaral’s 1928 painting, Abaporu, they consulted the Tupy dictionary of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Arte de la lengua guarani (1724). Cannibalism as theme references the account by Hans Staden of his captivity by the Tupinambá and narrow escape from a cannibal banquet in the first book to be published about Brazil in Europe in 1557.62 Oswald’s friend, the editor Monteiro Lobato, published an adaptation of the Hans Staden memoir in 1927 under the title Aventuras de Hans Staden, which may have brought the story to Oswald’s attention. Another possible source is the anthropologist and ethnologist Alfred Métraux, who in 1928 published a book on the Tupinambá in Paris (La religion des Tupinamba et ses rapports avec celle des autres tribus Tupi-Guarani), containing images reproduced from Staden. The woodcuts in the 1557 edition depicting scenes of cannibalism among the Tupinambá, the work of Theodor de Bry, are based only on first-hand descriptions, since he never travelled to the Americas. On that point, de Bry’s depictions and Oswald’s manifesto share common ground since, as an intellectual and law school graduate in rapidly urbanizing São Paulo, neither did Oswald have any contact with indigenous societies. His identification with native cannibalism is based on a notion of common nationality assumed by his citizenship and completed through research in published sources. De Bry’s scenes were republished in a 1928 edition,63 became associated with the manifesto, and reappeared on the cover of the facsimile edition in 1975.64 outros montes de Gelboé pella maldiçãõ de David, & morrer˜e nelles os insignes Varoens de Israel Saul & Ionathas Do castigo que houueraõ na terra estes insolentes saluagens, noutro lugar diremos’ (1663), 187.

62 Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen (True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America). 63 An edition of Staden’s memoir was published in English in 1928 (translated by Malcolm Letts, the Broadway Travelers, 1928, edited by Sir E. Denison Ross and Eileen Power) and previously by the Haklyut Society (1874). 64 Revista de Antropofagia (São Paulo, Editora Abril, 1975).

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Anthropophagy Today When Oswald de Andrade’s forgotten works began to be revived and promoted by the São Paulo concrete poets in the 1960s, the idea of anthropophagy gradually gained wide acceptance as a socio-cultural theory underlying and predicting many different forms of incorporation. Antropofagia became a preferred theme of artists, musicians, essayists, ecologists, novelists, and even popular musicians. It evolved to represent the postcolonial and transatlantic legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde and began to enter museums. In 1998 antropofagia was selected to be the theme of the prestigious 24th São Paulo Art Biennial exhibition, curated by one of Brazil’s leading art historians, Paulo Herkenhoff. As organizer, he noted in a general introduction the open and multifaceted conceptual reach of antropofagia, with its unusual fusion of cultural appropriation and interrelation, its strategy of otherness and cultural emancipation.65 The massive exhibit in Spain, ‘Brasil 1920–1950:  De la antropofagia a Brasilia’ at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) in 2001, repeated in São Paulo the following year, both organized by Jorge Schwartz, displayed more than 600 works of Brazilian modernism in all areas of the arts. The anthology Anthrophagy Today? (2011) assembled world texts on cannibal themes along with interpretive essays on antropofagia, promoting and questioning the manifesto’s significance as the framework for a global theoretical model of appropriation and otherness.66 In the Met Breuer exhibit in New York in 2017–18, ‘Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950–1980’, spectators were confronted by large, grotesque, and distorted mouths in all their chilling strangeness in Ana Maria Maiolio’s super-8 ‘In-Out Antropofagia’ (1974), a work created during the darkest period of Brazil’s military dictatorship. The three iconic paintings of

65 Paulo Herkenhoff, ‘General introduction’, XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, Núcleo Histórico: Antropofagia e Histórias de Canibalismos, vol. 1, Paulo Herkenhoff and Adriano Pedrosa, orgs. (São Paulo: A Fundação, 1998), 35–48. 66 Antropofagia hoje: Oswald de Andrade em cena, Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cézar de Castro Rocha, orgs. (São Paulo, É Realizações, 2011).

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Tarsila do Amaral associated with the manifesto were the subject of a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017) and The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2018), ‘Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil’. Embryo of a major theme in the arts, the 1928 manifesto has now become widely accepted as a declaration of artistic independence applicable to a transatlantic and global context.

Image 27:  Cover of reprint of Revista de Antropofagia, 1976.

Image 28:  Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.

Chapter 4

Transatlantic Voyages: Ethnography, Aesthetic Landscapes, Sonorities

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken – Keats At this point in my life I have a roving inclination Like a photographer – Oswald de Andrade

Introduction to the Modern Voyage Jules Verne fictionalized the sea change in the nature of modern travel in his popular novel, Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingts Jours (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1872). Earlier travel around the circumference of the world for trade or exploration began in the sixteenth century, with the voyages of Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães), finished by Juan Sebastián Elcano, and the Englishman Sir Francis Drake (1580). By the first decade of the nineteenth century, circumnavigation took on a larger scientific purpose, when Ivan Fyodorovich Kruzenshtern sailed the Nadezhda and the Neva for the Russian Imperial Navy, introducing naturalist Grigory Langsdorff to Brazil.1 The Portuguese cruiser S. Gabriel 1

See Ivan Fyodorovich Kruzenshtern, Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1803, 1804, 1805 und 1806 auf Befehl Seiner Kaiserlichen Majestät Alexanders des Ersten auf den Schiffen Nadeschda und Newa’ (‘Journey around the World in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806 at the Command of his Imperial Majesty Alexander I  in

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departed Lisbon on December 11, 1909 for a voyage around the globe, returning on April 20, 1911 after sixteen months and nine days, traveling 41,981 miles and visiting seventy-two ports, including all the overseas territories at the time.2 The American Richard Halliburton is a professional traveller, who in 1930 flew around the world in The Flying Carpet, piloted by Moye Stephens, in eighteen months visiting thirty-four countries.3 As in Verne’s novel, the objective is rapid, horizontal, and intercontinental travel, whose purpose is not to observe or study the world, but to see it passing in front of one’s eyes and to arrive, or return, as speedily as possible to a point of origin to tell the story. Verne’s novel features a constantly changing geographical panorama about which the characters are uninformed. It is pertinent to the modernist cannibals in its encounter with diverse cultural practices, particularly those of colonial areas that are considered primitive in comparison to the superior culture of the traveller, and in its dry satire of the impassive composure and cold eccentricities of the English gentleman by the French author. Notable is Phileas Fogg’s detachment from the content of his travels, most of which are by steamship, the mode of transatlantic travel par excellence from the midnineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Verne’s novel likewise can be seen to invert historical antecedents, as it travels around the world eastwards, reversing the direction of earlier circumnavigations. Around the World in Eighty Days is the prototype and precursor of a modernist world of travel whose objective is to pursue and satisfy an external objective. Verne’s works cite the eagerness for the unknown and its expectations that dominated the European outlook towards the end of the nineteenth century: The period in which we live is eager for the unknown. The new is its charm. Embarrassed by its old ideas, of which it is also weaned, it wishes new horizons, new peoples, new empires, new ideas. There is everywhere a fever of expectancy: some

2 3

the Ships Nadezhda and Neva), St. Petersburg: 1810; and G. H. von Langsdorff, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1803 bis 1807 (Frankfurt am Mayn: F. Wilmans, 1812). Academia de Marinha, Newsletter, No. 2 (February 2018). See Barbara H.  Schultz, Flying Carpets, Flying Wings  – The Biography of Moye Stephens (Lancaster, CA:  Little Buttes Publishing, 2012); and Richard Halliburton, The Flying Carpet (Garden City, NY: Garden City Pub., 1932).

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seek immense territories to found empires; other exploit mines which yield gold in profusion; these dream of glory, those of commerce: all have a definite program and ambitions more often than not at variance but which show the ardor of their desires and their determination of purpose. Everything is possible in this form of ideals.4

Mário de Andrade invoked Verne in verses about new rapid transportation: ‘In the rapid trajectory of the streetcar … / From Sant’Ana to town / From the Earth to the Moon / Jules Verne / Have I passed the centre of a comet?’5 At the same time Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiroz foresaw that a surfeit of voyages by the European explorer and traveller could result in reducing the diverse cultures of the world to uniformity, as he ironized in his novel The Maias, and he predicted the role of indigenous cultures in providing an alternative to standardization: But Ega, who had been somewhat silent, fixing his monocle to his eye from time to time, and smiling towards the Baroness, now gaily declared himself against all the explorations of Africa, against all these long geographic missions. Why not leave the Negro peacefully alone with his idols? What harm did the existence of savages do to the order of things? On the contrary, they gave the Universe a delicious abundance of the picturesque! This mania of the French and bourgeoisie for reducing all nations and races to a uniform type of civilization was making the world abominably monotonous. It wouldn’t be long before a tourist, at enormous expense and sacrifice, would make his way to Timbuktu. And for what? Only to find there Negroes in top hats reading the Journal des Debats. (2007, 34)

Novelist Lidia Jorge found in the voyage an implicit purpose existing in all literature: Distance is a character in itself, a happening, Adventure, allowing the enigma to be present. It prepares the disclosure. All literature is an invitation to the voyage that is fulfilled in a creative verbal flux […] Literary truth, which is a lie but not a

4 General Tchenk-Ki-Tong, quoted in ‘Introduction:  O Cancioneiro Chinês (The Book of Chinese Songs)’, Songs of Li-Tai-Pè, trans.by Jordan H.  Stabler (New  York: Edgar H.  Wells & Co., 1922). Stabler translated António Feijó’s Cancioneiro Chinês (1890) and quoted from the introduction. 5 Mário de Andrade, O Losango Caqui (São Paulo: Antonio Tisi, 1926).

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Atlantic Crossings On the night of June 19, 1922 the distinguished Luso-Brazilian author and Portuguese deputy Carlos Malheiro Dias, author of the novel A mulata (1896) and editor of the História da colonização portuguesa no Brasil (1921), among other titles, rose to speak to the Portuguese immigrant community in the Portuguese Reading Room in Rio de Janeiro with a greeting for the aviators who had just completed the first crossing of the South Atlantic.7 His address in praise of the Portuguese pilots is a polar opposite of the cannibal theses developed by Brazilian modernists in France, although it is highly pertinent to the historical continuities of travel and transatlantic contacts between Portugal and Brazil. Max Leclerc describes the Portuguese in Brazil as rich and powerful, so that Brazilians feel themselves to be sons of Portugal.8 The poster prepared by the executive committee of the Portuguese colony in Rio announced the formal ‘Greeting’ by Malheiro Dias to the officials of the Portuguese Navy, Contra-Admiral Carlos Viegas Gago Coutinho and Captain of the Fleet Arthur de Sacadura Cabral. At the top of the poster, filling a celestial arch, is the winged horse Pegasus, with the 6

7 8

Lídia Jorge. ‘Toda a Literatura é uma proposta de viagem’, Jornal de Letras, Artes e Idéias Ano XXXV No 1190 (11–24 de Maio de 2016), 7–8. ‘A distância é por si só personagem, acontecimento, Aventura, que permite que enigma esteja presente. E propicia a revelação. Toda a literatura é uma proposta de viagem que se cumpre num fluxo verbal criador […] A verdade literária, que é uma mentira mas não uma falsidade, transforma-se em algo concreto e real, numa vivencia possível, uma viagem dentro de outra viagem’. His text, ‘Allocution offered on the occasion of the arrival of the aviators Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral to the Bay of Guanabara’, was later published in his book, Orações e Conferências (Lisboa: Livraria Bertrand, 1924). Max Leclerc, Cartas do Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1942), 161.

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red cross of the Order of Christ on its breast and mounted by an ancient Portuguese horseman. Below, on both sides of an armillary sphere, also displaying the cross of the Order of Christ, two ships are departing, with their full sails blowing towards the centre of the poster, symbolizing the two navigators and pioneers of aviation being greeted by comparing their flight to the maritime voyages of discovery.

Image 29:  Programme to receive transatlantic aviators in Rio de Janeiro, 1922.

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The first argument presented by Malheiro Dias in his speech is to compare the recently arrived aviators with Portuguese navigators who arrived at the land called Vera Cruz April 22, 1500, 422 years earlier: ‘I did nothing more than trace the voyage of your grandfathers and precursors for which this seems to be the aerial rendition, the eternal mirror’.9 He notes the similarity in the route of both maritime and aerial navigators: 8 hours 10 minutes for the 1,315 kilometres from Lisbon to the Canary Islands; 10 hours 45 minutes more for the 1,666 km. To S. Vicente do Cabo Verde; 2 hours 15 minutes more to cross to the island of Santiago; and 13 hours 5 minutes for the 1,716 km crossing of the South Atlantic to reach the islands of Pedro and Paulo, and then Fernando de Noronha. In this contemporary repetition of the voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral, Malheiro Dias claims to sense occult motives in the ‘mystery of the oceans’, which he invoked in terms of visual images, ‘maritime solitudes […] of water and ether’ (1933, 52). His speech anticipates the plastic seascape atmosphere of the poems in Mensagem (Message, 1934) by Fernando Pessoa. Malheiro Dias proclaims: One could say that Nuno Gonçalves’ polyptych [four panels depicting the Avis dynasty] is inspired by a miracle worker who brings his ancestors to life. Why should your actual presence move us to invoke the venerable shadows of those who disappeared? What mysterious movements tie us together, the men who are our contemporaries to the radiant past? It’s that you represent in a living synthesis the enduring capabilities of the race. It’s your blood that moves you. You are the greening bud of deep roots. You give certainty to our faith. In you our glory reappears. You are the veiled Encoberto that reveals its hidden contents. Everything – even the natural sobriety and modesty of your words, agrees with the austere simplicity of our ancestors, with that simplicity with which the scribe Caminha told the sovereign about the discovery of Vera Cruz. (1933, 52)

All this was prepared for the deed that Malheiro Dias considers the ‘theatre of an epic thrust’. A second contrasting motive in the greeting is science, praised by aviator Alberto Santos Dumont: ‘The Portuguese carried out marvellously the designed task. They did not detour from their path for one instant, 9

Carlos Malheiro Dias, Orações e Conferências (1933), 44.

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they scrupulously followed the itinerary’. In their ability to calculate the artificial horizon with confidence and technical exactitude, Malheiro Dias sees links with an ‘honour guard’ to include fifteenth and sixteenthcentury sailors Bartolomeu Dias, Nicoláu Coelho, Pero Vaz de Caminha, Duarte Pacheco, Pedro Nunes, and Pero Escobar. He notes the limitations of the Fairey III MkII seaplane Lusitânia, which has only one 300 HP motor, with fuel for a maximum of eighteen hours of flight. It took two more planes, the Pátria and the Santa Cruz, at a massive cost to the Portuguese government, and seventy-two days to complete the journey to Rio de Janeiro because of the loss of two planes in the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago. The transatlantic flight to Brazil commemorates the country’s centenary of Independence and corresponds with the Modern Art Week, and at the same time it reaffirms Brazil’s connections to Portugal. In recognition, Malheiro Dias contrasts the arrival of the aviators with that of the navigators in Cabral’s fleet: in 1922 they will encounter an industrial and modern country: ‘magnificent cities, crowned with domes and cupolas […] factory chimneys smoking, the bells of the towers tolling’.10 The allusion to modernization suggests a link between the technical skill and achievement of aerial navigation and earlier voyages that are key to any definition of modernity. The crossing of the South Atlantic occurred just four months after the Modern Art Week, adding a new connection to the maritime travel that had marked Brazilian life throughout its history. This new airborne modernity, a concept captured in the image of the Lusitânia, will become a definition of modernity itself, a technical achievement in aviation comparable to the voyage of Cabral’s fleet. If the flight over the South Atlantic repeats the heroic voyages of expansion, as Malheiro Dias wishes, it also anticipates the ethnographic, geographic and mechanical voyages that will spread around the globe. ***.

10

Malheiro Dias, Oraçoes e Conferências (1933), 46.

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Voyages Out Scholars of modernist travel literature note the depiction of spaces and movement using metaphors of ships and trains, such that the modernist world is defined by motion.11 Oswald’s character Serafim Ponte Grande (Seraphim Grosse Pointe) is transformed ‘from petit bourgeois and fairweather bureaucrat to dancer and tourist’. Gago Coutinho’s inaugural flight supports the modernist equation ‘Europeans in Brazil/Brazilians in Europe’, for which every voyage out is a voyage back that testifies to the ‘different languages, poetic traditions, and cultures connected by the heterogeneous geopolitical space of the Atlantic Ocean […] [a]‌juncture between colonialism and the postcolonial era […]’.12 Composer Darius Milhaud’s assignment to the French Legation in 1917–18 signals a productive period in which he is influenced by music incorporating Brazilian culture and nature, part of the his openness to travel and world music, from jazz to Provençal traditional melodies. Milhaud’s music travels from France to Brazil (Deux Poèmes Tupis, Le Boeuf sur le toit, Saudades do Brasil, Création du Monde) and to other lands: Brasileira (1936), Alfama (1939), Le Bal Martiniquais (1944), Carnival de New Orleans (1947), Suite Cisalpina sobre temas Piemonteses, Kentuckiana (1949). His geographic and ethnographic method parallels the trans-geographic poetry from the travels of Blaise Cendrars. Virginia Woolf ’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), sails characters to the South American Amazon, while during the same period Anita Malfatti’s voyages out are to Berlin, New York, and Paris. Both directions provide illuminating, instructive, and even strange or unexpected contacts with other cultures that prove transformative, catalysts for change of self and other as the traveller proceeds from

11 12

Maps are being re-drawn by this travel in accord with personal, ethnic, national, and social identities and by the fascination with travel in itself. See Alexandra Peat, Travel and Modernist Literature (New York; London: Routledge, 2011). Ignacio Infante, After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic (New York: Fordham, 2013), 17.

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familiar to foreign spaces. As for this new modernist way of traveling, poet Álvaro de Campos wrote, ‘I don’t evolve, I travel’.13 In that spirit, the author, poet, and diplomat Ronald de Carvalho wrote in his Notebook (Caderno das Imagens da Europa, 1935) that the aesthetic of the 1920s is ‘an undisguisable constant, which is man’s absorption by the machine’.14 For the date, his thoughts on this topic constitute an early contribution of wide consequence to theories of modernism and modernization, addressing a change in the conceptual basis of travel. His contribution to modernity is the dual insight about the dominance and importance of the geographical surface and of speed: ‘The machine gave to modern literature a dimension of surface: velocity. This common denominator assured the appearance of a purely spatial aesthetic […] Thus there came about a literature of two planes, dominated by the imperatives of parallels and meridians’.15 Ronald then applied his contrast of two modern ages of travel to the construction of modernity as a whole, and in particular to the maritime and transatlantic dimensions of Luso-Brazilian modernity. He contributed a second theoretical concept to modernism by considering that in ‘the grand and successive voyages in space […] the disquietude of profundity, or depth, has been substituted [in the modern voyage] by the disquietude of distance’. The modern world is characterized by velocity and by the fragmentary expansion of surface movement and travel, dramatized in the now legendary, segmented flights and misadventures of the hydroplane Lusitânia. While the first flight across the South Atlantic is a victory over distance, and over the machine itself, it lacks the depth of Vasco da

Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, January 20, 1935, in Fernando Pessoa, Textos de Crítica e de Intervenção (Lisboa: Ática,1980), 211. 14 Ronald de Carvalho, Caderno de Imagens da Europa (São Paulo:  Companhia Editora Nacional, 1935), 10. ‘[…] uma constante indisfarçável:  a absorpção do homem pela machina’. Álvaro de Campos both celebrates and satirizes modern machinery in his 1915 ‘Ode Triunfal’ (Triumphal Ode). 1 5 Caderno de Imagens da Europa 12. ‘A machina imprimiu á literatura modernista uma dimensão de superfície:  a velocidade. Esse divisor comum determinou o apparecimento de uma estética puramente especial. […] Nasceu, assim, uma literatura de dois planos, dominado pelo imperativo dos paralelos e dos meridianos’. 13

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Gama’s epic voyage to India, the profundity of his hubris, the epic curse of Adamastor, and the meaning of his quest: ‘This last kind of disquietude’, continued Ronald, ‘is a replica without the nobility of the former’.16 ***

South Atlantic Voyages In his formative years, Portugal’s future modernist poet and author of Mensagem, Fernando Pessoa, voyages between Lisbon and South Africa as if he were participating in Verne’s novel. In 1896 at the age of seven, he takes the ocean liner Funchal to Madeira and from there sails on the English ship SS Hawarden Castle to South Africa, where he will finish high school. In 1901 he returns for a visit to Portugal on the German liner König, continuing on the steamship Peninsular to Terceira Island in the Azores, from May to June 1902. Again, from Lisbon, Pessoa returns alone to South Africa in September on the German liner Herzog. On the same ship he will return permanently to Lisbon, again traveling alone, in 1905, on his seventh and last ocean journey at age 17. The return voyage to Lisbon may have been the origin of the poem ‘Opiário’ by the heteronym Álvaro de Campos, one of the most important poems of world modernism, published in the 1915 journal ORPHEU. In the poem, Campos describes the changes in himself in terms of a voyage, reinforcing Ronald’s theory of the purely surface aesthetic of modernist travel:  ‘This march within myself [is] comparable to a voyage. I didn’t go up from one floor to another; I kept going, on a plain, from one place to another’.17 Remaining in Caderno de Imagens da Europa 12. ‘A inquietação de profundidade foi substituída pela inquietação da distância. […] Esta última espécie de inquietação é uma replica sem nobreza da primeira’. 17 Fernando Pessoa. Correspondência (1923–1935) (Lisboa:  Assírio & Alvim, 1999), 350. ‘Essa marcha em mim […] comparável a uma viagem. Não subi de um andar para outro; segui, em planície, de um lugar para outro’. 16

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Portugal for the rest of his life, the poet continued to invent other poetic, dramatic, and philosophical oceanic voyages of the imagination, notably the celebrated ‘Maritime Ode’ of Álvaro de Campos also published in ORPHEU in 1915, in which he expressed the cannibal urge to devour humanity as a solution to his desire to become a universal everyman: ‘I love you all carnivorously. Pervertedly […]. Ah, not to be me to be everyone everywhere’. The ocean liner is an icon of modernist voyages. Ronald de Carvalho celebrates oceanic travel in his poem ‘Cristal Marinho’ in the spirit of Álvaro de Campos’ ‘Ode Triunfal’: ‘All the freshness of a naval romance / galleys / brigs / brigantines / ferries / and long barges soaked with sea oil […] poetry of planes and volumes that conquers melancholy and founds reality in the joy of intelligence’.18 In Oswald de Andrade’s novel A Escada (The Staircase) character Jorge D’Avelos takes refuge from urban society in a simple romantic life with nature on a small island near the port of Santos, where he can watch the arrival and departure of the great transatlantic liners that in his eyes represent the Utopian theme of permanent voyage and transformation. The magical atmosphere of the ocean liner enchants young Guta, in Raquel de Queiroz’s novel The Three Marias, as she sets out to explore the world: I had never been aboard ship in my life. To me, a ship was a fairy palace, sailing the seas with its cargo of delightful people and pleasures beyond compare. Everything white, the polished metal gleaming, just as in the movies. Young men from foreign shores in white flannel, telling stories of far-off lands; an orchestra at meals, bars, cocktail parties, ballrooms, women in low-cut dresses smoking – Everything that I had never seen, that I had never dared desire in my unfailingly austere and pleasureless life.19

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Ronald de Carvalho, Toda a América (Rio de Janeiro:  Pimenta & Melo, 1926), 70–78. ‘Toda a frescura do romance naval / galeras, / briques, / bergantins, / barcaças / e chatas largas embebidas no oleo do mar […] poesia dos planos e dos volumes, que vence a melancholia, e funde a realidade na alegria da inteligência’. Rachel de Queiroz, The Three Marias, Fred P. Ellison, trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 139.

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The Brazilian modernists are avid travellers for whom poetic material is to be found in the very reality before their eyes. They travel to find the Utopian and cannibal origins of their own culture and identity. Their determination to seek out other cultures through travels is divided dialectically between their wish to discover the country’s vast interior, unknown to them, and to study and travel in Europe, long considered a necessary component of artistic education. They are constantly alternating between local and global, so that the concepts and presentations of national selfperception are always changing.20 They keep traveling, whether in literature or reality, for the same reasons Brazilians always travelled, captivated by the country’s discovery by sea. Perhaps motivated by the metaphor of ‘achamento’, literally ‘finding’ of Brazil, used in the letter of discovery, they travel to the interior to find the origins of their own culture and identity and to Europe to complete the picture of what ties Brazil to the world of literature, classics, and philosophy. Their adventures both collect and disseminate features of Brazilian cultural hybridity; the country’s interior furnishes images, colours, and musical instruments for their works, while in Europe the artists and writers assimilate new forms, designs, and techniques. Tarsila’s and Oswald’s travels in 1923–24  – based in Paris, with excursions to Morocco, Spain, and Portugal, and on return to Brazil the significant excursion to baroque Minas Gerais with Blaise Cendrars – give rise to an aesthetic of surprise, proposed in the ‘Manifesto of Pau Brazil Poetry’, with poems in Kodak flashes and the vivid colours of landscapes in Tarsila’s ‘Pau Brasil’ paintings. In a later poem, ‘Recife’, artist Rego Monteiro recalls a sonorous country of ‘Instantaneous Poetry, full of healthy, tranquil figures who nonchalantly earn their daily bread’.21 20 See Alexandra Peat, Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys (New York; London: Routledge, 2011), 181–82. 21 Mon onde était trop courte pour toi (1939–1941), Lettre-préf. de Georges Bernanos. (Paris: P. Seghers, 1956): Recife Au lever de ton jour salubre et tranquille aucun problème `a résoudre

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Voyaging, whether to distant interior regions of Brazil, to Europe, or around the Americas, is for the modernists the vehicle for assimilation of discovered or found content that supports the creation of a hybrid or intercultural art and expression. Ronald de Carvalho in his poem ‘Uma Noite em Los Andes’ finds that his love of Brazil intensifies in the foreign mountains: ‘That night in Los Andes I loved Brazil as never before […] the four stars of a cross hung in the wrong place’.22 As do other modernists, Tarsila admits discovering Brazil on her own terms in Paris, meaning a special place for Brazil in the presence of indigenous and primitive art, which is the cauldron of the cannibal movement announced in 1923 by A Negra. Similarly, while studying painting in Berlin, Roberto Burle Marx, future landscape architect, discovers bromeliads native to Brazil in the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden with which he will build his career, alongside modernist architects. ***

Ethnographic and Geographic Voyages To produce the cannibal idea, the modernists relied for their sources on documents and histories by ethnographic and geographic travellers. Most prominent in the Cannibal Magazine is Hans Staden’s 1557 account of cannibalism among the Tupinambá; Simão de Vasconcellos’ chronicle of les figurants reprennent leur attitude nonchalante    du gagne-pain quotidian … ‘S.O.S’. Afin que je puisse atteindre le pays sonore de la Poésie Instantanée 22

Toda a América 70. ‘Aquela noite de Los Andes eu amei como nunca o Brasil […] as quarto estrelas de um cruzeiro pendurado fora do lugar’.

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the Jesuits in Brazil, containing the episode of the devouring of Bishop Sardinha; a poem in Tupi from José Vieira Couto de Magalhães’ steam navigations in the interior, reported in O Selvagem; and vocabulary from Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s Tupi-Guarani grammar. The magazine quotes Nicolau Badariotti’s travels in Mato Grosso and contact with the Parecis. Modernist travel writing in general is said to rely on its origins in earlier centuries.23 This background consisted primarily of a series of scientific missions, from the Dutch in Pernambuco, 1630–54, to Portuguese, German, Russian, and Austrian missions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.24 Portraits, drawings, and photographs produced in the description and documentation of Brazilian life by visiting scientists and artists constitute a reference archive for modernist depictions of indigeneity and cannibalism. In counterpoint to Brazilian sources, the manifesto additionally cites well-known international studies of world culture and religion in English, French, and German with the objective of asserting the primacy of indigenous cultures over European norms.25

23 See Robert Burden, Travel, Modernism and Modernity (Surrey:  Ashgate, 2015), 235 for comments on archetypes of shipwreck and survival in Robinson Crusoe (1719). 24 From the Dutch in Brazil under Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen with painters Frans Post and Albert Ekhout, producing Caspar Barlaeus’ Rerum per octennium in Brasilia et alibi nuper gestarum sub praefectura in 1647; Portuguese naturalist Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira’s ‘philosophical journey’ to the Amazon from 1783–92; Russian Consul-General Langsdorff (1774–1852), botanist who traveled with Saint-Hillaire in Minas Gerais, later throughout the Amazon region accompanied by the painter Johann Rugendas (1802–58); the German botanist and ethnographer Prince Wied-Neuwied in Southern Brazil in 1815–17; to the GermanAustrian mission that accompanied Princess Leopoldina to Brazil in 1817, with Von Martius, Von Spix, and the painter Thomas Ender. 25 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902); Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913); Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), translated as How Natives Think (1926); La mentalité primitive (1922), translated as Primitive Mentality (1923); L’ âme primitive (1927), translated as The ‘Soul’ of the Primitive (1928), Sir James George Fraser (The Golden Bough, 1906–15), Fritz Graebner (Das Weltbild der

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Ethnographic research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to what Mário de Andrade would define in his novel Macunaíma as a Pan-Brazilian and Pan-American folkloric fantasy, for which the primary sources were Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s research among the Pemon in Roraima in 1910–11,26 Rego Monteiro’s illustrations of indigenous legends, and the folkloric research of Luís da Câmara Cascudo.27 In the same year as Macunaíma, Vladimir Propp published his Morphology of the Folktale in Russian in St. Petersburg, which was the basis for Haroldo de Campos’ analysis of Mário’s episodic novel.28

António Lopes Mendes and Edgard Roquette-Pinto Two travellers contributed to the study of cultures in international perspective. An ethnographic traveller and researcher whose work took on a transoceanic dimension is the Portuguese agronomist António Lopes Mendes, who was sent to Goa in 1862 by the Navy and Overseas Ministry to survey its lands and cultures. The resulting book, A Índia Portuguesa (Portuguese India, 1886), with 382 illustrations and seven maps by Francisco Pastor, remains the most complete geographical and cultural survey of Goa. In 1882–83 Lopes Mendes is in the Amazon, and in 1892 the Geographical Society of Lisbon published his comparative study, The Orient and America:  notes on the practices and customs of the peoples of

Primitiven, translated as The World View of the Primitives, 1924); Charles Blondel (La Mentalité primitive. Préface de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, 1926); and Serge Voronoff (Étude sur la Vieillesse et la Rajeunissement par la Greffe, 1926). 26 Theodor Koch-Grünberg, Vom Roroima zum Orinoco, Ergebnisse einer Reise in Nordbrasilien und Venezuela in den Jahren 1911–1913, unternommen und herausgegeben im Auftrage und mit Mitteln des Baessler-instituts in Berlin von Theodor Koch-Grünberg. 5 vols (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1917–28). 2 7 See Luís da Câmara Cascudo, Histórias que o tempo leva (São Paulo:  Monteiro Lobato, 1924), and articles in the Revista de Antropofagia. 28 Haroldo de Campos, Morfologia do Macunaíma (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1973).

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Portuguese India compared with those of Brazil,29 which he submitted to the Xth International Congress of Orientalists in Lisbon. Lopes Mendes’ essay is a little-known precursor to the theme of Luso-tropicalism developed by anthropologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s. Rather than assimilate world cultures into Brazil, as the cannibal manifesto proposes, Lopes Mendes projected Brazilian cultures into global comparative perspective through the Luso-Indian lens. As a consequence, Lopes Mendes’ Brazilian travels constitute an early example of the study of comparative world cultures, a practice that Sir James George Fraser continued in his multi-volume work, The Golden Bough. The second traveller is the Brazilian Edgard Roquette-Pinto, ethnographer and anthropologist who in 1912 accompanied explorer and commander Marshal Cândido Rondon on an expedition to western Mato Grosso, today Rondônia, for research among the previously un-contacted Nhambiquara peoples. The ethnographic material he collected is the basis for his 1917 book, Rondônia: antropologia etnográfica (Rondônia, Ethnographic Anthropology), which includes transcriptions of music of the Nhambiquaras. These melodies and other recordings placed in the National Museum have been identified as the source for the indigenous music incorporated by Villa-Lobos into his compositions, performed in Rio de Janeiro and in Paris, and the basis for his self-presentation as a cannibal in the Parisian press in 1927. Paulo Renato Guéiros affirms that on returning to Brazil in 1924, Villa-Lobos listened in the National Museum to the phonograms recorded by Roquette-Pinto during Rondon’s 1908 expedition and incorporated sections into his subsequent compositions.30 Following Roquette-Pinto, Lévy-Strauss would visit the Nambiquara in 1938 and publish his own ethnography, ‘La vie familiale et sociale des indiens Nambikwara’ (1948), included in part in Tristes Tropiques.

29 O Oriente e a América: apontamentos sobre os usos e costumes dos povos da Índia portuguesa comparados com os do Brasil (Lisboa: Sociedade de Geografia, 1892). 30 See Guéiros (2003), 12–13.

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Ronald de Carvalho and ORPHEU between Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon The writer and diplomat Ronald de Carvalho is the first of the modernists to travel and write on both sides of the Atlantic: ‘Always shining in conversation, full of spirit, with a massive career in front of him […] one of the most faceted and dynamic intelligences of our generation’.31 His literary career is linked to the Portuguese literary figure Luís de Montalvor who comes to Rio de Janeiro in 1912 as the private secretary of Bernardino Machado, extraordinary envoy and minister plenipotentiary of the Portuguese Republic.32 Ronald departed in early 1913 to continue studies at the Sorbonne, and in 1914 he entered Brazilian diplomatic service in Portugal, where he published two poems in A Águia, to which he continued to contribute in 1916, as well as the journals Alma Nova and Atlântida.33 Returning to Brazil in late 1914, he married, and met Montalvor.34 Just as Montalvor’s poems written between 1910 and 191535 show an incipient modernist style, still heavily borrowing from decadentism and symbolism, Ronald follows suite in his first book of poetry published in Paris in 1913, Luz Gloriosa. His inclination at that time, according to critic Alceu Amoroso Lima, was towards classical, symbolist,

See Alceu Amoros Lima, Companheiros de Viagem (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1971), 32. ‘Sempre luminoso de conversa, cheio de espírito, com uma carreira fulminante diante de si […] uma das inteligências mais facetadas e dinâmicas da nossa geração’. 32 See Fernando J. B. Martinho, ‘Luís de Montalvor: O rastro discrete de um dandy da palavra poética’, 1915 – O Ano do Orpheu, Steffen Dix, org. (Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2015), 225–37. 33 See Ricardo Daunt, ‘A passagem de Ronald de Carvalho por Portugal’, Sibila: Revista de Poesia e Crítica Literária 18 (5 abr 2009). Accessed . 3 4 Rui Sousa, ‘Presença(s) e Ronald de Carvalho em Portugal’, 1915  – O Ano do Orpheu, Steffen Dix, org. (Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2015), 255–69. 35 O Livro de Poemas de Luís de Montalvor, Arnaldo Saraiva, ed. (Porto: Campo das Letras, 1998). 31

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and Parnassian poetry.36 When Montalvor returned to Portugal in February 1915, he delivered a dedicated copy to Fernando Pessoa, which attracted a positive reply in a letter dated February, 1915: Your book is one of the most beautiful that I have read recently. I tell you this, as you do not know me, so that you do not think me severe or inattentive to the beauties of your Book. You have within you that with which great poets are made. From time to time the hand of the sculptor makes the unreal curves of his Matter speak. And then that is your poem about the Pier and your impression of Fall, and this and that verse, fallen from the gods like what is blue in the sky in intervals of the storm. Demand from yourself what you know that you cannot do. The path to Beauty is no other.37

With poet Eduardo Guimaraens, Ronald was invited to collaborate with Montalvor on the famous Lisbon magazine ORPHEU as co-director. In a letter to Montalvor in March, 1915 Ronald recalled the origin of the idea for the journal in Copacabana: ‘[…] whose first seed blossomed near the waves in Copacabana near the boats, the Portuguese fishermen, and the aging nets’.38 ORPHEU introduced four of the most important works in European modernism by Fernando Pessoa, his existential play O Marinheiro (The Mariner) and three odes by his heteronym Álvaro de Campos, ‘Opiário’, a maritime poem of anguish and rejection of colonial cultures; the ‘Ode Marítima’ (‘Maritime Ode’), which at some thirty-five pages is an ocean 3 6 Alceu Amoroso Lima, 31. 37 Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência (1905–1922) (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), 150. ‘O seu livro é dos mais belos que recentemente tenho lido. Digo-lhe isto para que, não me conhecendo, me não julgue posto a severidade sem atenção às belezas do seu Livro. Há em si o com que os grandes poetas se fazem. De vez em quando a mão do escultor faz falar as curvas irreais da sua Matéria. E então é o seu poema sobre o Cais e a sua impressão do Outono, e este e aquele verso, caído dos deuses como o que é azul no céu nos intervalos da tormenta. Exija de si o que sabe que não pode fazer. Não é outro o caminho da Beleza’. 38 See Arnaldo Saraiva, Modernismo brasileiro e modernismo português:  subsidies para o seu estudo e para a história das suas relações (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2004), 336. ‘[…] cuja primeira semente floriu ao pé das ondas de Copacabana perto dos barcos, dos poveiros e das redes de corda envelhecidas’.

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voyage itself; and the ‘Ode Triunfal’ (‘Triumphal Ode’), a seriocomic edged tribute to the new mechanistic reality of modernity. The ‘Triumphal Ode’ proclaims a cannibalistic love for the totality of modernity (‘Amo-vos a todos, a tudo, como uma fera. Amo-vos carnivoramente’) (I love your all, everything, like a wild beast. I love you carnivorously), while Campos’ ‘Ode Marítima’ reveals the discovery of savagery in the modern through a maritime fantasy recounting the adventures of pirates, in whom the poet recognizes another more primitive self: ‘Ah! a selvajaria desta selvajaria! Merda/Pra toda a vida como a nossa, que não é nada disto!’ (‘Ah! the savagery of this savagery! Down/With all life like ours/that knows nothing of it!’). The cannibal metaphor of possession meshes with the fever of wheels and gears. The orgiastic savagery of the pirates in the ‘Maritime Ode’ exalts the theme of the exhausted, dead body (‘fogo, fogo, fogo, dentro de mim! / Sangue! Sangue! Sangue! Sangue!) (fire, fire, fire, inside me! / Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!) of a narrator who wishes to be changed into a ‘victim-synthesis in flesh and blood of all the pirates in the world!’ in a rite of cannibal expiation. The poem sets a precedent for cannibal assimilation in Oswald’s 1928 Manifesto. After participating in ORPHEU 1, the most important journal of the Portuguese avant-garde, Ronald returned to São Paulo for the Modern Art Week in its first session on February 13, where he read Manuel Bandeira’s poem ‘Os Sapos’ and delivered a lecture on modern painting and sculpture. He turned to a modernist style in his book of poems, Epigramas irônicas e sentimentais (Sentimental and Ironic Epigrams, 1922), influenced by Tagore and by Japanese and Chinese poetry,39 which were set to music for soprano and piano by Villa-Lobos. In 1923 he was in Mexico with Minister of Foreign Relations Félix Pacheco, a prelude to his travel essays and poetry covering the continent, from Argentina to the Caribbean, the United States, and Mexico. Ronald returned to Paris in the key years 1923–24 to work for Ambassador Souza Dantas, directing political and diplomatic matters, where he would once again return as general secretary in 1930. His poetic focus on the American continent in the 1926 volume of poems, Toda a América, was followed by a prose description of his American journeys 39

See Alceu Amoroso Lima (1971), 31.

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published in Itinerário (1935), counterbalanced by a book on European politics, Caderno de Imagens da Europa, the year of his death in an automobile accident in Rio. Strangely, Montalvor perishes when his car falls into the Tagus river twelve years later.

Ronald de Carvalho’s American Itinerary In the prose sketches of Itinerário, Ronald records images of a journey through the Americas as sketches, impressions, or engravings, three from the Antilles, four from the United States, and fifteen from Mexico.40 Throughout, he described the Americas in contrast to Europe, making judgments about the entire scope of their civilizations and contacts. His evocation of traveling on board is set in poetic evocations reminiscent of Álvaro de Campos (‘The air of the Antilles blows a desire for naval adventures / The air of the Antilles balances on deck its plume of salty aromas / The air of the Western Indies!’).41 Like the Portuguese poet of ‘Opiário’, he expressed the tedium and superficiality of the voyage by contrasting the weary black attendant at the bar with two oblivious young American girls: ‘Miss Garrett, from St. Louis Missouri, and Miss O’Bryen, tennis champion from San Antonio, Texas […] wear the same white dresses and in the mornings have the same smell of toothpaste […]’.42 The narrator’s irony and reserve become the very content of his travels, confirming what Ronald himself calls the surface or superficiality of travel, conveyed in lively visual images: ‘The only adventure on board belongs to my imagination’.43 A  stop at the island of Guadaloupe brought him into contact 40 See Ronald de Carvalho, Itinerário:  Antilhas, Estados Unidos, Mexico (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1935). 41 Itinerário, 15. ‘O ar das Antilhas sopra um desejo de aventuras navais / O ar das Antilhas balança pelo ‘deck’ a sua pluma de aromas salgados / O ar das Índias Occidentais!’ 42 Itinerário 14. ‘[…] vestem os mesmos vestidos brancos, têm, de manhã, o mesmo cheiro de pasta dentifrícia […]’. 43 Itinerário 16. ‘A única aventura a bordo é a minha imaginação’.

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with young Mme. Blanche Durand, who spends the hot afternoon in her bungalow overlooking the sea, with a Victrola, hammock, mangoes, and some romantic novels in a calm tropical setting punctuated by macaws and toucans. Even in such an idyllic setting Europe intervenes: ‘Mademoiselle Durand waits for the mail to arrive from Paris’.44 She dreams of Parisian fashions, and in Ronald’s expressionist depiction her hand entwined with embroidery is a snake waiting in the quite shadows. A parody of the governor’s mansion in Trinidad reads like a satirical poem in the style of Hallucinated City or Pau Brasil: Tudo está no seu lugar   Everything is in its place. As árvores estão atentas.   The trees are attentive. Mangueiras imóveis.    Mango trees immobile. Bananeiras imóveis.    Banana plants immobile. Palmeiras imóveis.    Palms immobile. A paisagem é uma parada.   The landscape is a parade. A natureza espera o sr. governado para se mexer. Nature waits for the governor before moving.

Once in New York, Ronald’s travels continue to contrast the New World with Europe by addressing what he terms the psychology of the skyscraper, which he sees as the architectural symbol of civic equality in the United States. He noted the lack of decoration, the sense of universal belonging in these buildings, far from the abstractions and visual qualities of the palace, exemplified by the gallery of mirrors in Versailles, or the splendour of the Romanesque cathedrals that inspire respect or discipline. In the skyscraper, Ronald saw social relations reduced to a pact of simple equality. He celebrated the city’s mechanical modernity in hyperbole, with the gymnastics and acrobatics of geometry, the calculus of urban reasoning, grating chains, and dizzy lights in a dynamic vision of New York that has a parallel in Álvaro de Campos’ ‘Ode Triunfal’. Jazz and blues rescue the city’s expressive potential; even when sung or choreographed by others, this rhythmical music invades and dominates AngloSaxon America:

44 Itinerário 18. ‘Mademoiselle Durand espera o correio de Paris’.

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Chapter 4 The complex migratory currents stick together like banks of coral. They produce rich vegetation, however unpredictable, where the European constant is indestructible. Its most characteristic expressions renew its original model. The Woolworth Building is gothic. The Capitol is Greco-Roman. The columns of Chicago or San Francisco are more or less one hundred meters high. But quantity does not hide quality. On the contrary, it is diminished. Maliciously, we could say that North American enormity is an involuntary diminished copy of Europe. What’s happening, however, is not that. Yankismo is an adaptation, without any definitive measurements, of European technique. It is material greatness, of provisional character. A greatness that is searching for proportions. The spirit has not yet filled it with its own life. The United States is passing through a stage of civilization on scaffolds. The entire effort of its culture depends on being able to remove them, whenever the true creative work is concluded. (1935, 45–46)45

Traveling from New York to Laredo by rail, Ronald sees constant repetition of the national standard of equality, such that only the names of the States mark any difference among them. The American farmer, for example, repeats the Wall Street banker; far from recalling the loving care of a European shepherd for his flock, the American oversees a commercial operation, thinking of material acquisitions, ‘a radio, a Ford’. Ronald concluded that the country is patently in a stage of construction, in which even massive waves of immigrants are overlays to the constant weak repetition of European architectural models, the gothic of the Woolworth Building, the Greco-Roman of the Capitol. The country’s great material 45 ‘As complexas correntes migratorios agglutinam-se á feição dos bancos de coral. Produzem uma vegetação rica, mas disparatada, onde permanece, indestructivel, a constante européa. Suas expressões mais caracteristicas renovam o modelo primitivo. O Woolworth Building é gothico. O Capitolio é greco-romano. As columnas de Chicago ou de São Francisco têm cem metros ou mais de altura. Mas a quantidade não esconde a qualidade. Ao contrario, Diminue. Com má vontade, poderiamos dizer que a enormidade norte-americana é uma diminuição involuntaria da Europa. O phenomeno, entretanto, não é esse. O yankismo é uma adaptação, em planos desmesurados, da technica européa. É uma grandeza material, de caracter provisorio. Uma grandeza que busca as suas proporções. O espirito ainda não lhe insuflou vida própria. Os Estados Unidos atravessam uma phase de civilização com andaimes. Todo o esforço de sua cultura está, justamente, em poder retiral-os, quando a obra de criação verdadeira estiver concluida’ (1935), 45–46.

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character is provisional, waiting for the scaffolding to be removed. He found that the massive scale of construction at the cost of quality only diminished its significance. Ronald’s arrival in Mexico in 1923 for a series of lectures, replying to José Vasconcelos’ invitation after his visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1922, reflected the shaping influence of Vasconcelos’ theories of ‘cosmic race’ on his view of the Americas. His impressions of Mexico were once again rendered in contrast to Europe after early contacts by the colonial conquerors: ‘The American environment in its green and harsh solitudes absorbs the vestiges of the European’.46 Ronald’s engravings of Mexican scenes capture poetic and aesthetic qualities cast as solitude, resignation, discipline, sobriety, mysticism, melancholy, and imagination. In this portrait, he sees an awareness of transcendence and the universe in artistic impressions of the places he visits; his impression of Guadalajara again plays on the theme of absorption from Europe in his comparison of a foggy morning to a piece of pottery from Talavera de la Reina, Castilla, now produced in the town of San Pedro in the state of Tlaxcala: ‘Still covered by the brown mists of the morning, Guadalajara, painted blue and white, looks like a ceramic pot’.47 In the potter he sees a geometric lyricism that moulds the clay of the American landscape: A potter by profession, an adobe hut with trodden dirt floor was a marvellous tiny museum. On the fired clay and in the clay hardened by the tempered fire of the primitive ovens, there danced the free rhythms of his imagination stimulate by forms and colours, energetic volumes, modelled by an inexhaustible and mysterious geometrical lyricism. That man […] held in his unsteady hands the quiver of wild colts, and in his feet the salty muscles with roots, the dust of all high plains, that he swept up with his long career.48 46 Itinerário, 86. ‘O ambiente da América absorve, nas suas solidões verdes e ásperas, os vestígios do homem europeu’. 47 ‘Coberta ainda pelos nevoeiros pardos da manhã, Guadalajara, pintada de azul e branco, parece uma talavera’, 85. 48 ‘Oleiro de profissão, uma palhoça de adobe e piso de terra batida era um pequenino museu maravilhoso. No barro cosido e nas argilas endurecidas ao fogo temperado dos fornos primitivos, bailavam os ththmos livres da sua imaginação em impetus de formas e cores, de volumes energicos, modelados por um inexgotavel e misterioso lirismo geometrico. Aquele homem […] tinha nas mãos tremulas o

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In the town square of Tonalá, he watched dancers who ‘translate the religious conflict of the Aztec rite with the Catholic’ (1935, 94). The portrayal of the man from Tonalá, ‘The Tonalá man speaks little’, is a precursor of the description in the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade of the silent man from the interior of Minas Gerais, who embodies the strength and solitude of the interior: ‘The man behind the moustache / is serious and strong. / Rarely speaks’. The potter of Talavera anticipates Tarsila’s Abaporu, a figure who rejects thinking for the absolute reality of occupying a landscape: While, marvellously incredible, the outlines danced before my eyes, in an endless play of improvised geometries, immediately undone, I sensed that the potter was not thinking. That man had never suffered, because without searching for the essence of things, he pulled them from non-being by the prestige of form. The Verb, that he had not tried to translate, was converted in the act, that he dizzily shaped. That man was Reality itself, the continuous coming-into-being of appearances in their absolute transcendence. The aesthete was singing at the lathe, and the crackling fire in the ovens also sang the earth […] The man was singing because he had united himself with the land, he was singing the land because he was returning from the hand of the creator to a moment of perfection.49

The unspeaking telluric God-creator, the homo faber, precursor of the Abaporu, is a humble, transfigurative artisan of the Americas, theorized by Ronald in his 1923 travels in rural Mexico. The origins, however, fremito dos potros selvage, e nos pés, de músculos saltados como raízes, o pó de todos os planaltos, que ele varou em longas carreiras’. Ronald de Carvalho, Estudos brasileiros, 2.a série (Rio de Janeiro: F. Briguiet & Cia., 1931), 61. 9 ‘Enquanto, maravilhosamente incríveis, bailavam os contornos antes os meus 4 olhos, num jogo inesgotável de geometrias improvisadas e logo desfeitas, senti que o oleiro não pensava. Aquele homem nunca sofrera, porque, sem procurar a essência das coisas, ele as tirava do não ser pelo prestígio da forma. O Verbo, que ele não tentara traduzir, convertia-se na ação, que impelia vertiginosamente. Aquele homem era, pois, a própria Realidade, o vir-a-ser contínuo das aparências, na sua transcendência absoluta. Cantava no torno o esteta, e no fogo dos fornos crepitantes, cantava também a terra […] Cantava o homem, porque ser unira à terra, cantava a terra, porque voltava das mão do seu criador para o milagre de um momento de perfeição’. Ronald de Carvalho, Itinerário, 110–11.

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remain Iberian: ‘Querétaro! Was it Greco or Murillo who hung you in Mexico?’50 Ronald’s oscillation between Europe and the Americas continued when he returned to Paris as a diplomat in 1923–24, under Ambassador Luís de Souza Dantas and during the first residence of ‘Tarsiwald’ and Villa-Lobos. By 1926 he is again in Rio de Janeiro in the Ministry of Foreign Relations of Otávio Mangabeira. That year he published the volume of poetry Toda a América (All of America) in a luxurious edition by Pimenta de Melo & Cia. This series of poems consolidated his traveling survey of the Americas in verse in the manner of Blaise Cendrars’ geographical poetry.51 A line drawing of the author by Nicola de Garo, immediately following the title page, attests to the identity felt between the author and his travels. Ronald effectively replaces the artist in his sketches and evocations of scenes from his travels in the Americas in the poetry. He is a poet-traveller making a survey of the continents with an empathetic ear and a sharp yet removed eye. Critic Alceu Amoroso Lima considered these verses to be the dynamic results of his diplomatic missions to Mexico, the Pacific, and the United States, written for the first time like a Whitman,52 as the hymn of the Americas composed during the 1923 voyage and overland travels to Mexico. Paulo Moreira adds the pertinent observation that the creation of an American national character, freed from exhausted European liberal models, may spring as well from an authoritarian or patriarchal position as from a liberal or democratic one.53 The modernists mix the former, reflecting their own education and social origins, with the latter, found in their roles as independent artists and in their celebration of Brazil’s folkloric and multiracial society.

50 ‘Querétaro! foi o Greco ou Murillo que te pendurou no México?’ Carvalho (1935), 100. 51 As a modernist poem celebrating and surveying the Americas, it was written almost contemporaneously with Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra (1933), composed from 1925–30. 52 Alceu Amoroso Lima, 31. 53 See Paulo Moreira, ‘Ronald de Carvalho (and Carlos Pellicer)’, Literary and Cultural Relations between Brazil and Mexico (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 24.

