Mário Pedrosa

In this book, Otília outlines the non-linear career path of one of Brazil’s greatest art critics, who closely followed, throughout most of the twentieth century, the comings and goings of international art. Mário Pedrosa, without ever giving up on political activism, never dissociated social revolution from the most advanced art, or independent art—which he did not always interpreted in the same way. In other words, despite his initial reservations about the modern art that, in the 1933 conference about Käthe Kollwitz, he identified as “a childish play of shapes”, he gradually realized, as a politician and revolutionary, how much the struggle for the liberation of humanity involved the preservation and expansion of the minimum initiative allowed in capitalist society. He started to see bourgeois art with different eyes, and tried to find the convergence, although incipient, between the art that he called hermetic, confined to aesthetic appearance, and the art that sought inspiration in the “dramatic fermentation” of society. When he returned from exile in 1945, although distanced from Trotskyism, he was still loyal to the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art’s motto—“The independence of art for the revolution, and the revolution for the complete liberation of art”—, starting a relentless battle for Brazil to abandon isolation and embrace the most advanced art from that time. This effort obviously met with typical obstacles of a peripheral country, where talking about artistic independence is at best problematic, but the breath of fresh air that it brought to Brazil forced our artists and critics to discuss the course that art—which was clearly going backwards in relation to the avant-garde achievements—would take among us. In defense of abstract art, he claimed that it provided symbols for an unprecedented visual language destined to ‘wake’ us from the everyday perceptual atony, hoping to shorten the distance that separates us from the “distant horizons of utopia”. Such an undertaking would culminate in Brasília—the great synthesis announced by the vanguards and reactivated by the abstract construction project—, a feat he not only recorded but also vehemently defended, promoting an international meeting of art critics in 1959 called “Brasília, síntese das artes” (Brasília: Synthesis of the Arts).

Originally published in 1991, on the 10th death anniversary of Mário Pedrosa, and republished in 2004, with the addition of “Atualidade de Mário Pedrosa” (The current relevance of Mário Pedrosa), a text written on Pedrosa’s centenary that places him among the greatest Brazilian critics. The latest edition has been kept in its entirety.

Keywords: Mário Pedrosa, Art Criticism, Proletarian Art, Abstract Art, Concretism, Neoconcretism, Gestalt, Postmodernism, Brazilian Architecture, Brasília, Biennials