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*** While preceding antropofagia by two years, Toda a América expresses many of the movement’s key ideas in embryonic form, particularly the nonEuropean nature of the Americas. In the opening ‘Advertência’, Ronald addressed the European in his village, house, dining room, garden, landscapes of vegetation and animals to insist that he knows nothing about the Americas, which run contrary to the European’s obedience, economy, and good sense. To the contrary, the Americas embody alegria, the quality of happiness that the ‘Manifesto of Pau Brasil Poetry’ of 1924 calls constructive innocence, expressed in Ronald’s introduction as the ‘joy of inventing, of discovering […] of finding our own path’.54 Anticipating the manifesto, Ronald described the poet as ‘agile and innocent’;55 he presented the Americas as lands of assimilation, not of the arriving Europeans through cannibalism, but a general miscegenation where races and languages are dissolved, where an American ‘cosmic race’ – Aztec, Germanic, Guarani, Latin, Saxon, Hispanic, Incan, Aimoré, Slavic, and African – is ruled by ‘a rough yet ingenuous spirit floating over everything, where a primitive light of day shines over a divinely rustic reality’. Just as theorized by Oswald’s two manifestos, Ronald’s America is undisciplined and barbarous, lascivious and violent, yet full of constructive energy.56 In the first section, ‘Brasil’, the poet imagines the country as a vast chorus, as if recasting the singers in Hallucinated City into a national musical landscape. He further imagines a poetic ballet projecting the sounds of the land: the deep melody of the Amazon River, the humming and whistling of brush lands of the Northeast, squeezing of sugar cane, rubber dropping into collection cups, all of Brazil singing, crying, grating, hammering, panting, exploding, twisting, conversing, with the new man of tomorrow waiting in its cradles. When he wrote, ‘I hear the enormous song

54 Alegria in the Cannibal Manifesto will be synthesized in two aphoristic slogans, ‘Alegria é a prova dos nove’ and ‘Antes dos portugueses descobrirem o Brasil, o Brasil já tinha descoberto a felicidade’. 55 Itinerário (1935), 133. 56 Itinerário (1935,) 110–13.

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of Brazil’, he could have been predicting the massive groups of Orpheonic singing led by Villa-Lobos in the 1930s, when Maracanã stadium was filled with 30,000 singers following hand signals given by Villa-Lobos from the centre of the field: ‘It was as if our forests, our waterfalls, our birds, all the voices of nature and of the Brazilian people passed through the baton and spread like the voice of the Brazilian land itself’.57 In the path around the Americas, each stop was a letter dedicated to a colleague in Brazil, beginning in Trinidad and Barbados, crossing the Antilles on board the Vandyck and arriving at Broadway in New York. Ronald dedicated the poem ‘Broadway’ to Mário de Andrade to contrast São Paulo with a poet’s stroll through another metropolis even more hallucinated, shaking with lines and movements that mark it as the meeting place of the world’s peoples and goods – fins from Newfoundland, salt from Iquique, sugar cane from Cuba, junks from Shanghai. Broadway mixes the rhythms of the world’s peoples passing by while a saxophone decries the torpor of a slave quarters in the ultimate synthesis of the Americas as a world culture. The poet visited locales on his trans-geographic excursion that become mirrors, each reflecting a fragment of a larger continental identity for which the poet was searching: looking into the waters at Xochimilco, he asked: ‘What waters will next reflect me?’ (1926, 89). The five parts of the concluding section of the book, ‘Toda a América’, are a Whitmanian lyric singing the irrepressible creative energy and the rustic aggression of the saga of the construction of a civilization: ‘free poetry will lift up your voice’.58 Here, Africa, Europe, and Asia come together to dance around the night bonfires, tangos, maxixes, and cateretês. ***

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‘Era, realmente, como se os nossos matos, as nossas cachoeiras, os nossos pássaros, todas as vozes da natureza e do homem brasileiro passaram por aquela batuta genial e dali partissem para todos os quadrandes, como a própria voz da terra do Brasil’. Alceu Amoroso Lima, Companheiros de Viagem, 140. See Ronald de Carvalho (1926), 123.

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Blaise Cendrars in Brasil On January 28, 1924 Blaise Cendrars, master of geographical and ethnographic poetry and principal contact of Tarsila and Oswald in Paris, travelled for the first time to Brazil on board the Formose, invited by the Brazilians and financed by Paulo Prado, with a sense of leaving old Europe for a personal renewal.59 He carried his Remington portable, on which he wrote the poems of Feuilles de route, to be published after his return to Paris with illustrations by Tarsila. In Paris, from his high regard for her canvases as well as her dinners of feijoada and caipirinhas, Cendrars invited a cross section of the French artistic avant-garde to her atélier, Picasso, Léger, Brancusi, Delaunay, Chagall, Cocteau, Supervielle, Larbaud, Romains, Satie, and the merchant Vollard.60 Tarsila recalled a menu with bacuri jam and hand-rolled straw cigarettes meant to accent the exotic. She diplomatically separated the lunch groups:  ‘First team: Cendrars, Léger, Supervieille, Brancusi, Robert Delaunay, Vollard, Rolf de Maré, Milhaud, and Kojo Tovalou […] Some of these pass on to the group of Cocteau, Satie, Gleizes, and Lhote. Tied to his work, Picasso went out little. Jules Romains and Valéry Larbaud were also good friends’.61 Once on board, Cendrars remembered the travel accounts of Auguste de Saint-Hilaire (Voyage dans les provinces de Saint-Paul) and Claude d’Abbeville (Histoire de la mission des pères Capicins en l’ isle de Maragnan et terres circonvoisines) that prepare his own arrival in the New World. He observed among the Brazilians he knew a palpable anxiety to be modern: ‘Les Brésiliens, si modernes qu’ils soient (se revendiquant comme tel) … Bien sûr qu’ils exagéraient … Ils venaient de découvrir la modernité chez eux. Et ils l’accaparaient. Et ils l’exploitaient. Ils voulaient batter tous les records’.62 At São Paulo’s train station he was greeted by the See Jérôme Michaud-Larivière, Aujourd’ hui, Cendrars part au Brésil: récit (Paris: Fayard, 2003). 60 See Michaud-Larivière, 71. 1 Tarsila do Amaral, ‘Blaise Cendrars’, Diário de S. Paulo (19 October 1938); quoted 6 in Alexandre Eulálio, A aventura brasileira de Blaise Cendrars, 189. 62 Michaud-Larivière, 54. 59

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city’s modernist corps, including Oswald, Mário, Sérgio Milliet, Tasso de Almeida, Couto de Barros, Rubens de Moraes, Luiz Aranha, Alcântara Machado, and João de Almeida Prado (Yan). Cendrars’ São Paulo poems are precursors of Oswald’s Pau Brasil poetry, both published in Paris at Au sans pareil press with illustrations by Tarsila. Mário was jealous of the drawing on the cover of Le Formose by Tarsila, complaining jokingly that a foreigner can come dancing into Brazil and carry away its art with ease. He likes the poems, however, and saw in them ‘a moving poetic humility. A poverty of effects, absolute nudity, a rather miserable naiveté that Kodak foretold’.63 Both poets captured São Paulo through striking snapshot scenes of a consciously new city, as if for the first time. In terms of the aesthetics of travel poetry, Oswald’s poems are a continuation of the technique perfected by Cendrars, confirmed in the Manifesto of Pau Brasil Poetry that ‘following a suggestion of Blaise Cendrars’, the locomotives are ready to depart for modernity. As if preparing Oswald for the Pau Brasil phase, Cendrars finds poetry equally in the ‘aesthetic facts’ of the city: streetcars, cables, gasometres, and crowded streets. His greeting upon arrival reduced the entire city to a close encounter with his friends, as if they were in Nice or London, a comparison previously made by Mário in his Hallucinated City poems of 1922. SÃO-PAULO Enfin voici des usines une banlieue un gentil petit tramway Des conduites électriques Une rue populeuse avec des gens qui vont faire leurs emplettes du soir Um gazomètre Enfin on entre em gare Saint-Paul Je crois être em gare de Nice Ou débarquer à Charing-Cross à Londres Je trove tous mes amis Bonjour C’est moi Le Havre-Saint-Paul, févreir 192464 63 Mário de Andrade, ‘Blaise Cendrara  – Feuilles de Route’, Estética 3 (January– March 1925), quoted in Alexandre Eulálio (1978), 171. 64 Enfim eis uma fábrica uma periferia um bonde pequeno bonitinho

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For Cendrars, the city’s diurnal and nocturnal rhythms are observed from the windows of a contented populace: DEBOUT La nuit s’avance Le jour commence à poindre Une fenêtre s’ouvre Un homme se penche au dehors en fredonnant It est en bras de chemise et regards de par le monde Le vent murmure doucement comme une tête bourdonnante65

The poet recites a recipe for modernity under construction:  workers, newspapers, horns, and speeding cars: LA VILLE SE RÉVEILLE Les premiers trams ouvriers passent Un homme vend des journaux au milieu de la place

Cabos elétricos Uma rua cheia de gente que vai fazer suas compras da noite Um gasômetro Enfim entra-se na estação São Paulo Parece-me estar na estação de Nice Ou desembarcar em Charring-Cross em Londres Encontro todos os meus amigos Bom dia Sou eu Le Havre – São Paulo, fevereiro 1924 (CENDRARS, Feuilles de route, 1924; tradução de Sérgio Wax, 1991) 65 EM PÉ A noite avança O dia começa a despencar Uma janela abre-se Um homem debruça-se para fora cantarolando Está em mangas de camisa e olha para o mundo inteiro O vento murmura doce como uma cabeça zunindo (CENDRARS, Feuilles de route, 1924; 1991)

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Il se démène dans les grandes feuilles de papier qui battent des ailes et exécute une espèce de ballet à lui tout seul tout em s’accompagnant de cris gutteraux … STADO … ERCIO … EIO Des klaxons lui répondent Et les premières autos passent à toute vitesse66

With the poem ‘Menu Fretin’ Cendrars anticipated the categories of raw and cooked proposed by the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, who visited the city ten years later, as a means to distinguish degrees of culture of societies. The poet captured popular primitivism on contrasting the effects of the ‘raw’ – the sky and the sun – with the ‘cooked’, some small fish fried by a black woman who through ingenuity used an old biscuit can as a frying pan, while two young black boys prepared the ‘raw’ dessert, a stalk of sugarcane. With this scene, Cendrars evoked three themes of incipient modernity, treated with the intensity of the tropical sun and pastel colours: popular ingenuity, negritude, and urban location. MENU FRETIN Le ciel est d’un bleu cru Le mur d’en face est d’un blanc cru Le soleil cru me tape sur la tête Une négresse installée sur une petite terrasse fait frire de tout petits poissons sur un réchaud découpé dans une vielle boite à biscuits Deus négrillons rongent une tige de canne à sucre67

66 A CIDADE ACORDA Passam os primeiros trâmuei de operários Um homem vende jornais no meio da praça Debate-se entre as grandes folhas de papel que batem as azas executa uma espécie de balé dele sozinho enquanto se acompanha com gritos guterais … STADO … ÉRCIO … EIO Umas buzinas respondem-lhe E os primeiros carros passam a toda velocidade (CENDRARS, Feuilles de route, 1924; 1991) 67 PEIXES PEQUENOS

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Cendrars commented on Italian and Japanese immigration by looking at billboards and names that he saw while walking along the city’s avenues: PAYSAGE Le mur ripoliné de la PENSION MILANESE s’encadre dans ma fenêtre Je vois une tranche de l’avenue São-João Trams autos trams Trams-trams trams trams Des mulets jaunes attelés par trois tirent de toutes petites charrettes vides Au-dessus des poivriers de l’avenue se détache l’enseigne géante de la CASA TOKIO Le soleil verse du vernis68

For Cendrars, the new city is comparable to the ‘empty’ land found by Cabral  – without language, culture, or religion  – because the poet grasped the pure novelty of temps modernes: ‘no traditions, no prejudices’. His visit is to a city outside time and space, run only by utilitarian O céu é de um azul cru O muro da frente é de um branco cru O sol cru bate na minha cabeça Uma negra instalada num pequeno terraço frita uns peixinhos bem pequenos num fogareiro recortado duma velha lata de biscoitos Dois negrinhos rolem um rolete de cana-de-açúcar (CENDRARS, Feuilles de route, 1924; 1991) 68 PAISAGEM O muro pintado a esmalte da PENSIONE MILANESE se enquadra na minha janela Vejo um trecho da Avenida São João Trâmueis, carros, trâmueis Trams-trams trams trams Burros amarelos atrelados por três puxam carrocinhas pequeninas vazias Acima das pimenteiras da avenida destaca-se a placa gigante da CASA TOKIO O sol verte verniz (CENDRARS, Feuilles de route, 1924; 1991)

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‘furious’ work, without styles or aesthetics, by peoples from all countries. Instead of a Paulista nature, he sees a transparent city, understood by the foreigner as pure energy, pure desire for unbridled construction, whose Portuguese architectural heritage is on the way to extinction. His opinions will be seconded by Lévi-Strauss in his 1935 visit to São Paulo, registered in Tristes Tropiques. SAINT-PAUL J’adore cette ville Saint-Paul est selon mon coeur Ici nulle tradition Aucun préjugé Ni ancien ni moderne Seuls comptent est appétit furieux cette confiance absolue cet optimisme cette audace ce travail ce labeur cette spéculation qui font construire dix maisons para heure de tous styles ridicules grotesques beaux grands petits nord sud égyptien yankee cubiste Sans autre préoccupation que de suivre les statistiques prévoir l’avenir le confort l’utilité la plus-value et d’attirer une grosse immigration Tous les pays Tous les peoples J’aime ça Les deux trois vieilles maisons portugaises qui restent sont des faiances bleues69

***

69 SÃO PAULO Adoro esta cidade São Paulo é conforme ao meu coração Aqui nenhuma tradição Nenhum preconceito Nem antigo nem moderno Só contam esse apetite furioso esta confiança absoluta este otimismo essa ousadia este trabalho este labor esta especulação que fazem construir dez casas por hora em todos os estílos ridículos grotescos bonitos grandes pequenos norte sul egípcio yankee cubista Sem outra preocupação se não a de seguir as estatísticas prever

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Image 30:  Tarsila do Amaral: Drawing for Oswald de Andrade’s Pau Brasil, 1925.

Ouro Preto In March, 1924 Blaise Cendrars joined a group of modernists for a visit to the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, followed by a first lecture in São Paulo, and then by a fifteen-day excursion to the colonial cities of Minas Gerais to spend Holy Week in São João del Rey. Ouro Preto, named Vila Rica in colonial times, was the centre of Brazil’s first independence movement in the 1790s with its leader Tiradentes (Joaquim José da Silva Xavier). The historical site represents for the Paulistas an iconic source of national identity and heritage. As a current UNESCO site, the town maintains its architectural appearance, among Baroque churches with numerous sculptures by Antônio Francisco Lisboa, ‘Alejadinho’. Cendrars joined Tarsila, Oswald and his son Nonê (then aged 10), Mário, Olívia Guedes Penteado, Gofredo da Silva Telles, and René Thiollier,70 a group of eight traveling by o futuro o conforto a utilidade a valorização e atrair uma grande imigração Todos os países Todos os povos Gosto disso As duas três casas velhas portuguesas que restam são faianças Azuis (CENDRARS, Feuilles de route, 1924; 1991) 70 Thiollier would describe the trip in ‘De São Paulo a S. João del Rey’, in O homem da Galeria, (São Paulo: Livraria Teixeira, 1927).

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train. Just as Tarsila incorporated the colours and themes of carnival in the canvases Morro da Favela and Carnaval em Madureira after the visit to Rio, the excursion to Minas was by all accounts another transformative moment for her concept of colour and form, influenced on a first visit by the architecture, colour, and landscapes of the colonial cities: ‘I felt an awakening looking at the popular decorations of the houses where people lived in São João del Rei, Tiradentes, Mariana, Congonhas do Campo, Sabará, Ouro Preto, and other small towns of Minas, full of popular poetry. I return to tradition, to simplicity’.71 Art historian Aracy Amaral refers to the ‘dozens and dozens’ of drawings Tarsila made during this trip, so numerous that she could hardly have stopped drawing in her notebooks, and Sérgio Milliet considers her colours to be ‘typically ours […] fresh and frank […] the pinks of wooden chests, the blues of skies, the greens of grass’.72 At the same time, Oswald is taking the notes that will become the nucleus of the ‘Carnaval’ and ‘Roteiro das Minas’ sections of the Pau Brasil poems.73 When the caravan arrived in Belo Horizonte, local writers Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Emílio Moura, Martins de Almeida, and Pedro Nava were waiting at the Grand Hotel. The Paulistas arrived from São João del Rei, Dinivópolis, Ouro Preto, Mariana and would continue on to Sabará, Lagoa Santa, and Congonhas do Campo. In his memoirs, Nava paints veritable portraits of the key figures. He recalls Oswald’s agile and quick stride, his well-dressed figure, scintillating conversation and entrance into the Grand Hotel like a Roman Emperor: ‘In his weighty presence there was something of a tribunal, a proconsul, imperial, and statuesque. At a glance he was analogous to Tarsila’s future anthropophagic Abaporu, giving the impression of growing smaller from toe to head or enlarging from head to toe […] He was imposing, with full powers at age 34’. Nava comments that Tarsila and Oswald are headed inexorably for each other: ‘Tarsilalá do 71

‘Senti um deslumbramento diante das decorações populares das casas de moradia em São João del Rei, Tiradentes, Mariana, Congonhas do Campo, Sabará, Ouro Preto e outras pequenas cidades de Minas, cheias de poesia popular. Retorno à tradição, à simplicidade’. Revista Annual do Salão de Maio (1939), 31–35. 72 Quoted in Aracy Amaral, Tarsila, sua obra e seu tempo (São Paulo: Editora 34; Edusp, 2003), 152. 7 3 Aracy Amaral (1970), 46.

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Amaralalá. Can you imagine? The divine and intelligent package that she was at age 34? […] Put all that in the most well-proportioned body in the world and listen to the softest musical voice coming out of a smile and you will have what was in her youth the greatest interpreter of antropofagia’. And Nava is taken with the 52-year-old widow, patroness, and representative of the coffee aristocracy of São Paulo, D. Olívia Guedes Penteado: ‘I have never seen a person distil so much charm as this lady […] Her black eyes, liquid, brilliant, darting, expressive were mimics of themselves […] I can describe her walk, her hat, her hand rolling and unrolling a string of pearls from her long necklace’.74 In a fortnight touring the colonial cities of Minas, the modernists must have been conscious of re-enacting colonial scientific and artistic missions into the country’s interior, for which they are collecting designs and impressions useful for their modernist artistic production. Perhaps Tarsila and Oswald were thinking of Darius Milhaud’s ballets, L’ homme et son désir, composed in Brazil on forest themes and produced in Paris by the Ballets suédois, or La Création du monde, based on folk mythology, which they may have attended in Paris. That they see themselves as characters in a theatrical adventure is confirmed by the playful false identities they invent for the Hotel Macedo registry: ‘D. Olívia, single, photographer, English, London; Tarsila, single, dentist, American, Chicago; René Thiollier, married, pianist, Russian, Rio; Cendrars, single, violinist, German, Berlin; Mário, single, rancher, black, Bahia; Oswald de Andrade Filho, single, escrittore (sic), Swiss’.75 Critic Brito Broca asks why the Brazilian avant-guardists would make a point of taking a visiting avant-garde poet to see eighteenth-century cities that evoke ruins of the past. Perhaps the landscapes and architecture of baroque Minas to the eyes of the São Paulo modernists did appear new and original? As Aracy Amaral suggests, however, the re-enactment of Holy Week in Minas must have meant more to them as a native folk drama with original settings and structures in a landscape. The visitors act like anthropologists 7 4 Pedro Nava, Beira-Mar, memorias 4 (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1978, 183–85. 75 See Telê Ancona Lopez, ‘Modernistas em um diner’, Pró-Posições 19.1 (January– April. 2008), online version ISSN 1980-6248.

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or folklorists, making notes and sketches and, above all, discovering in the ruins of the past a plausible authentic expression of national art. In a similar juncture of the modern with the historical, Alcântara Machado cultivated a taste for old texts by commenting the work of José de Anchieta, S. J., one of the founders of São Paulo: It seems so paradoxical that a youth involved in the modernist adventure, at the height of the fight between antigos and modernos and in the midst of the most adventurous modernist ranks should exude so much pleasure and erudition on commenting the oldest of the colonial texts […] But in the modernist movement, at least at the beginning, there was a deep nationalist interest’.76

The encounter of avant-garde technique, in this case with Cendrars as focal point, with the nativist or primitive content of the Brazilian baroque exemplifies a dynamic of the Brazilian avant-garde, an alternating current between Brazil and Europe that will culminate in antropofagia. Just as the colonial towns of Minas absorb and nationalize the maritime baroque of the empire, the Paulista modernists assimilate their contacts with Europe to produce the internationalization of national culture. In view of Mário’s complaint, it is undoubtedly ironic that Cendrars, in his excitement to discover the architectural treasures of Minas Gerais along with the modernists, suggested the creation of a ‘Societé des Amis des Monuments Historiques du Brésil’ to protect architecture, sculpture, and popular traditions, to be financed by D. Olívia, and exclaimed ‘Brésiliens, gardez vos trésors! […] Le Brésil aux brésiliens!’77 ***

76 Alceu Amoroso Lima, Companheiros de viagem, 61. ‘[…] tão paradoxal parecia que um jovem lançado em plena aventura modernista, no auge da luta entre ‘antigos e modernos’ e no meio das hostes mais aventurosas dos modernos, pudesse ter tanto gosto e tanta erudição em comentar os mais velhos escritos coloniais […] Mas é que, no movimento modernista, houve uma profunda intenção nacionalista, ao menos no início’. 77 W. Mayr, ‘Chez Blaise Cendrars’, Le Journal Littéraire (3 January 1925), cited in Aracy Amaral (1970), 47.

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Mário de Andrade as Apprentice Tourist in the Amazon From 7 May to 15 August 1927 Mário de Andrade travelled to the Amazon carrying his ‘codaque’ camera, accompanied by the patron D.  Olívia Guedes Penteado and two young girls, her niece Margarida Guedes Nogueira (Mag) and Tarsila’s daughter Dulce, or Dolur.78 On this voyage, his camera substitutes for drawings made in pencil by earlier travellers such as Lopes Mendes (1882–83) that are, in the words of Benedito Nunes, the main instruments for knowledge of the Amazon throughout the nineteenth century.79 The voyage by ship emphasizes the great distances and ‘far-off Brazils’, the time of travel, the enormous cost, and the scarcity of knowledge about the interior; it is an apprenticeship for Mário the ethnographer, musicologist, and folklorist. He will meet the researchers Luís de Câmara Cascudo and Antônio Bento in Natal, who will help him collect dramatic dances linked to rites of vegetation, such as the death and rebirth of the land in the boi-bumbá, and he will hear performances of folk quatrains on the rivers.80 Mário’s first voyage confirms the description of young Guta’s expectations on her first voyage leaving Fortaleza, in The Three Marias: My soul was like that of the soldier in the folktale of Pedro Malasarte who abandons everything, sets out with his knapsack on his shoulder, experiences hunger and persecution, walks covered with dust and weariness through strange cities governed by cruel and crafty kings, all plotting his downfall. He, however, a slave to his desire to ‘see’, to ‘know’, confronts all things, continues eternally in search of the impossible surprise, of things never seen, journeying always ahead, beneath the sun and through peril. (1963, 69)

For a study of photography and portraiture in O turista aprendiz, see Ester Gabara, Errant Modernism:  The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 79 See Maria Stella Faciola Pessôa Guimarães and Edna Maria Ramos de Castro, ‘Benedito Nunes e reflexões sobre a Amazônia’, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 6.2 (May/August 2011). 8 0 See Telê Ancona Lopez and Tatiana Longo Figueiredo, ‘Por esse mundo de páginas’, in O turista aprendiz (Brasília: Iphan, 2015), 24. 78

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The diary and notes taken on a pocket dictionary from this excursion and from a second to the Northeast, from November 27, 1928 to February 24, 1929, are excerpted in the Diário Nacional in 1928–29 and eventually come into print in 1943 as O turista aprendiz (The Apprentice Tourist), which had once carried the subtitle ‘Viagens pelo Amazonas até o Peru, pela Madeira até Bolívia e por Marajó até dizer chega – 1927’ (Travels on the Amazon to Peru, on the Madeira to Bolívia and around Marajó until saying enough  – 1927). Ever the scholar, Mário’s voyages for collection of folklore had been encouraged by his reading of texts by earlier travellers or explorers, such as Martius, Débret or Maria Graham, which he mentions in correspondence with Manuel Bandeira. Aware that this category applies to his current voyage, Mário proposes to write a humoristic satire of scientific expeditions and ethnography, for which he invents a tribe called ‘dó-mi-sol:’ ‘I think that for the kind of Indians that I encountered who have morals different from ours, I can write a humoristic monograph, a satire of scientific explorations, of ethnography and also social […] very open to fantasy […]’ (2015, 133).81 His diary documents a discovery of Brazil in ways the group of Paulistas dislocated to Minas Gerais never imagined. Mário’s pages register the effects of the landscape in verbal paintings and in photographs: a butterfly that measures some 3  m from wingtip to wingtip. They are consciously telegraphic flashes, an experiment with modernist travel prose in the Amazon that confesses greater interest in writing than in traveling. The travellers receive nicknames, D. Olívia is Raínha or Raínha do Café, Mag is Balança and Dolur is Trombeta. The names suggest that the journey is the reprise of an opera by Carlos Gomes, or a performance that gives the actual voyage a theatrical dimension as experience. Following every stage of the voyage, the diary is a subjective and at times fictional memoir. Mário tells his own cannibal story when he dreams that he composes a short speech in Tupi to deliver to a tribe at the Madeira river: 81

‘Creio que com os tais índios que encontrei e têm moral distinta da nossa, posso fazer uma monografia humorística, sátira às explorações científicas, à etnografia e também social. Seria a tribo de índios dó-mi-sol […] prestam muito para a fantasia […]’ (2015), 133.

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More than an apprentice traveller to an unknown region, Mário is an incipient anthropologist on an extended field excursion. Yet his travels are more poetic than documentary, as he converts the voyage into a personal document, writing in a notebook received as a present during the trip. Just as in Tarsila’s diary of her travels, Mário’s includes receipts, caricatures, drawings, and Kodak snapshots. Even in the Amazon, Mário like his fellow modernists is always conscious of comparisons with Europe, particularly France. When he buys a string hammock in the market, he calls it a multi-coloured Braque, and when arriving in the ship Pedro I near the mouth of the Amazon river, he exclaims: ‘And I swear to you that there is nothing in the world more sublime. Seven kilometres before the entrance the sea was already clogged with brown because of the advancing fluvial waters. It was a gigantically immense opening laced by an amphitheatre of forested islets so large that the smallest of them was larger than Portugal!’83 He prepares himself to take in the vast differences of the North of Brazil, and the resulting sensation of insufficiency ‘completely spoils the grey and natty European that I  still have inside me’.84 The voyage for him will be a ritual of becoming more Brazilian, 82 ‘Com muito cuidado, escrevi um discurso em tupi pra dizer a nossa saudação a todos, quando estivéssemos entre os índios. Encontramos uma tribo completa bem na foz do Madeira, não faltava nem escrivão nem juiz-de-paz pra eu me queixar se alguém bulisse com a Rainha do Café. Vai, recitei o meu discurso, que aliás era curto. Mas desde o princípio dele os índios principiaram se entreolhando e fazendo ar de riso. Percebi logo que era inútil e que eles estavam com uma vontade enorme de comer nós todos. Mas não era isso não:  quando acabei o discurso, todos se puseram gritando pra mim: – Tá errado! tá errado!’ O turista aprendiz (2015), 63. 83 ‘E vos juro que não tem nada no mundo mais sublime. Sete quilômetros antes da entrada já o mar estava barreado de pardo por causa do avanço das águas fluviais. Era uma largueza imensa gigantesca rendilhada por um anfiteatro de ilhas florestais tão grandes que a menorzinha era maior que Portugal!’ 84 ‘[…] que me estraga todo o europeu cinzento e bem arranjadinho que ainda tenho dentro de mim’ (2015, 67).

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revealed to himself through writing the diary. On arriving in Belém, Mário muses that Brazilian civilization was put together in too much of a rush, without taking in ‘the Africa and India inside of it’, except as external influences or ornaments; rather than absorbing its diversity and adjusting to its actual situation, he sees only a continuing surface copy of Europe: ‘just […] aping Europe’.85 On the return voyage passing towns along the Amazon, he will comment almost with derision: ‘Everything has a Portuguese name around here’.86 The voyage is both a search for and return to origins, with references to historical chronicles recollected with humour. As the São Salvador stops along the river to pick up firewood, Mário tells a story about the Indians who bring it to the ship, as if it were a scene in the famous ‘Carta’ of Pero Vaz Caminha: ‘I think that the Indians were afraid of us, they brought as much wood as we needed, however there was no way to invite them on board to show them the chicken we had brought just for that purpose’.87 As the ship crosses into the state of Amazonas and approaches the town of Itacoatiara, which in Mário’s dream has 700 palaces with a single door in red marble, the streets are canals where transportation is by manatee or, for women, dolphins. A band of women on dolphins invites him to enter a palace, where there is a hammock for two, where he makes love before visiting local monuments, but since the bureaucrats are busy, the couple returns to the hammock for more lovemaking. The young women let him cut their hair, amassing a sea of hair until the dreamer awakes. Mário praises the ‘discreet elegance’ with which the Amazon women from the lower classes know how to be nude, thinking of the depictions of Greek women during the Renaissance: ‘What a difference from civilized women!’88 Arriving at Santarém, Mário pretends that he is in Venice and recounts the arrival in the language of a chronicle of discovery: ‘[…] Santarém with its strange Venetian sensations, because of the hotel anchored at the port, sticking its wall into the water, with domed windows! The Venetians speak our language very well and all are of a dark tapuia colour, very uniform. We 85 ‘[…] apenas macaquear, a Europa’ (2015, 67). 8 6 ‘[…] tudo é nome portuga por aqui’ (2015, 178). 87 See Mário de Andade (2015), 85. 88 ‘[…]que diferença das mulheres civilizadas!’ (2015, 91).

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were received with great cordiality by the doge who showed us the city that ends abruptly. The clock at City Hall had stopped, which allowed us to understand Santarém of thirty years ago. We were admirably predisposed in favour of the city […]’.89 Language on this voyage is a decisive component of place and identity. If the Tapuias of Santarém speak ‘our language’, so does Mário translate into Portuguese the language of a variety of river creatures that pass by the São Salvador: ‘A flock of parrots welcomes us, saying “good-day” in Abanheengá’.90 By language, the populations of the Amazon acculturate as Brazilians: ‘Boats appear with people who come up, my God! To see people from so many civilizations, Manaus, Belém, the world. And some acculturated Amerindians, now completely Brazilians, who live around here speaking our language, perhaps with no memory at all of their tribes’.91 If the travellers on the upper deck are intent on filtering their experiences in a familiar language, they nevertheless constantly encounter reminders that they are the outsiders. In the evenings, Mário descends to third class to talk with the caboclos. When told his guests were Paulistas, an Italian Franciscan friar in Tonantins, a town on the upper Solimões River, after an afternoon singing opera melodies together, admonishes them: ‘ – You are Paulistas. You are not Brazilians! To be Brazilian you have to come to the Amazon, here yes!’92 The travellers also face a different culinary vocabulary with novel new tastes: pirarucu, taperebá, tambaquí, 89 ‘[…] Santarém, com estranhas sensações venezianas, por causa do hotel ancorado no porto, enfiando o paredão n’água, e com janelas de ogiva! Os venezianos falam muito bem a nossa língua e são todos duma cor tapuia escura, mui lisa. Fomos recebidos com muita cordialidade pelo doge que nos mostrou a cidade que acaba de repente. O relógio da Câmara estava parado, o que nos permitiu compreender Santarém há trinta anos atrás. Ficamos admiravelmente predispostos em favor da cidade […]’ (2015, 87). 90 ‘Um bando de papagaios nos recebe, falando ‘bom-dia’ em abanheenga’ (2015, 109). 91 ‘[…] surgem assim embarcações com gente que vem, meu Deus! ver gente das civilizações, Manaus, Belém, o mundo. E vêm também desses índios mansos, já completamente brasileiros, que vivem por aí falando língua nossa, sem memória talvez de suas tribos’ (2015, 109). 92 ‘– Vocês são paulistas […] Vocês não são brasileiros não! Pra ser brasileiro precisa vir no Amazonas, aqui sim!’

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graviola, matrinxão, cupuaçu, cúbio. And they tolerate co-existence with insects and disease, the hoard of carapanãs (mosquitoes) so dense that strolling around the deck is impossible, the intense heat that is always said to be hotter wherever they arrive than in the previous stop, and local encounters with cases of leprosy and widespread chronic malaria. Each turn of the river elicits Mário’s inner fears of terrible hidden mysteries, making him more aware of the ‘brutal danger of being alive, of existing’.93 Notwithstanding the travails of the voyage, one constant is the overwhelming sense of the sublime, an adjective first applied to the vast immensity of the waters and horizon, such that everything appears far off, the monumentality of the scene overcoming one’s capacity to take it in. The grandiosity of its monotony defines the sublime. The feeling accompanies Mário throughout his journey, applied to the morning of his arrival in Belém, birds and fish alongside ship, starlit nights, the manner of a young woman, the solitude of lakes, the noble vitória-régia flower, an evening of dancing with Ursa Major in the sky, moonlight and tranquil early morning skies, folk singers, dramatic dances of the North and Northeast, the diversity of equatorial nature, to all places and peoples he finds to be of extreme beauty. The accompanying idea of a primal indigenous happiness anticipates the Manifesto: the quiescence of the Amazon caboclo expresses a greater happiness than is found in the cities: ‘He doesn’t have the slightest ambition. A little flour, a lot of cachaça and he’s happy. Lots of children. And he doesn’t need anything else […] thirteen straight nights of dancing at the trezena de Santo António […] Happier than you, civilized people’.94 Happiness also involves a greater spirituality attributed to things and a sensorial life so strong that it inebriates. Visiting a rubber tapper’s trail, he experiences the ‘almost absurd silence’ of small lakes surrounded by gigantic trees, the joy of an invulnerable peace. On the last afternoon on

9 3 Mário de Andrade (2015), 104. 94 ‘Não tem a mínima ambição. Farinha um pouco, cachaça muita e está feliz. Tem filho à beça. E não carece de nada mais. Mais feliz que vocês, civilizados. […] Agora mesmo acabou a trezena de Santo Antônio que são treze noites de dança’ (2015, 114).

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the Madeira, an unexpected breeze elicits an olfactory sense of voluptuous desires: ‘the smell of flowers in the brush, a savage smell, hot, delicious’.95 No less than Ronald’s poetry in Toda a América, Mário’s diary documents a continental synthesis, centred on the Brazilian Amazon region and supported by excursions to Peru and Bolivia. Like Ronald, on his voyage Mário ‘hears the enormous song of Brazil’ in its vast diversity and multiple sonorities. He listens to the singing of birds on the Solimões. On his return down the Madeira, departing Guajará-Mirim and after visiting the waterfalls at Ribeirão, under a sublime moonlight, a general feeling of well-being breaks out in a transformational farewell song expressing oneness with the voyage: I sing without ever wanting to stop. And I sing everything that I know, without any help. I sing to the moonlight, excessively in pure uncontrolled ecstasy, with the best voice I ever had in my life, a voice without training but with its very nature, good, warm, full, rough but itself, generous. What I felt inside! I don’t even know! How could I know, even if I could analyse myself, I am bursting with moonlight, like I’ve never seen before […] I am moonlight!96

Pathé Baby Whereas Mário’s travel diary in meditative prose, with its expressive episodes of fiction and fantasy, is illustrated by snapshots, Antônio de Alcântara Machado’s innovative novel published the year before, Pathé Baby, is a cinematographic travelogue of Europe based on the photographic image conveyed by telegraphic prose in poetry. After contemplating the ocean, Alcântara Machado jumps onto the European continent, where 9 5 Mário de Andrade (2015), 169. 96 ‘Canto que não paro mais. E eu canto, canto tudo que sei, desamparado. Canto ao luar, desabaladamente em puro êxtase descontrolado, com a melhor voz que jamais fiz na minha vida, voz sem trato, mas com aquela natureza mesmo, boa, quente, cheia, selvagem mas sem segunda-intenção, generosa. O que eu sinto dentro de mim! nem eu sei! não poderia saber, nem que pudesse me analisar, estou estourando de luar, tenho este luar como nunca vi, […] Sou luar!’ (2015, 161).

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the sharp clashes of the most opposite ideologies and tendencies develop ‘[…] examined not from a Brazilian distance but with a certain precision […] and accentuated satirical critical attitude, selecting particular and meaningful examples presented in an anecdotal method so much to his liking’.97 In his short life, summarized by Amoroso Lima, Alcântara Machado ‘was one who passed through our generation like a meteor. But leaving a really luminous trajectory. Like Ronald de Carvalho, he was the joy of life in person’.98 His title is borrowed from the name for a system of amateur cinema created in 1922 by Charles Pathé. The ‘Pathé Baby’ is a small economical projector operated by lever meant to make studio films more easily available. The author’s ‘codaque’, in this case, creates the prose in a series of images, as if passed through the Pathé Baby projector. Alcântara Machado’s voyage out  – from the Canary Islands to Portugal, Paris, London, Italy, and Spain – is an exploration of the world as a self-conscious travelogue of images and impressions, a counterpart to Mário’s voyage into the depths of the Brazilian Amazon. Using telegraphic prose to describe an international travel circuit, Pathé Baby follows the precedent of Blaise Cendrars and fulfils a principal slogan of the Manifesto: ‘routes, routes, routes, routes, routes, routes, routes’. Although the two modernists are both apprentice tourists intent on turning their experiences into written text and image, they adopt opposite approaches to travel writing. While Mário sails into a deeper ‘heart of darkness’ in a strange Amazonian interior, fountain of unexpected discoveries and meditations, Alcântara Machado follows an international tourist itinerary that covers five European capitals and major cities of Italy and Spain. Each of the twenty-three stops is printed in the table of contents, called ‘Program: Continuous Sessions’, each name printed in a different type font. Each chapter/location is introduced by a humorous full-page illustration by Antônio Paim Vieira, featuring a caricature of the location on the top part of the page and at the bottom a sketch of musicians playing flute, violin, piano, and contrabass. As the voyage progresses, the 97 Luís Toledo Machado, Antônio Alcântara Machado e o modernismo (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1970), 53. 98 Alceu Amoroso Lima (1971), 62.

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musicians drop out one by one, leaving only the contrabass playing alone in illustrations of the last chapters. Amoroso Lima called it a ‘[…] book of travel impressions, where (the author) launched telegraphic and impressionistic prose’.99 A link between this novel and the manifestos is the unusual preface, an ‘Ocean-Letter’, telegraphed by Oswald de Andrade from on board the transatlantic liner Cap Polonio. Oswald characterizes Pathé Baby first as a new literature of reporting; from the Cap Polonio he could recognize a familiar cast of characters. One of the aims is satire, as Oswald observes that the travelogue in its many layovers consistently portrays Europe as both ridiculous and delightful. The novel surveys character types: ‘Without frightening anyone, you took the temperature of each people in each country’. This new literature, Oswald says, is ‘cinema with smell’. In a reference that suggests the theme that will appear in the 1928 manifesto, Oswald describes the two authors as contemporary Tupinambás, like the ones who captured Hans Staden in the sixteenth century. The humorous account of cannibalism that underlies the manifesto, fully developed in the 2nd ‘dentition’, is first put forward by Oswald in this preface: when advised by their fearful captive Staden not to eat people, the Tupinambá replied, ‘Don’t bother us, it’s delicious’. The reaction of the author-travellers to the novelties of Europe, specified as cocaine, bullfights, and artistic nudes, is the same dismissive challenge to prohibition. Alcântara Machado’s novel, for Oswald, represents a new vein of travel writing: ‘As far as wireless transatlantic literature, definitely the armada Pathé Baby’. The kaleidoscope of images in travel imitates the frames passing through the Pathé Baby. In Las Palmas, city images flash before the traveller’s eyes: People of all stripes, of all colors: Indians, Canary islanders, Blacks, Spanish, Browns, Germans, Scandinavians, English to beat with a stick. Buildings of all styles: peninsular, Mourish, Venetian, French, gothic […] Houses painted shouting colors […] Six blue eyes and a balcony full or arabesques […] patched street cars, noisy automobiles, soldiers and officials in clusters. Very funny municipal guards. Motorcycles. Carts. Foreign exchange. Shawls. Caps. (1926, 19–20)100 9 9 Alceu Amoroso Lima, 61. 100 Gente de todos os feitios, de todas as cores: indianos, canaries, pretos, espanhóis, pardos, alemães, escandinavos, ingleses a dar com pau. Prédios de todos os estilos:

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Arriving in Lisbon, he passes through the streets: ‘The Chiado, Houses of fashion. Stores. Lots of tailors’ shops […] The statue of Luís de Camões. A strong smell of past glories’.101 In Paris the author visits the Exposition (April to October 1925)  displaying Le Corbusier’s urban designs and materials that would come have a major impact on Brazilian architecture: ‘The Éxposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, cubist trees, square rooftops, wooden gardens, lift up in the Parisian sky antennas of light’.102 He parodies the superficiality of wealthy international tourists (‘And the North American woman, showcase of pearls and diamonds, pointing out the waves with her little cane: – Beautiful! Oh! Oh! Wonderful!’),103 while noting the confluence of peoples from all corners of the globe in travel: ‘And the handsome Argentine (supported by prostitutes), and the Russian duchess, and the Indian prince, and the group of Irish staring at a Cook Agency guide with thumbs in their mouths – This is the casino’.104 They all carry Kodaks: ‘Focusing Kodaks or shouting litanies, the hordes go on’.105 His description of leaving Paris by car repeats the reductive geography of Oswald’s Pau Brasil: ‘The asphalt Road is a pencil scratch cutting the green field. Paris was left behind. In the mist. Between acacias, the Citroen eats kilometres with a 10 H. P. hunger’.106

101 102 103 104 1 05 106

peninsular, mourisco, veneziano, francês, gótico. […] Casas de cores berrantes […] Seis olhos azuis e o balcão cheio de arabescos […] Bondes emendados, Automóveis ruidosos, Soldados e oficiais em penca. Guardas municipais engraçadíssimos. Motocicletas. Carroças. Casas de câmbio. Mantilhas. Gorros, 19–20. ‘O Chiado, Casas de moda. Lojas. Alfaiatarias a valer […] A estátua de Luís de Camões. Cheiro forte de glórias idas’, 31. ‘A Éxposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, de árvores cubistas, de telhados quadrados, de jardins de madeira, levanta para o céu de Paris antenas de luz’, 59. ‘E a norte-americana, montra de pérolas e brilhantes, mostrando as ondas com a bengalinha: – Beautiful! Oh! Oh! Wonderful!. ‘E o argentine bonito (que as prostitutas sustentam), e a duquesa russa, e o príncipe indiano, e o grupo de ingleses basbaques tendo `frente, de dedo espetado, um guia da Agência Cook –This is the casino’, 67. ‘Focalizando Kodaks ou berrando litanias, as hordas vão-se’, 170. ‘A Estrada de asfalto é um risco de lapis cortando o campo verde. Paris ficou atrás. Na bruma. Entre acacias, a Citroen engole quilômetros com uma fome de 10 H.P’, 65.

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London is a parody of itself:  ‘In the confusion of Piccadily Circus the Criterion pours out mohair cloaks with pearl collars, tuxes with clacks, shaved faces with monocles, blonde heads with diadems […] London wheezes like a motor’.107 In travels through Italy and Spain, Alcântara Machado perfects Oswald’s ‘lancing metaphor’:  ‘Florence makes the Divine Comedy its Baedecker’ / ‘the Comunale Palace has the neck of a giraffe’ / ‘In the distance, Capri is a floating black island’. / Under the leaves of the Rambla, the crowd stretches out like a carpet’.108 The novel’s final page, titled ‘moralidade’ (morality), quotes the second stanza of the romantic poem, ‘Canção do Exílio’ (Song of Exile) by Gonçalves Dias, reminding the reader of the superior quality of the stars, life, and loves in Brazil in contrast to the travel-survey of Europe:  ‘Contact with the old European cultures only heightened the powerful unrepentant feeling that dominated Brazilian modernism […] Europe was not worth Brazil […]’.109 Alcântara Machado’s novel of camera-eye tourism catalogues impressions that predate the manifesto’s metaphoric assimilation of Europe.

The Transatlantic Novel-Inventions: João Miramar and Serafim Ponte Grande In 1924 Oswald de Andrade published his first ‘novel invention’, As Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar (‘Sentimental Memoirs of John Seaborne’)110 in the style of a geographical travelogue, with a cover

107 ‘O Criterion despeja na confusão de Piccadily Circus mantos de zibeline com colares de pérolas, smockings com claques, caras raspadas com monóculos, cabeças louras com diademas […] Londres ofega como um motor’, 77, 80. 108 ‘Florença faz da Divina Comédia o seu Baedecker’ / ‘O Palácio Comunale tem pescoço de girafa’ / ‘Ao longe, Capri é uma nuvem preta boiando’ / ‘Sob as folhagens da Rambla, a multidão se estende como um tapete’. 109 Luís Toledo Machado (1970), 55. 110 Translation published in Texas Quarterly 15.4 (Winter 1972), 112–60.

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illustration by Tarsila.111 In the novel, 163 fragments of synthetic, cubist prose written in a witty, humorous, satirical, and burlesque style follow the life of João Miramar from birth to middle age. In the frame of a geographical kaleidoscope the novel features a voyage to Europe and return, occupying fragments 28–55. The name that Oswald de Andrade invented for his fictional self, João Miramar, appears as early as 1916 and relates to his own first voyage to Europe in 1912 as a graduation present. The name João Miramar, more than the American ‘John Doe’, is meant to convey a type of characterless youth of passive nature as he gazes out on seas, trying to discover a suitable identity. Miramar wanders through Europe as a narrator-observer with a Kodak, another ‘hero in search of a character’. An ingenuous youth, his critical consciousness develops both through travel and through writing the memoir, as he accumulates camera-eye images of the world around him instilled with humour, satire, and irony. Multiple snapshots enliven the style of prose in poetry. An aimless traveller, João Miramar’s life can be summarized as succinctly as Oswald did his own: ‘I travelled, got rich, got poor, married, divorced, and widowed, travelled …’.112 Miramar’s satirical voyage repeats the framework inherited from Cendrars and followed by Alcântara Machado in Pathé Baby. His ship, the Martha, leaves the port of Santos and on passing Rio de Janeiro he writes, ‘Sugarloaf was a geometric theorem’. Miramar parodies tourists on board: ‘An Italian woman with immobile eyes sucked me down like a grog […] Madame Rollingboule mulattoed a merengue in the dancehall of the sea’. After the first stop in Tenerife, Canary Islands, the ship passes Gibraltar: ‘Life on board put on rouge for proximity with Barcelona’. Arriving at the Gare d’Orsay by train, the narrator equates the trip as accumulation of images with a book: ‘We dreamed a travel book’. The stops on his European tour all become entries in the book/diary: Munich, Milan, the Vatican, Sorrento, Venice. The technique of prose in poetry reaches its apex in a synthetic description of mountain climbing in Switzerland: 111 112

Some incipient excerpts belonging to the future novel had appeared in A Cigarra with the name that he had invented for a fictional self as early as 1916. Diário de Notícias (1 August 1950). Repeated in Um homem sem profissão (1954).

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Chapter 4 MONT-CENIS   The alpinist   with alpenstock  descended   upon the Alps113 (1972, 124)

The excursion continues to Aix-en-Provence, London, Calais, and once again Paris for celebrations on July 14: Pigalle’s rolling pavement carried me alone through tapestries of lights and voices to a dancehall’s decolleté bent elbow with grogs satin legs in the mixture of bodies and of gloves and of accordions with drums. Mathematicians rumps midinettes with legs exposed over circular fishes in an aerial ocean of harmonicas.114 (1972, 125).

In Montmartre, Miramar is overcome by nostalgia for Brazil and pens a poem that parodies the theme of longing for one’s native land: […] Brazilian nostalgia Is the fly in the soup of my itineraries São Paulo of yellow trolley cars And romanticisms under sleepwalking trees My country’s ports are black bananas Under palm trees My country’s poets are black Under banana trees

113 MONT-CENIS O alpinista de alpenstock desceu nos Alpes (2004, 92) 114 ‘Mas a calçada rodante de Pigalle levou-me sozinho por tapetes de luzes e de vozes ao mata-bicho decotado de um dancing com grogs cetinadas pernas na mistura de corpos e de globos e de gaitas com tambores […] Matemáticos garupas midinettes de pernas ao léu sobre peixes circulares num oceano aéreo de gaitas’ (2004, 95).

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My country’s banana trees Are calm palms […]115 (1972, 126)

In the travel fragments, Miramar relives his naïve consciousness by describing his images of Europe as a ‘sky movie screen’: But St. Marks was a Turkish bath’s electric night in absurdity of whirling worldwide elegance encircling concerts served with sherbets […] (1972, 124) An old Englishman slept with an open mouth like a blackened tunnel under civilized glasses. Vesuvius awaited eruption orders from Thomas Cook & Son. And a woman in yellow was informing a sport in shirt that marriage is an indissoluble contract.116 (1972, 123)

Eroticism is an inherent part of his creative travels: Mountains thrust teats at the sky’s blue thirst.117 (1972, 124) In Las Palmas erecting projects mixed between alpestrine beards and Kodak girls […]

115

‘Nostalgias brasileiras São moscas na sopa de meus itinerários São Paulo de bondes amarelos E romantismos sob árvores noctâmbulos Os portos do meu país são bananas negras Sob palmeiras Os portos de meu país são negros Sob bananeiras As bananeiras de meu país São palmas calmas […]’ (2004, 96).

116 ‘Mas São Marcos era uma luz elétrica noturno de banho turco num disparate de mundiais elegâncias aviadoras rodeando concertos servidos com sorvetes […] Um inglês velho dormia de boca aberta como uma boca enegrecida de túnel sob óculos civilizados.



O Vesúvio esperava ordens eruptivas de Thomas Cook & Son.

E uma mulher de amarelo informava a um esportivo em camisa que o casamento é um contrato indissolúvel’ (2004, 91, 92). 117 ‘Montanhas espetavam tetas para a sede azul do céu’ (2004, 93).

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Chapter 4 Dakar became black in the pure perdition of some green eyes that were my shipboard diary.118 (1972, 126)

The ship passes Ceuta, Las Palmas, and Dakar before depositing the seasick Miramar back in São Paulo. Travel as critical experience contrasting Brazil and Europe represents another step in preparing the Cannibal Manifesto, with its dialectic opposing colonial voyages to indigenous perspectives. *** In a radicalization of the Sentimental Memoirs, Oswald’s second novelinvention, Serafim Ponte Grande (Seraphim Grosse Pointe),119 written ‘from 1929 backwards’ and published in Brazil in 1933, is likewise structured on the transatlantic voyage. Even in travels to the Middle East, memories of the iconic 1924 trip to Minas Gerais interfere: ‘The room recalled a hotel in São João del Rei’. The novel maintains a Kodak perspective, in which travel across multiple locations is conveyed by an accumulation and enumeration of images: The Orient closed up. Everything disappeared like a city in the sea, its brilliance, its whites, its points of land, sphinxes, caftans, fezzes, camels, dragomen, pyramids, harems, minarets, habits, pilafs, deserts, mosques, temples, carpets, acropolises, Englishmen, Englishwomen.120

Oswald divides Serafim into eleven titled sections, each of which parodies a traditional literary genre, thereby turning the novel into a parody of

118 ‘Em Las Palmas ficaram entre barbas alpestres e kodaks moças projetos ascensionais […] Dakar negrejou na pura perda de uns olhos verdes que eram meu diário de bordo’. (2004, 97). 119 Seraphim Grosse Pointe, Kenneth D.  Jackson and Albert Bork, trans. (Austin, TX: New Latin Quarter, 1979). 120 ‘O Oriente fechou-se. Tudo desapareceu como a cidade no mar, seus brilhos, seus brancos, suas pontas de terra, esfinges, caftãs, fezes, camelos, dragomãs, pirâmides, harens, minaretes, abaias, pilafs, desertos, mesquitas, templos, tapetes, acrópoles, ingleses, inglesas’ (2007, 189).

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itself as fiction.121 Oswald referred to the work as the ‘grand finale of the bourgeois world among us’, and the quote brings out the dramatic qualities of the novel as performance. The uninhibited traveller Serafim transmutes Miramar’s alienation into an open, carnivalesque rebellion against the values and behaviour of modernist, bourgeois society: ‘My country has been sick for a long time. It suffers from cosmic incompetence’. Scholar Flora Süssekind interprets satire as a genre appropriate for resistance to the particular tensions of a Latin American postcolonial society, since it expresses ‘[…] tensions and social uncertainties, the conflicts arising from the persistent coexistence of ideas from different historical periods and the practices of cultural hybridization and appropriation of foreign and domestic, traditional and contemporary models’. Süssekind sees the satirical effect in an elliptical structure that applies poetic processes to all contexts, especially to microstructures that are incomplete or digressive, like those of Serafim. The novel’s sections are theatrical scenes, like a series of parentheses with interpolated material that can be read vertically, as satire of situations; or read horizontally as satire of personal and national formation. Disjunction serves as a prime vehicle to satirize and ridicule social and cultural practices.122 Serafim introduces himself to the reader as a character in a theatrical pose: ‘The surroundings of this capital rot. I appear to the reader. Character behind a glass. Rubber cape and boots. There were some military types who changed my life’. The author refers to Serafim as a ‘cannibalistic tourist’ who overturns conventions and parodies stock characters of the social world. The character’s Rabelaisian rebellion is described in the 1933 preface: The new Brazilian cast loose on the high seas of the last stage of capitalism. Amoral. Opportunistic and revolting. Conservative and sexist. Married at the police station.

121 See Haroldo de Campos’ essay, ‘Serafim, um grande não-livro’ in Oswald de Andrade, Obras completas  – 2 (Rio de Janeiro:  Civilização Brasileira/INC/ MEC, 1971), 99–127. 122 Flora Süssekind, ‘Satire and Temporal Heterogeneity’, in Mario J.  Valdés et  al., eds, Literary Cultures of Latin America:  A Comparative History, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 241–57.

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Chapter 4 Going from petit-bourgeois and fair-weather bureaucrat to dancer and tourist. As a solution, transatlantic nudity.123

Serafim’s first travels on the steamship Rompenuve (Cloudburst) carry him to exotic travels in the Middle East in the ‘Splendours of the Orient’ section, written in an exaggerated style parodying a mystery novel: ‘The Bristol Bar between Syrian chairs and ashes […] prepared the nomadic caravan of crusading globetrotters and polyglots’. Eroticism in this voyage intensifies a picaresque rejection of restrictions and conformity, far removed from Brazilian law: ‘Caridad awoke like a tomato in sheets. She was in our hero’s bed. She wrote, “I moaned.” ’ Like Miramar, and the modernists in Paris, Serafim grows tired of his exotic travels and longs to return to Brazil, taking with him the lessons of his expansive travels: Tired Of my travels on the earth I look for you The road home By the stars Atmospheric coasts of Brazil Sexual coasts To take you Like the mustached father from Portugal […]124

123 ‘O brasileiro atoa na mare alta da última etapa do capitalismo. Fanchono. Oportunista e revoltoso. Conservador e sexual. Casado na polícia. Passando de pequeno-burguês e funcionário climático a dançarino e turista. Como solução, o nudismo transatlântico’ (2007, 57). 124 Fatigado Das minhas viagens pela terra De camelo e táxi Te procuro Caminho de casa Costas sexuais Para vos fornicar Como um pai bigodudo de Portugal […] (2007), 193.

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Serafim’s attack on society upon his return culminates in a comic revolutionary action against the city of São Paulo: Hunched on his skyscraper, after wiping clean his cannon, he tries two shots against the headquarters of the romantic police of his country. Fire from the roofs threatens at once the Colonial Press and Sanitary Service. They discover him, identify him, surround him. Firemen erect ladders to wash the pelter from Theatres and Amusements. Ant people shouting viva the police. He will fall into the white gloves of his persecutors.125

In the last section titled ‘The Anthropophagites’, Serafim, now a fugitive from justice, boards the ship El Durazno (The Peach) to lead a group of travellers in a permanent voyage of opposition to what they interpreted derogatively to be ‘Western civilization’: They proceeded to flee the ports’ policed contagion […] They docked against Bahia’s mango groves. Still with the plague. Afterwards in Sidney, Malaca, in the Fiji Islands, in Bacanor, Juan Fernandez, and Malabar, in front of Malta.126

In an inversion of the dialectic of health-disease, the free society on El Durazno proclaims plague on board, so to assure their isolation, independence, and impunity, as Oswald proclaimed in the Manifesto: ‘Plague of the so-called cultured and Christian peoples, we’re acting against them. Cannibals’. The ship is effectively an island, and the voyage is projected as a modern Utopian project, now a timeless and permanent separation from land, to escape the mores of Westernized Brazilian society. It is Utopia

125



‘Acocorado sobre o seu arranha-céu, depois de luzir de limpo o seu canhão, ensaia dois tiros contra o quartel central de polícia romântica de sua terra. Fogueteiro dos telhados, ameaça em seguida a imprensa colonial e o Serviço Sanitário.

Descobram-no, identificam-no, cercam-no. Os bombeiros guindam até escadas o pelotão lavado dos Teatros e Diversões’.

O povo formiga dando vivas à polícia. Ele cairá nas luvas brancas dos seus perseguidores’ (2007, 194). 126 ‘Passaram a fugir do contágio policiado dos portos, pois eram a humanidade liberada […] Encostaram nos mangueirais da Bahia. Sempre com peste. Depois em Sydney, Malaca, nas ilhas Fidji, em Bacanor, Juan Fernandez e Malabar. Diante de Malta’ (2007, 206).

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turned into a primitivist myth, a libertine dramatization and carnivalization parallel to the deglutition of Bishop Sardine in the Manifesto. In Serafim’s ‘endless cruise’, scholar Patrick Tonks finds a critique of transatlantic capitalism and a combative, alternative structure that seeks freedom from bourgeois norms of family, morality, and patriarchy. The novel’s very cynicism, incoherence, fragmentation, and immorality, he asserts, break the colonial system and replace it with an audacious and diametrically opposed alternative. In mobility over the seas, Tonks finds ‘a liberating and redemptive force’, a resistance to conformity and to the geography of transoceanic transport. With no destination, and without being able to unload its passengers, El Durazno creates its own world of opposition, as if quarantined from the repressive restrictions of societies. Passengers live by ‘unrestrained appropriation’, that is, they are cannibals living ‘the prospect of an endless, delicious future’.127 To conceive of the ship El Durazno as a recharacterized cruise ship, based on the liners on which Oswald and Tarsila sailed to Europe, is to see it in opposition to established routes of commerce, law, and morality as it sails the world’s oceans and exploits tropical ports to collect avocados. Remaining outside the system of transatlantic capitalism, it sails in endless pursuit of the ideal of unrestricted liberation and Utopia. The voyage as myth and fantasy on the oceans parallels episodes in Mário de Andrade’s ‘The Apprentice Tourist’ on the interior rivers, where Amazon nymphs ride on dolphins and make love with tourists in hammocks. Travel on the high seas is here a mobile theatre turning codes and structures imported from Europe on their heads, substituting instinctual freedoms in a land where the Indian undresses the Portuguese, or where permanent travellers pursue tropical pleasures: ‘Let your dreams become concrete, oh ladies and gentlemen!’ The travellers on El Durazno shed their clothing as a protest and, shunned by society, El Durazno stops only to take on food: ‘On El Durazno they only dock to stock avocado cases in tropical places’.

127 Patrick O’Reilly Tonks, ‘Cannibal Routes: Mapping the Atlantic as a Network of Appropriations’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Michigan, 2013.

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An Ocean without Mystery In a poem that reflects on the modernist epoch of transatlantic travels both with subtle humour and ironic admiration, Rego Monteiro summarizes the essential counterpoint linking Brazil and Europe, an interrelationship that was once a joint and indissoluble project connecting Brazilian modernist artists with their European counterparts. In light of the dozens of crossings by artists from both continents, Rego Monteiro’s conclusion is at the same time a concluding statement about the times that modernists voyaged across the Atlantic by ocean liner, now that citizens of Rio de Janeiro can order European culinary specialties by telephone: ‘The Ocean has lost its mystery’ / ‘L’Océan perd son mystère:’ ESSAIS TRANSATLANTIQUES Des essais organisés     Montrèrent que toutes les idées admises étaient absolument fausses Avec puissance dérisoire    dérisoire et bilatérale Révolutionnant tous les     dogmes l’ère des impossibles     était  close Par téléphone un abonné de Rio demande Issy-lesMoulineaux     Saint-Ouen Chocolat     Pastilles de  menthe     Pochettes surprises L’Océan perd son mystère128 128 Monteiro, ‘Mon onde était trop courte pour toi’ (1939–41), Lettre-préf. de Georges Bernanos (Paris: P. Seghers, 1956).

Image 31:  Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.

Chapter 5

Transatlantic Exchange: Brazilians in Europe / Europeans in Brazil

Most of them were itinerant Brazilians, people who had weekly longings for Europe – Pagu 04.01.46 Until the entire ocean Curdled with transatlantic liners – Oswald de Andrade, história pátria Carts in the street, transatlantic liners at sea … – Mário de Andrade

A Calendar of Contacts. Brazilians in Europe: Arrivals and Departures In the first three decades of the twentieth century, young Brazilian modernist artists continued a network of transatlantic crossings and European encounters, a prominent feature of colonial Brazilian life that accelerated during the Empire. Transatlantic crossings are prominent in the last novel by Machado de Assis, Counselor Ayres’ Memorial (1908); the recently married couple Fidelia and Tristan sail away to Lisbon without plans to return, leaving behind their native land and adoptive parents, who are left in a state of melancholy. The couple’s voyage foreshadows those of modernists who will depart to develop or practice their arts in Europe, where a sudden awareness of their estrangement from Brazilian life often overtakes them. On reading news from Brazil, a diplomat stationed abroad writes that ‘everything that I read causes an impact on the

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fibres of my heart. And something remains there, perhaps an afflicted longing, something that keeps beating its wings like a nervous little bird in a rib cage’.1 Even before Machado’s characters sail, at the beginning of the century Brazilian modernists are being educated in France, as are painter Toledo Piza and the sisters Vera and Adriana Janacopulos. Vera, a soprano, will perform the groups of songs ‘Ironic and Sentimental Epigrams’ and ‘A Child’s Thoughts’ in Villa-Lobos’ 1924 concert in the Salle des Agriculteurs. Adriana, a sculptor, will contact Brecheret, marry the Russian sculptor Alexandre Wolkowyski and eventually return alone to Brazil in 1932. Piza returned in 1933. The Brazilian weaver Ivan da Silva Bruhns was born in Paris and visited Brazil infrequently. His tapestries were awarded the Grand Prize and Diploma of Honour at the International Exhibition of 1925. In contrast with the European avantgardes, the Brazilian modernists’ works come late, after the Modern Art Week. Only Anita Malfatti and Villa-Lobos produced important works in the period 1915–17. By 1926 almost all of Brazil’s important modernist figures can be found together in Paris. Their main concerns are studies and apprenticeships; contacts with the French avant-garde; exhibits, performances, and publications; and travels. Even before the century begins, the iconic modernist presence in Paris is aviator Alberto Santos Dumont, whose long residence dates from 1897. On October 23, 1906, Santos Dumont pilots the 14-bis before a large crowd of witnesses at the grounds of Paris’ Château de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne for a distance of 60 m at a height of about 5 m, the first flight by a heavier-thanair machine in Europe, making Santos Dumont Brazil’s most celebrated and iconic international figure. His historic flights in the 14-bis revolutionize the voyage, preparing the first crossing of the South Atlantic in 1922 by Portuguese aviators Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral.

1

Davino Sena, ‘[…] tudo o que leio causa um impacto nas fibras do coração. E algo fica, uma talvez saudade aflita, algo que me fica batendo as asas como um passarinho nervoso na gaiola das costelas’, Facebook (June 2, 2018).

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1900–1910 As early as 1906, while Machado de Assis is writing his last novel, Brazilian modernist artists travel to Paris. In 1902 at age 16 Tarsila do Amaral embarks on the Magellan with her sister to study for two years at the SacréCoeur in Barcelona, where she is introduced to painting. The return voyage in 1904 includes a first visit to Paris, which the young Brazilian student would only come to appreciate twenty years later: ‘I hardly knew that the seduction of Paris was all in its intense life rich in emotions and aesthetic pleasures […]’.2 Also, in 1906 Brazilian pianist Magdalena Taliaferro departs São Paulo for the Conservatoire de Paris, at the suggestion of Pablo Casals who had heard her play in Brazil, beginning a concert career that would take her to more than thirty countries.3 The artist Anita Malfatti leaves São Paulo in 1910 to study in Germany for four years at the Königliche Akademie der Künste with expressionists Fritz BurgerMuhlfeld, Lovis Corinth, and Ernst Bischoff-Culm. At the Armory Show in Cologne in 1912 she meets Homer Boss, of the Independent School of Art in New York, where she will study from 1915–16, after a first exhibit in São Paulo in 1914. While in New York, she meets European artists who are fleeing the war – Duchamps, Isadora Duncan, Maxim Gorki, Diaghilev – whom she describes as interesting people: ‘All the artists expressed their opinions with equal frankness, and this led to controversies and lessons’.4 1911–1920 In the second decade, an increasing number of Brazilian artists, writers, and musicians pursue study in Europe. Artist Zina Aita moves to Italy 2 3

4

Tarsila do Amaral, ‘Recordações de Paris’, Habitat 6 (1952), 17. Quoted in Aracy Amaral (2003), 38. See Magdalena Taglliaferro, Quase Tudo (Memórias) (1979), 16. She performs in 1913 with soprano Vera Janacopulos. Taliaferro later teaches in the Conservatoire de Paris from 1936–39 and creates her own piano schools in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. Anita Malfatti, ‘1917’, in Revista Anual do Salão de Maio, No. 1 (1939); English translation in Jorge Schwartz (2002), 586.

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from 1914–18 to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti de Firenze with Galileo Chini, while Regina Gomide Graz studies in Geneva at the School of Fine Arts and Decorative Arts along with her brother Antonio Gomide, returning to Brazil in 1920. Pernambucan artist Vicente do Rego Monteiro travels with his family to Paris in 1911, where he studies in various academies, contacts artists such as Modigliani, Léger, Braque, Miró, and Gleizes, and participates in the 1913 Salon des Indépendants. With the outbreak of the war, he returns temporarily to Rio de Janeiro in 1915. Sculptor Victor Brecheret, who immigrated to Brazil from Italy in 1904, returns to study for six years with Arturo Dazzi in Rome in 1913, before moving to Paris in 1921. He will return to Brazil only in 1932, after nineteen years in Europe. The Lithuanian artist Lasar Segall, who studied in Berlin from 1906–10 at the Königliche Akademie der Künst before moving to the Künstakademie Dresden, crosses the Atlantic in 1913 to visit three siblings who are already living in São Paulo, an influential voyage that prepares his definitive return to Brazil ten years later, where he is soon accepted as one of Brazil’s most influential modernist painters. His home opens as a museum in 1967 on Rua Berta in the Vila Mariana district of the city. In 1914 the sculptor and painter Angelina Agostini travels to London with a grant from Belas Artes, exhibiting after the war at the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, Salon des Tuileries, and the Salon de l’Amérique Latine in Paris, where she becomes a close friend of Tarsila do Amaral. Writer Oswald de Andrade travels to Europe for the first time in 1912, recording experiences that will be fictionalized in the 1924 novel-invention Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar (‘Sentimental Memoirs of John Seaborne’), while the future poet and critic Sérgio Milliet leaves for Geneva at age 14, only returning to São Paulo for the Modern Art Week. In 1923 he joins modernists in Paris and reports in four ‘Letters from Paris’ for the Rio journal Ariel. Composer Francisco Mignone, the son of an Italian immigrant flautist, travels to Milan in 1920, where he studies with composer Vincenzo Ferroni for two years, choosing to remain in Italy until 1929.5 The young pianist João de Souza Lima, through his acquaintance with Tarsila’s father, José 5

Tamara Livingston-Isenhour, and Thomas Garcia (2005), 19.

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Estanislau de Amaral, receives support for studies in Paris with Marguerite Long from 1919–30. Souza Lima becomes friends with Tarsila and performs works by Villa-Lobos before developing his own national concert career. Back in Brazil, he conducts and works with Mário de Andrade in the Department of Culture in São Paulo in 1935. As an adolescent, singer Elsie Houston departs her native Rio de Janeiro to study voice in Germany for one year with the celebrated operatic soprano Lilli Lehmann. She will sing in Villa-Lobos’ concerts in Paris in the 1920s. Années folles, 1921–1930 During the mid-1920s Paris is an intensive centre for the promulgation and practice of Brazilian arts, with the presence of patrons Paulo Prado, Olívia Guedes Penteado, Ambassador Luís de Souza Dantas, and visits by industrialist Arnaldo Guinlé and his brother Carlos, principal financial supporters of Villa-Lobos. In 1922 the city was chosen as a cultural magnet for all of Latin America by Brazilian intellectual Pedro Luís Osório and Argentine economist Alejandro de Olazabal, who proposed to the French government the creation of the Académie Internationale des Beaux-Arts for the purpose of educating Latin American artists and showcasing their works. Italo-Brazilian sculptor Victor Brécheret joined a group of French artists in the formation of the school, whose activities began with a small art exhibit in the summer of 1923. Their first major exhibition of Latin American art at the Musée Galliera (14 March to 15 April, 1924), preceded by an elegant reception at the Hôtel de Ville, counted on the presence of Ambassador Souza Dantas, joined by a daughter of the former emperor of Brazil.6 Paris continued to play a decisive and instrumental role for Latin American artists and in the genesis of works that are now considered among the most important in Brazilian modernism by three major figures, Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade, and Heitor Villa-Lobos, all of whom produced major works in the French capital in the 1920s. Among other 6

See Michele Greet, ‘Occupying Paris:  The First Survey Exhibition of Latin American Art’, Journal of Curatorial Studies 3.2&3 (2014), 213–36.

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Brazilians to arrive in the third decade are the sculptor Victor Brecheret, sculptor and painter Angelina Agostini; diplomat and poet Ronald de Carvalho (who previously had been in Paris in 1913); artists Di Cavalcanti, Rego Monteiro, and Anita Malfatti; pianist Souza Lima and soprano Elsie Houston. In the same year that Tarsila and Oswald are first in Paris together, 1923, sculptor Elisabeth Nobiling began her study at the University of Colgone, transferring in 1925 to Müenster, then Munich. In 1929–30 she studied with Edwin Scharff and Klipech in Berlin, before returning to Brazil in 1934, where she worked with Brecheret. ‘Tarsiwald’ The joint nickname given to Tarsila and Oswald by Mário de Andrade indicates how closely their careers and ideas develop in contact during six extraordinary years of travel and residence in Paris, 1923–28. Tarsila embarks on June 3, 1920 for two years of academic training at the Académie Julian and Académie Émile Renard, travelling on to London to visit her daughter Dulce, to Barcelona, and to Venice. She and pianist Souza Lima attend concerts together and daringly fly over the capital city in a small plane.7 Tarsila returns to Brazil on the Massília in June 1922, encountering pianist Arthur Rubenstein on board. In December, Tarsila returns to Paris, as does Oswald de Andrade, to begin their residence as the couple ‘Tarsiwald’, coming in contact with a wide section of the Parisian avant-garde. The ambassador is present for the inauguration of the course in Brazilian Studies at the Sorbonne in February, 1923, where on May 11, at the invitation of Professor George Le Gentil, Oswald delivers the address ‘L’effort intelectuel du Brésil contemporain’. On May 29 the Maison de l’Amérique Latine opens. Traveling to Italy in August with Tarsila, Oswald puts the finishing touches on his ‘novel-invention’, Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar (‘Sentimental Memoirs of John Seaborne’), published the following year with a cover by Tarsila and dated ‘Sestri Levante/Hotel Miramare, 1923’. At 7

Aracy Amaral (2003), 54.

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their apartment on rue Hégésippe-Moreau in Montmartre, Tarsila offers Brazilian lunches to the Parisian avant-garde, serving ‘ feijoada, compote of bacuri, pinga and straw cigarettes […]’. Among her guests are Cocteau, Cendrars, Eric Satie ‘amusing us with his picturesque language […] Valéry Larbaud with his calm demeanor’, Jules Romains, Giradoux, John Dos Passos, Jules Supervielle, Brancusi, the collector Ambroise Vollard, Léger, Gleizes, Cendrars, and Villa-Lobos, who improvises on the Érard piano to Cocteau’s displeasure. Among the Brazilians who visit her studio are the patrons Paulo Prado and Olívia Penteado, pianist Souza Lima, Sérgio Milliet, and Di Cavalcanti. Tarsila attends theatres and ballets, visits Picasso’s studio, meets Giorgio Di Chirico and Juan Gris, as well as patron Eugenia Errázuriz, artist Marie Laurencin, the gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg, poet Léon-Paul Fargue in Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, and becomes close friends of artists Sonia and Robert Delaunay.8 Tarsila and Oswald return to Brazil at the end of 1923 to prepare for the visit by Blaise Cendrars in January. After Tarsila returns to Paris alone in September, until Oswald’s arrival in November there is an intense amorous correspondence between the two, full of playful names and assumed identities, in the same spirit as the pseudonymous hotel registry in Ouro Preto. Tarsila sails back to Brazil in February, 1925, leaving Oswald to wait for the publication of Pau Brasil before his return in August. The couple then returns to Paris in December 1925 on the Cap Polonio, from which Oswald sends a telegram-preface for Alcântara Machado’s novel Pathé Baby. With the year 1926 Tarsila and Oswald begin their most intensive European travels, in a year that would culminate in their marriage in São Paulo on October 30. Beginning with a Thomas Cook & Sons voyage to the Middle East with Nonê (Oswald de Andrade Filho), Dulce, Claúdio de Sousa, and Altino Arantes, they visit Greece, Turkey, Rhodes, Cyprus, Israel, and Egypt.9 Cendrars returns from Brazil to attend Tarsila’s first solo exhibition at the Galerie Percier, opening on June 7 with seventeen paintings dating from 1923–26. The paintings are São-Paulo, Négesse, Paysage à 8 9

Tarsila do Amaral, ‘Recordações de Paris’, Habitat-Revista das artes do Brasil 6 (São Paulo, 1952). Their acquaintance, American author John Dos Passos, reported on a similar tour in his book Orient Express, while Oswald incorporated themes taken from this

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niveau, Paysage no 1, 2 and 3, Lagoa Santa, Le nègre du Saint-Esprit, Barra do Pirahy, Portrait de l’artiste, La foire, La gare, Marchand de fruits, Les anges, A Cuca, Les enfants au sanctuaire, and Morro da favela. One of the ‘Paysages’ is Paisagem com Touro, offered by the artist to Serge Romoff, the other two are unidentified. The exhibition catalogue features a close-up of Tarsila’s Self-Portrait with long earrings on the cover, with a reproduction of the painting Angels on the first page. While commenting the influence of Léger, critics responded more to the ‘radiant geometries of vibrant colours’10 and to the creation of a fantastic, magical, and sensual atmosphere. The observed freshness, purity, and charm of the artist’s stylized recreation of Brazilian landscapes added to the exotic, abstract, and fantastical effect praised by the Parisian reviewers.11 Tarsila returned from Brazil to Paris for her second exhibition at the Galerie Percier in 1928, where her works are viewed in the spirit of antropofagia, leading to a naïve comparison with Henri Rousseau. They now include ten new paintings dated that year, placed in unusual frames made by Pierre Legrain, as well as two earlier works, Manacá and Pastoral. Her paintings are considered notable for their intense colour and oneiric density, even their fantasy, artificiality, and strange visions.12 The catalogue is limited to three black-and-white illustrations (Sono, O Touro, Abaporu), and some paintings are presented with different names, notably the Abaporu, curiously exhibited as Nu (Nude). Os Barcos would become Porto, La Voûte is now known as O Sapo, Marinha is known as Calmaria, L’Oeuf is Urutu, As Colunas becomes O Touro, and Le Parc remains unidentified. Tarsila’s exhibition is paralleled by Rego Monteiro’s in Galerie Bernheim-Jeune the same month. She left some of her works in Paris to be included in the Salon des Vrais Indépendants in October and in the Salon des Surindépendants in October of 1929. excursion into his novel Serafim Ponte Grande (Seraphim Grosse Pointe) in the section ‘Splendors of the Orient’. 10 Jornal des Débats, 20/6/26. 11 These effects will continue to be highlighted in the exposition of Tarsila’s works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2018. 12 See Aracy Amaral (2003), 293. The paintings exhibited in 1928 are Paysage, Manacá, Les Bateaux, Pastorale, Sommeil, Le Parc, La voûte, Nu, Marine, L’Oeuf, Les Colonnes and Lac.

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Villa-Lobos Heitor Villa-Lobos arrived in Paris in July 1923 with the goals of performance and publication of his compositions. He quickly finished Nonetto:  Impressão rápida de todo o Brasil (Quick impression of all of Brazil), a chamber piece featuring polyrhythms and exotic percussion instruments, and his compositions begin to be performed on October 23 at the Salle des Agriculteurs, with the support of Vera Janacopulos and her husband Aleksei Staal, and again in February 1924 with Spanish pianist Tomás Terán at the Salle Érard. Villa-Lobos attends an event organized by Olga de Moraes Sarmento Nobre to present guitarist André Segovia, who becomes a friend, and plays his pieces at Prokofiev’s house in the Bois de Boulogne, where he meets Diaghilev. At a meeting of Parisian pianists at the home of Henri Prunières, editor of La Revue musicale, he is introduced to Florent Schmitt, Paul Dukas, Albert Roussel, and other major figures in the Parisian musical world, including Maurice Ravel, Satie, Arthur Honegger, Milhaud, and especially Edgard Varèse. The most important concert of 1924 occurred on May 30 at the Salle des Agriculteurs with pianist Arthur Rubenstein playing Prole do Bebê, soprano Vera Janacopulos in ‘Ironic and Sentimental Epigrams’ and ‘A Child’s Thoughts’, Quatour (for E-flat alto saxophone, harp, celeste, and female voices), and the premiere of Nonetto. The concert attracted the attention of the reviewers for its metrical complexity and contrast of timbres.13 Max Eschig began to publish Villa-Lobos’ compositions in October, at a moment when he was obliged to return to Brazil to raise funds for a more extended stay in Paris. His compositions continued to be performed in Paris by pianists Roberto Viñes, Van Barentezen, and Tagliaferro and programmed by orchestral conductors. Walter Straram conducted Les Danses africaines in the Salle Playel on April 1928, Albert Wolff the Choros nos. 8 and 10 at the Concerts Lamoureau in February 1929, violinist Gaston Poulet conducted the symphonic poem Amazonas in its debut in May 1929, and Victor Golschmann with Poulet presented the Première Symphonie in December 1929. His pieces appeared on 8 to 10 concerts each year in Paris from the mid-1920s.14 1 3 See David P. Appelby (2002), 70. 14 See Anaïs Fléchet (2004), 42.

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Image 32:  Villa-Lobos, orchestral score for tone poem Amazonas, published by Max Eschig, Paris, 1929.

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In the concerts in Brazil in 1925, Villa-Lobos advanced his relationship with French composers he had met in Paris by having their works performed in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Albert Roussel was enthusiastic about the presentation of his symphony Le Poème de la forêt and in appreciation recommended Villa-Lobos to the Societé International pour la Musique Contemporaine, where he joined Bartok, Kodály, Hindemith, Milhaud, and Webern. In 1929, with João Souza Lima and Maurice Raskin, VillaLobos continued to organize concerts of contemporary French music, presenting compositions by Florent Schmitt and the group Le Six, and in 1930 a concert entirely dedicated to works of Schmitt. With these concerts, Villa-Lobos completed the transatlantic ties with French music in the role of a Souza Dantas, as an ambassador of music. In early 1927 Elsie Houston arrived in Paris, singing in the clubs Cabane and Sheherazade and performing in Villa-Lobos’ concert in October. When he returned in December 1926 to 11 place Saint Michelle, VillaLobos signed a new contract with Max Eschig, and after the publisher’s death in September 1927 the new director, Eugène Cools, became the composer’s close friend. Villa-Lobos and Lucília opened their home to guests every other Sunday afternoon from 2–5. The guests received a printed card requesting them to bring their own food and wine, which would often serve the couple’s needs until the following reunion. Attending were French composer Florent Schmitt, who does much to promote Villa-Lobos’ international fame, Leopold Stokowski, pianists Tomás Terán and Magda Tagliaferro, cellist Tony Close, composers Edgard Varèse and Conrad Beck, and violinists Maurice Raskin and Oscar Fried. Cuban author Alejo Carpentier describes the receptions: Sunday afternoon. Villa-Lobos’ studio couldn’t hold more friends, performers, and guests. The composer shows his agility in carrying on simultaneous conversations – something like chess games against twenty players. Around the piano – a sonorous arch – burn the votive fires of countless cigars. On the walls are photographs of other performers of his works: Arthur Rubenstein, Vera Janacopulos, Aline van Barentzen […] The extraordinary Russian singer Kurganov employs his intrepid throat for the lyrical caprices of a stupendous Hebraic vocal. After the lament, the violinist Saenz de la Maza plays Falla and Mozart. Immediately Berta Singerman, the prodigious declaimer, intones The Bells of Poe, with her vibrant diction of bronzes and metals […] Among the listeners we recognize Lucie Delarue-Mardrus

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Massive concerts planned for October 24 and December 5 are placed in the hands of professionals through the publisher, as they involve 200 singers and 80 musicians of the Cologne Orchestra and are billed as ‘festivals dedicated to the works of Villa-Lobos’. The first concert includes the premiere of Choros 4 (for three horns and trombone) and eight (for orchestra), and two more Choros that had debuts in Rio in 1925, Choros no. 2 (for flute and clarinet) and Choros no. 7 (for flute, oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bassoon, violin, and cello). Arthur Rubenstein performs the fiendishly difficult and lengthy Rudepoema, dedicated to him, and soprano Elise Houston sings five movements of a set of songs titled Serestas. The December 5 concert repeats two of the compositions heard in 1924, the Nonetto, conducted by the composer, and A Prole do Bebê, now performed by Aline Van Barentzen. Vera Janacopulos performs the impressive Trois Poèmes Indiens, dedicated to Roquette Pinto, that had caused a sensation after an article in the press by Lucie Delarue Mardrus presenting the piece as ‘cannibal music’. The concert features two additional Choros composed in 1925, the Choros no. 3, called ‘Pica-Pau’, for masculine chorus and wind instruments, conducted by Robert Siohan, and the epic Choros no. 10, called ‘Rasga o coração’, for mixed choir and orchestra, conducted by the composer. Qualities of his compositions that Villa-Lobos wishes to bring to the attention of his listeners include mechanical rhythmic intensity, primitive character of melody, sudden changes of key, unusual melodic and harmonic combinations, dominance of harmony over melody, and re-exposition and restatement of materials.16 During the decade, Villa-Lobos composed some 15 In Gaceta Musical, Paris, July–August 1928, In Villa-Lobos por Alejo Carpentier (1991), 31. 16 See Villa-Lobos: sua obra, 3rd ed., Museu Villa-Lobos (1989), 205.

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100 compositions, some containing sets of pieces. He fulfilled his expectation of being accepted by the French musical avant-garde as an interpreter of Brazil and composed most of his major works, with the exception of the Bachianas brasileiras, completed in the following decade. After the 1927 concerts, Villa-Lobos received invitations to conduct throughout Europe, and on November 27, 1928 his Danses africaines was performed by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowsky, and in January 1930 the Choros no. 10 in Carnegie Hall, directed by Hugh Ross of the Schola Cantorum of New York, to an enthusiastic public. In Paris, the festival of works by Villa-Lobos will be repeated in two concerts in 1930 on April 30 and May 5, conducted by Gaston Poulet, after which Villa-Lobos returns to Brazil, where he is obliged to remain until 1945 because of financial policies of the Vargas government. The Return to Brazil At the end of 1928, Santos Dumont returns to Brazil, however he is so overcome with pain and remorse at having seen his airships used in World War I that he leaves almost immediately for Switzerland. Seriously ill with multiple sclerosis, he returns with his nephew for the last time to Brazil in 1931. To close the decade, in 1930 Rego Monteiro and the poet-athlete Géo-Charles (Charles Louis Prosper Guyot) bring an exhibit of contemporary paintings to Recife, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo titled ‘School of Paris’ (‘École de Paris’). The exhibit includes works for sale by Picasso, Braque, Miró, Léger, and Gino Severini, as well as Rego Monteiro himself and Tarsila do Amaral (in São Paulo only). The ‘École de Paris’ marked the first international show of modern art in Brazil and a moment of cultural ambassadorship to parallel the music by French composers presented to the Brazilian public by Villa-Lobos in 1925 and 1929. Its international dimensions were enhanced by a showing in New York at the Roerich Museum in October 1930. Soprano Elsie Houston returned to Brazil for concerts in 1930 in the Salão Vermelho of the Hotel Esplanada, with compositions by Ravel, Debussy, and Stravinsky, as well as Lorenzo Fernandez and Villa-Lobos, along with North American

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black popular songs from Louisiana and Georgia and folksongs from the Northeast of Brazil. ***

Europeans in Brazil, 1913–1920 Europeans artists and intellectuals in Brazil, interacting with Brazilian nature and arts, continued the practice of travels and interactions of long standing and of mutual interest. The arrival of the European avant-gardes in Brazil was marked by performances of the Ballets Russes in Rio de Janeiro in 1913 and 1917, featuring dancers Lydia Lopokova and Vaslav Nijinsky, although the company did not perform any of Stravinsky’s ballets, neither L’Oiseau de feu, premiered in Paris on June 25, 1910; Petruska, first performed at the Théâtre du Châtelet on June 13, 1911; nor the revolutionary Sacre de Printemps, premiered May 19, 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, preceding the company’s tour of South America. The programme at the Teatro Municipal featured a waltz by Chopin and ballets Thamar, by Mily Balakirev, Giselle, music by Adolphe Adam, and Le Lac des Cygnes by Tchaikovsky. The Ballets Russes nevertheless inspired the development of modern dance in Brazil, as attested by performances of the Stravinsky ballets in the 1940s. In August 1916, the free-spirited dancer Isadora Duncan, famous for her dancing bare-footed with the flowing movements of a Greek goddess in the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris in 1902, appeared in the Municipal Theatre of Rio de Janeiro. Her host is author and dandy João do Rio (João Paulo Emílio Cristóvão dos Santos Coelho Barreto), who writing on September 16 to João de Barros, the co-director of the journal Atlântida, ‘artistic, literary and social monthly’ for Portugal and Brazil, described his ‘amorous ecstasy’ for the visiting dancer: Even though I had no money, I spent 15 of the happiest days of my life in amorous ecstasy, true love, with a creature who is genius, divine goodness – everything.

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That creature who looked me over with desire, who almost made me her humble secretary, was Isadora. I never loved as much! My life is inside the Sun. My god! Is love like that? I only came to know it now, at age 35! It was a transfiguration. And I will never again be able to love in that way because on Earth there is no other creation of perfection.17

In his memoirs, Oswald de Andrade likewise recounts an encounter with the dancer in São Paulo. After asking for an interview, he arrived at her hotel room to see a table set for two with a bottle of champagne. Playing a tango on the gramophone, Isadora became a ‘crazy statue’ and the young writer felt a ‘humble anguish before such genius’ and left quickly, not realizing that the table had been set for him. Their São Paulo adventure did not end there, however, as Oswald recounts: ‘Every night Isadora Duncan went out with me in a taxi […] We went around the entire city. She would make me get out to ask for strange flowers from gardens of houses. We went to Osasco and, one sunset among trees, she danced for me, almost naked’.18 In 1920, the future Portuguese writer Miguel Torga (Adolfo Correia da Rocha), from the mountains of the Douro, was sent by his father at age 13 to work on his uncle’s coffee plantation in Brazil. The uncle recognized the boy’s academic potential and returned him to Portugal in 1925 to finish high school, and he later obtained a medical degree from the University of Coimbra, where he collaborated on the modernism journal Presença. His Brazilian adolescence is portrayed in the autobiography A Criação do 17 João Carlos Rodrigues, ‘João do Rio e a bailarina:  duas semanas de paixão’ (3 August 2013). O Estado de São Paulo. ‘Mesmo sem dinheiro, passei os 15 dias mais felizes da minha vida, no êxtase amoroso, no verdadeiro amor, com uma criatura que é gênio, bondade divina - tudo. Essa criatura que me olhou, me desejou, que quase me faz secretário humilde, foi Isadora. Nunca amei assim! A minha vida está dentro do Sol. Meu Deus! Mas é assim o amor? Eu só o senti assim agora, aos 35 anos! Foi transfiguração. E nunca mais poderei amar de tal forma porque não há na terra outra realização da perfeição’. 18 Oswald de Andrade, Um homem sem profissão (Rio de Janeiro:  José Olympio, 1954), 151–52. ‘E todas as noites Isadora Duncan me acompanhou num táxi, […] Andávamos de carro por São Paulo inteiro. Ela me fazia descer para pedir flores estranhas nos jardins das casas. Fomos a Osasco e, num pôr de sol entre árvores, ela dançou para mim, quase nua’.

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Mundo (The Creation of the World, 1937), reconstructing life in Brazil in a story comparable to those found in Northeastern social novels of José Lins do Rego. Rubenstein and Milhaud Two European musicians who are in Rio de Janeiro before 1920, Arthur Rubenstein and Darius Milhaud, demonstrate the necessary confluence of Brazilian themes and European form in the consolidation and recognition of the Brazilian avant-garde. Coincidence and the unforeseen are crucial factors as well that play indispensable roles in the development of Brazil’s most talented young musicians and artists, harking to the suggestion by Pablo Casals in 1906 that Magdalena Tagliaferro pursue studies of the piano at the Paris Conservatory. After meeting Villa-Lobos in Rio de Janeiro and hearing his compositions in 1917, Rubenstein performs O Prole do Bebê at his 1924 concert and the Rudepoema in 1927, while promoting Villa-Lobos both in Brazil and to French musical circles. Rubenstein comments that Villa-Lobos and Milhaud, whom he meets in Rio de Janeiro, are the most prolific composers of his time19 (1980, 155). In his autobiography, My Many Years, Rubenstein recounts the unusual ways in which he became acquainted with Villa-Lobos and his music: Two young musicians, students of the conservatory and my great followers, told me wonders about a composer. ‘A genius’, they said. He was expelled twice from the conservatory for rejecting any intervention or criticism from the teachers. He didn’t believe in any regular musical curriculum, ‘we think that he is a man who relies entirely on his own creative genius and is completely independent’. […] We entered a dark cinema, empty at that hour of the day. On the screen was an American melodrama. Every scene had its appropriate music. There was in intermission; the lights went on, and the five or six musicians waved to their friends and seemed to recognize me. After a short while they began to play again, but this time it was music, real music! It was made up of Brazilian rhythms which I easily identified but they were treated in a completely original way. It sounded confused, formless, but very attractive. My companions whispered, ‘He calls it “The Amazon”. It is a choro for orchestra’. 19

Rubenstein (1980), 155.

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A few days later, Villa-Lobos and his musicians showed up at eight in the morning at Rubenstein’s hotel room, where they played a string quartet in the bedroom and a choro for flute and clarinet, which captured Rubenstein’s attention because of its form. At a subsequent dinner with Carlos Guinle, owner of the Copacabana Hotel, Rubenstein recounted how he proposed that the capitalist support Villa-Lobos’ genius by sending him to Paris: Two years ago, during a dinner at the home of one of Rio de Janeiro’s biggest industrialists, the guests were speaking about Villa-Lobos. I said that I considered him one of the greatest composers of our century and that he would be enthusiastically welcomed in Europe, where he would be able to have his bigger works performed. […] Right here in Brazil lives an authentic genius, in my opinion the only one on the whole American continent. His country does not understand his music yet, but future generations will be proud of him. Like all great creators, he has no means of making his works known in the world unless he is helped by some great Maecenas. I thought of you first of all, knowing your understanding, your patriotism, and your great generosity. The composer is Villa-Lobos, a future famous name in the history of Brazil, and if you are ready to help him, your name will always be linked with his. […] Villa-Lobos must go to Paris. It is the only place where his work can get a hearing and be appreciated. This means staying in Paris for at least one year, giving a few concerts of his works and finding a publisher. […] The host interrupted me and laconically asked the question: ‘And how much money is needed for this?’ I named a fantastic amount. A little while later, I held in my hand a check for that amount.20 Heitor gave me a hug for the first time.

Rubenstein showed his dedication to the music of Villa-Lobos on looking over the score of the Rudepoema, which he received from the composer’s hands in Paris: A little deus ex machina in the person of Villa-Lobos lifted my morale considerably. He arrived one morning with a manuscript and shouted from the door: ‘Rubsten, Rubsten! I wrote for you a long piece which is so much like you that you could have written it yourself!’ […] he said excitedly, ‘We are both savage! We don’t care much for pedantic detail. I compose and you play, off the heart, making the music live, and this is what I hope I expressed in this work’. (1980, 251–52) 20 Rubinstein, quoted in Harvey Sachs (1995), 195.

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Rubenstein premiered the Rudepoema on October 24, 1927 and commented on the piece in his memoirs: It appeared to me to be a monumental attempt to express the origins of the native Brazilian caboclos, their sorrows and joys, their war and peace, finishing with a savage dance. The idea of this work is somewhat similar to Le Sacre du printemps, but with the difference that whereas Stravinsky’s work is clearly explained and each piece has a perfect form, Villa-Lobos’ great opus is a vast improvisation, as are all his large orchestral poems. However, his immense gift for musical invention often compensated for the lack of form and his refusal of discipline. He remained a master in his shorter compositions, especially his piano pieces and songs. I personally could not describe him better than as a rough genius, an uncut precious stone. (1980, 252)

Rubenstein considered the concert to be a great success because of the rough and uneven quality of the compositions: Villa-Lobos had a brilliant debut at the Salle Gaveau. He presented some of his larger things for orchestra, some with voice […] This concert was a great success without any doubt. The somewhat savage quality of his music, the unorthodox development of his ideas, and the novel treatment of his songs and solo instruments intrigued and pleased the Parisians. There were many important musicians in the hall – Prokofiev and Ravel, I remember, among them. These two showed a respectful interest in the music of the Brazilian, but Florent Schmitt, who was also an influential critic, became a steadfast follower of Villa-Lobos. (1980, 171)

*** The composer Darius Milhaud arrived in Rio on February 1, 1917 at the French Legation to join poet Paul Claudel on the Rua do Paisssandu, with its royal palms brought from Bourbon Island, planted in 1853, and its intense summer heat. Milhaud was fascinated by Rio’s charm and natural beauty, the stalls of exotic fruit on Ouvidor Street, drinks of mango and coconut, the Baroque style and azulejos of the Glória church, the deserted beaches in Niterói in bright moonlight, and above all Rio’s Botanical Garden with its promenade of royal palms, giant bamboo, exotic trees, the city’s irrepressible vegetation and invasive vitality, the sounds of crickets, toads, and birds in the forests at night. Milhaud seeks sonority and polytonality in his compositions, the Second Sonata for Piano and Violin, Les Eumênides, Choéphores, Le Récit

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de la Pythie for spoken voice and percussion, and Le Retour de l’enfant prodigue for orchestra of twenty-one soloists plus singers, and his fourth string quartet. Milhaud’s Deux Poèmes Tupis for feminine chorus is based on verses collected by the ethnographer Couto de Magalhães and published in O selvagem (1876), also a source for Oswald de Andrade’s Pau Brasil. He notes that French music dominates in performances and in the conservatory, with overwhelming influence of Debussy and Satie, plus Chausson, Dukas, d’Indy, Roussel, and Ravel as the choice of composers Alberto Nepomuceno and Henrique Oswald. The same is true for Godofredo Leão Velloso, pianist at the conservatory, and his talented daughter Virgínia (Nininha) Leão Velloso Guerra, devoted to works by the Groupe des Six and to main works of the French school, especially Debussy’s three sonatas and 12 Études. Milhaud deplores that Brazilian musicians follow European music exclusively, reflecting music from Brahms to Debussy, rather than the national element that he considers to be lively and original. Popular themes or dance rhythms are filtered through European musical standards and deformed: It is regrettable that all the compositions of Brazilian composers, from the symphonic works or chamber music of Mr. [Alberto] Nepomuceno and Mr. [Henrique] Oswald to the impressionist sonatas of Mr. [Oswaldo] Guerra or the orchestral works of Mr. Villa-Lobos (a young man of robust temperament, full of audaciousness), are a reflection of the different phases that succeeded each other in Europe from Brahms to Debussy, and that the national element is not expressed in a more lively and original fashion. The influence of Brazilian folklore, so rich in rhythms and with such a unique melodic line, is only rarely felt in the works of Rio’s composers. When a popular theme or a dance rhythm is used in a musical work, this indigenous element is deformed, since the author sees it through the lenses of Wagner or Saint-Saëns, if he is sixty or over, or through those of Debussy, if he’s in his thirties. (Milhaud, 1920, 61)

Milhaud insists on the importance of local forms, tangos, maxixes, sambas and cateretês, found in compositions by Marcelo Tupinambá and Ernesto Nazareth, with their rhythmic abundance, verve, melodic invention, and musical imagination. For Milhaud these forms represent the genius of a national music in Brazil. The presence of poet and dramatist Paul Claudel and composer Darius Milhaud at the French Embassy in Rio from 1917 led to the joint ballet

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composed in Brazil, L’Homme et son désir, on a poem by Claudel, choreography by Jean Borlin, decoration and costumes by Audrey Parr, and performed in a four-hand reduction for piano by Nininha. The stage with purple, green, blue, and black carpets suggests a tropical forest, arranged to be perpendicular to the eye like a painting: [T]‌he main character is Man recuperated by primitive powers whom the Night and the Dream have stripped of his Name and a Face. He is led by two identical forms under a veil who mislead him […] One is Image and the other Desire, one is the Memory and the other, Illusion […] All the animals, all the noises of the eternal jungle break away from the orchestra and come over to look at him and play their note in his ear: the Bells and the Pipes of Pan, the Strings and the Cymbals.21

The ballet is premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on June 6, 1921. Musicologist Manoel Aranha Corrêa do Lago considers it to be one of the most experimental compositions not only of Milhaud but of the first half of the twentieth century for its musical qualities: […] radical polytonality, which frequently uses all the chromatic steps, for the extraordinary rhythmic independence among groups of instruments, for very complex polymetrics and polyrhythms, for timbre in the spirit of a chamber symphony (in which each instrument is treated like a soloist), for a spatial arrangement of instrument groups that predates the Fourth Symphony (1952) of Charles Ives and the Gruppen (1956) by Stockhausen.22

At the invitation of Darius Milhaud, Nininha Leão Velloso-Guerra, with her husband composer Oswaldo Guerra, reached Paris in September 1920 where she performed in important concerts before her tragic early death in 1921.23 As an homage, Milhaud himself performed her composition Deux Épigrammes on a concert of Brazilian music at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier on April 13, 1921. In 1920 in Paris Milhaud composed a set of twelve piano pieces called Saudades do Brasil, Op. 67, each piece carrying the name of a neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro or a Brazilian city and each dedicated to a personality Milhaud had met in Brazil. 2 1 22 23

Paul Claudel, Claudel on the Theater (1972), 46. See Manoel Aranha Corrêa do Lago (2012), 35. See Manoel Aranha Corrêa do Lago (2010).

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The pieces and their dedications are as follows: Sorocaba (dedicated to madame Regis de Oliveira); Botafogo (dedicated to Oswald Guerra); Leme (dedicated to Nininha Velloso-Guerra); Copacabana (dedicated to Arthur Rubenstein); Gávea (dedicated to Madame Henrique Oswald); Corcovado (dedicated to Madame Henri Hoppenot); Tijuca (dedicated to Ricardo Viñes); Sumaré (dedicated to Henri Hoppenot); Paneiras (dedicated to La Baronne Franchon); Laranjeiras (dedicated to Audrey Parr); and Paysandu (dedicated to Paul Claudel). The pieces are characterized by a tango or samba rhythm, by polytonality (each hand in a different key) to add harmonic colour, polyrhythms, ternary form, and occasional use of tone clusters. Milhaud orchestrated the pieces in 1923, both versions published by Max Eschig. Contrary to Saudades do Brasil, which is based on Brazilian rhythms, the surrealist ballet Le Boeuf sur le toit comes from the popular tango by Zé Boiadero, O boi no telhado, a success in the 1918 carnival, with some additional thirty Brazilian songs quoted in the piece like a collage or montage, representing Milhaud’s interest in Brazilian folklore and popular samba. Musicologist Manoel Corrêa do Lago identifies thirty popular compositions used by Milhaud, principally Zé Boiadero’s O boi no telhado, along with compositions by Tupinambá, Nazareth, Soriano Robert, Xon-Xon (João de Souza Lima), Zé Boiadero (José Monteiro), Chiquinha Gonzaga, Álvaro Sandim, Catulo da Paixão Cearense, Juca Castro, Osvaldo Cardoso de Menezes, Alexandre Levy, Carlos Pagliuchi, Eduardo Souto, Alberto Nepomuceno, Pedro Hallier, and the polka ‘Morro da Favela’ by Passos, Borneo, and Barnabé.24 What attracts him to these sambas is ‘their clarity of shape, their glowing spontaneity, their immediate humour, and their inner intensity’.25 The piece was presented as the ballet Le Boeuf sur le toit with text by Jean Cocteau, stage designs by Raoul Dufy and costumes by Guy-Pierre Fauconnet and premiered in February 1920 as an ‘imaginary farce’ at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées. The music cycles through all twenty-four keys, with the scene set in a bar with a number of unconnected characters and disconnected actions tending towards Dada, first performed by 2 4 Manoel Corrêa do Lago (2012), 290–97. 25 See Paulo Renato Guérios, ‘Heitor Villa-Lobos and the Parisian Art Scene’, Mana 1, Rio de Janeiro (October 2006), 10.

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clowns. When Louis Moysés founded a cabaret-bar in 1921 at 28, rue Boissy d’Anglas, he decided to name it after the ballet, in Cocteau’s literal translation, and it became a popular meeting place for the avant-garde, jazz musicians, artists, and eventually a Parisian icon. Personalities who frequent the cabaret include many artists and inventors, Coco Chanel, Josephine Baker, Serge Diaghilev, Mistinguett, Picasso, Ravel, Stravinsky, Hemingway, and dozens of others. ***

Europeans in Brazil, 1920–1930 Transatlantic Provocateurs: Two ‘Illustrious Clowns’ Two European promoters of avant-garde aesthetics tour Brazil, the young Portuguese writer António Ferro and the mature professional agitator and creator of futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Both are received cordially, however with reservations and some ridicule by the Brazilian modernist circle, willing to take advantage of their public avant-garde positions. António Ferro’s Jazz Band Five months after the Modern Art Week, as if completing a cycle of Portuguese travellers that starts with Montalvor, the writer and later politician António Ferro visits Brazil in July 1922 for a series of conferences in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Recife and other cities titled ‘The Age of the Jazz-Band’, during which his presentations are interrupted by a live jazz band at predetermined intervals. Ferro describes his enthusiasm and the camaraderie:  ‘Making raids, assaulting weak reputations, knocking off all the high hats passing within reach, I lived almost four months with these jolly companions, in a constant close companionship, in a spiritual

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bohemia that I will never forget’.26 Ferro publishes his ‘sensational and burlesque’ manifesto, ‘Nós’, in the third number of the Brazilian journal Klaxon employing combative rhetoric: A streetcar going by is a century advancing […] We are the Hour! […] Rebellious, revolutionaries […] May our cries become airplanes in space […] free men […] carrying the Infinite […] I am me – gluing posters on the walls of the Hour! […] death to you, oh, etceteras of Life! […] Long live ME! […] We are the official Hour of the Universe.27

Amused, the Brazilians are more than happy to take advantage of Ferro’s aggressive rhetoric (‘I am my time, we all are, the minutes of each hour, this feverish hour, this danced hour, this Ballet Russes Hour, in which the hands of the clock are like arms of a slender woman, or legs of a thin ballerina […]’).28 Ronald de Carvalho’s praise of his creative freedom makes Ferro look more like a decadent than a modernist: In the modernist literature of his country there is no more up to date, perturbing, more agile artist than the author of the Theory of Indifference […] The certainty of his art is in movement, the surprises of lines that move, transforming themselves into colors, sounds, perfumes […] reducing the universe to a play of shapes, to a joyous and enthusiastic rhythm […] to a fine and sensual wine […] like rouge, voluptuous mouths, perturbing kisses.29 26 See Modernismo Português e Modernismo Brasileiro, 27. ‘Fazendo raids, assaltando reputações frágeis, alvejando todos os chapéus altos que passavam ao nosso alcance, vivi cerca de quatro meses com esses bons companheiros, numa camaradagem íntima de todas as horas, numa boémia de espírito que nunca mais esquecerei’. 27 In Os modernistas portugueses, vol. 1, 91–97. ‘Um comboio que passa é um século que avança[…] Somos a Hora! […] Sejamos rebeldes, revolucionarios[…] Que os nossos gritos sejam aeroplanos no espaço[…] homens livres[…] carregadores do Infinito[…]. estou EU  – affixador de cartazes nas paredes da Hora![…] morram vocês, ó etceteras da Vida! […] viva EU[…] Nós somos a Hora official do Universo[…] ’. 28 António Ferro (1924), 41. ‘A minha época sou eu, somos todos nós, os minutos da hora, desta hora febril, desta hora dansada, desta Hora-Ballet-Russe, em que os ponteiros do relógio ora são braços de mulher esguia, ora são pernas de bailarina magra[…] ’. 29 Ronald de Carvalho, ‘Discurso pronunciado no Trianon do Rio de Janeiro em 21 de junho de 1922’, in António Ferro (1924), 29, 34–37.

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Ferro enjoys the role of co-literary agitator in support of the Brazilians: ‘I had arrived in S. Paulo at a time of extreme literary agitation […] Mário de Andrade was still dressing up as a harlequin in his Hallucinated City. Oswald de Andrade, bogeyman of the bourgeoisie, was showing the first appetites of his antropofagia […] Oswald is Brazil, an enormous Brazil, a Brazil that stretches out to Paris’.30 The writer Álvaro Moreira attends Ferro’s lecture at the Palace Hotel in Rio and comes away with an impression of the energy of the Portuguese writer’s presentation: António Ferro, unforeseen, scandalous, fascinating, is Portugal’s latest artist. He had no teachers. Only disciples. Past, for him, is a word without meaning. He only understands the future […] Disdainful, he believes in everything that hasn’t happened yet […] He doesn’t smile. He just laughs. Because he was born and lives at a time of cinematography, he set up a colossal studio inside his head. He composes plots, paints scenery, directs, photographs, plays numerous roles. And he doesn’t worry about pleasing or irritating the public.31

Oswald’s own summation of Ferro’s visit is more equivocal, ‘The modernist terror begins. We have to call António Ferro a genius and Carlos Gomes a dunce. We do’.32 ***

‘Não conheço na literatura modernista do seu país, mais actual, mais perturbador, mais agil artista que o autor da Theoria da Indiferença […] A razão da sua arte está no movimento, nas surpresas das linhas que se deslocam, que se transformam em cores, em sons, em perfume […] reduz o universo a um jogo de formas, a um ritmo de alegria e de entusiasmo […] a um vinho esquisito e sensual […] que sabe a carmim, a bocas voluptuosas, a beijos perturbadores’.

3 0 See Modernismo Português e Modernismo Brasileiro, 26. 31 Alvaro Moreyra, A Cidade Mulher (1923), 194–95. ‘António Ferro, imprevisto, escandaloso, fascinante, é o artista mais novo de Portugal. Não teve mestres. Tem discípulos. Passado, para elle, é uma palavra de sentido. Elle só entende o futuro. Ouviu que falavam muito de saudade, desandou a desejar. Não escreve hoje. A sua poesia e a sua prosa, uma disfarce da outra, são feitas sempre no dia seguinte. Desdenhoso, acredita em tudo que ainda não foi. Irreverente, olha as creaturas e as coisas numa delícia de amor. Não sabe sorrir. Dá gargalhadas. Porque nasceu e vae vivendo no tempo do cinematographo, arrumou um studio colossal, dentro da intelligencia. Compõe enredos, pinta scenarios, dirige, photographa, representa os numerosos papeis. Depois, exhibe as produções. E não se preocupa de agradar ou irritar a platéa’. 32 Oswald de Andrade, Estética e política (São Paulo: Globo, 1992), 97.

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Marinetti in Brazil ‘Does that amaze you?’ Marinetti taunts an audience to which he describes the ‘force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power’ of his Futurist movement, whose manifesto was published in Paris on February 20, 1909 in Le Figaro.33 Seventeen years later, traveling as a well-known figure both denounced and praised in literary journals and the press, Marinetti arrives in Brazil on a tour extending to Uruguay and Argentina arranged by the Brazilian impresario Niccolino Viggiani, spreading inflammatory futurist prose intended to expand the aesthetic and defend Fascist politics in the Western Hemisphere. In her thesis, Mira Korber demonstrates how Marinetti attempted to align himself with Argentine and Brazilian modernists to promote revolutionary aesthetics (Kober, 2017). Marinetti received a contract with a substantial fee and first-class accommodations on the well-travelled circuit to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. Writer Menotti del Picchia compares his controversial conferences to a cannibalistic dance: ‘Marinetti was the clear evangelist in the middle of Tupinambá fury’.34 In Brazil, where he is greeted both with disgust and fascination, Marinetti’s tours serve both the visited and the visitor, his promotion of modernist arts thus raises the profile of young artists in South America, while propping up his image and international relevance that was facing resistance and disenchantment in Europe.35 In ‘Velocità brasiliane’, an unpublished text composed during his voyage, Marinetti applies the aesthetic of speed to a mechanized take on Rio de Janeiro: ‘Motors pulse […] between the sea and trees. Young as could be, carefree, exuberant, excited. Speed bark roar, crackle howl. In every car a tiger. The motors ape the beasts in a seraglio […] Rio de Janeiro is a tropical fruit whose delicious juice is the speed of its automobiles’.36 Although large numbers of 33 Umbro, Apollonio, ed., Documents of 20th Century Art:  Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking, 1973). 34 Menotti del Picchia, ‘O Tripudio dos Zulús’, Correio Paulistano (May 26, 1926). 35 Mira Korber, ‘Tomorrow, Today:  South American Encounters with Italian Futurism, 1900–1936’, Senior essay, Yale University (April 2016), 84–85. 36 See Schnapp and Castro Rocha, 137. ‘Fra l’oceano e gli alberi rombano i motori. Sono giovanissimi, spensierati, esuberanti, accaldati. Correre abbaiare ruggire,

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Italian immigrants in Rio and São Paulo promise a sympathetic public, and the cities are rapidly industrializing, Marinetti is largely dismissed by the literary establishment, as in the press announcement by Cassiano Ricardo: ‘This news is of minimal importance, from an artistic or literary point of view. The coming of this illustrious clown, in considering the influence that he could exert over us, doesn’t stir the slightest traces of admiration’.37 In São Paulo his reception is even more tumultuous. Mário de Andrade declares futurism to be a fraud and Marinetti an agitator. Mário had mocked Marinetti’s arrival and the idea of traveling to Rio to receive him: ‘I am going to welcome Marinetti. Ha! Ha! Ha! It’s Viggiani who’s paying for everything. Ha! Ha! Ha! Otherwise I wouldn’t go. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! To welcome Marinetti. Haha! Ha! Ha! (This is a modinha)!38 At Marinetti’s first performance at the Teatro Lírico in Rio on May 15, 1926, an avant-garde happening, the book Futurismo: Manifestos de Marinetti e seus companheiros, containing the text of Graça Aranha’s introduction and eleven of Marinetti’s manifestos in French, is distributed without charge as a marketing tactic. At the second conference on May 18, Marinetti is interrupted, booed, and jeered by the audience and students assembled outside. In his book published earlier that year, A Escrava que não é Isaura, Mário levels his critique at futurism and other avant-garde movements for their assumptions of novelty, whereas Mário thinks of modernism as an organic phase of artistic evolution and expression: ‘Marinetti invented words-in-freedom. That is, something that had always existed, and made a serious mistake by taking as an end-product what was actually little more than a fleeting means of expression. His words-in-freedom verses are intolerable in their hermeticism, falseness, and monotony’.39 The crepitare urlare. Ogni automobile contiene una tigre. Giocano i motori ad imitare le bestie del seraglio [….] Rio Janeiro 6 un frutto tropicale che ha un delizioso succo: la velocitA delle sue automobile’. 37 Cassiano Ricardo, ‘A Vinda do Sr. Marinetti’, Correio Paulistano (May 13, 1926). 38 ‘Vou buscar o Marinetti. Qua! Qui! Qua! O Viggiani é que paga. Quai Qua! Qua! Sinão eu não ia. Quá! Quá! Quá! Quá! Buscar o Marinetti! Quáquá! Quá Quá (Isto é uma modinha)’. Quoted in Schnapp and Castro Rocha (1996), 127. 39 Mário de Andrade, A Escrava que não é Isaura, in Obra imatura, 239–40. ‘Marinetti criou a palavra em liberdade. Marinetti alias descobriu o que sempre

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historical scope of the Brazilian modernists’ project is incompatible with Marinetti’s proclamations. Although Marinetti exaggerates his successes in written reports and mechanically declaims his futurist poems, he is unable to make Brazilian converts to his movement during his 1926 lectures. As Lévi-Strauss will observe a decade later in Tristes Tropiques, the future in New World cities is always now, they have no backward dimension in time, thus there is no past to annihilate, nothing to be swept away, no antecedents to present and future time to justify or serve Marinetti’s destruction of past time. Marinetti’s lectures in Brazil are nevertheless an event. In composing his lectures, according to Jeffrey Schnapp, ‘[…] improvisation, the recycling of materials, and the mixing of genres were very much the point’.40 Korber concludes that Marinetti is influential in promoting popular culture as a commodity because of his presence in newspapers, radio, and advertisements, enhanced by his inflammatory rhetoric, Fascist politics, and the raucous opposition to his first lecture. He presents himself as up to date and understands how to play the lecture circuit as performance by uniting aesthetics with hyper-nationalism. And while he does not change the thinking of the South American avant-gardes, his presence and aesthetic, well-known from the 1909 manifesto, has already left traces in some works by Brazilian modernist authors, thus his arrival produces a recognition and perhaps a regret that he has succeeded in permeating local writing and avant-garde culture in view of his bombastic tirades. ***

existira e errou profundamente tomando por um fim o que era apenas um meio passageiro de expressão. Seus trechos de palavra em liberdade são intoleráveis de hermeticismo, de falsidade e monotonia’. 0 Jeffrey Schnapp, South Central Review 13.2–3 (Summer-Fall 1996), 105–56. 4

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Image 33:  Josephine Baker and Le Corbusier, Fondation Le Corbusier.

Closing the Decade: Josephine Baker, Le Corbusier, Benjamin Péret and the École de Paris The panorama of European artists and writers in Brazil in the 1920s comes to an end with the arrival of high profile visitors in 1929, Josephine Baker (Frida Josephine McDonald), the black dancer from St. Louis who in 1925 captivated Paris in ‘La revue nègre’ and shocked Parisians with the ‘Danse Sauvage’ in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées wearing a skirt of feathers, later in the Folies Bergères and Cassino de Paris wearing a skirt of sixteen bananas. Dubbed ‘black Venus’ and icon of Afro-Atlantic modernity, Baker danced in the Teatro Cassino in Rio de Janeiro in November 1929, arriving from Buenos Aires on November 17 on the Giulio Cesare along with architect Le Corbusier, who disembarked in Santos, also on his first visit to South America. There, the architect overflies the city with Eng.

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Jorge Corbisier, visits the modernist houses of Gregori Warchavchik  – Ukrainian-Brazilian architect who arrived in 1923 where he soon became part of the modernist group and architect of the first ‘casa modernista’ (modernist house) in 1928 – and delivers two addresses, ‘Architecture and Architectural Revolution’ and ‘Urbanism: The Architectural Revolution’. The dancer arrived in São Paulo a week later for twenty-six shows (always at 8 and 10 p.m.) in the Teatro Santana, Odeon, and Teatro República. On November 27, the architect saw her show at the Teatro Santana, and afterwards the couple attended a reception at Warchavchik’s house on r.  Santa Cruz. Of her performance, Le Corbusier wrote in Prólogo Americano: ‘When on 27 November 1929 in São Paulo Joséphine Baker, in an idiotic spectacle of varieties, sung Baby, she communicated to me such an intense and dramatic sensibility that tears invaded my eyelids’.41 Tarsila and Oswald gave a party for Le Corbusier at Santa Tereza do Alto, the coffee plantation, with the ‘splendorous presence’ of Josephine Baker, suggesting a previous acquaintance with both figures in Paris, perhaps through Cendrars and others present at Tarsila’s atelier and social occasions.42 Le Corbusier then travelled to Rio on December 2, where he repeated his conferences, the second with the altered title of ‘Urbanism was born from the need to solve the problem of the city’. Baker’s last show in São Paulo was December 8, and on the 9th both dancer and architect sailed for Europe on the Lutetia, continuing their transatlantic adventure. In a costume ball on board, Le Corbusier is said to have dressed as Josephine Baker, with blackened skin and a waistband of feathers. Commenting on their intimate friendship, she is reported to have said, ‘What a shame you’re an architect, you would have made a great partner’. Le Corbusier’s visit is an important influence on Brazilian architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, while Josephine Baker transmits an atmosphere of artistic independence and sexual liberality, and she is much applauded and admired for her originality and avant-garde behaviour. 41 See Le Corbusier. Precisões sobre um estado presente de arquitetura e do urbanismo (2004), 25. ‘Quando em 27 de novembro de 1929, em São Paulo, Joséphine Baker, num espetáculo idiota de variedades, cantou Baby, ela transmitiu-lhe uma sensibilidade tão intensa e dramática que as lágrimas invadiram minhas pálpebras’. 42 See Aracy Amaral, Tarsila: sua obra e seu tempo, 332.

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Image 34:  Josephine Baker, Museu das Artes do Rio.

In July 1929 the French poet Benjamin Péret arrived in Brazil after marrying Brazilian soprano Elsie Houston in Paris, with André Breton and Villa-Lobos present. Elsie was born in Rio in 1902 to James Frank Houston, a dentist who arrived in Brazil in 1891 from Tennessee, a confederado who joined their community at Americana. In Petrópolis he met and married Elsie’s mother, Arinda Galdo, who family was from the island of Madeira. Her sister Celina married a doctor, Nelson Velloso Borges, while sister Mary married the influential art critic, scholar, and Trotskyist

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Mário Pedrosa. As a youth, following vocal studies in Germany with the Wagnerian soprano Lilli Lehmann, Elsie travelled to Buenos Aires to study voice with soprano Ninon Vallin, then to Paris, where she resided in the 1920s and met Péret. Elsie’s friendship with Villa-Lobos began in Rio through his wife Lucília, and Elsie participated in a major concert of his music in Paris on October 24, 1927 singing the Serestas, one of which (‘Desejo’) is dedicated to her, as is his suite of songs Canções típicas brasileiras. Elsie shared an interest in folk music with Mário de Andrade, furthered by composer Luciano Gallet, leading to her only publication, a book on Brazilian folksongs.43 Péret wrote uncompromisingly surrealist poetry, practiced automatic writing, and was a Trotskyite like Mary Houston’s husband, art critic Mário Pedrosa. In Brazil, Péret delves into Afro-Brazilian religion and publishes several essays on candomblé and macumba in the Diário da Noite (São Paulo) from November 1930 to January 1931, being one of the first scholars to address the topic.44 On arriving in Brazil, Elsie pursues a career as a star and avant-garde artist from Paris, singing both in popular and classical venues, recording modinhas, sambas, and Cole Porter hits. She includes legitimately folkloric songs in her repertoire, singing with the ‘coyness and malice of a mestiça’.45 Her style of singing is captured in verse by Murilo Mendes, ‘aggressive lyricism, anarchy, ecstasy; tonal, atonal, terrible blue, a star in the sky and new moon’.46 The couple can be seen in a classic photo on board with Tarsila, Oswald, Pagu and Anita Malfatti sailing to Rio to attend Tarsila’s solo exhibition at the Palace Hotel in 1929.

43 Elsie Houston, Chants populaires du Brésil, Première série, Philippe stern, intro. (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1930). 44 See Emerson Giumbelli, ‘Macumba surrealista:  observações de Benjamin Péret em terreiros cariocas nos anos 1930’, Estudos históricos 28.55 (2015). 45 Emanoel Araujo, ‘Elsie x Abigail’, in Elsie Houston, a feminilidade do canto, n.p. 46 Murilo Mendes, Retratos Relámpagos, 1965–66. ‘lirismo agressivo, anarquia, êxtase; tonal, atonal, azul terrível, estrela do céu e lua nova’.

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Image 35:  Group of Brazilian modernists traveling to Tarsila do Amaral’s exhibit in Rio, 1929.

In São Paulo, Péret gained acceptance by the cannibal group and appeared in the 2nd ‘dentition’ of the Revista de Antropofagia. In 1931, however, he was expelled from Brazil for political writings and the couple returned to Paris, leaving their son in Brazil with the Houston family and separating permanently when Péret left to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Their story accentuates the general dissolution that will bring the années folles to an end, as Oswald pithily writes at the conclusion of his novel Seraphim Grosse Pointe: ‘This book was written in 1929 (year of Wall Street and Christ), backwards’.47 The decade draws to a close with the major artistic event of 1930, the exposition in Brazil of modern art by the ‘School of Paris’. The poet-athlete 47 See Serafim Ponte Grande, ‘Este livro foi escrito em 1929 (ano de Wall Street e Cristo) para traz’.

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Géo-Charles, who enjoys auto racing, a close friend of Rego Monteiro whom he meets in 1927 at the sculptor Pablo Gargallo’s studio, accompanies him to Brazil to present the exhibition ‘École de Paris’, carrying almost 100 works offered for sale, along with conferences on French art and books.48 The ‘School of Paris’ presents cubists (Braque, Gleizes, Léger, Lhote, Herbin, Laurens, Valmier, Marie Blanchard, Csaky, Gromaire, Lurçat, Marcoussis, Rendon, Survage), popular painters of Montparnasse (Foujita, Papazof, Pascin), some expressionists (Masereel Loutreuil, Le Fauconnier), Bauchant, Vlaminck and Zak, and others tied to the surindépendants, such as Bores, Fasini, Gounaro, La Serna, Sénabré, Viñes and the surrealist Masson. In Rio they exhibit in the Palace Hotel, where Tarsila had her first Brazilian solo exhibition the year before, then at the Palecete Glório in São Paulo from June 6–20. Tarsila contributes the paintings O Sapo and Morro da Favela. The latter had been exhibited in Warchavchik’s ‘modernist house’ and would soon be taken to New York. Rego Monteiro himself includes an oil, Le Tennis, and a guache, Les Tullipes. After the crisis of 1929, and Oswald’s elopement with Patrícia Galvão, then 19-year-old art student of Tarsila, the noble residence on Alameda Barão de Piracicaba is shuttered, and the Fazenda Santa Teresa do Alto will only return to Tarsila’s control in 1937. The haunting canvas A Lua (1928) and the geometrically mirrored landscape Calmaria II (1929) reflect the melancholy Tarsila’s solitude.

48 See Marta Rossetti Batista (2012), 263–65.

Chapter 6

Portraits and Self-Portraits: Angels with Banana-Leaf Wings

Je trouve tous mes amis Bonjour C’est moi – Blaise Cendrars, ‘São-Paulo’ The portrait didn’t look like him […] his eyelashes were weighted with explosive lead. – Seraphim Grosse Pointe

Modernist Portraiture ‘It’s me’. With this redundant self-presentation upon arrival at the São Paulo Estação da Luz train station, Blaise Cendrars highlights one of the most distinctive features of the modernist circle of artists, a focus centred on images and portraits of themselves. In the same way that the modernists constantly improvise on topics related to their circle and times, they likewise create and exchange likenesses and portraits of themselves as a main focus of their works, whether in literature, visual arts, or music. While doing so, they also portray figures in Brazil’s multiracial society. Di Cavalcanti is known for scenes of Rio de Janeiro’s popular districts, while in literature the characters Juca Mulato, created by poet Menotti del Picchia in 1917, Jeca Tatu, created by Monteiro Lobato in 1918 for his book Urupês, and Macunaíma, the Amazonian hero of Mário de Andrade’s 1928 novel, are much-read examples of regional and ethnic types. In musical compositions, Villa-Lobos portrays the Amazon in sound in the tone poems Uirapuru and Amazonas in the same year of 1917.

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The voyage, the carnival fantasy, the artistic persona, the regional stereotype, and the ethnic immigrant are main ingredients of a humorous self-portrait of Brazil’s early twentieth-century modernity. The first number of the avant-garde journal Klaxon in 1922 proclaims a just revolt against the past, which is to be accomplished by constructing happiness, as if exuberance were a material component of the building of a new national society and a natural quality of its population. Klaxon’s manifesto states: ‘Farce and burlesque do not repulse us, as they did not repulse Dante, Shakespeare or Cervantes’.1 In 1919 modernist Ronald de Carvalho, who had ties to Portuguese Futurism, published a book in French on Rabelais, while Oswald de Andrade used an illustrated citation from Don Quijote in an early fragment published in O Pirralho in 1916, announced as part of his novel in preparation, Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar. Dom Quixote was also the title of a magazine in which Mendes Fradique serialized his comic text, Brasil pelo Método Confuso. Such examples show that Brazilian modernist writers were aware of their relationship with the comic tradition in European literature, which had been so well explored in the major novels of Machado de Assis, upon which they also drew in their works. The crossing of laughter with revolt provides the theoretical focus necessary to understand modernism’s depictions of itself, whether in its characters, its historical moment, or its recapitulation of universal comic themes. Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point is once more a pertinent reference for the formal interplay of social personalities of the time and their mutual portraiture. The São Paulo modernists gather at D. Olívia’s weekly soirées and in the ‘group of five’ at Mário’s house. Modernists incorporate each other in their prose in a movement à clef in which the main figures can all easily be recognized in their fictional equivalencies. Looking back on the modernist group and times in his memoirs, Pedro Nava plays the role of the portrait artist of Montmartre, or strolling photographer, in his vivid depictions of some of the principal figures. From his depictions, they appear to be ready-made for fiction or theatre, and the major characters 1

Ronald de Carvalho, Rabelais et le rire de la Renascence (Paris, E. Hazan, 1932); Madeira de Freitas, (pseud. Mendes Fradique), História do Brasil pelo método confuso (Rio de Janeiro: Leite Ribeiro, 1927).

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may themselves be aware of performing a real-life modernist drama, as if they were characters. There is the patron D. Olívia Guedes Penteado, who receives the modernists in her salon in São Paulo and meets them in Paris: […] daughter of the Barons of Pirapitingui […] of coffee aristocracy, 400 years in Brazil and São Paulo plutocracy […] At this time Dona Olívia had been a widow for ten years. She lost her husband, Inácio Penteado, on February 8, 1914. And so like Mário – who could see her without loving her? […] Physically she was not very tall and compensated by using a hair style that raised her wavy, grey hair. Her face was oval, well delineated cheeks and chin, aquiline nose without being too large, wonderfully designed mouth, the upper lip a ‘Cupid’s bow’ and above all those eyes […] for which the rest of her physiognomy were merely accessories. She laughed the best and most discrete laughs […] her hand was always rolling and unrolling a large string of pearls that hung from her neck to her waist. She spoke with a low cottony voice and seemed profoundly interested in our activities and stories.2

Then Tarsila in the 1920s, compared to her famous self-portrait with long earrings: Exactly like the face in the self-portrait, symmetrical from the front showing those two prodigious eyes, two nostrils and shells for ears, her mouth looking like a cutout sticker. A perfect oval, smooth hair with its implacable widow’s peak.3 2 ‘[…] filha dos Barões de Pirapitingui, José Guedes de Sousa e D.  Carlona Leopoldina de Almeida Lima. Entroncava, assim, na aristocracia cafeeira, no quatrocentismo e na plutocracia paulistas. […] A esta época Dona Olívia estava viúva há dez anos. Perdera o marido, Inácio Penteado, a 8 de fevereiro de 1914. E assim como Mário – quem poderia vê-la sem deixar de amá-lo? […] Fisicamente não era muito alta e compensava essa estatura mediana usando pentado que lhe levantava os cabelos fortes, ondeados e grisalhos. Tinha o rosto oval, maçãs e queixo bem traçados, nariz aquilino sem ser grande, boca admiravelmente desenhada, lábio superior género arco de Cupido e sobretudo tinha os olhos […] de que todo o resto da fisionomia era apenas os traços acessórios. Ria o melhor e mais discreto dos risos […] sempre sua mão ficava enrolando e desenrolando o enorme sautoir de pérolas que lhe vinha do pescoço à cinta. Falava baixo e algodoado e parecia se interessar profundamente por nossas estórias e histórias […]’, Pedro Nava, Beira-Mar (1978), 183–85. 3 ‘Exatamente aquela cara no auto-retrato de frente, de frente simétrica direita de igual à esquerda para mostrar que aqueles olhos prodigiosos eram mesmo dois, as narinas duas, as conchas das orelhas par, as metades da boca decalques. Dêem

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Nava captures Blaise Cendrars during the 1924 visit to Minas Gerais: […] a free man, adventurer and poet […] Cendras was 34, he had been mutilated in the war when I met him in 1924. Physically he was thin, dry, muscular, agile, triangular face, shiny skin as if it had been waxed, ruddy and always with a smiling expression. Brown reddish hair and cat-like yellow-green eyes. His conversation was always original and spicy. His judgment was profound, quick, and sharp. He was never wrong about questions of art, poetry, and literature.4

A short sketch of Oswald is almost a censure, or a caricature: The same phrase could be applied to him that he wrote in A Estrela de Absinto. ‘He didn’t grow old in spite of everything. He didn’t even feel himself to be an adult. From inside, an unchangeable adolescence shouted out that it was necessary to suffer, live, die, follow the iron law of the world’. He was like that and would die like that – without aging or senility.5

Finally, Nava reveals a recipe for the ‘science of Brazilianism’ that he sees in Mário de Andrade through a photograph: Photos taken by Warchavchik […] It’s the portrait of a man at the top of his game […] a decided and robust chin with a Dionysian smile. Above is a near-sighted gorgon […] on the left side a cold and lucid observer, a sharp and cutting eye […] hidden behind his always off-track glasses […] on the right side the dull look of a sufferer and martyr while the rest of his mouth has heroism and the endurance a esse resto o oval perfeito, a cabeça lisa cabelos gomalina e a vertical caindo, implacável do seu bico de viúva’, Nava (1978), 188. 4 ‘[…] homem livre, aventureiro e poeta […] Cendrars nasceu em 1887 e morreu em 1961. Tinha trinta e quarto anos, uma guerra e uma mutilação quando o conheci em 1924. Fisicamente era magro, seco, musculoso, ágil, cara triangular, pele do rosto lustrosa como se tivesse sido envernizada, muito vermelho e de expressão sempre sorridente. Cabelos dum castanho avermelhado e olhos gateados. Conversando, o que dizia era sempre de originalidade saborosa. Seu julgamento era profundamente rápido e arguto. Não se enganava de jeito nenhum em questões de arte, poesia e literatura’, Nava (1978), 185. 5 ‘Podia ser-lhe aplicada a própria frase que ele escreveu em A Estrela de Absinto. ‘Não envelhecera apesar de tudo. Nem sequer se sentia adulto. De dento um imutável fundo de adolescência gritava-lhe que era preciso sofrer, viver, morrer, seguir a lei férrea do mundo’. Era assim, morreria assim – sem envelhecimento ou senilidade’, Nava (1978), 185.

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to carry on smiling in spite of everything. The whole figure could be a model for saints of Greco and Zurbarán.6

A fuller portrait catalogues Mário’s intellectual and artistic interests and abilities, showing him to be the most versatile intellect and broadly educated figure of modernism: First, he was a musician. Student and professor of music […] notable musicologist and critic in the wide sense, historian […] Philosopher in the widest definition, psychologist, philologist, aesthete of language, glottologist, keeper of mysteries of the word, folklorist who didn’t miss any detail of our culture –whether gastronomy, our cuisine and alimentary habits, whether artists who make organs out of wood, pulp, forged clay, the designers and sculptors of ex-votos. Profound scholar of our vision, our artisans, our ecclesiastical, civil and military arts […] a master of grammar, literature and linguistics. On this point he was a scriptor classicus and a popular writer of cordel and trovas, as indicated by that most Brazilian work of art and science that is called Macunaíma.7

*** 6

7

‘Fotos tiradas por Warchavchik […] É o retrato de um homem em plena forma e sem apresentar certos sinais de magreza forçada e de queda de traços traduzindo regime, moléstia e velhice. Mas que retrato […] Dividido por um horizontal que passasse pela ponta do nariz temos embaixo o queixo voluntarioso e possante dum dionísio sorridente. Já a metade de cima é a de uma gorgona míope atormentada pelas próprias serpentes. Se fizermos o mesmo jogo om uma vertical, o lado esquerdo é o dum frio e lúcido observador, o olhar agudo e cortante se esgueirando de dentro da deformação habitualmente acarretada pelas lentes dos óculos. A meia boca é irônica e altiva. Mas a metade direita mostra um olhar morto de sofredor e mártir enquanto o resto de sua boca tem o heroísmo e a endurância de continuar sorrindo apesar de tudo. No conjunto é figura que podia server de modelo aos santos do Greco e de Zurbarán’, Nava (1978), 192. ‘Mas antes de falar do literato vamos apenas enunciar o mundo de coisas que foi esse diabo d’homem. Foi primeiro músico. Aluno de música e professor de música. Além disso e coisa diferente o musicólogo insigne e crítico dessa arte no grande sentido. Seu historiador. E ele foi incapaz de mantê-la em compartimento estanque do seu espírito senão que a trouxe inteira como contribuição presente em toda sua poesia. Filósofo na amplitude do termo foi psicólogo, filólogo, esteta da língua, glotólogo dono dos mistérios da palavra, folclorista a que não escapou nenhum detalhe de nossa cultura  – fosse na gastronomia e conhecimentos de nossa cozinha e nossos hábitos alimentares, fosse na arte dos fazedores de órgãos de pau, de massa, barro cozido, dos desenhadores e esculpidores de ex-votos. Daí

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National Portraits As if it were a national family portrait, Oswald’s poem ‘Fotógrafo ambulante’ (Strolling photographer) celebrates the public photographer who takes family portraits in the park on Sunday afternoons, just as the Kodak comes of age to popularize the portrait as a popular national family album. Fixador de corações    Debaixo de blusas    Álbum de dedicatórias   Marquereau    

Clincher of hearts Beneath blouses Autograph album Gigolo

Tua objetiva pisca-pisca   Namora     Os sorrisos contidos    És a glória    

Your blinking lens Woos The shy smiles Your  glory

Oferenda de poesias às dúzias  Tripeça dos logradouros públicos Bicho debaixo da árvore   Canhão silencioso do sol  

Poems offered by the dozen Tripod of public places Animal under the tree Silent cannon of the sun Tr. Richard Zenith

The segment of Pau Brasil poems titled ‘Light Co. Posts’ [‘Postes da Light’] is a series of snapshots from São Paulo city life. In the park where the strolling photographer takes his snapshots, Oswald juxtaposes images of the banality and tranquillity of city life as opposed to the nearby jungles of the interior in Luz Public Garden (‘Jardim da Luz’): o conhecedor profundo de nossa imaginária, dos nossos santeiros e pulando, de nossa talha, de nossa arte arquitetural eclesiástica, civil e castrense. O homem que reuniu os conhecimentos que lhe foram possíveis não podia deixar de se derramar na mestrança da gramática, da literatura e da linguística. Nesse ponto foi um scriptor classicus e um escritor popular, cordelesco e trovadoresco como o demonstraria essa obra-prima de arte e ciência de brasileirismo que chamar-se-ia Macunaíma’, Nava (1978), 192–93.

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They’ve caged the surviving monkeys Of  Brazil The fountains languish like old people In the  pools Dandies and soldiers Pink generations Birds no one sees in the trees Snapshots and cold beers Families Tr. Richard Zenith

Throughout the sections of Pau Brasil, Oswald takes a Kodak of Brazil itself, its history, culture, and geography. In ‘aperitivo’ he captures the urban spirit of modernism at the height of coffee fortunes: aperitivo     appetizer A felicidade anda a pé   Happiness is strolling Na praça Antônio Prado   On Antônio Prado Square São 10 horas azuis    It’s ten o’clock azure time O café vai alto como a   Coffee’s on the rise like the skyscraper morning    manhã de arranha-céus Cigarros Tietê     Tietê cigarettes Automóveis     Cars A cidade sem mitos    The city without myths Tr. Richard Zenith

Train rides across the grand expanse of Brazilian geography become a map of ‘instant’ flashes and snapshots: noturno     Lá for a o luar continua   E o trem divide o Brasil   Como um meridiano   

nocturne Outside the moon still shines And the train divides Brazil Like a meridian

*** longo da linha     Coqueiros    

along the line Coconut  palms

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Chapter 6 Aos dois     Aos três     Aos grupos     Altos      Baixos     

By  twos By  threes By  groups High Low

Murilo Mendes’ poem ‘Cartão Postal’ (Post Card) from the same period is a snapshot of the newness and openness of Brazil’s urban immigrant culture, with its charming cultural incongruencies: CARTÃO POSTAL Domingo no jardim publico pensativo consciencias corando ao sol nos bancos bebês arquivados em carrinhos alemães esperam pacientemente o dia que poderão ler A Escreva Isaura passam braços e seios com um geitão que si Lenine vise não fazia o Soviete marinheiros americanos bebados fazem pipi na estatua de Barroso portuguezes de bigode e corrente de relogio abocanham mulatas o sol afunda-se no ocaso como a cabeça daquela menina sardenta na almofada de ramagens bordada por Dona Cocota Pereira. Rio, 1924 POST CARD Sundays in the pensive public gardens consciousnesses reddening in the sun of benches babies archived in German carriages waiting patiently for the day when they can read The Slave Isaura arms and breasts go by with such moves that if Lenin could see them he wouldn’t make the Soviet drunk American sailors pipi on Admiral Barroso’s statue moustached Portuguese with watch chains chat up mulattas the sun sinks in the sunset like the head of that freckled girl in the pillow of branches embroidered by Dona Cocota Pereira. Rio, 1924

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In music, Villa-Lobos specializes in compositions designed as portraits of Brazil that highlight its folk music, popular instruments, and indigenous chants. In 1915, for example, he composes the Dança dos Índios Mestiços (‘Dance of the Mestizo Indians’) giving the three dances indigenous titles that did not necessarily correspond to the content, followed by the orchestral pieces Uirapuru (Amazonian organ wren, Cyphorhinus arada) and Amazonas (1917), the Canções Típicas Brasileiras (Typical Brazilian Songs) (1919), and Choro N.  5 ‘Alma Brasileira’ (Brazilian Soul), composed in Rio de Janeiro in 1925. His many suites and collections of pieces are based on folk melodies, such as the pieces in A Prole do Bebê n.2 (‘The Baby’s Offspring’, 1921), the Serestas (‘Serenades’) (1925), and Cirandinhas (‘Rounds’, 1925–26). The prime musical materials the composer uses to paint the country’s portrait are rhythm and folk or popular melodies. In ‘Brazilian Soul’ two different rhythmic patterns are overlaid: a quadruplemeter accompaniment of chords with a sentimental melody in triplets, both in syncopated patterns featuring rhythmic delays.8 Poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade gathers poems together like Villa-Lobos does with music to portray Brazilian life. His suite of eight poems, ‘Lanterna Mágica’ (Magic Lantern), each describes a different location, capturing the national mood with humour, irony, and linguistic play: O presente vem de mansinho  The present comes softly de repente dá um salto:  suddenly it takes a jump: cartaz de cinema com fita americana.  movie poster about an American film (Sabará) Meus amigos todos estão satisfeitos  All my friends are happy Com a vida dos outros.   With everyone else’s life. Fútil nas sorveterias.    Useless in the ice cream shops. Pedante nas livrarias …   Pedantic in the bookstores … Nas praias nu nu nu nu nu.   On the beaches nude nude nude nude nude Tu tu tu tu tu no meu coração.  You you you you you in my heart. (Rio de Janeiro)    (Rio de Janeiro)

8

See David P. Appleby, Heitor Villa-Lobos: A Life (1887–1959) (Lanham, MD and London: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 83.

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By the 1930s, Drummond’s poems survey some of the changes brought by modernization and urbanization with deception and irony, as in ‘Hino Nacional’ (National Anthem, 1934): Precisamos educar o Brasil    We must educate Brazil Compraremos professors e livros,   We will buy teachers and books, assimilaremos finas culturas,    We will assimilate fine cultures abriremos dancings e subvencionaremos as elites.  We will open dancing clubs and subsidize elites. Cada brasileiro terá sua casa    Every Brazilian will have a house com fogão e aquecedor elétricos, piscina,  with stove, electric heater, swimming pool salão para conferências científicas   large room for scientific meetings E cuidaremos do Estado Técnico.   And we will manage the Technical State.

In a remembrance of his childhood in rural Minas Gerais, he paints the picture of a traditional life of the interior that has been lost: gold, cattle, iron, pride, carved statues of saints, ranches. The poem ‘Confidência do Itabirano’ (Confidence of the citizen of Itabira), a place he once described as ‘as ruínas do meu tempo’ (the ruins of my lifetime), dramatizes his separation from Itabira by space, time, and even by his existence as an urban intellectual. Yet it is a vital part of his memory and a historical past of long duration that has disappeared. Poet Manuel Bandeira likewise evokes a past now gone in his 1930 ‘Evocação do Recife’ (Evocation of Recife), which he writes at the request of Gilberto Freyre for a book commemorating the centenary of the Diário de Pernambuco.9 His lyrical recollections of society, family, labour, and leisure put him at odds with modernity: he recalls a more poetic national rhythm that belonged to the near past, almost as if it still existed. His lyrical recollection is a defence against the chaos of Brazil’s insecure 9

See Flávio Weinstein Teixeira, ‘Impregnado de eternidade. O Recife em Manuel Bandeira. Impregnated with Eternity. Recife in Manuel Bandeira’s Poetry’, Antíteses 9.18 (1984), 325–45.

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chaotic present; only the memory of a recognizable recent family environment reassures the poet, and he restores the past and personifies Brazil in an intimate, personal way: […] Depois do jantar as famílias tomavam a calçada com cadeiras Mexericos namoros risadas […] Como eram lindos os nomes das ruas da minha infância Rua do Sol (Tenho medo que hoje se chame de dr. Fulano de Tal) […] A vida não me chegava pelos jornais nem pelos livros Vinha da boca do povo na língua errada do povo Língua certa do povo Porque ele é que fala gostoso o português do Brasil Ao passo que nós O que fazemos É macaquear A sintaxe lusíada […] Tudo lá parecia impregnado de eternidade. After dinner the families took over the sidewalks with chairs Gossip flirtations laughter […] How beautiful were the names of streets when I was young Street of the Sun (I’m afraid that today it’s called Dr. So and So) […] Life didn’t come to me from newspapers or books It came from people’s mouths in the wrong speech of the people Correct speech of the people Because they delight in speaking Brazilian Portuguese While we What we do Is to imitate Lusitanian syntax […] Everything there seemed impregnated with eternity.

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In 1931 the Pernambucan painter Cícero Dias exhibited a mural 15 X 2 m at the Revolutionary Salon at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, painted from 1926–29 and titled ‘Eu vi o mundo … ele começava no Recife’ (I saw the world … it began in Recife), an enormous panorama of cultural life of the city and region that is so scandalous that viewers destroy part of it that depicts naked women. Only in 1965 is it rescued and exhibited in the 8th Art Biennial of São Paulo. It could have been a companion to Bandeira’s poem, as the mural is a visual, lyrical and at times erotic evocation of a familial and cultural past, although more pointedly critical and comprehensive. Drummond protests against the national tendency to imitate Europe in the poem ‘Explicação’ (Explanation): For me, of all the stupidities the greatest is sighing for Europe. Europe is a very old city where they only care about money and there are some actresses with adjective legs who are always pulling our legs.10

His sentiments, which encourage more study of Brazil and things Brazilian, are summed up in the verse ‘Meus olhos brasileiros se enjoam da Europa’ (My Brazilian eyes are sick of Europe). Like Mário, Drummond never travelled to Europe; he achieved recognition as a national poet in Rio de Janeiro, after a youth and adolescence in Minas Gerais. Cândido Mota Filho explains the national tendency that is the subject of Drummond’s complaint: ‘All values that do not come from Western sources are exotic and, almost always, incomprehensible to us’.11

10 ‘Para mim, de todas as burrices a maior e suspirar pela Europa. A Europa e uma cidade muito velha onde só fazem caso de dinheiro e tem umas atrizes de pernas adjetivas que passam a perna na gente’. 11 Candido Motta Filho ‘A Formação de Joaquim Nabuco’ Diário de S.  Paulo (17.08.47), 2.

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Serial Portraiture The modernists portray each other in their works. In Hallucinated City Mário paints a vivid picture of Oswald in the poem ‘A Caçada’ (The Hunt): –Abade Liszt da minha filha monja,  –Abbot Liszt of my daughter the nun, Na Cadillac mansa e glauca da ilusão,  in the tame blue-green Cadillac of illusion, Passa o Oswald de Andrade  Oswald de Andrade goes by Mariscando gênios entre a multidão!…  gathering geniuses in the midst of the throng!…

Mário adds a note to say that the image of Oswald can be found in a newspaper column by Hélios (Menotti del Picchia), proof that his lines have become a commonplace characterization of Oswald’s ‘delicious mania’.12 And Oswald returns the favour in his malicious Dicionário de Bolso (Pocket Dictionary): ‘MÁRIO DE ANDRADE. Macunaíma de conservatório. Muito parecido pelas costas com Oscar Wilde’ (MÁRIO DE ANDRADE. Conservatory Macunaíma. From behind appears very similar to Oscar Wilde).13 Anita Malfatti paints portraits of Mário in 1921 and 1922, in which the figure looks slightly to the viewer’s right.14 Both are expressionistic, using different planes, shapes, and colours for the effect of movement and distortion of features in the upper body and head. In the second, the head occupies more than half the canvas, and the application of different yellows and golds produces a hallucinatory effect in planes of the face. Her Mário de Andrade, Hallucinated City, Jack E. Tomlins, trans. (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1970), 53. 13 Oswald de Andrade, Dicionário de Bolso, Maria Eugênia Boaventura, org., intro. & notes (São Paulo: Globo, 200), 78, 100. 14 Reproductions of paintings by modernist artists can be viewed in the plastic arts category of the Itaú Cultural Encyclopedia online, . 12

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portrait of Oswald in 1925 is even more expressionistic, with dark colours, the eyes in dark sockets, red lips, and conflicting planes of colour in the features and the background. In 1922 Tarsila paints complementary portraits of Mário and Oswald. Both are busts with the face looking to the viewer’s left, serious expressions, dressed in sport coats with white shirts and ties. The figures occupy the entire canvas, leaving only a few centimetres at the top, emphasizing their full presence. Oswald’s jacket is green and Mário’s blue. Facial tones are similar, with an impressionism in the soft imprecise shapes and colours that blend together. Through their similarities the two portraits join together the two ‘Andrades’ and promote their role as leaders of modernism in São Paulo.

Image 36:  Tarsila do Amaral, Retrato de Mário de Andrade, 1922. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.

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Image 37:  Tarsila do Amaral, Retrato de Oswald de Andrade, 1922. Photo by Romulo Fialdini.

To return the favour, Oswald portrays Tarsila in his poem ‘Atelier:’ Caipirinha vestida por Poiret    Brazilian peasant woman dressed by Poiret A preguiça paulista reside nos teus olhos São Paulo slothfulness is in your eyes Que não viram Paris nem Picadilly   Which didn’t see Paris or Picadilly Nem as exclamações dos homens   Or the men in Seville Em Sevilha       Calling  out À tua passage, entre brincos    As you passed by between earrings Locomotivas e bichos nacionais   Locomotives and native animals Geometrizam as atmosferas nítidas  Give geometry to the limpid settings Congonhas descora sob o pálio   Congonhas fades under the canopy Das procissões de Minas    Of the processions of Minas Gerais

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Chapter 6 A verdure no azul klaxon    Cortada      Sobre a poeira vermelha   

The greenness in the blue Klaxon Cut Over the red dust

Arranha-céus      Fordes       Viadutos      O cheiro de café     No silêncio emoldurado   

Skyscrapers Fords Viaducts The smell of coffee In the framed silence Tr. Richard Zenith

The expression ‘between earrings’ refers to Tarsila’s 1924 self-portrait with two long gold earrings hanging far below each side of her face. In a 1923 self-portrait, Manteau rouge, a strikingly stylish ruby red coat collar, perhaps belonging to a carnival dress, surrounds her angular head and shoulders, with a bent hand in the foreground.

Image 38:  Tarsila do Amaral, Manteau rouge, 1923.

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Her painting ‘Caipirinha’ in the same year, although the female figure is cubist in the ‘Pau Brasil’ style, without distinct features, can also be considered a self-portrait and perhaps the origin of the initial description of Tarsila in Oswald’s poem. During the first years they were together in Paris, Oswald portrays Villa-Lobos in a poem published in the Revista Novíssima: O artista     The  artist Cabelleira de chantage   Long hair for blackmail Celebridade por hora e por táxi  Celebrity by the hour and by taxi Parlapatatão     Big  talker Bombardino de barbeiro   Barber’s euphonium Desafinação     Off  key No teu fundo fundo    Deep deep down lies A maroteira dos primeiros mestiços  The naughty mother of the first mestizos Repousa como um índio   He reposes like an Indian Sob a árvore nacional da confiança  Under the national tree of confidence Pires technico     Expert Da paulificação    At aggravation

Villa-Lobos in return dedicates Choro N. 3, called Picapau (Woodpecker), composed in 1925 (clarinet, saxophone, bassoon, three trumpets, trombones and male choir), to Oswald and Tarsila. In 1929 he includes three poems from Oswald’s Pau Brasil in his Suite Suggestive (Cinémas) using anonymous French translations of the poems ‘Procissão de enterro’ (Procession d’enterrement), ‘O capoeira’ (Le capoeira), and ‘O medroso’ (Le froussard).15 In 1926 Villa-Lobos delivers the very challenging composition for piano titled ‘Rudepoema’ (Rough poem), in progress since 1921, to Rubenstein. In the dedication he presents the piece as a veritable Kodak of the pianist’s 15

‘Trois poèmes d’Oswald de Andrade mis em français & en musique par VillaLobos’, Bois Brésil & Cie. (9 avril 2011). Post republished by Antoine Chareyre (février 2015). Premiered on June 26, 1929 at the Teatro Lírico in Rio de Janeiro with soprano Elsie Houston and in Paris on April 3, 1930 with French mezzosoprano Claire Croiza and the composer conducting both concerts. See also Simon J. Wright, ‘Villa-Lobos and the Cinema: A Note’, Luso-Brazilian Review XIX, n°2 (Winter 1982), 243–44.

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temperament, so much so that the pianist could be considered to be the true composer, rather than the one who simply recorded it on paper: Rudepoema, pour piano solo à Arthur Rubenstein. Mon sincère ami, je ne sai pas si j’ai pu tout à fait assimiler ton âme avec ce Rudepoema, mais je le jure de tout mon coeur que j’ai l’impression, dans mon ésprit, d’avoir gravé ton tempérament et que machinalment je l’ai écrit sur le papier, comme un Kodak intime. Par conséquent, si je réussis, ce sera toujours toi le véritable auteur de cette oeuvre (Rubenstein, 1980, 252)

Rubenstein premieres the piece in Paris at the Salle Gaveau on October 24, 1927. ***

Portraits of the Artists Readers of Brazilian Modernism are already well acquainted with the special relationships among its major figures, and portraiture is one of their specializations. These artists and writers portray themselves while drawing a new face for national identity and culture. Tarsila’s 1923 portrait of Oswald de Andrade and Di Cavalcanti’s 1929 sketch of modernism’s militant muse, Patrícia Galvão (Pagu), exemplify the serial collective portraiture of the decade, through which the avant-garde translates the experience of national modernization into a personal aesthetic expression, which is also a latent form of self-realization. Portraiture is a medium the artists choose to reinforce identity and document their present moment. The modernists appear in fictional prose portraits as well as paintings. Portraits in fiction can best be evaluated as variants of the modernist urban portrait. The depiction of the Afro-Brazilian seamstress Corina in Industrial Park, for example, continues the style of Di Cavalcanti’s Cariocas (1926), combined with the expressionist style of Malfatti and Segall. The rudimentary aesthetic presentation of the modernist portrait finds its literary equivalent in Mário’s Pauliceia Desvairada and Pagu’s Parque Industrial in the close-up of urban characters viewed with a strong social criticism. Oswald

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and Pagu depict each other as characters in their novels A Escada (The Staircase) and Parque Industrial, respectively.16 They capture the patterns and rhythms of their experiences using techniques of destabilization in prose, some of them comparable to Cubism in painting, from formal fragmentation to simultaneity, changing the portrait-memoir into an alternate biography of the cosmopolis of São Paulo. Anita Malfatti begins by drawing her brother in 1914, and some of her most famous paintings that follow before 1922 are portraits with an international dimension, A Estudante Russa (The Russian Student), O Homem Amarelo (The Yellow Man), O Japonês (The Japanese Man), A Mulher de Cabelos Verdes (The Woman with Green Hair), A Boba (The Stupid Woman), and Chinesa (Chinese Woman). Before doing the portraits of Mário and Oswald, Anita draws a pastel portrait of Tarsila (1919–20) and Portuguese writer Fernanda de Castro, who accompanies her husband António Ferro to Brazil in 1922. From this point in her career, Anita can be considered principally a portraitist. Anita sketches the ‘Group of Five’ who socialize in Mário de Andrade’s house in São Paulo. She paints the daughter of D. Olívia, Carolina Guedes da Silva Teles in 1929; Baby de Almeida, wife of Guilherme de Almeida; Felícia Moya, wife of the architect Antônio Moya, illustrator of the first edition of Mario’s Pauliceia Desvairada; and her aunt Maria Estela Krug. Other portraits are of types or figures, such as A Japonesa (The Japanese Woman), Dama de Azul (Lady in Blue), Retrato de uma Cantora (Portrait of a Gypsy Singer), Mulher do Pará (Woman from Pará) and several nudes, including La Chambre Bleue (The Blue Room) painted in Paris in 1925. In the 1930s, Anita continues to paint more than a dozen portraits, including one of Oswald’s son Nonê. That portrait mixes antropofagia with social realism and muralism: in the background is an enormous green leaf, similar to those in Tarsila’s Antropofagia, while the male figure fills the entire canvas, reminiscent of portraits by Portinari that project a massive presence of strength and 16 See ‘Oswald de Andrade in Pagu’s Industrial Park’. In One Hundred Years of Invention:  Oswald de Andrade and the Modern Tradition in Latin American Literature. K. David Jackson, ed. (Austin, TX: Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese/ Abaporu Press, 1992), 41–53; and ‘A Escada: Exílio e Utopia’. Preface. A Escada. By Oswald de Andrade. Obras Completas de Oswald de Andrade (São Paulo: Globo, 1991), 5–10.

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youth. Nonê’s bright yellow shirt, accompanied by yellow highlights in the background, is perhaps an homage to the creator of Pau-Brasil by placing Nonê in an iconic, nationalist setting. Vicente Rego Monteiro paints his brother Joaquim and his mother in 1920, both in expressionistic poses with extremely long necks against receding background scenes of Brazilian villages. In 1922 he paints the modernist writer Rui Ribeiro Couto, author of O Crime do Estudante Batista (The Crime of the Student Batista, 1922), who participates in the Week of Modern Art. With white suite, black tie, round glasses, and sharp features, Ribeiro Couto looks the part of tropical intellectual. In 1921 he paints author Ronald de Carvalho, director of ORPHEU, whose Poemas e Sonetos (Poems and Sonnets, 1919) won a prize from the Academia Brasileira de Letras and whose Epigramas Irônicos e Sentimentais (Ironic and Sentimental Epigrams, 1922) was set to music by Villa-Lobos. The portrait of Ronald is highly stylized, wearing a jacket with very wide lapel in nineteenth-century style, with high collar starched white shirt and red tie, with facial features so precise that they become flat and one dimensional, yet exuding youth and innocence. In 1929 Rego Monteiro draws a sketch in India ink of Géo-Charles in an athletic march, so prized that it lies on top of his good friend’s tomb in Mariel, France. Di Cavalcanti, who designed the cover of the programme for the Week of Modern Art, maintained an interest in samba, carnival, and life of the popular classes and mixed-race people of Rio de Janeiro. Di Cavalcanti’s portraits show influence of diverse styles, from art nouveau to cubism to surrealism. His 1925 Samba shows a mestizo musician playing cavaquinho with two women with bared breasts dancing, while his 1926 multi-coloured Meninas Cariocas (Girls from Rio) are one-dimensional figures with Rio’s hillsides and ocean in the background. His Mulatas (1927) is expressionistic and erotic, depicting three mixed-race women, one in the foreground who is taking the straps of her dress off her shoulders, while the 1929 Mesa de Bar (Table in a Bar) shows a female figure, perhaps lost in thought, against a hallucinated, expressionistic cityscape. The major personality Di Cavalcanti portrays is dancer Josephine Baker, presented as an almost transparent figure dancing in a carnival scene along with mysterious figures in costume. Lasar Segall, like Di Cavalcanti, will also bind national identity into his portraits of mulatas and women from the Mangue, a

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district associated with prostitution (Mulheres do Mangue com Espelho) (Women from the Mangue with Mirror) and Duas Mulheres do Mangue (Two Women from the Mangue). Poets Murilo Mendes and Manuel Bandeira appear on canvas. In the year of the Modern Art Week, Ismael Nery paints his Retrato de Murilo Mendes, while Cícero Dias and Portinari complete portraits of poet Manuel Bandeira in 1930 and 1931, respectively. While Portinari’s Bandeira looks directly at the viewer, dressed in jacket and tie against a distant background of Rio’s mountains and ocean, with an almost expressionless face, Cícero’s Bandeira aims to capture his sensual, melancholic, and lyrical vision in a tropical Le Déjuner sur l’ herbe. With a cloak on his shoulder and holding a cat, Bandeira sits on the grass in front of a distant colonial building, alongside a grove of palm trees. Alongside the poet, with her back to the viewer, is a nude woman lying on the grass, reclining on her elbows. The poet, dressed and wearing glasses, is imagining the scene in which he appears as the subject of his ideas and themes. In the 1930s, Portinari will also portray Pagu (1933), Oswald de Andrade (1933) and Mário de Andrade (1935). In 1927 Segall produces his Retrato de Mário de Andrade and will continue work as an active portraitist into the following decades. Flávio de Carvalho will paint the Retrato de Elsie Houston (1933) and Retrato de Mário de Andrade (1939), perhaps the last of the writer in life. ***

Foujita, Exotic and Kindred Soul The Japanese artist Tsuguharu Foujita travelled to Rio de Janeiro during 1931 and part of 1932, where he exhibited his paintings at the Palace Hotel.17 He arrived accompanied by Madaleine Lequeux, a dancer from the Casino de Paris, after exhibiting in France, where he resides, and the United States in 1929. In Rio they are hosted by Maria and Cândido 17

See Aracy Amaral, ‘Foujita no Brasil: pesquisa em andamento’, Textos do Trópico do Capricónio (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2006), 63–73.

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Portinari, whom Foujita had met in Paris. Foujita begins his Brazilian portraiture phase with poet Dante Milano, who is also a guest at the Portinari’s. There, Portinari draws a sleeping Foujita, much in the style of Foujita’s watercolours of languid society women. Aracy Amaral finds that in Foujita the artist becomes a character on the stage of the city of Rio de Janeiro in his exotic Asian figure and, above all, in his dress – striped trousers, a sleeveless shirt, grey bangs, and a pair of earrings, all receiving more attention because of his open habits and attitudes. Amaral notes his favourable reception in Brazil, in spite of her reservations about his superficial drawings, many of beautiful women with cats, and his cultivation of a seductive exoticism. Foujita is soon integrated among the city’s artists and intellectuals, and the city becomes a subject for his drawings that include prostitutes of the Mangue district, dramatically portrayed behind windows and Venetian blinds, along with scenes of Rio’s Carnival. He draws a caricature of poet Manuel Bandeira and a portrait of artist Ismael Nery, who reciprocates with a portrait of Foujita. Foujita leaves a portrait of the Portinaris in Brazil, along with many of his sketches of Madaleine and works sold in an exhibit of forty-eight paintings in São Paulo in March 1932, immediately before his return to France. Foujita’s exhibition in São Paulo attracted wide attention. In an article Mário de Andrade published on ‘Fujita’ in the press,18 he raises a question that could be applied to the Brazilian modernists who created a tropical exoticism in Paris. He asks why a Japanese artist would have adopted European aesthetics, as if the artist were placing himself in the position of a subaltern. One can gather from Mário’s extremely critical evaluation of Foujita’s works that he and other Brazilian viewers were expecting a very different kind of art from the Oriental Foujita, not ‘[…] the profound emptiness of his paintings and drawings […] the clean lines, the large smooth surfaces, the synthetic verisimilitude of the theme represented, the relative coldness in the placid expression’. His work shocks Mário because it apes Europe in concept and vision. Because he has abandoned the plastic traditions of his race, continues Mário, he has nothing to say, his work is ‘neither graceful, nor dramatic, nor profound’ […].19 1 8 Mário de Andrade, ‘Fujita’, Diário Nacional (São Paulo) (March 1932). 19 ‘[…] o profundo vazio dos seus quadros e desenhos. As linhas nítdas, as grandes superfícies lisas, a verdade sintética na representação do tema, a relativa frieza

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If Brazilian artists were not within the Western tradition, they would be in a position similar to Foujita’s, which is perhaps a reason for his positive reception in Rio de Janeiro. Foujita’s presence in Brazil is both instructive and controversial because of his successful exotic presence in Paris, a mirror image of what the Brazilians wish to be, although Mário thinks that Foujita has given up too much of himself. Mário had aimed a similar criticism at Tarsila in the 1920s when he asked her to come home from Paris to participate in a more authentic ‘matavirginismo’ (virgin forestism). Foujita’s voyage to Brazil was tied to an artistic friendship with the Portinari’s, much like the link between Cendrars and Tarsila. In Foujita, the Brazilian artists must have recognized a kindred soul, one whose exotic and improvisatory excesses are allied with their own Parisian pretensions. The exotic themes of the tropical jungle and indigenous cannibalism that the Brazilians carry to Paris are, like the Japanese Foujita, a cultural and intellectual disguise for their training and dependence on European masters and models. Perhaps the Brazilians also wish to identify as exotic characters on the stages of world modernism, as if they could be Foujita’s doubles? The mural that Foujita painted at the Café do Brasil in the Ginza Seishokan building in Tokyo in 1934 at the request of the Brazilian Institute of Coffee is perhaps the artist’s homage to Brazilian exoticism.20

Shonosuké and Foujita The desire to bring Foujita as exotic artist into the national school of art is confirmed by the short story ‘Shonosuké’, published in 1935 by Orígines Lessa, a journalist and writer of novels and stories from São Paulo. The story is, along with Industrial Park, one of the few known sharp parodies of modernist art patrons. In the story, a wealthy gentleman in a bar, Clemente Vidal, allows a poor wandering Japanese artist  – Shonosuké na placidez da expressao […] da europeanice da sua concepção plástica e da sua visão das cousas […] não é graciosa, não é dramática, não é profunda […]’, Diário Nacional (March 1932), cited in Aracy Amaral (2006), 71. 20 See Aracy Amaral (2006), 71.

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Shini, six years in Brazil with immigrant parents – to draw his portrait in crayon for a risible price. Vidal is impressed with the speed of execution and accuracy of the likeness: ‘Bam – there he was, his hooked nose, his bulging ears, that disdainful look in his eyes and smile, the big cigar that made his mouth appear proud’. Vidal himself was the stereotype of the elite patron: ‘Wealthy. Refined. Trips to Europe. Going to bed with all of Paris. Binge drinking in Rome and Venice. Vidal was the Maecenas of São Paulo. He knew and talked about art. Hundreds of paintings and statues from his gallery had nourished patrician artists and drew the admiration and wonder of his friends’. The character Vidal was perhaps patterned after Senator Freitas Valle (1870–1958), who with D. Veridiana da Silva Prado invited artists to their famous São Paulo residence, the Villa Kyrial, and sent select young artists to study in Europe.21 Yet Vidal, who had been forced by elite opinion to pay thousands for works of art, was dismissive of the public’s gullibility in questions of art and value: ‘Paris said it was a thing of genius. In Rome, so-and-so would say their guy had collected and condensed the entire history of art. And the other connoisseurs found themselves forced to call it “colossal”, “extraordinary”, “genius” and forked over their liras or franks’. With this idea in mind, Vidal thought to create a ‘blague’ to deceive his elite friends by promoting Shonosuké as the ‘Brazilian Foujita’. He prepared a publicity campaign promising that within a year Shonosuké would be taken for a genius all over São Paulo. At the exhibition, Vidal was seen to pay enormous prices for his paintings, word spread, everything was sold in record time, and the press could not stop talking about the painter’s genius: ‘Even in Paris they called for him’. It was at the height of Shonosuké’s fame that Vidal decided to expose his fraud; the pleasure of unmasking the gullibility of his circle was worth the damage to his reputation. Indeed, the revelation brought on scandal and humiliation: ‘ – And to think he’s a senator. The electorate needs revenge. Revenge’. In the excitement, no one noticed Shonosuké’s suicide in his studio. 21 See Márcia Camargos, Entre a vanguarda e a tradição:  os artistas brasileiros na Europa (1912–1930) (São Paulo:  Alameda, 2011); Vila Kyrial:  crônica da belle époque paulistana (São Paulo: SENAC, 2000).

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The depth of the parody of patrons, such as Freitas Valle or D. Olívia Guedes Penteado, is the revelation in the story’s final sentence that ‘What’s interesting is that Shonosuké was really a genius’. Hence, the inability of patrons to discern real artistic talent and value is doubled: Vidal has created a false career for an artist, now deemed worthless, who actually produced works of genius. Shonosuké was Foujita’s Brazilian double, yet lacking a Parisian master and model he was devoured by the voracity and the ‘nameless voluptuousness’ of unmasking local pretensions.22 Foujita was protected from this violent end by his Parisian fame and the protection of the Portinaris. ***

The Solitude of the Self-Portrait Portraiture reflects the polarity of the avant-garde, since portraits are vehicles for the modernists at once to confirm their identity and posit a tropical difference in their works. Through portraiture, the formative experiences of modernity as documented will survive a long transition into fable, by which the present can supersede itself as myth. Radical change thus prepares its own tradition and entrance into the museums, an outcome ostensibly at odds with the modernists’ artistic ideals and concentration on the present moment. Modernist representation runs the risk of becoming its own myth at too early a stage, and its invention a history of method rather than spontaneous creation. A suggestive theoretical approach to conflicting currents underlying modernist texts as portraits of the artist can be drawn from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, in which he sees New World cities ‘living feverishly in the grip of a chronic disease: they are perpetually young but never healthy’.23 While deriving justification from their newness, they 2 2 23

Orígenes Lessa, Passa-três (São Paulo: Edições Cultura Brasileira, 1935). ‘The contrast is not between new towns and old towns, but between towns with a very short evolutionary cycle and towns with a slow evolutionary cycle’, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Penguin, 1992), 101.

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never become old, as in the case of European towns, but only decayed. Applying Lévi-Strauss’ concept, one may envision that an ‘overexcited civilization’ in the early days of industrialization in São Paulo, possessing a gene inherent to newness, leads to what he terms ‘contaminated memories’ in textual or plastic portraiture, involving impermanence, decay, or disappearance. By establishing a fixed iconography, modernity portraiture risks betraying its own radical disharmony and inequality of rhythms, which is a determining structural principle in the compositions of Villa-Lobos and thus a quality of the new in Brazilian arts. In the case of Brazil, avant-garde artists juxtapose two flawed ideals: the musical dramatization of a young city, incapable of aging, with artistic sources from the primitive yet savage harmony of a primordial and timeless indigenous reality. Rego Monteiro confirms the primacy of the moment for modernist artists by describing Brazil as a country of instantaneous poetry:24 S.O.S. Afin que je puisse atteindre le pays sonore de la Poésie    Instantanée

***

True for Being False National portraiture in modernist style both announces and conceals its blemishes. Again, following Lévi-Strauss, the textual memoir, assembled like a photographic album or traveller’s book, has to be falsified, intentionally or not, because modern New World experience, destined to decay or disappear, can no longer be described in a direct or genuine form. An early literary paradigm for the pre-modernist text as pseudo-portrait and secret 24 Rego Monteiro, Mon onde était trop courte pour toi (1939–1941) (Paris:  P. Seghers, 1956).

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script can be studied in the facsimile edition of O Perfeito Cozinheiro das Almas deste Mundo (The Perfect Cookbook of the Souls of this World), collective diary and art book of Oswald de Andrade’s garçonnière, a scrapbook kept in private hands before its facsimile edition in 1987 that will be discussed in more detail for its improvisatory character in the following chapter. This collage of papers and scripts written in luminescent colours is both portrait and improvisation, representing the transition from the ornamental aesthetics of art nouveau to the fragmentary satire of modernism. The volume constitutes both an archaeology of early modernism and a prefiguration of what Haroldo de Campos calls an aesthetic of excess. Its pages are filled with notes, messages, letters, and puns that embody the true, but falsely told, story of love-death between Oswald, represented in the diary by the name ‘Miramar’, and the young spirited woman called Deisi, or Miss Cíclone, or Tufãozinha, who in letters to Miramar also signs herself ‘Gracia Lohe’. If the album’s plural identity and spontaneous pages can be read as instant epiphanies of modernist consciousness, its impenetrable semiotic language paints a shifting, expressive, and aleatory portrait. The appended notice of Miss Cyclone’s death at age 19 that closes the volume signals the change from portrait to epitaph and of memoir to fable. The funeral notice initiates a search for the lost body that is a decadentist precursor of future victims of anthropophagy. By juxtaposing texts in a cycle of fictional portraits, other avatars appear. The actual people whose adopted names are Gracia Lohe and Miramar are substituted in Oswald’s novel A Escada (The Staircase) by the characters Jorge D’Alvelos and Mongol, a dynamic continued in Pagu’s Parque Industrial with the characters Alfredo and Octavia, who represent Oswald and the author. The plural shifting identities in a textual palimpsest of portraiture appear to be a model of constant renewal, although the practice conceals a repetition of underlying sameness that continually reproduces its primal personages in other guises, confusing the old with the new. The open identity expected in portraiture will be called into question by its reproduction in fiction, by a very short evolutionary cycle, and by the overexcited aesthetics identified by Haroldo de Campos.

Image 39:  ‘I laughed slowly’, writing in the Perfect Cookbook of the Souls of this World, São Paulo, 1918–19.

Chapter 7

Improvisation: Play and Excess

And above all freedom! […] It is only possible to create something grand within the most absolute liberty of expression. – Villa-Lobos1 But we never recognized the birth of logic among us. – Cannibal Manifesto

Scrapbooks Since their subject is always themselves as Brazilians, the modernists are continuously improvising on themes or topics around them that they find interesting, whether about language, folklore, national culture, music, or history. The 1918–19 diary composed by visitors to a garçonnière and maintained by Oswald de Andrade – O Perfeito Cozinheiro das Almas deste Mundo2 (The Perfect Cookbook of the Souls of this World)  – is a book always open ready to record spontaneous comments on their lives and a living example of improvisation, both in life and art. With its pre-cannibal title, the diary-scrapbook is the first book, or artefact, 1 2

‘Villa-Lobos habla de música’, El Nacional, Caracas (25 January 1953). ‘E sobretudo liberdade! […] Só é possível criar algo grande dentro da mais absoluta liberdade de expressão’. Oswald de Andrade, O perfeito cozinheiro das almas deste mundo, Mário da Silva Brito, intro., Haroldo de Campos, prefácio, ‘Réquiem para Miss Cíclone, musa dialógica da pré-história textual oswaldiana’ (São Paulo, Editora Ex-Libris, 1987; Editora Globo, 1992).

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to record the life of a modernist group in São Paulo through improvisation. The young writers and intellectuals draw and write on 200 blank pages (24 × 36 cm) ‘kept open like a door’. The expression is from André Breton’s 1928 novel, Nadja, a work comparable to the Perfeito Cozinheiro in the role of the male narrator. Published the same year as the Cannibal Manifesto, Breton’s novel confirms the cannibalization of the muse as aesthetic object of male narration.3 The group records life as it passes by from a reclusive space that is a world apart, still maintaining a fin-de siècle atmosphere at the height of bohemian libertinage, in a protected space where imagination, rebellion, wit, and humour reign. Many of the participants will become leaders of literary modernism: Oswald, Monteiro Lobato, Menotti del Picchia, Guilherme de Almeida. In 1918 they write spontaneously and with complete liberty in their unorthodox sui generis book that they fill with exotic objects, post cards, drawings, graffiti, and caricatures. The volume is dated from May to September 1918, with a single page postscript dated August 1919 carrying an obituary. Both dramatic register and epiphanic testimony of the group’s ideas and activities, the scrapbook alternates from diary to invention, from life to fantasy. It documents genius and eccentricity with pages of pseudonyms, word plays, irony, sarcasm, and humour. The book is a small theatre in writing based on free conversation, shared by all. It captures the tension between the group and the city, between life and art, reality and fiction, on pages that amount to a collective memory of the moment. The pages tell a story as if by chance, determined by aleatory contents. The contents were never meant to be published and remained in a private collection for seventy years, until the publication of a meticulously prepared facsimile edition in 1987, now a collector’s item.4 The masculine club of the garçonnière is challenged by the unexpected arrival of a muse. The Perfect Cookbook contains annotations and drawings that narrate or annotate the romance between Oswald and a rebellious and 3 4

See K. David Jackson, ‘Oswald de Andrade e André Breton: Paixões loucas, loucos textos’, Remate de Males 33.1–2 (January/December 2013), 149–68. O perfeito cozinheiro das almas deste mundo …, Diário coletivo da garçonnière de Oswald de Andrade, São Paulo, 1918, Edição fac-similar, São Paulo, Editora Ex Libris, 1987.

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original young student from the interior who comes to study in the capital, whom he called Miss Cyclone. With her satirical, witty, and flirtatious lines, ‘the bony cousin with a lock of hair on her forehead’ captures the attentions of ‘Miramar’, Oswald’s author-pseudonym. The pages narrate in clever repartee the romance between Miramar and Cyclone, including one creative page of the diary made with rubber stamps that deconstruct ‘Miramar’ by playing with combinations of ‘amar’, ‘mira’, and ‘Miramar’. An appended last page, a newspaper clipping announcing Cyclone’s death at age 19, is the shocking conclusion to the fatal story of her sacrifice as an object of male desire. At the end of the diary, Oswald writes in large red letters, ‘Da Capo’. This fragile and unpretentious book marks the genesis of a modernist avant-garde in nonconformity and decadence, where assumed identities substituted for actual ones, prime material for the creation of an avant-garde performance. It is a direct line from the Perfect Cookbook to the cannibal banquet. The notebook initiates the paradigm of urban cannibalism in which the narrator and the city are aggressors, and the exotic muse is consumed. Madness is the mechanism, the aesthetic is improvisation, and inscription translates hidden desire. Another modernist scrapbook belongs to Tarsila do Amaral. It was displayed at the 2017–18 expositions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with other documents and letters. Its pages are filled with receipts, programmes, theatre tickets, and other souvenirs of her peripatetic transatlantic life of travel and study in the 1920s. The collection of objects allows viewers to recreate through metonymy Tarsila’s movements and contacts during the period of her constant transatlantic voyages. It is a coded history of her life in the 1920s that documents improvisation.

Humour In 1920 Hilário Tácito (José Maria de Toledo Malta) published a digressive novel, Mme. Pommery, satirizing the bohemian culture of fin-de siècle São Paulo:

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Chapter 7 Ida Pomerikowsky, with the nine thousand crowns and open road, loudly announced her career in itinerant prostitution. She wandered in cities and nations throughout Europe, negotiating kisses and smiles with the same finesse and talent she always had. This is the little that is known about the nebulous story of her life. As for the passions, dramas, and lovers, the obscurity is total. No one even knows when or why she began to be called Mme. Pommery. It’s probably a nickname that comes from her favourite champagne, Pommery. Since it sounded like Pomerikowsky, it was a natural choice, considering the advantages of brevity and allusion.5 (1977, 35)

Critic Eliane Moraes considers the work to be a precursor of the antropofagia movement because of its multiple styles and linguistic diversity. While Mme. Pommery may be a precursor of comic heroines in Oswald de Andrade’s two novel-inventions, the character belongs to the elegant, bohemian urban social world that is reflected in the Perfect Cookbook (‘The orchestra behind the grand piano continuously expelled the penetrating notes of maxixes and cake-walks in roguish rhythms. Boys and girl with broad gestures, open laughter, sharp voices, occupied all the table in the great hall’).6 Mixing the historical chronicle (‘With a perfunctory biographical sketch, in which for the first time are registered the most favoured legends and anecdotes about the birth, childhood and education of the same conspicuous lady’),7 with a pastiche of

5

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‘Ida Pomerikowsky, na posse das nove mil coroas e do caminho aberto, estreou-se com estrondo na prostituição itinerante. Peregrinou por cidades e nações de toda a Europa, a negociar os beijos e os sorrisos, com a mesma finura e o mesmo talento que revelara de princípio. Isso é o pouco que se sabe da sua vida, mas nebuloso na sua história. Quanto às paixões, aos dramas, aos amantes, a obscuridade é absoluta. Ignora-se, ainda, quando e por que motivos começøu a chamar-se Mme. Pommery. É provável que se trate de uma alcunha proveniente de predileção pelo champanha Pommery. Soando o nome como o seu próprio de Pomerikowsky, era natural que o adotasse, consideradas as vantagens da brevidade e da alusão’ (1977, 35). (‘A orquestra, atrás do grande piano, expelia de contínuo as notas penetrantes de maxixes e cake-walks, em ritmos acanalhados. Rapazes e raparigas, com grande soltura de gestos, risos escancarados, vozes álacres, tomavam todas as mesinhas do vasto salão […]’). ‘Com um perfunctório esboço biográfico, em que pela primeira vez se registram as lendas e anedotas mais abonadas sobre o nascimento, infância e educação da mesma conspícua senhora’.

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nineteenth-century French novels (‘I prefer the sincerity of a SainteBeuve’),8 and filled with self-conscious stylistic references to Machado de Assis’ novel, Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, (‘I ascribed the undertaking of this superior task to my ingenuity’),9 the narrative nonetheless recounts the adventures of a society woman who, under patriarchal domination, operates a sophisticated bordello, reminiscent of the reality of the law graduates’ garçonnières. The constant mixture of references and genres, as well as the pretension of the narrator, gives it the air of improvisation throughout, while it reproduces in a theatrical model some of the hidden features of the private social underworld of city life. Humourist José Madeira de Freitas (Alfredo Chaves) coined the phrase ‘confused method’ to describe Brazilian life, language, and history in an atmosphere of improvisation. Appearing in the same year as the Modern Art Week, the História do Brasil pelo método confuso (History of Brazil by the Confused Method) by Madeira de Freitas, a medical doctor and journalist, is a purposefully disjointed and humorous reconstruction of Brazil’s history. His ‘confused method’ dates from the discovery in 1500 to the crossing of the South Atlantic by ‘Sacadura & Gago’ in 1922, which the author compares to the crossing by Cabral: The odyssey of Gago and Cabral is, in all its route, a retake of the adventure of 1500. Only the proportions are different, leaving the most modern feature to Saca-Gago. Cabral I had a squadron; Cabral II a plane. Cabral I was accompanied by an expedition; Cabral II was accompanied by a Gago. Cabral I departed from the Tagus; Cabral II departed from the Tagus. Cabral I deviated from his route. Cabral I discovered Brazil; Cabral II discovered a steamship. […] Be that as it may, one cannot deny him the title of intrepid, bold, and personal bravery, not for what happened to them on the journey, but what they went through in the reception [in Brazil].10

8 ‘Prefiro a sinceridade de um Sainte-Beuve […]’. 9 ‘[…] assentei de empreender este trabalho superior ao meu engenho’. 10 ‘A odisseia de Gago e Cabral é, em toda a linha, uma reprise da aventura de 1500. Apenas diferem as proporções, cabendo a Saca-Gago a feição mais moderna.

Cabral I tinha uma esquadra; Cabral II um avião. Cabral I acompanhou-se de uma expedição; Cabral II acompanhou-se de um Gago.

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Madeira de Freitas adopted the allusive pseudonym Mendes Fradique, inverting the name of a famous writer-character invented by Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiroz in his Correspondência de Fradique Mendes (Correspondence of Fradique Mendes, 1900), who is presented as an educated, travelled, and perverse poet and dandy. Madeira de Freitas wrote satires of didactic works using a strategy of inversion and comic substitution. Already proficient in satire in verse as a student in 1917, he published Hipocratéa, aimed at colleagues and professors in the School of Medicine, and that year he began his ‘history of Brazil’ in the aptly named new journal D. Quixote. The journalistic columns lead to a first publication by Editora Leite Ribeiro in 1920, followed by a more widely known and augmented edition in 1922. His compositional method soon led to two more satires that captured the modernists’ improvisatory way of thinking, the 1925 A lógica do absurdo (The Logic of the Absurd) and the 1928 Ideias em ziguezague (Ideas in zigzag). In the year of the Cannibal Magazine, he applied his technique of unlearning to grammar in Gramática portuguesa pelo método confuso (Portuguese Grammar by the Confused Method):11 Grammar is the art of speaking and writing a language incorrectly. As grammarians affirm, grammar is a group of rules derived from the way a people normally speak a language. Well, people always speak very badly, and they write worse; therefore, it is not surprising that grammar is the art of speaking and writing a language incorrectly.12 Cabral I  largou do Tejo; Cabral II largou do Tejo. Cabral I  desviou-se do rumo:  Cabral II desviou-se do rumo. Cabral I  descobriu o Brasil; Cabral II descobriu um vapor. […] Seja como for, não se lhe pode regatear o título de intrepidez, arrojo e bravura pessoa, não pelo que passaram na jornada, mas pelo que sofreram-na recepção’. 11 See Rolf Kemmler, ‘Gramática e Humor na Grammatica Portuguesa pelo Methodo Confuso de Mendes Fradique (1928)’, In: Eberhard Gärtner and Alex Schönberger, orgs., Estudos sobre o Português Brasileiro (Frankfurt am Main, Valentia, 2009), 227–45.(6) A  Grammatica Portugueza pelo Methodo Confuso (Rio de Janeiro, 1928)  de Mendes Fradique. Available from:  (accessed Jun 13 2018). 12 ‘Grammatica é a arte de fallar e escrever incorrectamente uma lingua. Segundo affirmam os grammaticos, a grammatica é o conjunto de regras tiradas do modo

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Mendes Fradique’s zigzag, absurd, and ‘confused’ method is an early, radical blueprint for the humour employed by the Cannibal Magazine, with its satires, inversions, and carnivalizations that share an origin in bohemian circles in Brazil. Mendes Fradique himself proclaimed teasingly in the introduction that his work was ‘the perfect adaptation of this method to the mentality of my people and my race’.13 His motto, ‘We should not misrepresent tomorrow what we can misrepresent today’, illustrates the irreverence with which he shuffles the deck of history and politics. Journalist Gilberto Vasconcellos comments on ‘his confused method, superficial, lewd, tedious […]’ in his history of Brazil. Some incisive satires predate and prepare the humorous constructions used by Oswald in the ‘History of Brazil’ section of Pau Brasil poems and by Mário de Andrade in the novel Macunaíma. Mendes Fradique anticipated a major comic theme of Mário’s novel – national, creative sloth – when he suggested that posterity, ‘by the law of greatest laziness’ would accept his deturpations of the history of Brazil. From the geographical point of view Brazil was one of the most original countries of the globe. Borders – To the south Borges de Medeiros; to the east the undersea cable; to the west Acre. There is no north. Surface – It was always a very superficial country in every way. Rivers – Of all the rivers in Brazil the one of greatest political importance is without a doubt the River of January, a very populous village, alongside Guanabara Bay, with Sugarloaf at its doorstep.14

pelo qual um povo falla usualmente uma lingua. Ora, o povo falla sempre muito mal, e escreve ainda peiormente; logo, não é de estranhar que seja a grammatica a arte de fallar e escrever incorrectamente uma lingua’. 13 ‘[…] a perfeita adaptação desse methodo á mentalidade da minha gente e da minha raça’. 14 ‘Sob o ponto de vista geográfico era o Brasil um dos países mais originais do globo. Limites – Ao sul o Borges de Medeiros; a leste o cabo submarino; a oeste o Acre. Não tem norte. Superfície – Foi sempre um país muito superficial, em tudo.

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Madeira de Freitas creates a singular tropical stage for humour and irony and by doing so reinforces the satire practiced by modernist novelists and poets. Using a complementary style, poet Murilo Mendes in his 1931 História do Brasil (History of Brazil) parodically describes the land and its people after discovery by mixing comedy with the absurd in a national self-portrait. LVI HOMO BRASILIENSIS    HOMO BRASILIENSIS O homem      Man é o único animal que joga no bicho.  Is the only animal that plays the animal lottery.

Madeira de Freitas’ references to indigenous occupation of the land before discovery by the Portuguese will be reflected in the Cannibal Manifesto:  ‘The people of Pindorama are guided by the same political principal that still governs us today:  everyone gives orders and no one obeys’.15 The moral and critical purpose of Madeira de Freitas’ satire is illustrated by his ‘definition’ of the tongue:  ‘Tongue […] a moveable muscle with one end fixed and the other loose. There, precisely, is the great problem of humanity; if the tongue had its two points fixed, how many problems could be avoided in the human species?’16 His unorthodox histories use an improvisational approach to scrambling time, people, and events. *** Rios – De todos os rios do Brasil o de maior importância política é incontestavelmente o Rio de Janeiro, aldeia populosíssima, às barbas da baía da Guanabara, com o Pão de Açúcar à porta’.

15

16

Gilberto Felisberto Vasconcellos, ‘Obra coloca país em palco tropical de humor e ironia’, Folha Illustrada (5 jul 2004). ‘A gente do Pindorama guiava-se pelo mesmo princípio político que ainda hoje nos rege: todo mundo manda e ninguém obedece’. ‘Língua é um músculo […] muito móvel, com uma ponta presa e outra solta. E ahi é que está precisamente o grande mal da humanidade; se a língua tivesse as duas pontas presas, quantos males se não evitariam, no gênero humano?’.

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Linguistic Humour In the first decades of the twentieth century, São Paulo was a city of linguistic improvisation. Of five million immigrants who entered the country during this period, one million Italian workers settled in São Paulo, turning some of the districts such as Brás and Bom Retiro into veritable Italian nuclei. Their influence was felt in all social levels. Known for their lively sociability and large families, their speech was soon filled with Portuguese terms and phrases, typical expressions, and a mimicking self-awareness common to immigrant groups. A  macaronic ItalianPaulista dialect was widely spoken, if not the dominant city language in the city of São Paulo circa 1900–20. A Brazilian taste for humour and jokes is injected into the cosmopolitan dialect, leading to a particular verve, satire, and jokes aimed at local personalities. A 1924 book of poems in macaronic Italian-Paulista dialect, A Divina Increnca (The Divine Snafu)17 by Juó Bananere (Alexandre Marcondes Machado), is made up of apparently improvised versions of well-known poems in Brazilian literature, especially those recited in schools. While maintaining the form of the poems, the speaker substitutes the words in Portuguese by expressions in city dialect that makes them sound ridiculous, as if filtered through simultaneous interpretation to another language and culture by a translator who has little feeling for the original language. Bananere’s book pays homage to the city where Italian language journals and newspapers will continue to be published for another half a century and to the process of acculturation that finds itself, during the modernist years, at a point of pride in the mixture of Italian and Portuguese. The first poem is dedicated to ‘Maxado di Assizi’ (Machado de Assis), many are based on fables of La Fontaine that appear frequently in Machado’s novels and stories, along with ‘futurist sonnets’, patriotic poetry, and parodies of poems by famous authors, from sonnets by Camões to Poe’s ‘The Raven’ (O Gorvo). The best known of those is the ‘Canção do Exílio’ by the romantic poet Gonçalves Dias, here in an abbreviated version in which Bananere picks 17

See latest edition (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2017).

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up the theme of national pride and forgets the original in an extemporaneous improvisation: MIGNA TERRA Migna terra tê parmeras, Che ganta inzima o sabiá. As aves che stó aqui, Tambê tuttos sabi gorgeá. A abobora celestia tambê, Che tê lá na mia terra, Tê moltos millió di strella Che non tê na Ingraterra. Os rios lá sô maise grandi Dus rios di tuttas naçó; I os matto si perde di vista, Nu meio da imensidó. Na migna terra tê parmeras Dove ganta a galigna dangola; Na migna terra tê o Vap’relli, Chi só anda di gartolla.18

18

The original poem by romantic poet Gonçalves Dias has an epigraph, five stanzas, and develops the theme of the poet separated from his native land: Canção do Exílio Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen blühen,  Im dunkeln die Gold-Orangen glühen,  Kennst du es wohl? — Dahin, dahin!  Möcht ich … ziehn.[1]‌ Goethe Minha terra tem palmeiras, Onde canta o sabiá. As aves que aqui gorjeiam Não gorjeiam como lá. Nosso céu tem mais estrelas, Nossas várzeas têm mais flores. Nossos bosques têm mais vida, Nossa vida mais amores.

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In 1926 humourist Aparício Torelly launches a weekly magazine, A Manha (Tantrum), parody of the daily newspaper where he worked, A Manhã (Morning) without the tilde, reproducing its visual design and all the sections. The subtitle of the magazine, ‘ÓRGÃO DE ATAQUES … DE RISO’ (ORGAN OF ATACKS … OF LAUGHTER) illustrates Torelly’s style of twisting or inverting common usage to produce a contrary or paradoxical meaning. Juó Bananere and Madeira de Freitas are among his collaborators, along with Bastos Tigre, editor of the journal D. Quixote, mixing languages and altering sonnets, using a style of rapid juxtaposition of incompatible contexts. Torelly specializes in political parody, belittling authorities, and naming himself ‘Baron of Itararé’ after the site of a much-publicized expected battle that never took place during the Revolution of 1930. His magazine ceased regular circulation when he was arrested by the Vargas regime in 1935. His witty, deformed sayings were collected from A Manha and published with great editorial success in 1985 under the title Máximas e Mínimas do Barão de Itararé (Maxim(um)s and Minimums of the Baron of Itararé). ***

Em cismar, sozinho, à noite, Mais prazer encontro eu lá. Minha terra tem palmeiras, Onde canta o sabiá. Minha terra tem primores Que tais não encontro eu cá; Em cismar – sozinho, à noite – Mais prazer encontro eu lá. Minha terra tem palmeiras, Onde canta o sabiá. Não permita Deus que eu morra Sem que eu volte para lá; Sem que desfrute os primores Que não encontro por cá; Sem qu’inda aviste as palmeiras Onde canta o sabiá.

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Subversive Humour Humour resounds throughout the Cannibal Manifesto, echoing Macunaíma’s ‘grande gargalhada’ (giant laugh) when he first tastes ‘the fearful cachiri whose name is cachaça’, the distilled drink unknown in the Amazon jungle. Historian Richard Morse sees the origin of the manifesto’s humour in the ‘inversion and ludic recombination that were the copyright of modernism’.19 Irreverence contaminates the manifesto with the spirit of barbs and paradoxes seen in Rabelais and Montaigne, placed at the service of the highest modernist value, libertinage. The manifesto is full of memorable comic phrases: ‘A alegria é a prova dos nove’ (Joy is the proof by nines). It proclaims Brazil’s intellectual and political independence at the crossing of the forest and the school, instinct and the law: ‘The Indian dressed as senator’. Indigenous culture resists because ‘it is vengeful like the jaboti tortoise’. The utopia that the chroniclers wrote about is now found in American cinema: ‘the golden age and all the girls’. Brazil has magical powers that signal a spurt of exceptionalism, in a land of utopias and cannibals: ‘We made Christ to be born in Bahia or in Belém do Pará’. Morse characterizes the manifesto as a ‘serious joke’, written against the current, pitting the joy of primitive local knowledge against history. Cabral’s flotilla is welcomed not by ‘gentle young women’, about whose innocent nudity Caminha made jokes, but by cannibals with caldrons ready at a boil. Black humour is the tone, as the discoverers are described in Oswald’s manifesto as ‘fugitives from a civilization that we are eating’. Subversive humour for its own sake is a structural principle of the manifesto and the magazine as a whole. Comedy in Brazilian modernist literature is mainly expressed through social satire based on caricature or parody. Oswald de Andrade’s 1924 ‘Manifesto da Poesia Pau Brasil’ contrasts exaggerated, legalistic rhetoric imitating classical and European oratory with the popular speech of

19

See Richard Morse (1990, 86).

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a hybrid culture, explaining his jab at senior statesman Rui Barbosa: ‘uma cartola na Senegâmbia’ (a top hat in Senegambia). In the manifesto, convoluted rhetoric is elevated to the status of a national ill, the pain of excessive erudition: ‘País de dores anônimas, de doutores anônimos’ (Country of anonymous pains, of anonymous academic doctors). Oswald reinforces the strong role of hybridity in the description of Brazilian speech from the ‘Manifesto da Poesia Pau Brasil:’ ‘a contribuição milionária de todos os erros’ (the millionaire-contribution of all errors). The history of Brazil becomes a prime target for cultural irreverence and provocation. In Pau Brasil Oswald ironizes the colonial encounter by reproducing excerpted passages from historical documents and chronicles of discovery selected for double entendre: native feast There is also found in these parts A certain animal they call the Sloth […] That even if he goes fast for fifteen day He won’t cover the distance of a stone’s throw (1971, 83)20

In the poem ‘on the avenue’ a ‘dispute between the warring hosts of Laughter and Madness’ describes a carnival procession, in which fantasy is a veil covering a transparent social allegory of tropical Eros: na avenida      on the avenue 20 crianças representando de vespas   20 children dressed as hornets Constituem a guarda de honra    constitute the honor guard Da Porta Estandarte     of the Standard Bearer, Que é precidida de 20 damas    who is preceded by 20 ladies Fantasiadas de pavão     costumed as peahens Quando 40 homens do coro    when 40 men from the chorus

20 festa da raça ‘Hu certo animal se acha também nestas partes A que chamam Preguiça … Que ainda que ande quinze dias aturado Não vencerá a distância de hu tiro de pedra’ (1971, 83).

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Chapter 7 Conduzindo palmas     swinging palm  leaves E artistiamente fantasiados de papoulas and artistically costumed as poppies Abrem a alegoria     open the carnival school’s theme […]

Murilo Mendes shares Oswald’s universal sense of comedy and carnival in scenes from his 1932 book of poetry, História do Brasil (History of Brazil). The poet imagines a tropical birth of Venus in the discovery in 1500: 1500       O Pão de Açúcar sonhou    Que um carro saiu da Urca    Transportanto com amor    Meninas muito dengosas    Umas nuínhas da silva    Outras vestidas de tanga    E mais outras, de maillot.   

1500 Sugarloaf mountain dreamed That a car left Urca Transporting with love Very hip young girls, Some, naked as can be Others, wearing loincloths And still others, in maillots. (1994, 10–11)

Buffoonery carries the Revista de Antropofagia further into the hyperbole of farce and carnivalesque, erotic humour. The cannibal faction aggressively formulates a social and political agenda in the 2nd ‘dentition’, describing in comic exaggeration the utopian, matriarchal alterations to be made in Brazilian civilization, without any pretence of being taken seriously. In the column ‘A “Descida” Antropophaga’ (‘The Cannibal “Descent” ’) in the first number, Oswaldo Costa explains the philosophy of a new cannibal paradise: We want man without doubt, without even the presumption of the existence of doubt: naked, natural, cannibal. Four centuries of beef! Horrors!21

Costa’s farce pretends that Brazilians have been consuming the wrong kind of flesh and as a consequence have lost contact with the natural world. In the Cannibal Manifesto, Oswald de Andrade posits happiness as an endemic quality of Brazilian life before the discovery:

21 ‘Nós queremos o homem sem a duvida, sem siquer a presumpção da existencia da duvida:  nú, natural, antropophago. Quatro séculos de carne de vacca! Que horror!’ (1979).

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Improvisation: Play and Excess Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.22

The manifesto’s slogan ‘A alegria é a prova dos nove’ (‘Joy is the proof by nines’) is raised as the measure by which to judge the progress of civilizations. A  reader of Freud and Lévi-Bruhl, Oswald excoriates Western dress as the first indication of repression of natural society in the tropics: ‘What clashed with the truth was clothing, that raincoat placed between the inner and outer worlds. The reaction against the dressed man. American movies will inform us’.23 The new Brazilian matriarchy to remedy the patriarchal ills registered by Freud finds a humorous synthesis ‘in the country of naked people’, according to the column in O Homem do Povo: ‘Down with the dressed and oppressive social reality registered by Freud – reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitution and without penitentiaries, in the matriarchy of Pindorama’.24 The first page of the Cannibal Magazine prints a quote from Staden, in large type at the bottom of the page, ‘Ali vem a nossa comida pulando’ (Here comes our food hopping along), setting the humorous tone for the magazine and humanizing the manifesto by turning the colonial European into food. ***

Excess Essayist Álvaro Lins in his Jornal de Crítica finds the search for form to be a contradiction affecting modern Brazilian poetry in general, and 22

‘Antes dos portugueses descobrirem o Brasil, o Brasil tinha descoberto a felicidade’ (1970, 18). 23 ‘O que atropelava a verdade era a roupa, o impermeável entre o mundo interior e o mundo exterior. A  reação contra o homem vestido. O cinema americano informará’. ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ (1970, 14). 2 4 ‘Contra a realidade social, vestida e opressora, cadastrada por Freud – a realidade sem complexos, sem loucura, sem prostituições e sem penitenciárias do matriarcado de Pindorama’.

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especially the poetry of Mário de Andrade, perhaps because of its experimental and improvisatory qualities.25 Hallucinated City has the air of improvisation, as the poet strolls through the city of São Paulo ‘like a Tupi Indian strumming a lute’, choosing places, landscapes, and types for a lyrical and critical description. The unorthodox finale, an ‘oratorio’ for soprano and three choruses, the’ Enfibraturas do Ipiranga’ (Moral Fiber of the Ipiranga), is performed in the downtown city landscape with competing choruses and symphony orchestra. The oratorio is like a musical score with instructions for performance and texts for vocalists. The enormity of its proportions and symbolism of its meaning is foregrounded in the 555,000 singers who begin the programme when snare drums announce the ‘aurora of a new day’. Taking the form of an operatic fantasy, ‘The Moral Fiber of the Ipiranga’ is a conclusion reminiscent of the extravagant concerts organized in Rio de Janeiro in mid-nineteenth century by the virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk, or for the modernist times a literary predecessor of Villa-Lobos’ ‘Bachianas brasileiras’. In a study of the unusual oratorio,26 scholar Benedito Nunes sees an orchestral-operatic division of the city space and climate in which modernism develops. Improvisation plays a prominent role in sequences of unusual rhymes (A section of words ending in final stressed ‘ais’, ‘ús’, and ‘ó’) and an empty verse to be filled out ‘with the filthiest word that the reader knows:’ ‘Seus …………………………!’ As a text, the ‘Enfibraturas’ resembles a piece of expressionist theatre or opera, concluding with a protest of change and condemnation from ‘an enormous derision of whistles, cat-calls, and stamping of feet’ that comes from conservatives and traditionalists in adjacent downtown buildings. Novelties of expression, even those particular to Brazil, Lins thinks, are transitory and accidental, depriving the literature of poetic works of greater profundity, if only because everything ages rapidly in the modern world; at the same time, Lins finds many of these creations to be lively and admirable. Those motivated by a sense of revolt against the bourgeoisie and consequent social inequalities are suitable for pointed satire 2 5 Álvaro Lins (1943), 24. 26 Benedito Nunes, ‘As Enfibraturas do Modernismo’, Revista Iberoamericana, Vol L, No. 126 (Enero-Marzo 1984), 63–79.

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in place of deeper poetic emotion. In the poem ‘Família Russa no Brasil’ (Russian Family in Brazil, 1930), for example, Murilo Mendes sketches the improvisations that are a necessary adaptation to a Brazilian way of life for European immigrants: O Soviete deu nisto, seu Naum largou de Odessa numa chispada, abriu vendinha em Botafogo, logo no bairro chique. Veio com a mulher e duas filhas, Uma delas é boa posta de carne, A outra é garotinha mas já promete. No fim de um ano seu Naum progrediu, Já sabe que tem Rui Barbosa, Mangue, Lampião. Joga no bicho todo o dia, está ajuntando pro carnaval, Depois do almoço anda às turras com a mulher. As filhas dele instalaram-se na vida nacional. Sabem dançar o maxixe Conversam com os sargentos em tom brasileiro. Chega de tarde a aguardente acabou. Os fregueses somem, seu Naum cai na moleza. Nos sábados todo janota ele vai pro crioleu. Seu Naum inda é capaz de chegar a senador.

The Soviet added up to this, Naum took off from Odessa in a flash, opened a little store in Botafogo, right in the fancy neighborhood. He came with his wife and two daughters, One of them is a good-looking dish, The other is a young girl, already promising. After one year Naum was progressing, He knows about Rui Barbosa, Mangue, Lampião Every day he plays the animal lottery, he’s saving up for Carnival, After lunch he fights with his wife. His daughters settled into national life, They know how to dance maxixe They talk to sergeants in Brazilian accents. By afternoon the cachaça runs out. The customers vanish, Naum takes it easy. On Saturdays all dandy he goes to the Creole dance hall. Ol’ Naum may still make senator.

***

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Musical Performance Improvisation is central to the performance of music, whether variations on a fixed harmonic framework, as in baroque or classical cadenzas or preludes, in Indian classical ragas based on rhythmic patterns, or in the free form of twentieth-century blues or jazz. In Brazil the practice is found both in European and folk practices that produce hybrids, involving a meeting and mixture of musical forms:  The Brazilian waltz finds its influence in the modinha (lyrical love song of Portuguese origin accompanied by the guitar), for example, adopting its slower and more intimate rhythm, while the modinha adopts the 3/4 time signature of the waltz.27 According to musicologist Gérard Béhague, the court composer and organist José Maurício Nunes Garcia is said to be ‘the foremost improviser in the world’ by the Austrian composer Sigismund Neukomm, who lived in Rio from 1816–21. Improvisation is likewise rooted in folk traditions, which are assimilated by popular musicians and mixed with European dance genres, producing hybrid forms. The African origin of much folk material is exemplified by the jongo, a dance of Bantu origin accompanied by drums and verses. In one of his letters from Paris, Sérgio Milliet defends what he considers to be folk expressions in popular music: It is a big mistake to consider maxixe an unimportant musical form. It is part of our soul, and the soul of a race is something extremely serious. What we should cultivate are precisely the spontaneous elements that spring up among our people. We should base our work on their characteristics, the ingenuity, sensuality, melancholy, and wit of the popular song in order for us, with these attributes, to arrive at our own, and hence universal, music. (1924, 215)

Hybrid genres, such as the maxixe and the choro, become universally popular and, just as in the contemporaneous ‘world dance fusion’ analysed by David Hesmondhalgh,28 are seen to be progressive and to comprise a 27

Alexandre Zamith Almeida, ‘Verde e amarelo em preto e branco: as impressões do choro no piano brasileiro’ (Master’s thesis, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1999), 35. 28 See David Hesmondhalgh, ‘Western Music and Its Others’, International Times: Fusions, Exoticism, and Antiracism in Electronic Dance Music, 280–304.

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significant method of cultural interaction in 1920’s Brazil. By 1930 soprano Elsie Houston-Péret collects popular folksongs, presents them to an international congress, and publishes them as Chants populaires du Brésil.29 Around 1917, during her famous parties the front room of Tia Ciata’s (Hilária Batista de Almeida) house in Rio’s Cidade Nova district, near Praça Onze, is reserved for the most proficient musicians playing choro, all Afro-Brazilians, many from the adjoining neighborhoods of Catumbi and Estácio.30 The flutist Pixinguinha relates that sambas are played behind the house, while he plays his choros in the front room.31 Pixinguinha soon forms the group ‘Oito Batutas’ who open in the foyer of the Cinema Palais on April 7, 1919 playing maxixes, sertanejo melodies, batuques, cateretês, and choros. Choro is a musical form that develops in the late nineteenthcentury, originally performed by small groups playing flute with guitar and cavaquinho. It already carries signs of improvisation as a synthesis of multiple dance forms, blending the modinha with the lundu (drums and voice, African origin) and maxixe (a faster and syncopated kind of polka), and influenced by the waltz and serenade. In sheet music by composers Chiquinha Gonzaga and Ernesto Nazareth, the terms used for choro are ‘serenade polka’ or ‘fast polka’. Choro is defined by its instrumentation and fast rhythms, based on the polka, while also incorporating other European dance forms popular in Brazil such as mazurcas, habaneras, tangos, and Schottisches. Its Afro-Brazilian content comes from the lundu, introduced by Bantu slaves, originally a dance accompanied by drums and singing. Performed in Rio by mostly Afro-Brazilian musicians, the choro projects syncopated rhythms derived from the lundu over a harmonic and melodic matrix that reflects the salon modinha, popular with all social classes.32 29 Elsie Houston, Chants populaires du Brésil, Première série, recueillie et publiée para Mme Elsie Houston-Péret, Introduction par Philippe Stern (Paris:  P. Geuthner, 1930). 30 See Bruno Carvalho, Porous City (Liverpool University Press, 2013). 31 See Marc Hirshman, Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 60. 32 See Gabriel Sampaio Souza Lima Resende, ‘O problema da tradição na trajetória de Jacob do Bandolim:  comentários à história oficial do choro’, Diss. Unicamp (2014), 32.

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Both modinha and lundu use syncopation, as do late nineteenth-century popular dances such as maxixe. All contribute to the choro, which is widely heard in the years leading up to the Modern Art Week. The choro gains international notoriety in the visit to Paris by the ensemble ‘Oito Batutas’ in 1922, whose most prominent members are Pixinguinha and Donga (Ernesto Joaquim Maria dos Santos). Choro is recognized by its expressive rhythm and instrumental virtuosity that includes improvisation both in melody and accompaniment. The style is at first associated with an ensemble of flute, a small four-stringed guitar (cavaquinho), guitar and pandeiro (Brazilian tambourine), playing a homophonic dance form in simple meter, played by a soloist with other instruments who provide a rhythmic and melodic counterpoint to the main melody. The flute usually takes the melody; the cavaquinho provides the rhythmic centre with high-pitched repeated strummed chords in offbeats; the guitar (bass) fills in tonic and dominant chords with riffs, pedal pointe and improvised melodies; while the tambourine plays a constant sixteenth-note pattern in 2/4 emphasizing the offbeats. A general spirit of trickery or dissimulation, known as malícia, takes the improvisation to unexpected finesse in its twists and turns. As a cue to the musicians, choro tunes usually have a three-note or extended pickup to their long fluid melodic lines. The ensembles, called rodas, are characterized by musicians who can respond spontaneously at the moment, and although many of these chorões do not read printed music, they combine knowledge of form with playful experience, comparable to jazz improvisation. Improvisation is key to the performance of the choro.33 In their study of choro, Livingston-Isenhour and Caracas Garcia explain how performance practices increased the degree of spontaneity and improvisation: [T]here were still those, particularly guitarists, cavaquinho players, and percussionists who did not read music. As a result, the earliest regional arrangements were characterized by a degree of spontaneity and improvisation in both structure and accompaniment. The usual procedure was a variation of the following: The musicians

33 See Tanara Elena Livingston-Isenhour, and Thomas George Caracas Garcia, Choro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005) for definition and discussion of the Brazilian choro tradition.

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would gather several hours before a scheduled broadcast or recording session. The pieces to be played that day were selected, many of which were already known to the players, and the key was agreed upon. As in the roda de choro, each instrumentalist would fit his part into the stylistic puzzle. The guitars would pluck or in some cases strum harmonies; the seven-string guitars would improvise a baixaria; the cavaquinhos would provide rhythmic and harmonic colour; and a melodic instrument such as flute, clarinet, or (later) saxophone would play the melody and embellish on the repeats. If a singer was scheduled for a broadcast, a melodic instrument would improvise an introduction; the other melodic instruments would improvise counterpoint to the melody. (2005, 91)

The flutist, who is often the only performer who knows how to read music, improvises a syncopated and virtuosic melody that challenges the other players to improvise harmonies and modulations. At the same time, the guitar and cavaquinho try to surprise the soloist with syncopations and rubato in the chordal accompaniment. The regular harmonic structure is made irregular, while the flutist improvises melodies that guide the piece through rhythmic and melodic virtuosity.34 Performances are marked by improvisation in melody, accompaniment, and structure: after a three-sixteenth-note pickup, the solo instrument, usually flute, plays in leaps, chromatic passages, and repeated notes. The supporting rhythm in constant sixteenth notes plays against the melody with offbeats, runs, and improvised melodies, slightly altering the rhythmic pattern. An art of finesse based on musical deception and trickery aims at confusing the other players and adds surprise and innovation to the improvisatory structure. In choro, improvisation is propitiated by stable, repetitive formal structures (AABB, ABA, ABACA) and standard European harmonic progressions (I-IV-V7-I), onto which the improvisational character can be recognized by wide leaps, fast scale passages, syncopations and repeated notes. The new genre soon enters Brazilian classical music with the series of choros for different combinations of instruments composed by Villa-Lobos 34 Gunther Schuller’s comments about rhythmic syncopation in jazz are applicable to the Brazilian choro, in the contrast between the regular and the irregular, in rhythm and syncopations, against a background of a steady accompanying beat. See ‘Jazz and Musical Exoticism’, in Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern, 1998), 283–84.

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and performed in Parisian concert halls in the 1920s. Pieces from other genres are also brought into the choro style, such as a mazurka-choro or the waltzes-choro composed by Francisco Mignone. In January 1922 the group of Rio de Janeiro street musicians called ‘Oito Batutas’, led by flutist Pixinguinha and financed by Arnaldo Guinle, perform at the Shéhérazade Club in Paris for six months, playing a repertoire of maxixes, choros, serenades, polkas, and lundus accompanied by voice, cavaquinho, guitar, tambourine, and percussion instruments reco-reco (scraper) and ganzá (cylindrical rattle). The musicians who played in Paris were Pixinguinha (flute), Donga (guitar), China (Otávio Liplecpow da Rocha Viana, guitar and vocals), Feniano (Sizenando Santos, tambourin), Nelson dos Santos Alves (cavaquinho and reco-reco), José Alves Lima (mandolin and ganzá), and José Monteiro (voice).35 While absorbing the influence of North American jazz and other international groups, the ensemble plays an important role in defining and characterizing a recognizably Brazilian musical style. As Henrique Cazes explains: The Batutas were not seen only as a musical ensemble, but above all, for what they represented for the ‘Brazilianness’ of national culture. There were emblem and symbol, perceived within a scope that ranged from exotic to being the creators of the national cultural synthesis, made with the social, historical, and musical elements of the 1920s. (1998, 83)

When the Oito Batutas play choro, their performances blend with dance music from the Caribbean and other parts of the world, as Cazes comments: [T]he Batutas in Paris were just one of several typical orchestras from various countries who livened up the city in the period after World War I. Besides French dance music and North American jazz bands, there were orchestras from throughout the Caribbean, such as Martinique and Cuba. […] ‘just one season of a group in 35

See Martha Tupinambá de Ulhôa, Cláudia Azevedo, and Felipe Trotta, eds, Made in Brazil: Studies in Popular Music. For a racial perspective, see Lisa Shaw, ‘The Rio de Janeiro-Paris Performance Axis in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century: Duque, the Oito Batutas, and the Question of ‘Race’, Tropical Travels (2018), 69–91. For the cultural history of the maxixe, see Micol Seigel, ‘Maxixe’s Travels’, Uneven Encounters (2009), 67–94.

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a dance hall functioned as just another exoticism among many in the intellectual capital’. (1998, 80)

Much of their exotic appeal comes both from syncopation and from their improvisations in performance. Gunther Schuller ponders the reasons for the popularity of syncopation in music at the time: Was it the novelty of rhythmic syncopation? If so, why? Had syncopation not been around a very long time? The answer is at least twofold. One, syncopation in classical music, apart from being relatively rare – many famous composers never used any syncopation at all – was of a different sort from that found in Negro Ragtime; and two, the ragging of rhythms in the melodies and tunes of Ragtime in irregular syncopation was juxtaposed with the inexorably regular underlying oom-pah accompaniments. It was this contrast between the regular and the irregular – many saw it more than a contrast, indeed a contradiction, a kind of musical oxymoron – displayed not successively but simultaneously, that captivated people. (1998, 283–84)36

The Batutas return much influenced by the jazz they heard in Paris. As Álvaro Neder notes, ‘After their historic season in Paris in 1922, they introduced via the choro the instrumentation taken from jazz by Pixinguinha (saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, banjo, and drums), at the same time they also introduced a new repertory of fox trots, shimmys, and ragtimes’. They add instruments, expand their repertoire, and change themselves into an international jazz band, as Cazes describes:  ‘Shortly after returning to Brazil, the group repeatedly changed the team of instrumentalists, which could reach 12 or more members. From there, the instrumentation incorporated saxophones, clarinets, and trumpets, updating itself to join the generalized fashion of jazz bands then appearing’.37 In their transformation following Paris, the Batutas are following the same goal of international recognition sought by Brazilian artists and musicians who arrive in Paris the following year, where their works likewise absorb and reflect practices of the international avant-garde. *** 3 6 37

Gunther Schuller (1998). Cazes (1998), 79.

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Improvisation in Villa-Lobos In an attempt to characterize the musical compositions of Villa-Lobos in contrast to those of Stravinsky, pianist Arthur Rubenstein comments on their improvisatory organization: ‘Villa-Lobos’ great opus is a vast improvisation, as are all his large orchestral poems’.38 Yet when he first hears the composer and his friends play a choro, he notes: ‘I was simply enchanted by a little piece which he called Choros, written for flute and clarinet. It was not an improvisation; it had a perfect form’.39 Part of his improvisational technique involves the introduction in concerto compositions of a variety of popular instruments used in Brazilian popular music, as Rubenstein comments: He showed me many new compositions, many of them for the cello, which was his favourite string instrument. He also let me hear some beautiful new songs in which he treated the voice in a completely new way. On free evenings he would take me to nightclubs where I heard at last Brazilian sambas played as Villa-Lobos told me they should be. He pointed out some instruments I had never seen before: different kinds of flutes and piccolos, strange brass instruments, and, most interesting of all, all sorts of novel percussion instruments. There were shakers and devices for producing sounds which I couldn’t begin to describe. The effect of all this was terribly exciting. (1980, 154)

Like the Afro-Brazilian composers who popularized the choro, VillaLobos merges many different styles of popular and folk music. Through a mixing of sounds he hears in Rio de Janeiro and regional folksongs, VillaLobos gains a pan-Brazilian perspective, ‘from the most distantly gaucho to the most distantly Amazonian’.40 Villa-Lobos’ composition for nine instruments, the Nonetto, begun in Brasil and completed in Paris on September 24, 1923, carries the subtitle 3 8 Rubenstein (1980), 252. 39 Rubenstein (1980), 91. 40 G. Freyre, ‘Villa-Lobos Revisitado’, Transcription of lecture given at the VillaLobos Festival, Manuscript (1982), In Mana vol.  1, Rio de Janeiro (October 2006), 10.

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‘Impressão rápida de todo o Brasil’ (‘Quick impression of all of Brazil’). To standard chamber instrumentation (flute, oboe, clarinet, alto and baritone sax, bassoon, harp, celeste, piano), he adds twenty percussion instruments: timpani, xylophone, tam-tam, drum, bass drum, large bass drum, field drum, side drum, cymbals, bronze and crockery dinner plates, shakers (wood and metal), triangle, (small and large), côco (large and small), friction drum, tambourines (small and large), caxambu drum, and xylophone. In addition, the score calls for a SAATBarB mixed choir, performed in May 1924 by the Choeur Mixte de Paris. Beaufils finds in the piece ‘a game of disarticulation of symmetries, which doubtless allows the creation of a new balance’.41 Musicologist Simon Wright likens the multi-sectional score to a mosaic, with melodic and rhythmic fragments superimposed in rapid succession in eight large sections made up of short episodes. Dwayne Corbin comments on the ‘rhapsodic, improvisational atmosphere […] with a strong influence of Debussy, Stravinsky’.42 In Nonetto, Villa-Lobos finds the compositional pattern that he will follow in a burst of creativity during his two long residences in Paris and major concerts in 1924 and 1927. Improvisation in the music of Villa-Lobos, following the analysis of Zélia Chueke, is enhanced by its mixture of tradition and modernity, the expected and unexpected, in compositions that may be at once tonal, atonal, and polytonal.43 Beaufils speaks of a ‘[…] jeu de timbres: un phénomène spécifiquement lobosien’ […].44 His perception is confirmed in a review by Boris de Schloezer in the Parisian Revue Musical (July 1924) in which he cites a rich sonority of timbre and variety of instruments as most salient in the compositions, along with metric diversity and complexity: The simple enumeration of instruments [used in his works] already shows us that his concern with sonorities of timbres play a primordial role in the composer’s art, which is in effect a music of timbres and also of rhythms […] the metrical diversity

1 4 42 43 44

Marcel Beaufils (1988), 90. See Corbin (2006), 60. See Chueke (2012), 135, 137. See Beaufils (1988), 102.

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*** Perhaps considering their overriding improvisatory character, Mário de Andrade finds that modernist works are never complete: For our modernist vanity it is painful to remember that all the works by all the artists are no more than trials. One Thursday the artist dies and the attempt becomes an obra prima. Or disappears. Really the artist did no more than attempt the obra prima that could not be completed. However, let us be courageous […] The lesson stays with us.46

In his poems of 1930, Murilo Mendes coins the expression that best describes and summarizes the modernists’ improvisatory spirit:  ‘Viva eu, que inauguro no mundo o estado de bagunça transcendente’ (Long live me, who inaugurates in the world the state of transcendental confusion).

45

Cited by Paulo Renato Guéiros (2003), 139. ‘A simples enumeração dos instrumentos [utilizados nas obras- já nos mostra que as preocupações de sonoridades de timbre têm um papel primordial na arte do compositor, é com efeito uma música de timbres e também de ritmos […] a diversidade e a complexidade métrica dessas obras é extraordinária e o jogo dos timbres atinge nela uma riqueza e um refinamento sofisticados […]’. 46 ‘[…] isso é doloroso verificar prá nossa vaidade modernista mesmo a gente se lembrando que todas as obras de todos os artistas não passam de tentativas. Uma quarta-feira o artista morre e a tentativa vai ficando obra-prima. Ou desaparece. Realmente o artista não fez mais que tentar a obra-prima que não conseguiu realizar […] o que ficou foi a lição’. Mário de Andrade, ‘Blaise Cendrars – Feuilles de Route (I. Le Formose) – Desenhos de Tarsila (Paris, 1924, L’Or – Romance – Grasset – Paris, 1925)’, Estética 3 (January–March 1925).

Image 40:  Detail from Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciæ Brasillæ historiam contines, Francofvrti ad Moenvm, 1592.

Chapter 8

Eating the Self: The Modernist Artist as Cannibal

– Who are we, if not Europeans, if not Indians, if not a species in between aborigines and Spaniards? We are what was undone from what we used to be, without ever becoming what we shall be or might want to be. Not knowing who we were when we were innocent of them, unknowing ourselves, even less do we know whom we will become. – Darcy Ribeiro, Utopia Selvagem … spontaneous movements of the voracity of the vacuum – Caio Meira, ‘Close to the bone’ Nice. In a restaurant. A French couple exchanges a few rare monosyllables for twenty minutes. The bouillabaisse arrives, the two throw themselves into the plate and begin a very animated dialogue. – Murilo Mendes

The Edible You Who are the eaters and who are the eaten in antropofagia, that is the question. The confusion arises in cannibalism as well as in communion, as Kilgour theorizes, when the eater brings the outside inside. The banquet unites those apparently opposite dimensions and, in the act, cultural differences are subsumed into the myth of an all-encompassing body, for

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which the eaten is virtuous substance, become part of the eater. For the theme of the exotic, eroticized body, this is Brazil’s moment to counter European exhaustion and self-mutilation with the fresh exoticism of youth, seen in the health and diet of the Amerindians met by Cabral and by the naked women on the beach ‘with their shames highly on display’. There are nevertheless consequences for this myth of unification, for the modernists projecting themselves onto an indigenous persona, notwithstanding their laudable objectives. The poet Fernando Pessoa, a master at creating multiple selves, has Álvaro de Campos comment on the inevitable alienation – in this case eating the self – that results from the artificial stimulant of becoming another: ‘There are no ideals or aesthetics except in the illusions that we make of them. An ideal is a myth of action, a stimulant like opium or cocaine: it helps us to become others, but we pay a high price – of not even becoming whom we could have been’.1 By referencing the ritual of cannibalism, the modernists are engaging in rhetorical satire and humour, on the one hand, borrowing words and reconfiguring contexts of Portuguese colonial texts that now belong to the canon of Brazilian history, and at the same time staging a literary performance on the page in which they are national actors, in scenarios parallel to two ballets produced on Brazilian themes in Paris by Milhaud, Claudel, Cendrars, and Léger. In either case, the modernists are ‘becoming another’ on stimulants, avoiding what they could have been. Identity, as well as deeper poetic meaning, as Álvaro Lins perceived, is often sacrificed for ebullient, satirical, and spontaneous creativity. Poet Augusto de Campos describes the Revista de Antropofagia as ‘the most unknown and without a doubt the most revolutionary of our Modernism’.2 In the Manifesto, the metaphoric act of incorporation is meant to serve the utopian goal of national unification of Brazilian culture, 1

2

‘Não há ideais nem estéticas senão nas ilusões que nós fazemos deles. O ideal é um mito da ação, um estimulante como o ópio ou a cocaína: serve para sermos outros, mas paga-se caro – com o nem sermos quem poderíamos ter sido’. Álvaro de Campos, ‘Considerações sobre Estética e Ética’ (Obras em Prosa, 1982), 154–55. Augusto de Campos, ‘Revistas re-vistas: os antropófagos’, Revista de Antropofagia, Edição fac-símile (São Paulo: Metal Leve, 1976), n.p.

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in which the colonized absorbs the colonizer. The time frame is a scant six years after the centenary celebration of political independence from Portugal. The appeal to unity and incorporation disguises a national self that is about to be altered once again as much by its long attachment to Europe as by its act of rebellion. Poet Charles Bernstein captures perfectly the dilemma of the modernist cannibals in the imperative they felt to export an independent Brazil to an international audience: In the Brazilian modernism of the early 1920s, there was a focus on the specificity of Brazil but also on the fact that Brazil – its culture, its art – was unknown to the outside world. And at this point a fundamental conflict emerges between exporting and refusing to export ‘Brazil’. The fear of exporting culture is that one may end up extracting, reducing, translating (away), sacrificing the heart for a hollow representation. Moreover, there is the sense that one must have a culture in order to be in dialogue with other cultures; so first there is the need to build your culture into something substantial. Dialogue, in other words, export, comes into conflict with self-development. Or put it this way: internationalism comes into conflict with willed isolation, the insistence on cultural solitude, which necessarily entails remaining unknown to the outside world. (2016, 159)

The fundamental issue raised by Bernstein is whether the modernist cannibal is absorbing and digesting Europe as a path to internationalizing Brazilian culture, as it was understood in the 1920s, or whether the cannibal is ‘sacrificing the heart’, being consumed from the inside because of the insistence on exporting a yet inchoate Brazil to Europe, which is its duplicitous place of origin, still omnipresent in Brazil, absorbed over the centuries yet hardly neutralized, or capable of being so by a proclamation. By embracing the concept of ‘primitivism’, modern artists prepared to subvert their own received traditions in an encounter that would reveal unsuspected depths of social, psychic, and artistic forces. On that point, Kilgour observes that ‘oppositions seem infinitely reversible as long as the assumptions upon which they are based remain unquestioned’ […], whereas one of the duplicities of the movement is ‘denying the existence of anything outside of it, swallowing and appropriating what is outside by a form of colonial discourse, identifying criticism with melancholy and cannibalism’. Kilgour further explains the mechanism:  ‘A number of our basic assumptions about experience and ourselves are based on

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a relationship of false transcendence or sublimation, the cannibalistic subsumption of one term by the other […]. All language is potentially colonial discourse, as in order to make ourselves understood by others we constantly have to make the strange familiar […] the danger occurs when these analogies are forced to tell a fable of total identity, when differences are pushed into complete antitheses that then meet by being collapsed into total identification.3 Author Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna uses the term ‘amorous cannibalism’ to describe this oscillation between desire and interdiction in Brazilian culture.4 Poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe published a poem on the theme of the amorous cannibal the following year: ‘Suppose I were to eat you […] When I had quite devoured the edible you […] I would wake in the groin of the night to feel, ever so slowly, your plangent, ravishing ghost munching my fingers and toes […]’ (1985). The dilemma can be related to the passage from local to global knowledge, a process often marked by the sacrifice or standardization of complex local processes.5 A problem with eating the arriving European is that one becomes dependent on that food supply in place of local flora and fauna: how can one resist the very substance that one is made of, without being caught in an unsolvable contradiction and oxymoron? Luís Madureira outlines the fundamental contradiction: The future antropofagia sets out to construct adheres in large measure to the familiar contours of Western discourses of emancipation. On the other hand, however, antropofagia’s attempt to convert the Tupi’s alleged craving for the heterogeneous into an ethical and political imperative seems to indicate a new historical direction, a future that is at least imaginatively distinct from the one enforced by European models of modernization.6

Critic Paul Mann recognizes the condition: ‘The avant-garde’s historical agony is grounded in the brutal paradox of an opposition that sustains

3 Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism (1990), 226, 238–39. 4 Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna, O canibalismo amoroso: o desejo e a interdição em nossa cultura através da poesia (São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1984). 5 See James C. Scott (1998). 6 See Madureira, Cannibal Modernities (2005), 13.

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what it opposes precisely by opposing it’.7 In the conflict of local versus international, centripetal (local folklore) and centrifugal forces (international avant-garde) collide in the cultures of import and export. Oswald parses the situation in the ‘Manifesto of Brazilwood Poetry:’ ‘A single struggle  – the struggle for the way. Let’s make the division:  imported Poetry. And Pau-Brasil Poetry, for export’.8 Antropofagia defends its deep ties with an instinctive and magical nature, whose cuisine promises to produce an antidote or vaccine for ills spread by colonial contacts. Through the banquet, modernist cannibals attempt symbolically and sacramentally to reconstitute (communion) the national self, once the colonial part of it has been metaphorically dismembered and consumed (cannibalism). In these acts, as Silviano Santiago writes, metaphors of incorporation express the paradoxical interdependence of wholeness and otherness, conquest and submission, erotic realization and symbolic sublimation.9 The modernist cannibals of the Manifesto construct and enact a fable of their own identity by revisiting the encounters registered in Caminha’s letter of discovery and in chronicles of colonial history, without admitting their own vulnerabilities vis-à-vis Europe. Those writings are meant to mark a point of origin of the nation, which for the modernists is one of historical revision and reversal of what had become a reproduction of Europe, as Santiago explains: America is transformed into a copy, a simulacrum that wishes more and more to be like its original, when its originality is not to be found in the copy of an original model, but in its origin, completely erased by the conquerors.10

The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1991), 11. 8 ‘Uma única luta  – a luta pelo caminho. Dividamos:  Poesia de importação. E a Poesia- Pau Brasil, de exportação’. 9 Silviano Santiago, ‘O entre-lugar do discurso latino-americano’, Uma literatura nos trópicos (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1978), 11–28. 10 ‘[…] à medida que avança apropria o espaço sócio-cultural do Novo Mundo e o inscreve, pela conversão, no contexto da civilização ocidental, atribuindo-lhe ainda o estatuto familiar e social do primogênito. A América transforma-se em cópia, simulacro que se quer mais e mais semelhante ao original, quando sua originalidade não se encontraria na cópia do modelo original, mas em sua origem, 7

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Historian Francisco Bethencourt reinforces Santiago’s assertion by noting that all colonial societies in the Americas are created anew, since the native societies that existed there are either absorbed or exterminated.11 A comment by Montaigne in his essays speaks ideally of a New World in its pure origin, which has been smothered by Europe yet persists: We have so surcharged her with the additional ornaments and graces we have added to the beauty and riches of her own works by our inventions, that we have almost smothered her; yet in other places, where she shines in her own purity and proper lustre, she marvellously baffles and disgraces all our vain and frivolous attempts: ‘Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius; Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris; Et volucres nulls dulcius arte canunt’. (‘The ivy grows best spontaneously, the arbutus best in shady caves; and the wild notes of birds are sweeter than art can teach’. – Propertius, i. 2, 10).12

In a satirical poem, ‘Last March of the Guarani’, poet Murilo Mendes captures the subtle and corrosive inroads of Europeanization that forever alter indigenous life in Brazil’s interior:

11 12

Marcha Final do Guarani   

Last March of the Guarani

Ninguém mais vive quieto na terra.  Outros deuses povoam o país    Ando agora vestido de fraque,   Pus no prego a gentil açoiaba.   

No one can live calmly at home any more. Other gods are living in our country Now I wear a morning coat, I pawned my feathered cape.

O tacape enferruja num canto,   A bengala não largo da mão.    Sons agudos de inúbia não ouço,   trumpet. Na vitrola só tangos escuto.   

My sword is rusting in a corner, I’m never without a cane in my hand. I don’t hear bright sounds of the war On the Victrola I only listen to tangos.

apagada completamente pelos conquistadores’, ‘O entre-lugar do discurso latinoamericano’ (1978), 14. Francisco Bethencourt, interviewed by Isabel Salema, Ípsilon (27 June 2014), ‘O império português é talvez o mais flexível a gerir populações coloniais até ao século XVIII’. Chapter XXX, ‘De cannibals’ (‘About Cannibals’).

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Já não tarda o final desta raça.   My race will come to an end soon. Manitôs abandonam as tabas.    The spirits are abandoning the villages. Meus irmãos, azulemos pra Europa: My brothers, let’s sail away to Europe: O inimigo já chega bufando,    The enemy is huffing nearby Na maloca já fogo tocaram …    They’ve set fire to the huts … Ó desgraça! Ó ruína! Ó Rondon!   Oh calamity! Oh ruin! Oh Rondon! (1994, 183)

Once defeated by cultural invasion, despite Cândido Rondon’s protection, the solution of Mendes’ Guarani – to ‘sail away to Europe’ – is parallel to the apotheosis of Mário de Andrade’s novel Macunaíma, in which the parrot that has told the whole story in a village in the Amazon flies off to Lisbon. The goal of the anthropophagic rebellion is to replace a European simulacrum with native originality. Because antropofagia presents itself as a route to decolonization through symbolic and irreversible acts of mixture between autochthonous Brazil and its arriving Europeans, it signifies yet another stage in their long-standing symbiotic interdependence. There is a further conceptual flaw, in that the cannibal banquet of the 1920s is motivated by the same ‘savage thinking’ – to repeat LévyBruhl’s terminology – exemplified by the devouring of Bishop Sardine, by which the Brazilian Caetés became yet another case of ‘you are what you eat’, a phrase that first appeared ironically in French (Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826) by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: ‘Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es’.13 The problem of developing an original cultural specificity is still on the table, as Bernstein remarks.14 A mestizo society, engendered by Europe, is for Santiago an overturning of the concept of colonial unity, a contretemps and ‘progressive infiltration’ that is in his opinion ‘the only possible path to decolonization’ because this path is an inverse one compared to that of the colonizers. His idea supports 13 14

See Victor Lindlahr, You Are What You Eat: How to Win and Keep Health with Diet (New York: Nutrition Society; Journal of Living Publishing Corporation, 1942). The comprehensive collection of texts on antropofagia, Antropofagia hoje?: Oswald de Andrade em cena, organized by Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar de Castro Rocha (São Paulo: É realizações, 2011) examines the concept in literary texts and critical essays and presents theoretical models for its interpretation.

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the decolonizing programme of antropofagia through a slow assimilation by which Brazil, having been absorbed by Europe, changes the nature of the colonial assimilators. His programme is an early iteration of ‘the empire writes back’: ‘To speak, to write, means: speak against, write against’.15 Kilgour classifies the colonial voyage itself as a form of cannibalism coming from the metropolis, since it aggressively suppresses the cultural differences upon which the richness of its meaning depends. Indeed, the Europeans introduce their own form of cannibalism into colonial society, as described by Antônio Vieira, S. J. in the ‘Sermon of St. Anthony to the Fish’16 (1654). Addressing his audience of settlers in the state of Maranhão, Vieira raises the question of cannibalism applied to Europeans in Brazil: The first thing that distresses me about you, fish, is that you eat each other. This is a great scandal, but the circumstances make it even greater. Not only do you eat each other, but the large eat the small. If it were the other way would be sufficient for many small ones; but since the large eat the small, not even a hundred, not even a thousand are enough for one large one. (2009, 32)

Vieira approximates the greedy appetites of the settlers with practices of indigenous peoples: ‘Do you think that only Tapuia Indians eat each other? There is a much larger slaughterhouse here and white men eat each other much more’.17 While criticizing the barbarity and greed of colonial society, Vieira strikes the fundamental metaphor taken up positively by the modernists a quarter of a millennium later, in which tables are turned on European cannibals in Brazil. The Spanish intellectual Miguel de Unamuno uses the literary dialogue for a satire of cannibalism and selfcannibalism: now that the Spanish no longer consume flesh, they should begin eating souls, he urges ironically: 15

‘Falar, escrever, significa: falar contra, escrever contra’. Paul Melo e Castro notes that not all colonial entities of the Portuguese world engaged in writing back. Describing prose fiction written in Goa, he writes ‘[…] this literature was often more autocratical or intracritical than invested in “writing back to the empire”’ (2018), 103. 16 The Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish and Other Texts, Gregory Rabassa, trans. (Dartmouth: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2009). 17 See The Sermon (2009), 33.

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– What’s perfect is cannibalism, believe me, anthropophagy. Man lives only by hunger. The liveliest expression of affection is ‘I could eat you up!’ You already know what sacrament ends in piety. Only that today we no longer eat flesh; but we can and should eat souls. Which are, I assure you, of very painful digestion. Nourish yourself with them and give yours to be eaten. Insist, man, insist; insist if you truly want to live! When I left the house of the great mystifier don Fulgencio, author of the Ars magna combinatoria, I was thinking about self-cannibalism, in autophagy and egophagy. And I felt a strong pain in my gut and a knot in my throat.18

Cannibalism is the controlling metaphor in even the most idealistic form of conquering, knowing, or possessing objects; and possession is especially subversive in its intolerance of differences and its insistence throughout Brazil’s history on an overriding European identity. Thus to ‘write back’ for the manifesto is radicalized to mean to ‘eat back’. Yet this writing and eating are ambiguously aimed against the multiple self, in which eater and eaten are combined, as a whole. The main point here is that the modernist cannibalintellectual loses both identities, belonging neither to the one installed by the European arrival nor to that of the ‘savage’ tribe. As Suely Rolnik clarifies, ‘We are as diseuropean as disindians and disafros’.19 In the reading of Kilgour, the loss of identity results from the very act of incorporation: The dissolution of inside/outside boundaries are regressive and ultimately murderous of both identity and meaning for the self; constituted meaning depends on the destruction of one of the terms by the other; the desire to be only a subject, eat but not eaten; the notion of a self becomes meaningless through either lack of or too much relation (total isolation or total identification). (1990, 245) 18



19

‘– Lo perfecto es el canibalismo, créeme, la antropofagia. El hombre no puede vivir sino de hambre. La más viva expresión de cariño es: ‘Te comeria!’ Ya sabes en qué sacramento culmina la piedad. Sólo que hoy no nos comemos ya las carnes; pero podemos y debemos comernos las almas. Que son, te lo aseguro, de dolorosísima digestión. Aliméntate de ellas e da la tuya en alimento. Insiste, hombre, insiste; insiste si quieres existir de veras! Cuando salí de casa del gran mixtificador don Fulgencio, autor del Ars magna combinatoria, iba pensando en el autocanibalismo, en la autofagia e egofagia. Y sentí un violento mal de tripas y un nudo en la garganta’ (Unamuno, El Imparcial, Madrid, 8 de febrero, 1915). Suely Rolnik, ‘Somos tão deseuropeus, como desíndios e desafros’ (1998), 128–47.

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The result is estrangement, described by scholar Ignácio Infante: ‘[…] this “stranger” constitutes a form of alterity that happens to be located at the gap between the different conceptions of history, tradition, poetics, and languages that articulate the various manifestations of the transatlantic experience of modernity […]’.20 Projecting an identity ‘in between’ is another way of sacrificing the indigenous heart; it is the sacrifice of the modernizing project.21 This idea of sacrifice is the theme of Chris WallaceCrabbe’s 1985 poem ‘Eating the Future (II)’, expressed in almost cannibal language:  ‘[…] I  had eaten the future entirely, sauces, garlic and meat, I stared at the ruined table in paradoxical joy, having swallowed the whole fat roast and chucked the bones away […]’ (1985).

Intellectual between Cultures As author of the manifesto, Oswald clearly contributes to the complex problem of the ‘other’, fruit of the European colonial expansion. In her essay on the cannibal and the other, Luciana Stegagno Picchio recalls Montaigne on the question of savagery, when he comments that if the cannibal is not savage, then the Europeans are, given such a wide difference in their cultures. Antropofagia places in doubt who is the true ‘other’, when the intellectual and the native meet; the problem becomes more complex, given that the ‘savage’ does not speak in the manifesto, contrary to the care that Montaigne took in interviewing a native Brazilian on his visit to Rouen. The European arrival, certainly of outsiders in the land that would become Brazil, is devoured in the cannibal cauldron, and in 2 0 After Translation, 17. 21 The superficial presence of Brazilians in Paris who are unaware of their deep identity is portrayed in Cassiano Ricardo’s 1928 poem Martim Cererê: ‘Num salão de Paris / a linda moça, de olhar gris / toma café / Moça feliz / Mas a moça não sabe, por quem é’ […] (‘Moça Tomando Café’) (‘In a Parisian salon, the beautiful young girl with grey eyes drinks coffee, happy girl, But she doesn’t know who she really is’).

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the banquet the European nourishes and joins the indigenous body in the heart of Brazilian lands. In the case of Hans Staden, it is the European who is best acquainted with indigenous culture in the New World, which he observes during his long captivity among the Tupinambás, who plan to eat him; his knowledge is spread in Europe through the illustrations in his text.22 Oswald, the urban intellectual unacquainted with indigenous peoples, takes on the disguise of a Tupinambá in a carnivalesque change of skin, thus completing the cycle from European to indigenous to modernist intellectual and back. His shifting identity is a New World fascination with an incomprehensible cultural difference. In other parts of the world, the Portuguese were the barbarians; the Japanese considered the Portuguese who arrived in Japan in the sixteenth century to be barbarians and referred to them by the term ‘namban’.23 Staden’s experiences are close to the Tupinambá culture and society, whereas Oswald’s are theatre and fantasy. Santiago theorizes a ‘space in-between’ that is occupied by Brazilian intellectuals who belong neither to Brazil’s indigenous interior nor to Europe.24 Accordingly, the modernists sacrifice artistic identity in order to project a primitivist national ideal distant from their personal urban experience. The Brazilian artist-intellectual ‘in between’ takes on the guise of the cannibal without any first-hand contact or knowledge of indigenous ethnography in order to promote an exotic national aesthetic meant to gain 22 Hans Staden, Varhaftige befchzeibung eyner Landichafft der wilden nacketen grimmingen menschfresser leuthen in der newen welt America gelegen […] (Margurg: Andres Colben, 1557). ‘O volume contém 46 gravuras e 10 menores, com o frontispício impresso em vermelho e preto. É uma das estranhas coincidências da voga primitivista na Europa que o livro de Staden aparece em tradução inglesa no ano de 1928, em Londres. Havia também uma edição em alemão moderna em 1925’. 23 In ‘The “Indianness” of Iberia and Changing Japanese Iconographies of Other’, Ronald P. Toby distinguishes among Koreans, Chinese, and other ethnicities in a Japanese text by using the suggestive terms ‘other other’ and ‘alter other’, In Stuart Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings (1994), 340. 24 Silviano Santiago, Latin American Literature:  The Space in between, Stephen Moscov, trans. (Buffalo, NY: Council on International Studies, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1973).

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the attention of international avant-gardes. With antropofagia, Oswald occupies a space in-between urban and primitive Brazil, occupied by the intellectual in the periphery of the postcolonial period, halfway between the jungle and the city, the national and the global, equidistant from the two worlds depicted in art and folklore. Scholar Luiz Costa Lima explains the problem in an essay on antropofagia and the control of the imagination: The Cannibal Manifesto poses a fundamental existential question: that of adjusting the Brazilian life experience to the tradition that we inherited […] Oswald emphasizes a primitive force of resistance to the doctrines promoted by the colonizer […] The Cannibal Manifesto represents a break in the Brazilian process of internalizing occidental values, even though it is a limited break […] implying a dialogue between a local capacity – to cannibalize anything that arrives on our shores – and the Western archive. Besides that, through cannibalism Western values could recuperate an intimate feeling lost in the abstractions of Enlightenment rationality. Exactly because we were never totally colonized by the West, we are in a position to help it correct itself. (1991, 26–33)25

Oswald occupies a position of spokesman for his locale, his people and language, being at the same time a person whose education is profoundly tied to the West, to the European Enlightenment and law. What shapes the changeable identity of this intellectual between cultures is the symbiosis between centre and periphery, metropole and colony, civilization and nature. In the history of postcolonialism this category came to include such well-known figures in the areas of politics and literature as Rushdie, Gandhi, Senghor, Bandaranaike, and Paz, among others.

25 ‘O Manifesto Antropófago tem como base uma questão existencial: a de ajustar a experiência brasileira da vida com a tradição que herdamos […] Oswald enfatiza uma força primitiva de resistência à doutrinação promovida pelo colonizador […] O Manifesto Antropófago representa uma ruptura no processo da internalização brasileira dos valores ocidentais, se bem que seja uma ruptura restrita […] implicava o diálogo entre uma capacidade local – canibalizar o que quer que aqui chegasse – e o acervo ocidental. Além disso, através da canibalização, os valores ocidentais poderiam recuperar seu traço sensível, perdido pelo abstracionismo da razão iluminista. Mesmo porque não fôramos totalmente colonizados pelo Ocidente, poderíamos ajudá-lo a corrigir-se […]’, Costa Lima (1991), 26–33.

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Oswald was particularly susceptible to devouring the self, in the view of Haroldo Bruno, because of the irreconcilable difference between his political and irreverent ‘spirit of demolition’, desacralizing everyone and everything, and his serious concern with man’s destiny, values, and possibilities. The cost of a style of demolishing satire, in the spirit of the Cannibal Magazine, is a certain dilettantism, lack of discipline, internal incoherence, and obvious contradiction, qualities which could be offset by originality, experimentation, autonomy of thought, and absolute commitment to an ideal. Oswald devoured part of himself in relation to the kind of work that he could have produced, but did not. In that lies a potentiality in which he could have found artistic equilibrium and maturity to match the weight of his ideas.26 His two long late essays, ‘A marcha das Utopias’ (The March of Utopias) and ‘A crise da filosofia messiânica’ (The Crisis of Messianic Philosophy), from the early 1950s, could perhaps have created a philosophical school for antropofagia, if they had been written closer to 1928. Given the eclipse into which his intellectual legacy fell at his death in 1954, one could reasonably conclude, as does Bruno, that the anthropophagic idea over time had been transformed into autophagy, just as Oswald had become a victim of his own genius. The challenge to the intellectual between cultures is to correct the West from within and with the same gesture defend the values of the homeland, be they instinctual or vital, expressed by resistance or cannibal devouring. One of the enduring proofs of the continuing relevance of the Cannibal Manifesto in Brazil is that no artist has yet made a parody of it, to the contrary antropofagia has been widely embraced as actual theory, even made the theme of the celebrated international art show in São Paulo, the 24th Art Biennial. Antropofagia has been effectively been transformed internationally today into an original theory of hybridity and assimilation with global application.27

26 Haroldo Bruno, ‘Do Risco que tem a Antropofagia de Converter-se em Autofagia’, Novos estudos de literatura brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1980), 254–58. 27 See the international contributions to Antropofagia Hoje?, Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, orgs. (São Paulo: É Realizações Editora, 2011).

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Cases of Cannibal Indigestion The authors of the Cannibal Magazine predate Santiago’s method of decolonization by inverting the language of the metropole, which is the basis of their education, in order to place it at the service of national intellectual and cultural autonomy. Their project is an eating of letters from Staden and Montaigne, inspired by the example of the Caetés,28 applied across modernist writing. The local writer deforms the imported model through writing back in a pastiche, parody, or digression from European prime material that destabilizes the original. Yet the modernist intellectual remains caught in an inescapable ambiguity: the colonial experience and formative texts that provoke the act of resistance are mainstays of the transatlantic Brazilian society, shaped in the nineteenth century by the presence of the Portuguese court, when Rio de Janeiro was capital of a European empire. The Brazilians cannot claim even the basic text of antropofagia by Hans Staden, published in Marburg in 1557, nor its fanciful woodcuts by Theodor de Bry imaginatively portraying the Tupinambás.29 Brazilian pastiche and European text will both remain indelible pages of the manifesto of decolonization and the sustenance of cannibals. Even for the modernist rebels, ‘eating back’ has to mean eating books, published in Europe. Such is the quandary of cannibal resistance that places the modernist intellectual in a space ‘between prison and transgression, between submission to the code and aggression, between obedience and rebellion, between assimilation and expression’.30 By actually devouring themselves along with the enemy, who is part of their DNA, Brazilian modernist cannibals perform a literary, cultural, artistic, and intellectual ritual of retrograde, arrière-garde cannibalism, in 28 In Santiago’s text, ‘É preciso que aprenda primeiro a falar a língua da metrópole para melhor combatê-la em seguida’ (1978, 20). 29 Theodor de Bry, who never traveled to the New World, made fanciful engravings of the Staden story for his 1592 book Americae tertia pars: memorabile provinciae Brasiliae. (Francofvrti ad Moenvm:  Impressvm apvd I.  Wechelvm, impensis T. de Bry). 30 Silviano Santiago, ‘Latin American Discourse: The Space In-Between’ (2001), 38.

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which the identity of the artist-cannibal is negated by the supposed act of liberation. The self-proclaimed cannibals are incapable of freeing themselves from their opposite and sacred enemy. Simultaneously rejecting and affirming almost 400 years of mixed identity, the modernist writer in effect eats the self, coming to occupy a hollow space ‘without any character’, or with miscegenated character yet to be fully defined, like Macunaíma, ‘the hero without any character’. It is an intellectual space lying halfway between an autochthonous interior, never experienced, and a European education obtained by non-Europeans. The modernists belong to both worlds as surely as does Brazil itself, without being able to identify fully with either, since the two had long been joined to become a single, recognizable hybrid entity, which became the Brazilian reality. What the modernists call European is already changed and to a significant degree has acquired authentic Brazilian expression. In an urban Brazil with a burgeoning population of immigrants, imported ideas are inevitably altered but are not out of place. The modernists’ demand is for wide recognition of national arts, which must be granted from outside, not from inside Brazil’s hybrid culture. A final supreme twist of cannibal resistance is that to be recognized as Brazilian originals they must attract the attention and approval of the European avant-gardes, and in the mid-1920s to gain this approval they will present to the European vanguards in Paris a continental, folkloric, and indigenous Brazil in literature, music, and the plastic arts. To do so, the modernists must disguise their identities, which are changeable and in-between, and take on others, presenting an indigenous Brazil they have never experienced, along with an equally distant national folk and popular culture.31 The ballets of Milhaud, Claudel, Cocteau, and Léger are their models. In Paris, Oswald and Tarsila are the inside-outsiders who observe, critique, and promote the primitivist school. A second ambiguity complicating antropofagia is the result of dual transatlantic concepts of exoticism. Europeans came to Brazil for the pleasure of being eaten, as Mário de Andrade observes, ‘Europe, complete and organized in a stage of civilization, looks for foreign elements to set 31

On this point see Michelle Greet (2018), 54.

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itself free from itself […] What Europe takes from us are the elements of the world exposition: amusing exoticism. In music, even the Europeans who visit us persevere in this search for spicy novelties’.32 In Rio de Janeiro, one of the occupations of Brazilian intellectuals is to receive visiting Europeans and attend their lectures and performances. Conversely, the European avant-gardes are themselves anxious to invite Brazilian cannibals to Paris, where they become players in musical clubs, performers in concert halls, and exhibitors in art galleries. In Paris, the Brazilians find that their rebellion is changed into performances made for European audiences, who devour their exoticism by applauding their music, reviewing their paintings, and accepting their social invitations. Tarsila’s luncheons in Paris disguise the fact that the exotic visitors are the meal. On the floor beneath Villa-Lobos’ piano, Cocteau lies in wait. The Brazilian and French avant-gardes develop their exotic tastes by exchanging themes and techniques, as if Brazilian primitivism has been installed in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. Brazilian intellectual Sérgio Milliet, who spends most of his creative life in Europe, returned to the idea of origin and simulacrum in criticizing the ideal of interchangeability of the two cultural expressions: From a political point of view internationalism is without a doubt a worthy ideal. From the artistic point of view it seems to me to be a mistake. Great cultural centres have a specific climate, not transportable, and what is produced in them makes no sense elsewhere. When transplanted to Brazil, for example, French impressionism became vulgar. Our land did not possess the filtered light of Paris. When brought here, as a model to be copied, cubism became a formula: we lack the clean logic of the French.33

32 33

Ensaio sobre a música brasileira, 3.a ed. (São Paulo:  Vila Rica; Brasília, INL, 1972), 32. ‘Do ponto de vista politico é sem dúvida o internacionalismo um belo ideal. Do ponto de vista artístico parece-me um erro. Os grandes centros culturais têm seu clima especifico, intransportável, e o que neles se produz não tem razão de ser alhures. Transplantando para o Brasil, por exemplo, o impressionismo francês vulgarizou-se. Não havia em nossa terra a luz filtrada de Paris. Trazido para cá, como modelo a ser copiado, o cubismo vira formula: carecemos da limpidez lógica dos franceses’ (1960, 123).

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An original observation by scholar Rosa Vieira de Almeida unveils a third ambiguity in antropofagia, extracted from her work on miscegenation and periphery in the Portuguese world.34 Almeida notes a flaw inherent to peripheral movements of resistance, illustrated by literature in the small enclave of Macau, yet applicable to antropofagia, in that resistance as an entity prescribes and predetermines a limiting set of ideas and behaviour:  ‘[…] the notion that a margin must resist a centre is a limiting one […] resistance as the sole mode of understanding the margin is also ill-advised’ (2018, 15). The modernist cannibals define themselves in the Manifesto solely by their resistance to European arrivals in Brazil, a position that leads as much to ‘reification of the centre’ (2018, 19), in Almeida’s terms, as it does to restricting understanding of the movement to a sole model. If locked into a state of resistance with the single purpose of writing back to a centre, a margin is bound to follow a predetermined script. In that situation, as Almeida observes, ‘the margin is forced to perform marginally’ (2018, 15). What is important is not resistance but the question of relatedness, recognizing the margins as participants, in this case, in a transatlantic system. To apply Álvaro de Campos’ idea, the rebelling cannibals run the risk of not being even whom they could have been. They do succeed, however, in marshalling marginality to their own advantage in the principal metaphor of the manifesto, although it will take more than fifty years for antropofagia to find its place in studies of modernism. What may finally rescue antropofagia from marginality is precisely its rich fabric of tensions and contradictions  – an indigenous legal code, religion based on divination, kinship based on matriarchy – in which resistance to Europe aims to promote an autochthonous national culture and at the same time to attract the attention and favour of its European readers and creative artists. It can only function in the transatlantic context of its day as art. ***

34 Rosa Vieira de Almeida, ‘Writing the Margin: Sinophone Macau Literature of the pre-postcolonial era, 1987–1999’, Ph.D. Diss., Yale University (2018).

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In Search of National Culture: Colours and Cocktails Is there an alternate path to decolonization that avoids eating and being eaten, as Vieira denounces in his sermon? To follow Bernstein, it would involve willed isolation and cultural solitude. The isolation of the modernist cannibals comes in their ephemeral publications and readership, which is limited almost to the group itself. In his Diário Crítico, Milliet ponders as well the reduced audience to which the Cannibal Magazine and Manifesto are directed, which also touches on the problematic of resistance or rebellion: Why with all his qualities cannot Oswald de Andrade find the necessary bridge between the public and his work? In the conditions of our society, why does the artist live separately, in a state of rebellion against his group […]? Oswald is important because he is someone with a message. But that message is transmitted to us inscribed in code for which few have the key. His work is hermetic and lacks the deep mysticism that transforms […] the innermost poet into a religious proselyter. Only a very small circle of disciples and companions can grasp in his work the flavour that it actually has.35

For some Brazilian intellectuals of the time, antropofagia stands somewhere between a mystification and an ingenious social platform. The Manifesto’s slogans, including the well-known phrase that links Shakespeare to the indigenous question, ‘Tupy or not Tupy, that is the question’, run the risk in the opinion of author Pedro Nava of always being on the border of a clever joke. Nava notes in his memoirs the contrast between cannibal humour and the ‘serious and tragic tone 35

‘Por quê com todas as suas qualidades não consegue Oswald de Andrade jogar a ponte necessária entre o público e sua obra? Por quê nas condições de nossa sociedade sulina o artista vive desintegrado, em estado de rebeldia contra o seu grupo […]. Oswald importa porque é desses que têm uma mensagem. Mas essa mensagem nos é transmitida em código cifrado e poucos lhe conhecem a chave. Sua obra é hermética e carece por outro lado da mística profunda que transforma o esoterismo em esoterismo, o poético recôndito no religioso proselitiferador. Somente um círculo diminuto de discípulos e companheiros sentirá na leitura de sua obra o sabor que ela realmente tem’, Milliet (1981), 253.

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in Tarsila’s paintings  – Antropofagia, A Negra, Floresta, Sono and the Abaporu – which make them some of the most ferocious canvases in our art. Next to them the deglutition of Bishop Sardine is a simple tasting of ice cream’ (2003, 208). In 1929 Tarsila continues to illustrate the 2nd ‘dentition’ of the Cannibal Magazine with her line drawings of mythical animals placed in a tropical background; a reproduction of her canvas Antropofagia is located at the bottom of the last page of the final number, as a visual signature for the magazine’s twenty-two numbers. *** In his diary of travels to the Amazon, O turista aprendiz, Mário de Andrade answers the point raised by Bernstein, that one must have a developed culture in order to be in dialogue with other cultures, and thus one must build a culture into something substantial before seeking wider comparisons. Mário sees authenticity in the ‘Africa and India’ within Brazil, which in his view have been largely ignored or made superficial for the larger cause of imitating Europe, something that Brazil can never be: And this invincible pre-notion, really invincible, that instead of using the Africa and India that it has inside it, Brazil wastes them, using them only to dress up its physiognomy, its epidermis, sambas, maracatus, clothing, colours, vocabulary, snacks […] While on the inside, it let itself be precisely what by climate, race, alimentation, everything, it could never be, but only imitate: Europe. We take pride in being the only great (great?) civilized tropical country […] That is our defect, our weakness. We should think, feel like Indians, Chinese, people from Benin, from Java […]. Then perhaps we might be able to create our own culture and civilization. At least we would be more ourselves, I’m sure of it. (2015, 67–68)36

36

‘E esta pré-noção invencível, mas invencível, de que o Brasil, em vez de se utilizar da África e da Índia que teve em si, desperdiçou-as, enfeitando com elas apenas a sua fisionomia, suas epidermes, sambas, maracatus, trajes, cores, vocabulários, quitutes […] E deixou-se ficar, por dentro, justamente naquilo que, pelo clima, pela raça, alimentação, tudo, não poderá nunca ser, mas apenas macaquear, a Europa. Nos orgulhamos de ser o único grande (grande?) país civilizado tropical […] Isso é o nosso defeito, a nossa impotência. Devíamos pensar, sentir como indianos, chins, gente do Benin, de Java […] Talvez então pudéssemos criar cultura e civilização próprias. Pelo menos seríamos mais nós, tenho certeza’.

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Mário’s research on folk traditions includes a study of the ‘Romance do veludo’ (Ballad of Velvet) published in the 4th number of the Cannibal Magazine, a ballad that comes from European sources extending to the middle ages, in which a young woman is questioned and must dissimulate her romantic alliance.

Image 41:  Musical score of ‘Romance do Veludo’, in Revista de Antropofagia, 1928.

Mário cites examples in French, Portuguese, and Italian, commenting on the ballad’s arabesque melody. In the Luso-Brazilian version, it carries the rhythm and melody of the habanera, adding a recognizably AfroBrazilian refrain influenced by the lundu. –Netinha, que estás fazendo   –Granddaughter, what are you doing? Calada aí na cozinha?    All quiet there in the kitchen? –Estou pondo água no fogo   –I’m putting water on the stove

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Pra café, minha avozinha.   For coffee, my dear grandmother. –E vivo, aqui todo sarapantado  –And here I am all frightened Como gambá que caiu no melado …  Like a possum that fell into the molasses … –Netinha, tu deste um beijo   –Granddaughter, you gave a kiss Ou eu estou enganada?   Or am I wrong? –Vozinha, é o estalo da lenha   –Grandmother, it’s the crack of the wood Que está no fogo molhada.   That’s wet in the fire. (refrão)    (refrain) –Netinha, tu não me negues,   –Granddaughter, you won’t tell me Como quem estás conversando?  With whom you were talking? –Vozinha, é a chaleira   –Granny, it’s the kettle Que está no fogo chiando.   That’s on the fire whistling. (refrão)    (refrain) –Netinha, que modo é esse!   –Granddaughter, what a thing to say! Responde-me assim brejeira?   Are you giving me a sassy reply? –Vozinha, eu me queimei, ai!   –Granny, I burned myself, ay! Nesta maldita chaleira.   On this cursed kettle. (refrão)    (refrain) E a velhinha desconfiada   And the suspicious old lady De tão inocente santinha,   Of such an innocent little saint, Resolveu ir vagarosa    Decided to come quietly Surpreendê-la na cozinha.   To surprise her in the kitchen. (refrão)    (refrain) Ao chegar lá a velhota    On arriving there the old lady Ficou toda adimirada:    Was totally astonished: Nos braços do primo Joca   In the arms of cousin Joca ‘Stava a moça recostada.   ‘Twas the young lady reclined. (refrão)    (refrain)

Mário presents the ballad as an ethnic encounter that crosses the Atlantic to be re-created as a Brazilian mixture: The Ballad of Velvet is a curious document in our history of ethnic mixtures. Whether as literature or as music, Portuguese, Africans, Spaniards, and now Brazilians dance to it, adapting themselves to Brazilian circumstances. I really do

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In his memoirs, even the artist Di Cavalcanti, who studied and painted in Paris in the 1920s, considered the Brazilians’ work in Europe at the time to be dilettantish and immature, since it avoided the human problems of its time: I felt that all of that was the paroxysm of dilettantism. It wasn’t exactly that, but the truth is that a lamentable artistic-literary flowering attached itself to the movement of the Week. Only when a certain consciousness of the tragedy of the Brazilian common man appeared with the novelists of the Northeast did anti-academicism build a powerful structure.37

Di Cavalcanti’s critique echoes Mário de Andrade’s overview of the modernist movement in 1942, in which he laments his lack of social consciousness and engagement. Within the aesthetic field, Milliet sees the modernists’ imperative as representing the characteristic and peculiar qualities of Brazilian art: In art one must cultivate and take to the farthest extremes what is unique to each country. The Mexicans understood it well by not forgetting to include the indigenous note, even in their most abstract paintings. We ourselves understood it, at the beginning of our modernism, when Di Cavalcanti and Tarsila adapted their Brazilian colours, their sensuality and their primitivism to the teachings received in Paris. Fashion conquered, however, and the provincial ambition of being ‘à la page’ carried them to a production without originality, without its own character. A reaction must be imposed, not superficial, like a return to academicism – dead

37 ‘Senti que tudo aquilo ia ate o paroxismo do diletantismo. Não foi bem isso, mas a verdade é que ao movimento da Semana juntou-se, pelo Brasil afora, uma lamentável floração artístico-literária. Só quando surgiu com os romancistas do Nordeste uma certa consciência da tragédia do homem brasileiro, é que o antiacademismo criou uma estrutura poderosa’, Di Cavalcanti (1955), 119–20.

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and buried thank God – or a literary exploration of regional themes, but a deep reaction of freedom from ‘isms’ and in search of our colours and forms. (1960, 123)

The lesson of Mário’s study of the Ballad of Velvet is that what is unique to each national expression is inevitably a mixture of sources across languages and time that finds new expression. As Antônio de Alcântara Machado writes in the Cannibal Magazine (Ano I, No. 6) under the title ‘VACA’ (COW): ‘Once more Brazil is defending what in Portugal they call the common patrimony of the race. A defense that suits the Lusitanians. It’s all wrong. The Portuguese language is not the common patrimony of the race. First because there is no race, there are races. Secondly because there is no language, but languages’.38

Cannibal Pagu: A Radical Cultural Critique In 1929 a young art student, Patrícia Galvão, then aged 19, accompanied Tarsila, Oswald and a group of friends and artists to Rio de Janeiro for Tarsila’s exhibition at the Palace Hotel, captured in a famous photo of the group on board the ship that took them from Santos to Rio. The exhibit is the subject of an article in the last number of the Cannibal Magazine, ‘A singular expression of modern art’, that comments, ‘She will exhibit to cultured people who will […] see in her canvases the revolutionary expression of anthropophagic painting. A  disturbing and paradoxical painting, bathed in the light of our violent nature and full of unprecedented inspiration, derived from legends […] of our race’.39 Three of

38 ‘Mais uma vez o Brasil defendeu o que em Portugal chamam de patrimônio comum da raça. Defesas que cabia aos lusitanos […] Está tudo errado. A língua portuguesa não é patrimônio comum da raça. Primeiro porque não há raça há raças. Segundo porque não há língua há línguas’. 39 ‘Ela vai exhibir à gente culta que não poupará da alta alegria de ira ao Palace Hotel, para ver, nos seus quadros, a expressão revolucionária da pintura antropofágica.

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Pagu’s drawings appear that year in the 2nd ‘dentition’ of the Cannibal Magazine, depicting the stylized outline of a suffering young woman in expressive, vaguely indigenous settings.

Image 42:  Drawing by Pagu in Revista de Antropofagia, 2nd ‘dentition’, 1929. Photo courtesy of Centro Pagu, Unisanta.

At the exhibition, poet Raul Bopp dedicates a poem to her, the ‘Côco de Pagu’, that gives her the mistaken nickname by which she would henceforth be known (he thinks her name is Patrícia Goulart, thus ‘Pa-gu’), while praising her seductive and entrancing beauty. The poem is published under a sketch of her in a hammock playing a guitar by Di Cavalcanti: Uma pintura inquietante e paradoxal, banhada pela luz da nossa natureza violenta e toda ela cheia de uma inspriação inédita, recolhida nas lendas e nas sugestões originárias da raça’, 2.a ‘dentição’, No. 16 (January 1, 1929).

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Image 43:  Di Cavalcanti, Drawing of Pagu with guitar in the magazine Para Todos 515, Rio de Janeiro, October 27, 1928, p. 24. The drawing accompanies a poem by Raul Bopp. Reproduced with permission from Elisabeth Di Cavalcanti Veiga. Pagu tem os olhos moles   Uns olhos de fazer doer.   Bate-côco quando passa.   Coração pega a bater   

Pagu has soft eyes Some eyes to make you suffer. She sings a côco when she comes by Hearts start to beat faster.

Eh Pagu eh!     Eh Pagu eh! Dói porque é bom de fazer doer.  It hurts because it’s good to hurt. Passa e me puxa com os olhos  She goes by and pulls me along with her eyes Provocantissimamente.   Extremely provocative. Mexe-mexe bamboleia   She moves along swaying Pra mexer com toda a gente.   To catch everyone’s attention. Eh Pagu eh!     Eh Pagu eh! Dói porque é bom de fazer doer.  It hurts because it’s good to hurt.

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I love you just because In ways of loving well. An inner wanting to be together Because it’s good to hurt.

Eh Pagu eh!     Eh Pagu eh! Dói porque é bom fazer doer.   It hurts because it’s good to hurt.40

By late 1929, Oswald abandons Tarsila for Pagu. Their unofficial marriage on January 5, 1930 marks a counter current, the beginning of a short-lived anarchic period of intense social critiques and of Pagu’s unsuccessful yet passionate proletarianization, involvement with the Communist party, and voyage around the world in 1934–35. In the eight numbers of a tabloid published in 1931 with Oswald, O Homem do Povo (The Man of the People),41 ‘Pagu’ continues the critical programme of the 2nd ‘dentition’ of the Cannibal Magazine, which is aimed at the perceived defects of a patriarchal postcolonial society under the aegis of a cannibal programme. Pagu writes the column ‘The Woman of the People’, in which she unleashes scathing criticisms aimed at all sectors of society in a tone of condemnation, without offering any alternative programme, although she implicitly extends the radical suggestions of the magazine’s 2nd ‘dentition’. In his Jornal da Crítica, Lins notices the modernists’ ‘sense of revolt 40 See Raul Bopp, ‘Coco de Pagu (poema)’, Rio de Janeiro,  Para todos …, ano X, no 515 (27 out. 1928), 24. 41 O Homem do Povo  – coleção completa e fac-similar dos jornais escritos por Oswald de Andrade e Patrícia Galvão (Pagu), Augusto de Campos, intro. ªSão Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado; Arquivo do Estado, 1984. See Aurora Cardoso de Quadros, ‘Oswald de Andrade no jornal O Homem do Povo’, Ph.D. Diss., University of São Paulo (2009).

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directed against social inequalities, against the whole bourgeois organization’ (1943, 27). Pagu’s writings demonstrate that the social programme of the 1930s has its beginning in the radical politics of the Cannibal Magazine in its polemical phase in 1929. Pagu’s first column, ‘Maltus Além’ (‘Beyond Malthus’, sounds like ‘Methuselah’), attacks the model of political women in the example of anarchic-feminist Maria Lacerda de Moura (1887–1945), ridicules the habits of bourgeois women, and accuses the feminists of blocking the revolutionary movement by denying the vote to workers; ‘A Baixa da Alta’ (Low Point of the Upper Class) censures bourgeois motherhood; ‘O Retiro Sexual’ (Sexual Retreat) singles out bourgeois feminists for hypocrisy and moral duplicity, accusing the well-dressed women of being clandestine prostitutes; ‘Na Garupa do Príncipe’ (The Prince’s Rump) destroys the model of ideal husband in the visiting Prince of Wales and characterizes the upper classes as being the syphilitic leftovers of a sick society; ‘Liga de Trompas Católicas’ (League/Ligature of Catholic Tubes) criticizes religion and sexual repression, citing mothers who visit garçonnières and sell their daughters into elite marriages; ‘Saibam Ser Maricons’ (Learn to be Queers) accuses elite young men of being effeminate; ‘Guris Patri-Opas’ (Patri-Goody Boys) censures patriarchy; and ‘Normalinhas’ (Normal School Girls) accuses young women graduates of Normal Schools with ‘good conduct’ to have hypocritical attitudes of sexual repression. She invites elite students of the nearby law school to ‘exchange blows’ with her. In these columns, Gisely Coelho Hime sees a destructive trajectory that sweeps away any and all operative models of the society of its day.42 Pagu introduces popular antropofagia in O Homem do Povo through drawings in the form of comics. Her eight comic strips with captions, each with four scenes and titled ‘Malakabeça, Fanika e Kabelluda’ (a couple and their child) continue the style of drawings begun in the Cannibal Magazine, now presented in a popular style to tell a story, with colloquial language indicated by the letter ‘k’ in place of the normative ‘c’. The first comic strip (March 27, 1931) is a prediction of the fate of the short-lived 42 Gisely Valentim Vaz Coelho Hime, ‘Os desencontros entre a mulher do povo e as mulheres do povo – a atuação jornalística de Pagu no jornal O Homem do Povo’. Revista Alterjor 16.2 (2017).

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periodical: ‘– Kabeluda decided to start a newspaper of the people – She got Malakabeça to start a large enterprise – The paper was a great success. – The paper folded’.43 The captions of other selected scenes comment on issues of the day and the programme of the journal with subversive irony: ‘– Kabelluda found out that the Prince [of Wales] likes Brazilian women a lot’; ‘– Kabelluda organized a communist meeting at the Praça da Lamparina’; ‘– Kabelluda flees to Portugal; – The Portuguese catch on […] Kabelluda returns with Kabelludinha for the delight of Malakabeça’; ‘– Kabelluda runs away with the Man of the People’. In a column signed ‘K. B. Luda’ in No. 7 titled ‘Cinema Sexual’ (Sexual Cinema), Pagu pronounced herself in favour of an open ‘healthy and sportive’ sexuality, as embodied by Marlene [Dietrich] and Greta Garbo in films of Erich von Stroheim: They don’t have preconceived ideas about gestures, they are not forward with their adornments, they don’t follow diets. They don’t think about showing off their bodies for sexual excitement […] When [Garbo] reveals herself in sexual dramas of the screen like Marlene in ‘Blue Angel’, like Lya de Putti in ‘Varieté’ – woman in the biological sense appears more than dressed, made up for life’s parties, where love is part of the daily plot that snares man and woman.

Beyond self-portrait, the lives of the modernists become subjects registered in ephemeral journals, diaries, and notebooks, most notably in the previously mentioned scrapbook, O Perfeito Cozinheiro das Almas Deste Mundo (The Perfect Cookbook of this World’s Souls). Pagu’s involvement with Oswald is captured in a four-hand spontaneous notebook with a title scribbled by Oswald, ‘Romance da época anarchista’ (Romance of the Anarchist Epoch). The notebook measuring 19 X 12 cm containing 68 pages, dated from May 24, 1929 to June 2, 1931, features drawings and entries jotted in ink and pencil. There is a self-deprecating description of their unofficial marriage on January 5, 1930 written by Oswald: On this date the young loving Patrícia Galvão and the strong unscrupulous Oswald de Andrade signed a marriage contract. It was in front of a tomb in the Consolation Cemetery, Street 17, No 17, where they made the heroic agreement. In the immense 43 ‘Kabeluda resolveu fundar um jornal do povo – incitou Malakabeça a organizar uma grande empresa – O jornal fez enorme sucesso – O jornal fechou’.

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struggle in which they are engaged for the victory of poetry and the stomach, this was the great pronouncement, the maximum challenge. Then they were photographed in front of a church. The miracle was done. Now, yes, the world could come crashing down44

Oswald adds, ‘Now all the hours of Pagu are mine. I am Pagu’s clock’. Their son Rudá is born in April, and by 1931 Pagu leaves Oswald to devote herself to political militancy. Pagu follows up the columns of ‘The Woman of the People’ with the proletarian novel published in 1933, Parque Industrial, based on a dramatic portrayal of Italian immigrant women workers in the textile industry in the São Paulo district of Brás. The novel satirizes encounters of the bourgeois and upper-class modernists to which Pagu has access as a student of Tarsila and her incipient romance with Oswald. Her portrait of a modernist soirée in 1929 at the mansion of D. Olívia Guedes Penteado in the pavilion she had constructed for meetings of the modernist group, featuring paintings from the European avant-garde and the presence of visitor Hermann von Keyserling, is a grotesque expressionist depiction of wealth, decadence, and excess: The bourgeoisie plans mediocre romances. Jokes ooze from the depths of the cushions. They seep between belches of costly champagne. Caviar is crushed by filled teeth. From the main wall, a tragic eyeless Chirico spies the male shoulder that Patou undressed from the hostess’ gown. Dona Finoca, old patroness of new arts, suffers the courting of a half-dozen novices. – How can I not be a ‘communist’ if I’m a modern woman? The white tuxedoes stand erect in the tropical night, paling the topaz cufflinks on fists of silk.

44 ‘Nesta data contrataram casamento a jovem amorosa Patrícia Galvão e o crapula forte Oswald de Andrade. Foi diante do tumulo do Cemiterio da Consolação, à rua 17, n.o 17, que assumiram o heroico compromisso. Na luta immensa que sustentam pela victoria da poesia e do estomago, foi o grande passo prenunciador, foi o desafio máximo. Depois se retrataram deante de uma egreja. Cumpriu-se o milagre. Agora sim, o mundo póde desabar’.

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Chapter 8 In the gardens, the couples exchange partners. It’s the ‘cult of life’ in the most modern and free house in Brazil. No one sees the Green Count. (1981, 32)45

Her novel presents accusations against Zwi Midgal, a corrupt organization of Polish Jews that brought Eastern European women to Brazil for prostitution by presenting them as French, echoed in Oswald’s wellknown play O Rei da Vela (The Candle King). Both cast suspicion on the origin and social standing of wives of plantation owners: The great Paulista plantations always have their mares with old pedigrees at the service of the chosen visitor. Very Brazilian. Pioneer stock. Dark. Fair. Plump. Thin. And worse than the countesses of the Rotonde. Those became prim and fat after marriage. There are a half-dozen women, married, divorced, semi-divorced, virgins, un-virgins, syphilitics, semi-syphilitics. But politically very useful. Little bohemians who know Paris. Hysterical. Made to drive unaccustomed military men mad. (1981, 67)

In 1934–35 Patrícia travelled around the world, describing the experience in a late journalistic column as a ‘roundtrip without any objectives’: […] a quick march, always forward, Rio-Pará, Pará-California, crossing Panama, the Pacific, Japan […] Raul Bopp, consul in Osaka, made an itinerary for the four thousand islands, then it was time for Manchuria […] the coronation of Pu-Yi, where this Brazilian journalist danced in the grand salon with a North American reporter, breaking etiquette; then China; then Siberia; then Russia in the times of faith that had collapsed there […] Then Poland, Nazi Germany where to get to a beer hall, during the train’s long stop, the Gestapo assigned two men to watch me, then France […] And one year later the hard and long voyage back.46 45 Oswald de Andrade also satirizes upper-class society in the final poem of the section ‘Light Posts’ in Pau Brasil: ‘[…] os magnatas / as meninas / E a orquestra toca / Chá / Na sala de cocktails’; ‘the magnates / the girls / and the band plays / tea / in the cocktail lounge’ (trans. Richard Zenith) 46 Patrícia Galvão, ‘Às vésperas de viagem predomina a perspectiva’, A Tribuna (Santos) (October 15, 1961). ‘[…] marcha batida, sempre em frente, Rio-Pará, ParáCalifórnia, travessia o Panamá, traves sai do Pacífico, Japão … Raul Bopp, cônsul em Osaka, fez a maior parte dos itinerários pelas quatro mil ilhas, depois foi a vez da Manchúria […], a coroação de Pu-Yi, onde esta jornalista brasileira dançou no grande salão com um repórter norte-americano, quebrando a etiqueta; depois a

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She arrived in Paris from the other side of the world, where she stayed with Elsie Houston, studied at the Sorbonne, and communicated with Surrealist poets. She was deported to Brazil by Ambassador Sousa Dantas to save her from arrest, after participating in political protests in which she was twice seriously injured. After her return to Brazil, however, Pagu was accused and tried as a Party activist and imprisoned for three years. On her release, she herself recounted her dramatic life story through the modernist years in a personal memoir in the style of a confession, written for Geraldo Ferraz, whom she married in 1940 on leaving prison. It was published as Paixão Pagu in 2005. Even after her trajectory of intense personal suffering, Pagu reaffirmed the vitality and centrality of modernist art and vision. Her life is a vivid demonstration of political antropofagia in the spirit of the rebellious, individualistic 2nd ‘dentition’. As an active journalist in the 1950s, Pagu was in a position to make a retrospective analysis of modernist artists in the movement in which she participated with politics and passion. In her remarkable account of Tarsila do Amaral, published on December 10, 1950, Pagu questions the decline in Tarsila’s works after 1930, which she attributes to a new focus on social and urban themes: She developed an original mysticism in her antropofagia phase, still within her regional colourism […]. The discovery of social themes, however, must have been a draining fatality. As a painter she turned her attention to the city, and the results were not as good. I do not know why Tarsila did not keep being the great painter that she had been between 1925–1930 […]. I don’t find in her current work any of the discoveries that marked an earlier time. Her personality, however, remained the same, the same serenity and understanding […]. (Fanfulla, December 10, 1950)

Perhaps because of her own long and exhausting years of work for the Party and revolutionary politics, which she renounced after 1940, Pagu attributes Tarsila’s decline as a painter – why she did not remain the great painter she had been between 1925–30 – to her discovery of social themes, China; depois a Sibéria; depois a Rússia nos tempos de fé que aí desmoronaram […] Depois a Polônia, a Alemanha nazista onde para chegar a uma cervejaria, na longa parada do trem, a Gestapo dispensou dois homens para me vigiar, depois a França […] E um ano depois a dura e longa viagem de volta’.

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which Pagu calls a ‘draining fatality’. Even then, without any new discoveries in her painting like the ones in Paris, Pagu thinks that Tarsila as a personality did not lose ‘her profound sense of equilibrium, her wise psychological penetration, the serenity of her judgement and understanding […] the same mental emancipation, the same confidence as always’.47 Again, in her judgment of Tarsila, Pagu reaffirms the energy and innovation of antropofagia above the social and political themes of the 1930s. ***

Nouvelle Cuisine Cannibals The slight-of-hand of Oswald’s Manifesto is that cannibalism is not a spontaneous idea, but the product of years of transatlantic study of the arts and intellectual production, proposed at the end of the 1920s in an attempt to carve out a Brazilian presence within the transatlantic avantgarde. Even so, or for that very reason, the cannibal movement attempts to distinguish itself from world modernism: ‘The anthropophagists are not modernists. It would be completely useless for them to rejuvenate an unsatisfying mentality’.48 And neither do they wish to be primitivists in terms of modernist ethnographies. In the column ‘Ethnological manipulations’, Oswald de Andrade awaits the substitution of primitivism by antropofagia: The primitivist question is still current. It will only cease to be when it is substituted by the anthropophagic question […] The defect (of ethnographers) is the Western one – the ray of superiority. Mentality of an insurance company. They don’t understand that since man left the tree he suffered a major loss of intelligence. The proof 47 See Patrícia Galvão, ‘Tarsila do Amaral vai nos devolver alguma coisa dos dias idos e vividos, em sua mostra retrospectiva’. Fanfulla, ‘De Arte e de Literatura’ (10 de dezembro de 1950). 48 ‘Os antropófagos não são modernistas. Para eles se torna plenamente inútil rejuvenescer uma mentalidade que não os satisfaz’ (2.ª ‘dentição’, No. 4).

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lies in hundreds or thousands of citations affirming the mental agility and moral superiority of men who never lost the smell of the jungle. (2nd ‘dentition’, No. 6)49

Oswaldo Costa explains that antropofagia values a natural state of simplicity, preceding the decay and decadence of civilization: – One must not confuse a return to the natural condition (which is desired) with a return to a primitive state (of no interest.) What one wants is […] the savage without the beads from catechism […] naked, natural, cannibal. (2nd ‘dentition’, No. 4)50

The modernists’ choice to identify with cannibals was posited on a common nationality to gain the attention of the European avant-gardes. The manifesto is meant to give an original twist to the vogue of primitivism in Europe by re-locating its core in the interior and by radicalizing the past. Oswald is aware of the difficulties of abandoning the European context of anthropophagy, when stating ‘All our reforms, all our reactions are still being made within the streetcar of imported civilization. We need to jump off the streetcar, we need to burn the streetcar’.51 What is the fortune of the new in-between identity for the cannibal intellectuals and for the international projection of their culture? The time for the ‘Brazilian soul’, in Villa-Lobos’ genial title, as an in-between place glows with the brief yet intense contact and exchanges between Brazilian 49 ‘A questão primitivista continua actual. Mais actual do que nunca. Só deixará de o ser quando fôr substituído pela questão antropofágica. Vão ver! […] O defeito do primeiro grupo é o defeito occidental – o raio da superioridade. Mentalidade de companhia de seguros. Não compreende que o homem desde que deixou a árvore, emburreceu poderosamente. A prova está ahi, com centenas e mesmo milhares de citações pondo em valor a agilidade mental e a superioridade moral dos homens que nunca perderam o cheiro do mato’. 50 Oswaldo Costa esclarece: ‘– Não se deve confundir volta ao estado natural (o que se quer) com volta ao estado primitivo (o que não interessa). O que se quer é a simplicidade e não um novo código de simplicidade. Naturalidade, não manuais de bom tom. Contra a beleza canônica, a beleza natural, feia, bruta, agreste, bárbara, ilógica. Instinto contra verniz. O selvagem sem as missangas da catequese […] nu, natural, antropófago’. 51 ‘Todas as nossas reformas, todas as nossas reações – continua Oswald de Andrade – costumam ser feitas dentro do bondo da civilização importada. Precisamos saltar do bonde, precisamos queimar o bonde’, Revista de Antropofagia, No. 4.

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and European artists and intellectuals. It is not successful, however, in sustaining a union that can replace a dialectical or even differentiated reading, in which the two cultures merely make surface contact with each other, like the meeting of the waters in Manaus, without mixing, or in other works that maintain a distinction between their contents or layers. An in-between identity – whether cultural, linguistic or racial – is still not widely accepted today in a world structured by nationalisms, even ‘united’ ones. Mixed race is a category recognized in Brazil and lusofonia, but almost nowhere else in the former colonial world. From a modernist point of view, mixed identities make up the ‘Quelques visages’, whether from the Amazon chief who goes to Paris as a tourist or the French anthropologist in Mato Grosso, one who draws a portrait of civilization purportedly through primitive eyes, and another who describes the ‘savage’ by the civilized observer. In transatlantic modernism, their crossed visions renew and transform the possibilities of meaning and of reading. Hybridity on all levels prepares the path from colonialism to cosmopolitanism and transforms the ethnographic voyage into a democratic experience of self-criticism. The modernists’ moment of in-between is short lived. To what can one attribute the instability of the call of antropofagia in its historical moment? Even the modernist cannibals are nationalists, and few artists actually travel between cultures. Those who do represent an avant-garde of ideas and techniques that culturally are neither completely European nor Brazilian, thus of limited popular resonance in Brazil. They belong exclusively to the sphere of the arts and express themselves through clever humorous and literary syntheses and, with the historical festival of Rouen as a reference, stage their performances in urban centres – mainly Paris – for an intellectual public. For an avant-garde movement, perhaps it is necessarily of limited duration, and as part of the sphere of letters and arts its impact is exclusively aesthetic and cosmopolitan. Although limited in time and place, it does set in motion the devouring of cultural heritages, of the writer-eater of books, of the hybrid artist who reads and chews up tradition. It reinforces nationalist originality. And all of these are significant turning points. With the re-evaluation of modernism begun in the 1960s, antropofagia finally gained an avant-garde presence and significance that became global by the end of the century.

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Europe under the Sign of the Cannibal Haroldo de Campos’ 1981 signature essay on antropofagia, ‘The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devouring’, collects the fruits of Oswald’s export of poetry by registering the innovation of New World writers and intellectuals whom he calls the ‘new barbarians’, those who have created a strong and unavoidable counterpoint to Europe as a parallel literary world history. Citing Oswald de Andrade, Campos argues for ‘[…] the need to consider the national element in a dialogical and dialectic relationship with the universal’.52 Campos considers that it is local, ‘ex-centric’ literatures that give rise to a world literature, in what he terms ‘an intersection of discourses, a necessary dialogue’ that includes writers from all languages and societies, regardless of their economic position or relationship with the major European cultures. Antropofagia, for Campos, is more than the devouring of European arrivals to Brazil; it signals the asymmetrical, critical assimilation of a universal cultural heritage, controlled from the point of view of the outsider, the Brazilian cannibal, or the cannibal who is Brazilian. Haroldo’s argument is more subtle than what Madureira describes as ‘the drive to shift the dominant perspective […] between the metropolis and the periphery […] by proposing to view it from the subordinate’s standpoint’.53 The cannibal position does not stand in opposition to a metropolis since it critically evaluates a universal cultural heritage. The strength of the cannibal critique lies in its distance and its freedom to alter received tradition. The cannibal is not subordinate, and Europe as metropolis must negotiate with the cannibal critique on equal terms. Haroldo’s idea re-applies the modernist method of inversion, although more comprehensively, since what is appropriated can be expropriated, hierarchies of colonial society

52 ‘Da razão antropofágica:  a Europa sob o signo da devoração’, Colóquio:  Letras 62 (July 1981), 14; ‘The Rule of Anthropophagy:  Europe under the Sign of Devoration’, Maria Tai Wolff, trans., Latin American Literary Review 14.27 (January–June 1986), 42–60. 53 Luís Madureira, Cannibal Modernities, 3.

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can be deconstructed: ‘Any past that is an “other” for us deserves to be negated’.54 Along with inversion comes sharp satire of national customs, seen in Oswald’s oblique references in Pau Brasil that are pointed social critiques which will come to prominence in the 1930s. Both the cannibal and the poet address what Haroldo calls the differential, the ‘monstrous’ and the ‘disruptive’, confronting the linearity of historicism, or the logos of gradual, organic, and harmonic development common to Western literary historiography. To be national must mean to be something more, he affirms, as in the examples of Machado de Assis for Brazil and Fernando Pessoa for Portugal, authors in whom the assimilated and the assimilator cannot be easily distinguished. Once linearity and organicism are overthrown, new literary history must look for the suppressed, for paradoxical cultural space characterized by a plurality of models. In the case of Brazil, Campos points out the long baroque presence, which he considers a non-origin for national literature because it had no infancy, being imported fully developed from the Portuguese world. Brazilian literature participates from its beginnings in an elaborate international baroque rhetorical code. Brazilians can immediately read Camões or Góngora and share their complex visions of the world. It is furthermore a reversible style and aesthetic, in which the same form used for the sacred or courtly can be applied to a satirical, witty, or erotic play of concepts. The ‘rule of anthropophagy’, the ultimate response to colonial hierarchies – tradition reflected through the looking-glass – is grounded in the multidimensional baroque as a non-normative path, what Haroldo calls a ‘disreading’ of modes of thinking and even the transgression of order by ‘anarchic versatility’.55 Brazilian literature is full of roguish heroes, from the sixteenthcentury ‘mouth of hell’ Gregório de Matos56 to Vieira’s erudite sermons

5 4 Campos (1986), 44. 55 Campos (1986), 50. 56 Obra Poética Gregório de Matos, James Amado, ed., preparação e notas, Emanuel Araújo (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1990).

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to rustic settlers,57 from Sousândrade’s ‘Inferno of Wall Street’58 to Oswald’s ‘cannibal-rogue’ character Seraphim Grosse Pointe – all are travellers on an ex-centric literary path, a counter current to a unidirectional literary historiography, a periphery overtaking and assimilating a centre. Even in his conception of a disjunctive line of literary history, Campos once more follows the modernists’ example by staking his line of difference on Brazil, where imported tradition is devoured by anti-normative parallel local pathways: for haiku there is Tupi poetry, for Faust there is Guimarães Rosa, for Mondrianesque structures the poet João Cabral de Melo Neto and painter Volpi, for the Greco-Latin heritage there is Sousândrade, for contemporary music João Gilberto and Gilberto Mendes, for Le Corbusier Lúcio Costa, for the School of Design in Ulm there is Décio Pignatari, accompanying Eugene Gomringer there is the Brazilian Noigandres group of concrete poets, for Joyce the Galáxias, for the Beatles Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Recapitulating modernism of the 1920s, Haroldo concludes that ‘[…] the Europeans must learn to live with the new barbarians […], who have been devouring them and making them flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone, who have been resynthesizing them chemically by means of an impetuous and unrestrainable metabolism of difference […]’.59 As we have seen in previous chapters, Europeans in Brazil, artists, writers, and intellectuals, continue a long-standing transatlantic dialogue by incorporating Brazilian materials into their works, while importing European forms as a framework the Brazilians adapt for new arts. The difference here, in Campos’ concept, lies in the degree and duration of assimilation, to the

Obra completa António Vieira, José Eduardo Franco and Pedro Calafate, orgs. (Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 2014). 58 See Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Re-visão de Sousândrade:  textos críticos, antologia, glossário, bibliografia; com a colaboração especial de Diléia Manfio (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2002). 5 9 Campos (1986), 54. 57

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point that the arts of the New World demand equal footing in world literature, comparable to the recent international fame of the Abaporu in art. Haroldo’s New World barbarians produce world libraries that compete with Alexandria’s of the classical world. They support New World voices of ‘carnivalesque, de-sacralizing anti-tradition’ to be found in the enormous collections of Borges in Buenos Aires, Alfonso Reyes in Mexico, Lezama Lima in Havana, and Mário de Andrade in São Paulo. They participate in a universal literary project: authors from everywhere and any time period are all writing ‘the same unfinished universal poem’. After Haroldo’s essay, the dialogic relationship with Europe, underlying the Brazilian modernist arts of the early twentieth century, now tilts in favour of the cannibals. The modernists’ cannibal banquet and the radical programme of antropofagia are, for the ‘rule of anthropophagy’ to be valid, an obligatory initiation and, in retrospect, justification for their unstable and ambiguous status as eaters and eaten, neither entirely local nor global, neither indigenous nor European. For the modernists traveling in Europe, the inevitable hour to return home always arrived, as it had throughout Brazilian history. Why did the Caramuru leave Moema and her nymphs to drown in the Bahian bay while sailing away to marry the Tupinambá maiden Catarina Paraguaçu (later Catherine du Brésil) in Paris before the Medicis? Why did Nabuco leave his fiancée Eufrásia in Paris to marry in Brazil? Why did the Camonian mariners in The Lusiads leave the Island of Love to return to Portugal? By 1930 why had almost all the modernists returned to Brazil from Paris, leaving their new, original style dormant for a decade, if not permanently? For lack of an invitation, of desire, of conviction, or of fortune? After the Brazilians leave Europe, or Europeans leave Brazil for a return trip, both groups being full of melancholy and enchanting memories, Brazilian and European artists and intellectuals might perhaps meet in mid-Atlantic in a grand reunion, as if occupying the lost paradise of José Saramago’s stone raft floating in the Atlantic where, in Haroldo de Campos’ grand synthesis, ‘everything can coexist with everything’.60

60 Campos (1986), 55.

Image 44:  Tarsila do Amaral, Anjos [Angels], detail, 1924.

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Yesterday in São Paulo they buried A cannibal angel With banana leaf wings – Ferreira Gullar1 A novel and a museum are the same.2 – Orhan Pamuk

Historical Status of the Brazilian Avant-Garde If a novel, a painting, and a musical composition are the same as a museum, a perception of the writer Orhan Pamuk, then the major works of Brazilian modernists are ready-made repositories and artefacts of the cultural information that they contain. They exhibit Brazilian lore by their nature and composition. Their authors, artists, and composers are readers of historical chronicles, describers of indigenous cultures and collectors of national folklore. Reading, viewing, or listening to their works is like visiting a museum, since one observes the content synthesized from

1

‘Oswald morto’ Enterraram ontem em São Paulo um anjo antropófago de asas de folha de bananeira […] (24 de outubro de 1954).

2

See Orhan Pamuk, Museum of Innocence (New York: Knopf, Doubleday, 2009).

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folklore, history, music, and chronicles of discovery and exploration. The reader of the Cannibal Magazine is at the same time reading Hans Staden and absorbing exploration of indigenous culture, for example, as is the viewer of the Abaporu and the listener to Villa-Lobos’ Choro No. 10. Modernism is from its origin a museum of brasiliana, avant la lettre, open to visits by all interested in experiencing its cultural differences and specificities. Modernist works are both innovative syntheses of cultural information, while subject to the dynamics of chronology and museology. Seen from a perspective of almost a century, those fresh expressions of national culture belong to a historical exposition, comparable to World Fairs and exhibits in the 2013 Museum of the Arts of Rio de Janeiro. In his Jornal da Crítica (Journal of Criticism) of 1943, Álvaro Lins commented on the rapid aging of modernism: The modernist movement is already historic, alas, when just recently it was still a novelty. To age quickly is becoming a contingency of our vertiginous modern world […] Many of its novelties do not make sense to us today. Which doesn’t mean, however, that we deny their importance to our letters, nor that we are prevented from understanding and admiring their really lively figures. (1943, 27)3

To become historic, for avant-garde visual arts and photography, involves a move into the museums and, for music, onto major international concert programmes. Villa-Lobos travelled for the first time to the United States on February 22, 1945 to conduct the Boston Symphony in a programme of his works, thereby initiating a period of widespread recognition of his nationalist music by major world orchestras that placed Brazil on exhibit.4 The Yale conference ‘Grand Expositions: Iberian and Latin American Modernisms in the Museum’ in October 2001 responded to the increasing numbers of international museum exhibits on Iberian & 3

4

‘Já é histórico, alias, o movimento modernista, quando até há pouco era ainda uma novidade. Envelhecer depressa vai se tornando uma contingência do nosso vertiginoso mundo moderno. […] muitas das suas novidades nos parecem hoje sem sentido. O que não significa, porém, que negamos a sua importância nas nossas letras, nem que estamos impedidos de compreender e admirar as suas figuras realmente vivas […]’ (1943, 27). See Appleby (1983), 138.

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Latin American modernisms and modernist art that indicate resilience and historical status.5 Taken together, concerts and museum collections confirm the recognition by curators, art historians, and the public of Ibero-American artists, themes, and movements as strong, coherent, and attractive expressions of modernist aesthetics.6 Beginning in 1915 in São Paulo, modernist Oswald de Andrade advocated for a Brazilian school of painting in view of the growing number of active artists and promoted the construction of an art museum in São Paulo with the tropicalist argument, ‘Why shouldn’t Brazil be well placed in the world of visual arts? Our nature and our light are a constant stimulus for painting’.7

Souza Cardoso and Malfatti Exhibits Two presentations in Portugal and Brazil in 1916 and 1917, respectively, mark the public tone of scandal and rejection with which avant-garde paintings are first received in provincial capitals, illustrating in some cases a stark difference in reception with centres of the art world. The career of Portuguese artist Amadeo Souza Cardoso begins in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants (1911, 1912 and 1914) and the X Salon d’Automne (1912). Amadeo participates in the 1913 Armory Show in New  York and the large Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin the same year, where he sells eight paintings. With the outbreak of the war, Amadeo returns to Portugal and arranges two individual exhibitions titled Abstraccionismo (Abstractionism), the first in Porto at the Jardim Passos Manuel (1–12 November) and the second in Lisbon at the Liga 5 See Ciberletras:  Journal of Literary Criticism and Culture, n.  8. ‘Grand Expositions: Iberian and Latin American Modernisms in the Museum (January 2003). . 6 Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto documents the principal role that South American artists played in the kinetic art movement in London and Paris in the 1970s, thus suggesting a pattern of transatlantic practice in art in which the modernists provided an earlier parallel example. See Couto (2016), 86. 7 ‘Em prol da pintura nacional’, O Pirralho (January 2, 1915).

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Naval Portuguesa, situated in the Calhariz-Palmela Palace, from 4–18 December. Both provoke scandal and a violent reaction. Portugal is unprepared for the complex, vivid forms and colours Amadeo develops in Paris, even though fellow ‘futurist’ artist Almada Negreiros puts up a spirited defence: ‘Few people know as I do how to evaluate those who represent the best in Paris. Allow me to repeat what Mário de Sá-Carneiro knew so well how to classify: “ – We three are from Paris!” And we are. We have that elegance, that devotion, that lighthouse of Faith’.8 Amadeo dies of Spanish flu in 1918, and although an early retrospective follows in Paris in 1925 at the Galerie Briant-Robert (January 1–December 31), international exhibits outside of Portugal will have to wait half a century for the Europália in Brussels in 1991, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Arts Club of Chicago in 2000 (‘At the Edge: A Portuguese Futurist’), and the exposition at the Grand Palais (20 April–July 18, 2016), ‘Amadeo Souza-Cardoso’, featuring 250 works by Amadeo and his close friends Modigliani, Brancusi, and the Delaunays. It is possible that the negative reaction in Portugal in 1916 is partly responsible for the significant delay in recognizing the importance of Amadeo, now an international star. In 2017, Amadeo’s 1916 openings were re-created in Portugal, at the Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis in Porto and the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado in Lisbon (January 12 to February 17, 2017), featuring 81 of the original 113 works shown in 1916 and attracting more than 30,000 visitors to ‘Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso’. The first major exhibit of modern art in Brazil presents works by Anita Malfatti in the ‘Exposição de Pintura Moderna Anita Malfatti’ in a large hall on Rua Líbero Badaró in São Paulo, between December 12, 1917 and January 11, 1918.9 She includes fifty-three works to highlight her study in New York at the Independent School of Art in 1915–16. Her

8 9

In the dedication to José Pacheko in A Engomadeira (Lisboa: Tipografia Monteiro & Cardoso, 1917). See António Valdemar, ‘Paris Sempre’, Caderno E, Revista do Expresso (February 7, 2017). See Marguerite Itamar Harrison, ‘Between Exhibitions: Anita Malfatti and the Shifting Ground of Modernism’, Ciberletras 8.  .

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internationalism, innovations, and forceful, energetic compositions shock the conservative national tastes of the city and estrange her from the public. Anita is unprepared for the disapproval with which her works were received by the conservative public of São Paulo, unprotected by the international avant-garde climate she had come to expect in New York. Indeed, as Marguerite Harrison observes, Malfatti is accused of importing artworks from elsewhere, considered by the viewers to be unacceptable for defining a national style. Immigration and travel are major themes in her paintings: there is A Estudante Russa (The Russian Student, 1915), O Homem Amarelo of 1917 (The Yellow Man) who could be a poor Italian immigrant, and the 1915–16 O Japonês (The Japanese Man) that might be a portrait of fellow artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The international community of New York that Anita had come to know could not be transposed to hierarchical and patriarchal São Paulo, even though that city was itself undergoing rapid transformation through Italian and Japanese immigration. The 1917 show effectively puts an end to her self-confidence and career as an avant-garde painter, after a devastating review by influential author Monteiro Lobato.

Modernisms in the Museums International exhibitions accompany and promote avant-garde art works and thus aid their acceptance and commercial success among the public. The Salon des Indépendants of 1911 presents Cubism for public reaction by displaying Léger’s Nus dans le forêt (Nudes in the Forest) and Delaunay’s Tour Eiffel (Eiffel Tower):  ‘[…] unbridled abuse comes up against equally intemperate expressions of admiration; it is a tumult of cries, shouts, bursts of laughter, protests’.10 The Blaue Reiter in Munich the same year features Kandinsky and presents works by Picasso, Braque, Rouault, and others. The fourth Sonderbund takes place in Cologne between May and September of 1912, featuring 600 paintings and fifty

10

Gleizes, quoted in Edward F. Fry (1966), 174–84. See Altschuler (1994), 29.

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sculptures, all by modern artists representing nine different countries.11 The Sondebund precedes and perhaps instigates ‘The International Exhibition of Modernist Art, The Armory Show’ in New York in 1913, a comprehensive display of European modernist art, including Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Picabia, and Delaunay, making cubism its main drawing card, centred on the scandal of Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier (Nude Descending a Staircase).12 Among the first exhibits of Latin American modernist art in Paris is Tarsila do Amaral’s in 1923 at the Maison de l´Amérique latine, followed in March 1924 by a broader Exposition d´art américain-latin at the Musée Galliéra, also including works of Brecheret, before Tarsila’s two individual showings in 1926 and 1928.13 After her solo exhibits in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1929, and presentation of her works at Moscow’s Museum of Occidental Art in 1931, Tarsila has only three group opportunities in Brazil from 1933 until 1963 (I Salão Paulista de Belas Artes, 1933; I Bienal de São Paulo, 1951; VII Bienal, 1963) and one international (XXXII Venice Bienalle, 1963). After the passing of forty more years, her works begin to appear in group showings internationally, with prominence in the major exposition ‘Brasil 1920–1950: de la antropofagia a Brasilia’ in Valencia, Spain in 2001; in ‘Woman: Metamorphosis of Modernity’ at the Fundación Juan Miró in Barcelona in 2005, and the same year in ‘Brazil: Body Nostalgia’ at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Major solo international exhibitions will follow in 2009 at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, with publication of a major book on Tarsila, followed by the 2017–18 comprehensive exhibits of her works at the Art Institute of Chicago (October 8, 2017–January 7, 2018) and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, ‘Inventing Modern Art in Brazil’ (February See Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.1994), 60. 12 See Marta Rossetti Batista (2006), 32. 13 For information on international exhibits, see Aracy Amaral, ‘Brasil: Commemorative Exhibitions or Notes on the Presence of Brazilian Modernists in International Exhibitions’ for a schematic overview of presentations of Latin American and Brazilian artists in the twentieth century, presented at the Yale conference. . 11

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11–June 3, 2018). The latter firmly inscribes Tarsila’s name and iconic works in the presentation of modern art, and the MoMA purchases one of her paintings for its permanent collection. The exhibit that followed at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo [MASP] in 2019 set records for attendance, with long lines and extended hours.14 ***

Grand Exhibitions The theme of ‘Grand Exhibitions’ signals a change in critical perspectives on historical modernisms and the powerful choices of aesthetic objects involved in reconstituting Ibero-American movements and art works for museums. Brazilian modern artists arrive in New  York in October 1930 with The First Representative Collection of Paintings by Contemporary Brazilian Artists at the Roerich Museum, which includes Tarsila, Di Cavalcanti, Anita Malfatti, Cícero Dias, Ismael Nery, Alberto da Veiga Guignard, and Antonio Gomide. Brazilian works are included in the New York World’s Fair of 1939 in the pavilion designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. Exhibitions of Brazilian modernist artists in South America had begun in 1945 with Marques Rebelo’s ‘Veinte artistas brasileños’ in Buenos Aires, La Plata and Montevideo; Berco Udler’s traveling show ‘Exposición Contemporánea Brasileña’ in Valparaiso, Chile; and in 1957  ‘Arte moderno en Brasil’ in Buenos Aires at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Notwithstanding the early rejection of Malfatti and Souza Cardoso, major individual retrospectives are later responsible for contributing to 14 See Camila Maroja, ‘From São Paulo to Paris and Back Again’, Stedelijk Studies 9 (2019), 1. Raul Forbes, who purchased the Abaporu in 1984 for $250,000, tells the story of its sale in 1994 at Christie’s in New  York to Argentine Eduardo Constantini for 1.3 million. Forbes estimates its current worth is ‘at least 75 million dollars’. See ‘Esnobaram o Abaporu’, Veja (7 August 2019), 95.

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their fame and to that of Ibero-American artists in a global perspective. Only major art museums, collections, and galleries can create the iconic moments in the pre-history of what has become a traveling show, featuring the confluence of arts, literatures, and cultures of the modern age. This is the case, for example, of such figures as Surrealist Roberto Matta (Museum of Modern Art, 1957; Pompidou Centre, 1985), David Alfaro Siqueiros (San Antonio, 1968), Tarsila do Amaral (Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 1969), Rufino Tamayo (Museo nazionale di Reggio Calabria, 1970; Phillips Collection, 1978; Guggenheim, 1979), José Clemente Orozco (Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1979; Mexico, 1979; Berlin, 1981), Cândido Portinari (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, 1979), and Salvador Dalí (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1979). Groups of artists have been featured together in such retrospective exhibits as ‘Magnet’ (‘Latin American artists living in New York’, 1964, exhibited in Mexico City and Berlin); ‘Latin American Paintings’ (New York, Guggenheim Museum, 1969); ‘Latin American paintings and drawings from the Collection of John and Barbara Duncan’ (New York, 1970); ‘Twelve Artists from Latin America’ (Sarasota, 1970); ‘Seven Latin American Artists of Paris’ (Paris, Galérie du Dragon, 1971); ‘Speak Out! Charla! Bate-Papo!: Contemporary Art and Literature in Latin America’, University of Texas at Austin, 1975; ‘Amérique latine: 10e Biennale’ (Paris, 1977); or ‘Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti’ (London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982). These are a few of the iconic moments in the pre-history of what has become a mega show, featuring the confluence of arts, literatures, and cultures of the modern age. We can look into curved mirrors and be shocked to see Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu looking back at us. There is now a constant retrospective appearance of the celebrated works that have become our common heritage and currency, standing for many artists’ uncommon struggles to modernize art and life. *** It is not until the late 1980s, however, that the age of the grand exposition of Iberian & Latin American modernist art comes into its own, and modernist artefacts from Europe and the New World move into museum spaces and catalogues, reviving the encyclopaedism and novelty of the international shows, world’s fairs, and comprehensive exhibitions an earlier age, marked by the construction of a new broad consciousness of international if

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not global concepts and expressions. In 1966, Yale University hosts one of the first major contemporary exhibits of Latin American art that includes modernism in Brazil, the comprehensive anthological show ‘Art of Latin America since Independence’, curated by Terence Grieder and Stanton Catlin. The exhibition travels to the University of Texas at Austin, San Francisco La Jolla Museum, and Isaac Delgado Museum of Art in New Orleans. ‘Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’, displayed at the Museum of Modern Art (1984–85), illustrates modernist ‘primitivism’ and establishes some parallels between twentiethcentury painting, such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and African masks. Examples of tribal art became known in Europe in the first part of the twentieth century, particularly at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. The freedom of space and form, the release of psychological fantasies, the forceful art of the radically unfamiliar are functions of modern Western interest in values of savagery as defined by Jean Dubuffet: ‘instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness’.15 Signalling the international fame of Brazilian modern art is the 1987–88 exhibit at the ‘Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris’ for which the distinguished art historian Aracy Amaral writes the catalogue. ‘Art brésilien du XX siècle’ (‘Brazilian art of the Twentieth Century’) in Paris unfurls a poster in the shape and colours of the Brazilian flag, with the manifesto-slogan MODERNIDADE (Modernity) as its banner. The design is itself an homage to the cover of the celebrated book of poetry by Oswald de Andrade, Pau Brasil (Brazilwood). That book of poetry, tying Brazil to the French avant-garde and dedicated to Blaise Cendrars, reproduces the Brazilian flag on its cover, with the banner manifesto PAU BRASIL in place of the official slogan, ORDEM E PROGRESSO (Order and Progress). In the case of Oswald de Andrade and painter Tarsila do Amaral, Geneviève Vilnet comments that their works constantly bring spaces together, in particular the towns of São Paulo and Paris.16 In 1992 works of modernist and contemporary Brazilian artists are presented in different venues throughout the city of Zürich in the massive exhibition, ‘Brasilien’. 15 Jean Dubuffet, ‘Anticultural Positions’, The Arts Club of Chicago, 1951; in J. Dubuffet (New York: World House Gallery, 1960), 192. 16 Geneviève Vilnet, ‘Oswald de Andrade, l’homme sans profession’ (2004). .

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International retrospectives have intensified both for individual artists and groups, as in the show ‘Art of the Fantastic / Latin America, 1920– 1987’ organized by Holliday T. Day at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in July 1987. Celebrated artists are viewed on new continents. In 1989 art historian Dawn Ades produces ‘Art in Latin America’ at the South Bank Centre in London, a continental view including Portuguese America. Lesser known artists gain fame through major shows – the Brazilian Emílio Di Cavalcanti in São Paulo, 1990 and Uruguayan Torres-García in Austin in 1992. Thematic exhibits grouping artists are exemplified by the show of Iberian masters, Picasso, Miró, Dalí (Madrid, 1991), ‘Avantguardes a Catalunya, 1906–1939’ (Vanguards in Catalonia) in Barcelona in 1992, assembling 453 works; and another of Latin American plastic artists since the 1960s, Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel (Los Angeles, 1999). Clark, Oiticica, and Lygia Pape have individual exhibits in New York: Clark at the Museum of Modern Art in 2014 (‘The Abandonment of Art’, 1948–88), Oiticica in 2017 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (‘To Organize Delirium’), and Lygia Pape in 2017 at the Met Breuer (‘A Multitude of Forms’). Works of Roberto Burle Marx (‘Brazilian Modernist’) are presented at the New York’s Jewish Museum in 2016, and Mira Schendel in 2017 at Hauser & Wirth’s gallery. All of these enhance the major 2018 showing of Tarsila at the Museum of Modern Art, like a musical crescendo of Brazilian art in New York. Exhibits continue to be formed under the assumed continental affinity and unity of art works from throughout the Americas, an approach unchanged since the 1920s, as in ‘Art d’Amérique latine, 1911–1968’ (Paris, Centre Pompidou, 1992); ‘Lateinamerika und der Surrealismus’ (Bochum, 1993); and ‘Havana-São Paulo’ (Berlin, 1995). In 2015 the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid mounted an exhibition on a subject parallel to the Brazil-Europe exchange, which are interchanges between Spain and Latin America in modernism and the avant-gardes from 1920–70. The exhibit produced a significant book of critical essays, including several on Brazilian art.17 17 See Modernidad y vanguardia: rutas de intercambio entre España y Latinoamérica (1920–1970) (Madrid: Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, 2015).

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In 1992 the Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, Spain mounts a large exhibition of Latin American artists at the Plaza de Armas, organized by Walter Rasmussem of the Museum of Modern Art in New York with the participation of art historian Edward Sullivan. The show then travels to Paris (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Hôtel des Arts), Cologne (Josef-Haubrich Kunsthalle), and New York (MoMA), where it is billed as ‘the most extensive survey of Latin American art ever assembled’ […] with more than 300 works, including painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and installations, and an extensive catalogue, Latin American Art of the Twentieth Century. In 2000 the exposition in Valencia organized by Jorge Schwartz is an extraordinarily interdisciplinary and comprehensive representation of modern arts in Brazil. With a focus on the 1920s as a foundation for eight decades of production, the collection displays more than 600 works in plastic arts, books, journals, photography, music, architecture, and cinema, accompanied by a CD with musical compositions of the period. ‘Brazil 1920–1950’ contains most of the important works described in this book as major works of literary and artistic modernism. The large catalogue includes a bilingual anthology of historical and critical essays in all the fields represented, which facilitates an in-depth comparative view. Rego Monteiro’s work on Marajoara design dialogues with his drawing Antropófago, Tarsila’s Abaporu supported by Oswald’s poem ‘Caipirinha’ and the ‘Manifesto antropófago’, and Mário’s snapshots from the Amazon featured in O turista aprendiz are placed alongside the novel Macunaíma and Montaigne’s essay on cannibals. This exposition is perhaps the first to foreground the work of foreign intellectuals of different nationalities in Brazil, including Cendrars, Claudel, Milhaud, Marinetti, Le Corbusier, Lévi-Strauss, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. After Valencia, the exhibition travels to Buenos Aires and São Paulo, and its large catalogue is published in São Paulo in Portuguese in 2002. The international character of Modernism, visible in its multinational incubation in Paris and Valencia, is reconfirmed in the flowering of ‘Grand Exhibitions’ in the early twenty-first century, as if together they would constitute a ‘I Centennial’ of a century profoundly guided by the modern. By taking enough planes, a trans-geographized globetrotting art lover of today could have curated a personal ‘Museum of Everything’, collecting

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items from major exhibits on four continents. First fly to Valencia’s IVAM in 2000 to visit ‘Brasil, 1920–1950, de la antropofagia a Brasilia’ (from cannibalism to Brasília); then to Lisbon for ‘Olhares Modernistas’ (Modernist Gazes) at the Museu do Chiado; the next year to New York’s Guggenheim Museum for ‘Brazil: Body & Soul’ and to the Museo del Barrio for ‘The Thread Unravelled: Contemporary Brazilian Art;’ and back to São Paulo for the ‘V Centenary of the Discovery’ – with three million visitors – and the ‘XXIV Bienal, Antropogafia e Histórias de Canibalismos’ (Art Biennial, Histories of Cannibalisms). Another short excursion, another major exhibit and plane ticket, and hundreds of art works can flash before your eyes. For an art aficionado traveling around the world visiting museums, would the voyage most resemble Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, Ulysses, or ‘Around the World in 80 Exhibits’? Antropofagia also receives its own museum presentation when chosen for the theme of the São Paulo XXIV Art Biennial, subtitled ‘Histories of Cannibalisms’, featuring a massive catalogue with an introduction by Paulo Herkenhoff and numerous provocative essays on the dimensions of antropofagia and museocanibalismo (museo-cannibalism). The catalog ends with yet another fresh English translation of the ‘Anthropophagite manifesto’.18 Antropofagia further receives what could be called an exhibition in print in the extensive collection of essays in the 2011 book Antropofagia hoje? Oswald de Andrade em cena: O Pau-Brasil, o Brasileiro e o Antropófago (Anthropophagy Today? Oswald de Andrade on stage: Brazilwood, the Brazilian and the Cannibal),19 whose five sections and fifty-six authors treat the manifesto, related works by world authors, genealogies, re-readings and repercussions of Oswald’s celebrated manifesto. The spectator who enters the show ‘Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil’ at the Art Institute of Chicago or the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to her art featuring more than 100 works, 18 19

Translation by Adriano Pedrosa and Veronica Cordeiro, in: XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo: A Fundação, 1998), 536–39. Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, eds (São Paulo: Realizações, 2011).

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including paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, and historical documents, is confronted immediately with three of the most iconic paintings of the century, reminiscent of the three opening blasts in the overture to Verdi’s opera La Forza del Destino. First coming into view is Antropofagia, then the Abaporu, followed by A Negra. They are the fruits of a banquet of antropofagia in which both Brazilians and Europeans eat and are eaten in return, although Tarsila as visiting art cannibal in Paris returns to São Paulo with new canvases, minus a few sold at the Galerie Pércier or to friends. It is a production that ends with her return; she cannot continue to paint in this way outside the conversation, conventions, and mutual exchange of ‘the forest and the school’, the Brazilian colours and figures of Pau Brasil and Antropofagia tempered by her ‘military service in Cubism’, where the visual and geometrical language of the Parisian avant-garde enters into contact with a Brazilian environment. In a retrospective journalistic account in the 1950s, Patrícia Galvão (Pagu) gave her overview of the importance of Tarsila as a woman and artist, who came from the coffee plantations of the interior of São Paulo to be trained by French cubists. Her account of Tarsila do Amaral, published on December 10, 1950, is a remarkable critique and appreciation of Tarsila as a personality and of her art: From those times, more than a quarter of a century ago, a poet spoke of Tarsila: a ‘Caipirinha (Plantation girl) dressed by Poiret’. And she was. Not Poiret exclusively, but Poiret-Léger, since in her wardrobe as a woman from São Paulo and in her painting of our rural life, Tarsila came from Paris. As such, she was a unique case in modern Brazilian painting, producing a delightful primitivism, mixed with a coloristic transposition with an entirely new effect brought to our art.

While Tarsila ‘comes from Paris’, Pagu connects her work to remembered Brazilian landscapes and colours: Tarsila did not search for topics, she revealed only what her eyes saw or had seen. Her best painting, her most characteristic, comes out of this rediscovering. Her Brazilian colour is the colour of the interior, found in the blue and pink houses with their festive green. Tarsila found them on blue and pink trunks with their

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Chapter 9 flowers and leaves. All this painful, triumphant, luminous, and happy decoration represents a high point in São Paulo fortunes […]. I knew her during this phase […] Tarsila is above all a personality. She seems to me to be the first case of mental emancipation among São Paulo women, not for a question of wealth, intellectual development, or travel. Whether shaken by a pretentious high culture or alone in a painter’s studio, Tarsila kept up her good and welcoming smile, her superior understanding, her intelligence open to research, and all this with a dose of infinite modesty, always the first but doing everything to keep others from noticing […] An optimistic philosophy of life cast with a clear awareness of atmosphere […] products of the oratory and July festivals, waters, grass, cactus, that is Tarsila. (Fanfulla, December 10, 1950)

*** The controversial issue of power in the choice, loan, or purchase of prized aesthetic objects – the assembling of a constructed museum from a past that no longer exists and left no hierarchy of its ‘great works’ – can be recapitulated using the provocative notes of a quintessential avant-garde poet, Fernando Pessoa. His aesthetic writings on the difference between true genius and celebrity, or between fame and immortality, may prophesy from within modernism the next aesthetic age to come: Painting will sink. Photography has deprived it of many of its attractions. Futility or silliness has deprived it of almost all the rest. What was left has been spoiled by American collectors. A great painting means a thing that a rich American wants to buy because other people would like to buy it if they could. Thus paintings are set on a parallel, not with poems or novels, but with the first editions of certain poems and novels. The museum becomes a thing parallel, not to the library, but to the bibliophile’s library. The appreciation of painting becomes a parallel, not to the appreciation of literature, but to the appreciation of editions. Art criticism falls gradually into the hands of dealers in antiques. Architecture becomes a minor aspect of civil engineering. Only music and literature remain […] All statues and paintings […] are tyrannous in comparison with this. (2004, 207)

To follow Pessoa’s argument, Ibero-American cultural goods are still in relatively very few hands. Curator Tiago de Miranda comments on the fact that no Portuguese museum possesses a single

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important twentieth-century Brazilian artwork, and even in Brazil the institutional sources can be counted on one hand. Thus, the Grand Exhibitions are not only about choice and selection of modernist art; they represent a meteoric increase in value of individual objects. The Grand Exposition is the ultimate Collector. In their universality as ‘museums of everything’ – in the phrase of poet João Cabral de Melo Neto – the Grand Exhibitions widen their scope as they compare and synthesize the aesthetics of whole centuries and ages (the hotly debated terms pre- and post-modern are completely insignificant here, crushed by the collective weight of a century of the simply and all-consuming ‘Modern’). The ‘extravagant glory’ of their ‘Body & Soul’ – the latter phrase from the New York Times review of the 2001 Guggenheim Museum exhibit – can be taken to be a critical, emotional, and organizational principle, as well as a question to keep in mind while examining, viewing, and evaluating the art & artefacts and scripts & scribbles of the great global exhibitions of IberoAmerican modernisms. The Guggenheim exhibit is notable for connecting the baroque and contemporary in a synchronic history and selection of works through scholarship, patching together an influential textual history in the invention of modern art in Brazil. Although the Cannibal Manifesto has become the subject of postcolonial theory and subjected to analysis by major critics, and even a new close reading of its text,20 the Cannibal Magazine as a whole was reprinted only once, almost fifty years after its launching in São Paulo and fifty years before Tarsila’s major exhibits in Chicago and New York in 2018. Although the 1928 Magazine can now be read on-line, aside from the Manifesto its contents have not been the subject of any major study, nor has it been reprinted since 1975. The 2nd ‘dentition’, with its polemical columns, radical social critiques, and programme and illustrations by Tarsila and Pagu, has become all but invisible in the timeline of modernist studies. The 2nd ‘dentition’ allows readers to grasp the changes in perspective on Brazilian culture brought about by the politicization of concepts related to primitivism 20 See Beatriz Azevedo, Antropofagia  – Palimpsesto Selvagem (São Paulo:  Cosac Naify, 2016).

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after the Manifesto, and after Tarsila’s ‘tragic and ferocious’ paintings. Without that perspective, the evolution of modernism in Brazil cannot be fully understood. With the critical vacuum resulting from the invisibility of the 2nd ‘dentition’ and the lack of context for understanding Tarsila’s primitivism in Abaporu and Antropofagia, what has been missing in the presentation and understanding of transatlantic modernism between Brazil and Europe is the critique, made very explicit in 1929, that marks the beginning of the new social literature, the expression of a critical consciousness that has mistakenly been thought to be a phenomenon of the 1930s. The source of the acid and devastating critiques of patriarchy, class, gender, work, and wealth in Brazil are firmly established in the dissolution of the last stages of primitivism and the années folles, the end of the productive association between Brazilian artists and the Parisian avant-garde, and the return of its most prominent and productive personalities to Brazil by 1930. That transition is documented in the 2nd ‘dentition’, continued in 1931 in the short-lived pages of the journal O Homem do Povo and confirmed by the cinematographic, proletarian novel published by Patrícia Galvão in 1933, Industrial Park, by Oswald’s rebellion against transatlantic society and capitalism in the novel Serafim Ponte Grande in 1933, as well as by Tarsila’s last major painting, Workers, likewise dated 1933. The apotheosis of that period of interaction, study, and creative socialization is the final transatlantic voyage, implicit in Tarsila’s 1929 show in Rio de Janeiro; the 1930 exhibit and sale of dozens of paintings by European artists in major Brazilian cities, the École de Paris, led by Rego Monteiro and Géo-Charles; and the opening on March 26, 1930 of the ‘modernist house’ on Rua Itápolis in São Paulo, designed by the Ukrainian-Brazilian architect Gregori Warchavchik. With a tropical garden designed by Mina Klabin Warchavchik and art works by leading modernist artists, it is an early example of the Brazilian modernist style in architecture, receiving many thousands of visitors. Back in Paris in 1930, after almost all other Brazilians have returned, Rego Monteiro ironically participates in the inaugural show of an idea from 1922, the groupe d’artistes d’Amérique-latine à Paris. ***

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Brazil on Exhibit By way of the large number of international art shows and concerts, Brazil itself has been placed on exhibition,21 much like it was in the original modernist works, which raises the question how the entirety of a complex national entity can or should be understood to be the topic of a single work, or even a series of showings of its avant-garde artists. Scholar João Cezar de Castro Rocha proposes that Brazil has a history of objectification by visiting foreigners, grounded in the scientific and artistic missions visiting the country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Castro Rocha sees Brazil, in fact, as long represented through a series of vivid prose descriptions that resemble drawings or watercolours, beginning with Caminha’s letter in 1500, all similar to the widely displayed scenes of life and types in Brazil that Jean-Baptiste Débret published in 1835–36 in Paris. The country’s founding moments are common themes in art, from Victor Meirelles’ 1860 Primeira Missa (First Mass) to contemporary Portuguese artist Paula Rego’s distortion of the scene in The First Mass in Brazil on April 26, 1500 (1980). In such art, Brazilians are the object and Brazilwood is the commodity, thus setting up a sequence that will determine the future objectification of Brazil itself as a theme. A grand spectacle and architectural culmination of the Brazilian modernist project at mid-century is the official opening of Brasília on April 20, 1960 by President Jucelino Kubitschek. At the time, Brasília was the most audaciously futuristic city ever designed and constructed as a national capital, located on the country’s central plateau, an ‘inside’ without any major connections to an ‘outside’, except by air. As did Mário de Andrade and Ronald de Carvalho during their voyages, architect Oscar Niemeyer likewise compares and contrasts Brasília with Europe: the High Court is designed to have the ‘sobriety of the great squares of Europe’ and the massive concave and convex chambers of the National Congress are meant to 21 See João Cezar de Castro Rocha, ‘Brazil as Exposition’, Ciberletras 8.  .

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realize Le Corbusier’s ideal of ‘correct and magnificent volumes assembled in light’. Its streets were all one-way, and the overall design was in the shape of an airplane, or some say a cross. Photographs taken of the city on the day of its opening by artist photographers Marcel Gautherot, Peter Scheier and Thomaz Farkas document the incomplete construction and the provisional mode of operation of transportation and commerce on the immense panorama of the central plateau, with its vast spaces and 180-degree horizons.22 Its ability to function as a capital city seems paradoxical when writer Clarice Lispector writes in 1962, ‘Brasília is artificial, as artificial as the world must have been when it was created […] Construction with space calculated for clouds’.23 Like the blank pages of modernist scrapbooks, of a hero without any character, Brasília opens without any narrative of its own, like pages that await characteristic inscriptions that write its story and history. If the city’s architecture is a late modernist exposition on the landscape, it is also connected to the modernists of the 1920s through a manifesto, Lúcio Costa’s ‘plano piloto’ (pilot plan) containing twenty-three articles that draw on Le Corbusier and the lessons left from his visits to Brazil in 1929 and 1931. In March 2011, Tarsila’s Abaporu is the only painting displayed in the presidential residence, Palácio da Alvorada (Palace of the Dawn), to represent Brazil during the visit by a president of the United States.

Antropofagia for Export Antropofagia belongs to the attempts to overturn the conundrum of Brazil as colonial subject that began after independence in 1822. The Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (Historical and Geographical Institute) founded in 1838 initiates the study of Brazil as a topic, however, narratives of objectification continue to determine concepts of national history. With antropofagia, Brazil begins an exercise in self-criticism, using the very concepts of cultural miscegenation as prime material for 2 2 See ‘Corolário Brasileiro’, Forma 7–8 (Rio de Janeiro, March–April 1931), 20–22. 23 Brasília’, Jornal de Brasília (June 20, 1970).

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a more effective and definitive national assimilation from the outside to the inside. By 1924, Oswald de Andrade has Pau Brasil in mind as a step towards national autonomy through the export of poetry. By 1928 the concept of antropofagia takes its place as the country’s most important future export, one that has consolidated the attention and fame that the modernists seek to create in Paris. Under antropofagia, as Castro Rocha reasons, Brazilians are consuming both the perspectives of historical objectification and the long-standing contradictions of the country. The authors of the cannibal banquet of antropofagia will inevitably be affected by the process of constant change and assimilation, lacking the stability to sustain either a national or a personal identity. Facing internal contradictions, occupying a position themselves between ‘the forest and the school’, between Brazil and Europe, Oswald, Tarsila & Co. are intellectuals between cultures, artists who like Macunaíma are left without any character once the curtain falls on their grand moment of transatlantic synthesis. Their movement was built on these tensions and contradictions at every level, and in Europe their performances and artworks were successful because they synthesized these internal contradictions using traditional forms of music and art. They produced expressive and dynamic works of interest to international modernism and the avant-gardes. What survives of great importance is their idea and their strategy to allow Brazil to exist independently and internationally in all its unstable dynamism and variability. Following antropofagia, the cannibal theme will eventually appear in works of contemporary artists and writers, for whom the Manifesto is more a suggestion, an open text, than a blueprint. Brazilian playwright Newton Moreno’s ‘A refeição: ensaios sobre o canibalismo’ (‘The Meal: Dramatic Essays on Cannibalism’),24 draws directly on themes of cannibalism and the body: ‘The always problematic mode of contact with the other, the play’s thematic focus, has as its refrain the tormented encounter of the Indian with the culture of the “civilized” invader’.25 Two examples in North America 24 Newton Moreno, ‘The Meal:  Dramatic Essays on Cannibalism’, translated by Elizabeth Jackson, Theater 45.2 (2015), 69–81. The play was produced by Yale Cabaret in 2014. 25 Sílvia Fernandes, ‘Bodies in Pieces: An Introduction to Newton Moreno’s “The Meal” ’, translated by Elizabeth Jackson, Theater 45.2 (2015), 65–68.

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poetry and prose are ambient sound poet Jackson Mac Low’s ‘cannibalism mazurka’ and novelist Steve McCaffery’s ‘The Black Debt:’ ‘no minutes on sum time, yet the vegetarian eats cannibal through special permit of dissimilarity, phalanx in a direct clash’.26 A contemporary gallery work that engages with antropofagia is Ana Maria Maiolino’s installation originally in super-8 titled In-Out Antropofagia (1973), included in the Met Breuer exhibit ‘Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950–1980’ (September 13, 2017 to January 14, 2018).27 This super-8 film consists of close-ups of mouths in menacing and grotesque shapes, with large teeth and lips smeared with lipstick: ingesting, masticating and ejecting coloured string and other food and objects. To accentuate a ritualistic environment or to portray incomprehensible acts of a strange and aggressive kind, the film is accompanied by an arrhythmic soundtrack of electronic noise. Tape covers some of the mouths to prevent them from speaking, a form of protest that extends the radical politics of the 2nd ‘dentition’ of the Cannibal Magazine to the frame of military repression in the 1970s and 1980s. Maiolino’s installation anticipates the work of Leonora de Barros (2006) in ‘No país da língua grande’ (In the land of the large tongue, 1998; video performance 2006), in which the artist chews her own tongue, featured at the 24th Art Biennial of São Paulo (1998). Lygia Clark’s 1973 enactment titled ‘Baba antropofágica’ (Anthropophagic Drool), created in Paris with students at the Sorbonne, in which spools of thread are placed in the mouth to elicit drool, which then flows down the threads onto a person below who separates the threads, is re-enacted in New York in 200828 and included in the Museum of Modern Art show ‘Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988’.29 These enactments of antropofagia prepare and reinforce the giant Tarsila exhibition of 2017–18 at the root of ‘inventing modern art in Brazil’. 2 6 Steve McCaffery, The Black Debt (Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 1989). 27 See Ian Dudley, ‘In-Out Antropofagia (1973)’, Escala: Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (2014). 28 See Marie Carter, ‘The Re-enactment of Lygia Clark’s Baba Antropofágica (Anthropophagic Droo)’, The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics, and Culture (October 10, 2008). 29 See Roberta Smith, ‘See Me. Feel Me. Maybe Drool on Me’, The New York Times, Art Review (May 15, 2014).

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The nature and existence of these multiple exhibits raises, at the same time, theoretical questions and concerns that should be of interest to all. Is the grand baroque of the exposition as a form, in all its contrasts, shadows, and expressive heights, the operating metaphor that supports this new Exhibition Age, at once enveloping and assimilating our modernist heritage, both blotting out and aggrandizing its legacy of radical invention? Can the recalcitrant, insouciant, and rebellious modernisms be captured or portrayed by encyclopaedic exhibits? Is the prime material of our common intellectual constructions and visual experience of the twentieth century being reconceived and presented as a mass experience, changed unrecognizably into what could be termed the Museumification of the Modern, a Museum Cannibalism that denatures the material consumed? The commodification of Brazilian expatriate nationalist modernist artists may signal an ultimate synthesis or truce between the artist’s sphere and public space and the successful, if de-characterized, assimilation of the European avant-gardes by Brazilian primitivism. Brazilian modernist intellectuals and artists can be recognized in these exhibits as cannibal angels whose creative genius and radical criticisms forged the very substance that Brazil projects to the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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Index

Abaporu, O (painting) as cannibal 5, 79, 163 birthday present 42 description 81–2 drawings 9, 25, 109–10 exposition ‘Brazil 1920–1950’ 327 figure in Antropofagia 86–7 Galerie Percier 194 heritage of 324 in Chicago and New York 329 international fame 314 naming of 124 serio-tragic 194–95 source of cannibal manifesto 62 telluric 68, 152 Abdenur, Adriana Erthal 2, 16 Afro-Brazilian appropriation 21 characters 238 cuisine 69 figure in A Negra 61 music 22, 43, 58, 267, 272 musical instruments 61, 71 national character 8 national self-portrait 21 religion 217 role in primitivism 68 Agostini, Angelina 190, 192 Aita, Zina 5, 57, 189 Alcântara Machado, Antônio Castilho de 91, 93, 157, 165, 172, 193 Almeida, Guilherme de 57, 239, 250 Almeida Prado, Yan de 157 Almeida, Renato 58 Almeida, Rosa Vieira de 293

Almeida, Tácito de 56, 57 Almeida, Tasso de 157 Amaral, Aracy 163, 164, 242, 325 Amaral, Tarsila do Abaporu 5, 42, 61, 62, 79, 81–2, 124, 324 A Negra 61, 62, 66–8 Anjos 10, 43 Antropofagia (painting) 61, 62, 86–7 artist 1, 5, 12, 107, 111, 191, 329 Brazilian exhibits 219, 299 cannibalism and primitivism 104, 141 Cendrars in Brazil 156–65 Chicago and New York exhibits 126, 326–27 correspondence 41 description by Pagu 307–08, 330 École de Paris 111, 199 Galerie Percier 46, 68, 193, 194, 329 Paris 12, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 52, 61, 67, 69, 141 group of five 37 illustrations by 46, 157, 177, 295 Manteau rouge 21 Paris 12, 42, 45, 46, 52, 156, 243, 291 Pau-Brasil style 69, 163, 237 portraits 21, 234–35, 239 scrapbook 251 self-portrait 223, 236 ‘Tarsiwald’ 163, 192–94, 215, 217, 237, 291 travel 20, 162, 164, 184, 189–90 Amazonas (symphony) 48, 76, 195, 196, 221, 229

374 Index Anchieta, José S.J. 11, 165 Andrada, Bella de 5 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de 12, 21, 62, 77–80, 99–100, 152, 163, 229–31 Andrade, Mário de Cannibal Magazine 120 Escrava que não é Isaura, A 212 folklore 47, 92, 120, 143, 296–99 group of five 37, 222 library 314 Macunaíma 50, 71, 84–5, 92, 143, 222, 283 Modern Art Week 9, 57–9 music 92, 217 Ouro Preto 163–65 Paris 38 Pauliceia desvairada 34, 60, 62–6, 117, 157, 233, 238, 239, 264 portraits of 21, 233, 234, 241 satire 255 turista aprendiz, O 166–72, 184, 295, 327 Andrade, Oswald de Cannibal Magazine 102, 106, 107, 108, 112 Cannibal Manifesto 114, 262, 281 cannibal theory and critiques 294, 308–14 ‘Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil’ 69–70 memoirs 201 Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar 176–80 Paris 191, 192 Pau-Brasil 61, 73–4, 325, 335 Perfeito Cozinheiro das Almas deste Mundo, O 249–51 portraits 238, 241 Serafim Ponte Grande 180–84 ‘Tarsiwald’ 192–94

telegram-preface to Pathé Baby 174 travels 190–94 Anjos 10, 43, 316 Anthologie Négre 14 Antropofagia (painting) 61, 62, 86–7, 108 antropofagia (cannibalism) art exhibit theme 16, 194, 322, 328 assimilation 115 Cannibal Magazine 5, 101 Cannibal Manifesto 5, 70, 142, 294, 308 critical theory 4, 125, 126 critiques of 164, 277–86, 289, 291, 293, 308–14 cultural theory 2, 4, 14, 15, 94, 105, 106, 277, 332–37 Hans Staden 124–25, 141 humor 174 in literature 118 manifesto 23, 24 metaphor 3, 4, 30, 44, 46, 120 movement 61 Pagu 303, 307–08 performance 117 primitivism 23, 90, 165, 281, 329 rediscovery of Brazil 104 satire 18, 33 Tupinambás 3 Apollinaire, Guillaume 14 Aranha, Luiz 157 aristocracy 6, 8, 15, 164, 223 Art Biennal of São Paulo 15, 125, 232, 289, 328, 336 assimilation antropofagia 3, 46, 115, 119 Cannibal Manifesto 176 cultural practice 1, 16, 105, 154, 284 decolonization 10, 290 primitivism 313–14, 337 theoretical model 2, 18, 147 universal metaphor 120, 289, 311

375

Index Assis, Machado de comic tradition 15, 222 French language 38 lines borrowed 85 national character 10, 312 satire 18 self-conscious style 253 transatlantic crossings 187, 189   Badariotti, Nicolau 47, 142 Baker, Josephine (Frida Josephine McDonald) 20, 208, 214, 215, 216, 240 ballet 205–09 Ballets Russes 209 Le Boeuf sur le toit 207–08 Cendrars 159 La Création du monde 68 ethnography 23 Hallucinated City 66, 154 Légends, Croyances, et Talismans des Indiens de l’Amazone 50 L’ homme et son désir 47–8, 205–06 Ballets Russes 200, 209 Bananere, Juó (Alexandre Marcondes Machado) 257 Bandeira, Manuel 70–3, 97–8 berimbau 71 Modern Art Week 57, 59 poetry 21, 98, 230 portraits 241 Ritmo Dissoluto 51 banquet cannibal 33, 124, 251, 281, 283, 287, 314, 329, 335 metaphor 14 ritual 115 uniting opposites 277 Barão de Itararé, O (Aparício Torelly) 259

Barentzen, Aline van 51, 197, 198 Barros, João de 200 Barros, Leonora de 336 Beck, Conrad Arthur 197 Béhague, Gérard 43, 266 Bell, Clive 55 berimbau 11, 61, 70–3 Bernstein, Charles 46, 279 Bishop, Elizabeth 327 boi no telhado, O 207 Bopp, Raul Abaporu, O 42, 124 Brazilian identity 40–1, 118 Cobra Norato 37 diplomacy 92, 306 poet 300–02 second ‘dentition’ 108 Boss, Homer 189 Braga, Ernani 57, 58 Brancusi, Constantin 12, 156, 193, 320 Braque, Georges 190, 199, 219, 321, 322 brasilidade 2, 9 Brasil pelo Método Confuso 222 Brazilians in Europe 187–200 Brecheret, Vitor 45, 57, 188, 190, 191, 192, 322 Brésil, des hommes sont venus (memoir) xx Breton, André 216, 250 Broca, Brito 164 Bruno, Haroldo 91 Burle Marx, Roberto 2, 141, 326   Cabral, Pedro Álvares 20, 29, 118, 134–35, 160, 278 Câmara Cascudo, Luís da 71, 85, 92, 121, 143, 166 Caminha, Pero Vaz 73, 169, 281, 333 Campos, Augusto de 89, 101, 278 Campos, Haroldo de

376 Index aesthetics of excess 247 antropofagia 24, 90, 311–14 Cannibal Manifesto 46 Morfologia do Macunaíma 85, 143 Pau-Brasil 74 ‘Rule of Anthropophagy’ 46–7, 90 Cannibal Magazine (Revista de Antropofagia) 89–127 art 299, 303 Cannibal Manifesto 3, 28 cultural autonomy 290, 299 essential work 5 ethnography 47, 141–43 Hans Staden 263 humour 255 Pagu 300–02 poetry 77 politics 5, 8, 303, 336 reception 294, 318 ‘Romance do Veludo’ 296–98 satire 254, 289 second ‘dentition’ 83, 295 Cannibal Manifesto (Manifesto antropófago) 89–127 parody and humor 112–21 reception today 125–26 second ‘dentition’ 101–12 sources 121–25 capoeira 61, 71, 237 Carnaval em Madureira 69 carnival art 163 boi no telhado, O 207 comedy 262 fantasy 322 in poetry 262, 265 Manteau rouge 236 percussion 22, 77 primitivism 23, 40 procession 261–62 Rio de Janeiro 162, 242

songs 93 village celebration 69 Carpentier, Alejo 76, 197–98 Carvalho, Flávio de 241 Carvalho, Ronald de 145–55 Historietas 58 Modern Art Week 57, 59 Modernist theory 137 notebook 137 Portuguese futurism and ORPHEU 222, 240 travels 20, 139 Casa Modernista, see Modernist House Casals, Pablo 189, 202 Cascudo, Luís da Câmara 49, 71, 85, 92, 121, 143, 166 Castro, Fernanda de 239 Cearense, Catulo da Paixão 76, 207 Cendrars, Blaise 156–65 Anthologie Nègre 68 Au sans pareil 46 Ballet 74 Galerie Percier 193 Negra, A 67 Ouro Preto visit 162–65, 193 Parisian companion 45, 193, 242 poetry 136, 153 portraits 221 reception in Brazil 215 Tarsila do Amaral 67 travels 35, 140 Cezanne, Paul 42, 67 Chanel, Coco 55, 208 Chausson, Ernest 205 Chegall, Marc 156 Chopin, Frédéric 58 choros 267–72 Choro N. 10 75–7 Cinco Moças de Guaretinguetá (painting) 21 Claudel, Paul 47, 205, 206, 278, 291, 327

377

Index Clifford, James 115, Close, Tony 197 Cocteau, Jean ballets 291 Boeuf sur le toit, Le 207 Parisian companion 12, 156, 193 Corbusier, Le 215 Corrêa do Lago, Manoel 206, 207 Costa, Emília Viotti da 7 Costa, Lúcio 215, 313, 323, 334 Costa, Oswaldo 101–07 Couto de Barros, Antônio Carlos 157 Couto de Magalhães, José Vieira 121, 142, 205 Couto, Rui Ribeiro 240 Cunha, Euclides da 116,   d’Abbeville, Claude 156 Dada 207 Dalí, Salvador 324, 326 dance cannibal 211 choros 268 folk traditions 30, 267 French 271 fusion 43, 155, 266, 267, 270, 298 indigenous 48, 204 modern 200 rhythms 205 Villa-Lobos 48, 229 Dantas, Luís Martins de Souza 45 Débret, Jean-Baptiste 39, 167, 333 de Bry, Theodor 124–25 Debussy, Claude conservatory 205 Elsie Houston 199 Pauliceia Desvairada 63 Modern Art Week 58 Villa-Lobos 273 Delauney, Robert 156, 193, 320, 321, 322

d’Indy, Vincent 205 Diaghilev, Sergei 55, 189, 195, 208 Dias, Carlos Malheiro 132–35 Dias, Cícero 231, 241, 323 Di Cavalcanti, Emílio colours 298 memoirs 35, 298 Pagu drawing 300–01 Roerich Museum 323 Di Chirico, Giorgio 193 Divina Increnca, A 257–58 Dolzoni, Maria de Lourdes Castro (Miss Cíclone) 5, 22, 247–51 Dos Passos, John 193 Duchamps, Marcel 189, 322 Dufy, Raoul 207 Dukas, Paul 205 Duncan, Isadora 189, 200, 201 Duque, Gonzaga 10   Eça de Queiroz, José Maria de 131 École de Paris 219, 332 Eliot, T.S. 55 Errázuriz, Eugenia 193 Eschig, Max 195, 197, 207 Escola Nacional de Belas Artes 32 ethnography 141–43 indigenous 121, 287 Mário de Andrade 166 Lévy-Strauss 144 Europeans in Brazil 200–19 excess 247, 249, 263–73, 305   Fargue, Léon-Paul 193 Fauconnet, Guy-Pierre 207 Fernandes, Fabiano Seixas 23 Fernandes, Florestan Ferandez, Lorenzo 199 Ferraz, Geraldo 111, 307

378 Index Ferrignac (Inácio da Costa Ferrreira) 57 Ferro, António 208–10, 239 folklore berimbau 70 Câmara Cascudo 92, 121 Couto de Magalhães 124 Macunaíma 62 ‘Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil’ 281 Milhaud 205, 207 museums 318 turista aprendiz, O 167 Forster, E.M. 55 Foujita, Tsuguharu 219, 241–45 Fraser, Sir James George 12, 14, 144 Freitas, José Madeira de (Alfredo Chaves), see Mendes Fradique Freitas Valle, José de 245 French artistic mission 7, 39 Freud, Sigmund 12, 14, 114, 121 Freyre, Gilberto 144, 230 Fried, Oscar 197 Frond, Victor 40 Frost, Robert 55, 79 Fusco, Rosário 92   Gago Coutinho, Carlos Viegas 20, 132–35, 136, 188 Gallet, Luciano 217 Galvão, Patrícia (“Pagu”) 299–308 antropofagia 106, 302–03, 307 Di Cavalcanti 301 Homem do Povo, O 302–04 imprisonment 307 journalism 329 militancy 5, 302, 305 muse 238 notebook 304–05 Paixão Pagu 307 Parque Industrial 238, 247, 305 portraits 241 Raul Bopp 300–02

second ‘dentition’ 108, 300, 331 Tarsila 307–08, 329 travel 20, 217 Gambrell, Alice 45 Garcia, José Maurício Nunes 266 Géo-Charles 199, 219, 332 Gilberto, João 313 Giradoux, Jean 45, 59, 193 Gire, Joseph 59 Gleizes, Albert 41, 156, 190, 193, 219 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 121 Gomes, Carlos 117, 210 Gomide, Antônio 43, 323 Gonzaga, Chiquinha 44, 207 Gorki, Maxim 189 Gottschalk, Louis Moreau 43, 264 Graça Aranha, José Pereira da 57, 212 Graham, Maria 167 Graz, John 57, 83 Graz, Regina Gomide 5, 190 Gris, Juan 193 Guerra, Oswaldo 205, 206, 207 Guignard, Alberto da Veiga 323 Guinlé, Carlos 191, 203 Guyot, Charles Louis Prosper, see Géo-Charles   Haarberg, Wilhelm 57 Hallucinated City, see Pauliceia Desvairada Hemingway, Ernest 208 Henrique, Waldemar 71 Hesse, Herman 55 Hilário Tácito (José Maria de Toledo Malta) 251–53 História do Brasil (poetry) 262 História do Brasil pelo Método Confuso 253 Hollanda, Sérgio Buarque de 13 Homem do Povo, O (journal) 108, 302, 303, 332

Index Honneger, Arthur 55, 195 Houston, Elsie antropofagia 106 Chants populaires du Brésil 267 Pagu 307 Paris 192, 197 Péret 217–18 portrait 241 singer 5, 191, 198, 199 Villa-Lobos 198 Humanitism 15 humour 251–56, 257–59, 260–63 antropofagia 2, 3, 4, 91, 118, 294 Boi no telhado, O 207 Cannibal Manifesto 4, 18, 28, 52 Cannibal Magazine 5, 94–6, 113 Carlos Drummond de Andrade 229 chronicles 169, 278 Kodak 177 linguistic 257–59 Machado de Assis 15, 18

379 Perfeito Cozinheiro das Almas deste Mundo, O 22, 250 Quelques visages de Paris 31 renewal 11 subversive 260–63 travels 185 Huxley, Aldous 36–7, 45, 222 hybridity 1, 2, 7, 16, 23, 40, 140, 261, 289, 310   iconoclasm 5, 18 improvisation 249–74 choros 44 Marinetti 213 music 23, 266–72 Perfeito Cozinheiro das Almas deste Mundo, O 22, 247 Villa-Lobos 204, 272–74 indigeneity 1, 10, 120, 142 Industrial Park, see Parque Industrial

380 Index Instituto Nacional de Música 32 ‘In the Middle of the Road’, see ‘No meio do caminho’ Ives, Charles 206   James, William 121, Janacopulos, Adriana 5, 56, 188 Janacopulos, Vera 5, 51, 56, 188, 195, 198 Jáureguy, Carlos 17 Jarry, Alfred 14 jazz António Ferro 208 authenticity 44 improvisation 268 jazz-band 51 New York 149, 270 Oito Batutas 271 Paris 44, 208 world music 136, 266 João do Rio (Jõao Paulo Emílio Cristóvão dos Santos Coelho Barreto) 200 Jorge, Lídia 131–32 Joyce, James 55, 313   Kandinsky, Wassily 321 Karsarvina, Tamara 64 Keyserling, Hermann von 114, 120, 121, 305 Kilgour, Maggie 13, 33, 277, 279, 284 Koch-Grünberg, Theodor 84, 143 Kodak 32, 140, 157, 168, 175, 177, 226, 237 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo 321   Larbaud, Valéry 156, 193 Laurencin, Marie 193 Lawrence, D.H. 55 Lebreton, Joachim 39 Leclerc, Max 38 Le Gentil, Georges 192

Léger, Fernand ballets 278, 291 École de Paris 199, 219 fashion 329 influence 21, 67 194 Paris 45, 193 portraiture 21, 67 stage settings 68 Rego Monteiro 190, Tarsila 42, 156; Legrainm, Pierre 194 Léry, Jean de 29, Lessa, Orígenes 243–45 Lévi-Strauss, Claude Brazil 14, 327 Nambiquara 144 Roquette-Pinto 144 theory 149 travel 20 Tristes tropiques 14, 161, 213, 245–46 Levy, Alexandre 43, 207 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 12, 14, 120, 121 Lezama Lima, José 314 Lhote, André 41, 45, 156 Lima, Alceu Amoroso 145, 153, 174 Lima, Luiz Costa 288 Lins, Álvaro 263, 278, 302, 318 Lins do Rego, José 92, 202 Lisboa, Antônio Francisco (‘Aleijadinho’) 11, 162 Lispector, Clarice 334 Long, Marguerite 191 Lopokova, Lydia 200 Luís, Washington 39, 76   MacLow, Jackson 336 Macunaíma (novel) 62, 71, 84–5, 143, 225, 255, 260–61, 283, 327 Madureira, Luís 19, 280, 311 Maiolio, Ana Maria 126, 336 Malfatti, Anita artistic production 188 avant-garde 5 exhibits 320–21

Index expressionism 59, 239 Germany 189 group of five 37 Homem Amarelo, O 59 Modern Art Week 57 modernist house 83 Paris 12, 192 portraiture 233, 239 Roerich Museum 323 travels 20, 217; Malkovsky, François 50 ‘Manifesto antropófago’, see Cannibal Manifesto ‘Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil’ 61, 69–70, 26, 281 ‘Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry’, see ‘Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil’ Manteau rouge (painting) 21, 236 Maples Arce, Manuel 55 Marajoara 32, 327 Marcondes, Pureza 5 Mardrus, Lucie Delarue 51, 198 Maré, Rolf de 156, Marinetti, Filippo 14, 20, 211–13, 327 Marques Rebelo (Edy Dias da Cruz) 323 Martins de Almeida, Francisco 163 Martins, Fernando Cabral 117 Martins, Maria 5 Martius, Carl Friedrich Philipp von 167 Matisse, Henri 322 Matos, Gregório de 43, 312 Meirelles, Victor 333 Melo Neto, João Cabral de 313, 331 Mme. Pommery (novel) 251–53 Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar, As (novel) 176–84, 192, 222 Mendes, António Lopes 143–44, 166 Mendes Fradique (José Madeira de Freitas) 222, 254–56 Mendes, Murilo ‘Cartão Postal’ 228 ‘Família Russa no Brasil’ 265 História do Brasil 256, 262

381 improvisation 274 ‘Marcha final do Guarani’ 282–83 poetry 35 portraits 241 ‘República’ 99 Retratos Relâmpagos 217 second ‘dentition’ 108 Métraux, Alfred 124 Meyer, Augusto 92, 108 Mignone, Francisco 190 Milhaud, Darius 204–08 ballets 278, 291 exposition 327 in Brasil 20 L’ homme et son désir 47, 164 La Création du monde 74 music 136 Paris companion 45 156 Rio de Janeiro 136 Villa-Lobos 195, 197 Milliet, Sérgio 199, 266, 292, 294 Miró, Joan 189, 199, 322, 326 Miss Cíclone, see Maria de Lourdes Castro Dolzani 5, 22, 247 Mistinguett 208 Modern Art Week 3, 8, 9, 55–88, 135, 190, 240 Modernist House 83–4 Modigliani, Amedeo 190, 320 Mondrian, Piet 313 Montaigne, Michel de 41, 121, 260, 286, 290, 327 Montalvor, Luís de 145, 208 Monteiro, Vicente do Rego Amazon 47 École de Paris 111, 199, 332 exhibits 219, 332 ‘Essais transatlantiques’ 185 folklore 71 Géo-Charles 219, 240 illustrator 50 instantaneous poetry 140, 246 Modern Art Week 57

382 Index Paris 45, 52, 192, 332 portraits 240 Quelques visages de Paris 31–2 ‘Recife’ 140 travels 20, 190; Monteiro Lobato, José Bento Renato 124, 221, 250, 321 Montoya, Antonio Ruiz de 124, 142, Moraes, Rubens Borba de 157, More, Thomas 41, 119 Moreira, Álvaro 210 Moura, Emílio 163 Moya, Antônio 57 Municipal Theatre of São Paulo 9, 57, 59, 65, 200 museum exhibits and exhibitions Art Institute of Chicago 328 brasiliana 318 Casa Modernista 84 Fundación Juan Miró (Barcelona) 322 Guggenheim Museum (New York) 324, 328, 331 Indianapolis Museum of Art 326 Jewish Museum (New York) 326 Josef-Haubrich Kunsthalle (Cologne) Met Breuer (New York) 336 modernism 322–32 Musée d’art modern de la ville de Paris 324, 325, 327 Musée de l’Homme Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadero 33, 50, 292 Musée Galliéra 322 Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (Buenos Aires) 81 Museo de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid) 326 Museo del Barrio (New York) 328 Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires) 323 Museo nazionale di Reggio Calabria 324

Museu do Chiado (Lisbon) 328 Museu Nacional (Rio de Janeiro) 15, 48, 70, 144 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) 21–2, 126, 251, 322–27 Museum of Occidental Art (Moscow) 322 Museum of the Arts of Rio de Janeiro (MAR) 318 Museu Lasar Segall 190 National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo) 322 Phillips Collection 324 Pompidou Centre 324 Roerich Museum 199, 323 São Paulo Art Biennial 328, 336 Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) Whitney Museum of American Art 326 music black 41 Brazilian 206 cannibal 51, 198 chamber 205 contemporary 313 critic 92 dance 270 folk 217, 229, 272 French 197, 199, 205 habanera 43, 296 indigenous 33, 48, 291 lundu 43, 267, 268, 296 maxixe 44, 155, 205, 252, 265, 266, 267, 268, 270 modinha 43, 266, 267 mosaic 76 modern style 59, 222 nationalist 11, 44, 205, 249 Nhambiquaras 144 performance 266, 328 polka 43, 207, 267

Index popular 22, 266, 272 rhythm 149 serenade 267 syncopation 271 synthesis 8, 30, 76, 136 tango 43, 201, 207 theatre 59 world 136 Mussorgsky, Modest 64   Nabuco, Joaquim 22, 314 Nambiquaras 144 Nascimento Filho, Frederico 58 Nava, Pedro 163, 164, 222, 224, 294–95 Nazareth, Ernesto 205 Negra, A (painting) 21, 61, 62, 66–8, 86, 141, 295, 329 Nepomuceno, Alberto 205, 207 Nery, Ismael 241, 242, 323 Niemeyer, Oscar 215, 323, 333 Nijinsky, Vaslav 64, 200 Nobling, Elisabeth 5, 192 ‘No meio do caminho’, (poem) 77–80 Nonê (Oswald de Andrade Filho) 162, 164, 193, 239, 240 Nordau, Max 119 Novaes, Guiomar 5, 57, 58 Nunes, Benedito 4, 12, 63, 115, 166   Oito Batutas 267, 268, 270–72 Osorio, Pedro Luís 191 Oswald, Henrique 205 Ouro Preto 162–65   Paim, Antônio 57 parody cannibal 32 Cannibal Manifesto 112, 113, 114, 118, 289

383 cultural 15 linguistic 290 Manha, A 259 Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar 176 openness 4 Ronald de Carvalho 149 Satie 58 Serafim Ponte Grande 180 ‘Shonosuké’ 245 social 260 Torelly 259 Parque Industrial (novel) 6, 38, 58, 238, 239, 243, 247, 305, 332 Parr, Audrey 206 Pathe Baby (novel) 172 Patou, Jean 38 Pau-Brasil antropofagia 328 ‘Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil’ 61, 69 national portraits 226–28 Pau-Brasil 69, 70, 73–4, 240, 281 Pauliceia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) 62–6 fantasy 264 improvisation 264 São Paulo portrait 61, 233, 238, 240 Pedrosa, Mário 33, 217 Penteado, Olívia Guedes Amazon excursion 166 description 164 literary salon 36 Ouro Preto excursion 162 Paris 191, 193 Parque Industrial 38, 305 percussion instruments patron 5, 59, 223, 245 Afro-Brazilian 71 ballet 48 carnival instruments 22, 23 Choro N.10 61

384 Index expanded orchestra 77 Milhaud 205 Nonetto 273 Oito Batutas 270 unfamiliar 43, 195, 272 Péret, Benjamin 106, 108, 214, 216, 217 Perfeito Cozinheiro das Almas deste Mundo, O 22, 247, 248–51, 252, 304 Pessoa, Fernando 138–39, 146–47, 278, 293, 312, 330 Picabiá, Francis 14, 322 Picasso, Pablo 55, 156, 193, 199, 208, 321, 322, 325, 326 Picchia, Menotti del 37, 57, 58, 211, 221, 250 pilgrimage 13, 20, 35, 36 Pixinguinha (Alfredo Viana da Rocha, Jr.) 22, 267, 268, 270 Piza, Toledo 56, 188 poetry continental 147 export of 34, 311, 335 geographical and ethnographic 156 in prose 177 popular and folk 5, 85, 163 surrealist 217 telegraphic 172 Tupi 313 Week of Modern Art 57–8 polyrhythms 195, 206, 207 polytonality 204, 206, 207 Porter, Cole 217 Portinari, Cândido 239, 241, 242, 245, 324 portraiture 20, 21, 67, 166, 221–48 Poulet, Gaston 199 Pound, Ezra 37, 55 Prado, Paulo 56, 156, 191, 193 Prado, Yan de Almeida 57 primitivism assimilation and hybridity 40 avant-garde 14, 34, 78

Brazilian 33, 79, 292, 337 cannibal theme 23 ethnographic 67, 309 European 28, 42, 90, 114 literary 12, 141 museums 325 popular 159 radical 90, 309, 331 Rousseau 45 telluric 12 transatlantic 332 Prokofiev, Serge 12, 195 prose cubist 177 destabilization 239 futurist 211 indigenous or folk 85 poetic 177, 336 photographic 173 portraits in 222, 238 sketches 148 telegraphic 172, 174 travel 147, 167 Proust, Marcel 55, Przyrembel, Georg 57   Queiroz, Raquel de 36, 139   Raskin, Maurice 197, 197, 205 Ravel, Maurice 195, 199, 208 Rawson, Claude 18, 118 Rego, Paula 333 Rei da Vela, O (play) 6, 306 Renoir, Jean 42 Revista de Antropofagia, see Cannibal Magazine Reyes, Alfonso 314 Riaudel, Michel 4 Ribeiro, Alberto Martins 57 Ribeyrolles, Charles 40

Index Ricardo, Cassiano 212 Rilke, Rainer Maria 55 Ritmo Dissoluto (poetry) 61, 70–3 Rocha, João Cezar de Castro 14, 333, 335 Rodin, Auguste 42, 82 Rodrigues, Nelson 93 Romains, Jules 45, 156, 193 Romero, Sílvio 5 Rondon, Cândido Mariano da Silva 144, 283 Roquette-Pinto, Edgar 144, 198 Rosa, João Guimarães 313 Rosenberg, Léonce 193 Roualt, Georges 321 Rousseau, Douanier Henri 41, 45, 194 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 121 Roussel, Albert 195, 197, 205 Rubenstein, Arthur concerts 195, 198, 238 Rudepoema 204, 237–38 Villa-Lobos 197, 202–04, 207, 272 voyage 192; Rugendas, Johann Moritz 40 Russolo, Luigi 64   Sacadura Cabral, Artur de 20, 132–35, 188 Saint-Hilaire, Auguste 156 Saint-Saëns, Camile 205 Salgado, Plínio 57 samba 23, 40, 207, 240, 267 Santa Rosa, Henrique Américo 124 Santiago, Silviano 18, 281, 283, 287 Santos Dumont, Alberto 134, 188, 199 Sardinha, Pero Fernandes 28, 46, 121, 184 Satie, Erik 12, 55, 58, 156, 193, 195, 205 satire camera eye 177 cannibal 91, 284 destructive 289 dry 130 expressionist 66

385 fragmentary 247 fundamental 18 humoristic 167, 257 iconoclastic 5 in manifestos 52 literary 112 political 99, 113, 181 rhetorical 278 self-satire 18 social 119, 181, 260, 264, 312 subversive 19; Schiff, Sydney 55 Schmitt, Florent 195, 197 Schwartz, Jorge 32, 50, 327 Segall, Lasar 45, 190, 240, 241 Segovia, Andrés 195 ‘Sentimental Memoirs of John Seaborne’, see Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar Serafim Ponte Grande (novel) 104, 136, 176–84, 218, 313, 332 Seraphim Grosse Pointe, see Serafim Ponte Grande Severini, Gino 199 Shakespeare 11, 65, 113, 222 Shéhérazade Club Silva Bruhns, Ivan da 56, 188 Silva, Helena Pereira da 5 Silva, Lúcia Branco da 5 Sousândrade (Joaquim de Sousa Andrade) 313 Souza Cardoso, Amadeo 319–21 Souza Dantas, Luís Martins de 147, 153, 191, 307 Souza Lima, João de 190, 192, 197 Spengler, Oswald 119 Spruce, Richard 49 Staden, Hans devouring of 290 images from 124 in Cannibal Magazine 163 indigenous body and cultures 287, 318

386 Index memoir of captivity 124 Tupinambás 174 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 206 Stokowski, Leopold 197, 199 Stravinsky, Igor 55, 199, 200, 208, 272, 273 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 13, Sul América 20 Supervielle, Jules 156, 193 Süssekind, Flora 17, 18, 181 synthesis art and society 337 continental 155, 172 creative 43, 64 cultural 3, 40 humorous 263 musical 76, 267, 270 poetic 74 thematic 74 transatlantic 335 universal 314   Tagliaferro, Madalena 5, 38, 189, 195, 197, 202 Tagore, Rabindranath 147 Tamayo, Rufino 324 Tapuias 170, 284 Tarasti, Eero 61, 77 Terán, Tomás 51, 195, 197, 198 Thiollier, Réné 162, 164 Tiradentes 162 Toda a América (poetry) 172 Tonks, Patrick 16, 184 Torga, Miguel 201 Tovalou, Kojo 156 transatlantic 129–85 travels Amazonian 167–68, 295 Americas 20, 148 Brazilian 120, 144, 200–13 art exibitions 325–28

Caribbean 148 cultural 140 European 41, 190, 193 geographical and ethnographic 19, 136 Italy and Spain 176, 190 literary 179–80, 182 London 190 Mato Grosso 142 Mexico 152, 153 modernist 25, 188 Morocco, Spain and Portugal 140 musical 136 New York 149 Paris 35, 130 world 130 Tristes Tropiques 144, 161, 213, 245 Tropicália 45, Tupi-Guarani 3, 11, Tupinambá 41, 124, 141, 174, 287 Tupinambá, Marcelo 44, 205, 207 turista aprendiz, O (travel memoir) 166–72, 295, 327   Ubu-Roi 323 Udler, Berco 323 Uirapuru (symphony) 41, 48, 49, 76, 77, 221, 229 Unamuno, Miguel de 284–85 Utopia chroniclers 260 inverted 41 modernist 20 More 41, 119 pre-colonial 114 primitivist 10, 33, 183 regressive 24, 80 transoceanic 183–84 Vallejo, Ceesar 55 Varèse, Edgard 195, 197 Vargas, Getúlio 199, 207

387

Index Velloso, Hildegardo 57, Velloso Guerra, Maria Virgínia Leão (‘Nininha’) 5, 205, 206, 207 Verne, Jules 51, 129–30 Vieira, Antônio S.J. 119, 284, 294, 312 Vieira, Antônio Paim 57, 173 Viggiani, Niccolino 211 Villegagnon, Nicolas Durand de 120 Villa-Lobos, Heitor 195–99 Alma brasileira 309 Amazonas 48, 74 Amerindian melodies 48, 221 cannibalism 47 Carlos Guinlé 191 Choro N.10 75–7, 199, 318 choros 22, 23, 40, 237, 269 compositions 12 Danças Africanas 48, 67, 199 Epigramas irônicas e sentimentais 147, 240 essential works 5, 188 folk and popular compositions 229 French composers in Brazil 199 improvisation 44, 272–74 indigenous elements 49 interview 51 National Museum 144 Orpheonic singing 155 Paris 12, 52, 191, 193, 237

Parisian concerts 56, 57, 188, 191 primitivism 33 Prole do Bebê, O 202 Rudepoema 202–04, 237 rhythms 246 Souza Lima 191 ‘Suite Populaire brésilienne’ 44 Sul América 20 syncretism 44 Três Poemas Indígenas 49 Uirapuru 48, 74 United States 318 Week of Modern Art 57–60 Villa-Lobos, Lucília 5, 58, 217 Viñes y Roda, Ricardo 195, 207 Vollard, Ambroise 156, 193 Voronoff, Serge 121   Wagner, Richard 65, 205 Wallace-Crabbe, Chris 280, 286 Warchavchik, Gregori 62, 83–4, 214, 219, 224, 225, 332 Warchavchik, Mina Klabin 332 Whitman, Walt 153 wit 3, 18, 52, 92, 112, 113, 250, 266 Woolf, Virginia 55, 136

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY EDITORIAL BOARD: RODRIGO CACHO, SARAH COLVIN, KENNETH LOISELLE AND HEATHER WEBB This series promotes critical inquiry into the relationship between the literary imagination and its cultural, intellectual or political contexts. The series encourages the investigation of the role of the literary imagination in cultural history and the interpretation of cultural history through literature, visual culture and the performing arts. Contributions of a comparative or interdisciplinary nature are particularly welcome. Individual volumes might, for example, be concerned with any of the following:

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For Italian studies, contact Heather Webb

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Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500. Papers from the ­Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 1. 316 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-160-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6970-X Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): German Literature, History and the Nation. Papers from the ­ Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 2. 393 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-169-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6979-3 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Science, Technology and the German Cultural Imagination. Papers from the C ­ onference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, ­Cambridge 2002. Vol. 3. 319 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-170-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6980-7 Anthony Fothergill: Secret Sharers. Joseph Conrad’s Cultural Reception in Germany. 274 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-271-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7200-X Silke Arnold-de Simine (ed.): Memory Traces. 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity. 343 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-297-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7223-9 Renata Tyszczuk: In Hope of a Better Age. Stanislas Leszczynski in Lorraine 1737-1766. 410 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-324-9 Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 1. The Art of Urban Living. 344 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-532-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7536-X Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds): Imagining the City, Volume 2. The Politics of Urban Space. 383 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-533-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7537-8

Vol. 9 Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl (eds): ImageScapes. Studies in Intermediality. 289 pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-573-1 Vol. 10 Alasdair King: Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing, Media, Democracy. 357 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-902-9 Vol. 11 Ulrike Zitzlsperger: ZeitGeschichten: Die Berliner Übergangsjahre. Zur Verortung der Stadt nach der Mauer. 241 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-087-2

Vol. 12 Alexandra Kolb: Performing Femininity. Dance and Literature in German Modernism. 330pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-351-4 Vol. 13 Carlo Salzani: Constellations of Reading. Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality. 388pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-860-1 Vol. 14 Monique Rinere: Transformations of the German Novel. Simplicissimus in Eighteenth-Century Adaptations. 273pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-896-0 Vol. 15 Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones (eds): Constructions of Conflict. Transmitting Memories of the Past in European Historiography, Culture and Media. 282pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-923-3 Vol. 16 Ingo Cornils and Sarah Waters (eds): Memories of 1968. International Perspectives. 396pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-931-8 Vol. 17 Anna O’ Driscoll: Constructions of Melancholy in Contemporary German and Austrian Literature. 263pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0733-8 Vol. 18 Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (eds): Other People’s Pain. Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics. 252pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 Vol. 19 Ian Cooper and Bernhard F. Malkmus (eds): Dialectic and Paradox. Configurations of the Third in Modernity. 265pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7 Vol. 20 Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds): Playing False. Representations of Betrayal. 355pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0867-0 Vol. 21 Guy Tourlamain: Völkisch Writers and National Socialism. A Study of Right-Wing Political Culture in Germany, 1890–1960. 394pp., 2014. ISBN 978-3-03911-958-5 Vol. 22 Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds): Alternative Worlds. Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900. 343pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1787-0

Vol. 23 Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel (eds): Invisibility Studies. Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture. 388pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0985-1 Vol. 24 Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler (eds): Cultural Transformations of the Public Sphere. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. 349pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0991-2 Vol. 25 Marjorie Gehrhardt: The Men with Broken Faces. Gueules Cassées of the First World War. 309pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1869-3 Vol. 26 David Walton and Juan A. Suárez (eds): Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space. Borders, Networks, Escape Lines. 302pp., 2017. ISBN 978-3-0343-2205-8 Vol. 27 Robert Craig and Ina Linge (eds): Biological Discourses. The Language of Science and Literature Around 1900. 448pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-78-9 Vol. 28 Rebecca Waese: When Novels Perform History. Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature. 272pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-84-0 Vol. 29 Udith Dematagoda: Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic. A Study of his Novels and Plays, 1926–1939. 222pp., 2017. ISBN 978-1-78707-289-3 Vol. 30 Bernard Beatty and Alicia Laspra-Rodríguez (eds): Romanticism, Reaction and Revolution. British Views on Spain, 1814–1823. 342pp., 2019. ISBN 978-3-0343-2249-2 Vol. 31 Remko Smid: European Vistas. History, Ethics and Identity in the Works of Claudio Magris. 184pp., 2020. ISBN 978-1-78997-635-9 Vol. 32 Caroline Rupprecht: Asian Fusion. New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde 259pp., 2020. ISBN 978-1-78707-355-5 Vol. 33 Kenneth David Jackson: Cannibal Angels: Transatlantic Modernism and the Brazilian Avant-Garde. 410pp., 2021. ISBN 978-1-78874-038-8