Ever since the academic romanticism of the nineteenth century, Brazilian artists had longed to create a “national (Brazilian) art,” a goal that at times had hampered their creative development. The painters Giovanni Castagneto, Oswaldo Goeldi, and Alberto da Veiga Guignard were among those who were able to avoid that shortcoming in the early twentieth century, while remaining immersed in the contradictions of contemporary Brazilian life and art. Beginning in the 1950s, given the impact of modernity, the quest for a “typical sort of art” was set aside in favor of a dialogue with the ideas being advocated by international art. Following the Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (1951), a number of different movements emerged, influenced by geometric abstraction, informalism, and other cosmopolitan trends. The conflict between “national” and “international” art was no longer a problem for artists in the 1960s and 1970s, who worked on their own versions of Pop Art or Nouveau Réalism, and even Minimalism and Conceptual Art, and reconnected with earlier neo-concrete approaches. By the 1980s the legitimacy of Brazilian art produced therefore showed that the local art milieu had measurably matured. Local artists were now able to think in international terms, while keeping in mind local contributions made in the past. This justified references to “an international Brazilian art.”    

Tadeu Chiarelli, curator and current director of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, has been active as a researcher and curator in the fields of photography and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian art. His work has shown how art and photography are linked to the art world and its circuits, emphasizing an interest in social events. He played a key role in promoting photography as a fundamental medium in Brazilian art in recent decades.

Chiarelli reviews more than a century of Brazilian art, identifying the work of a number of local exponents of modern and contemporary art who addressed “the conflict” between national and international art. From the ufanismo (boastful nationalism) of the nineteenth century to the “international Brazilian art” of the 1980s, there were various degrees of interest concerning intrinsically Brazilian matters as compared to the repertoire favored by international art. Ignoring the subjugation issue and focusing more on formal academic models for an “autonomous and non-colonization” approach (as distinct from the essentialist idea of Brazilian “authenticity”), the author reiterates the qualitative importance of certain local predecessors.

This essay, written in 1994, was originally scheduled to be published in the catalogue for an exhibition of Latin American art in the United States (which was ultimately canceled). The text appeared the following year in the magazine Portoarte, and was included in Chiarelli’s series of articles and essays entitled Arte internacional brasileira (1999).   

[See the following articles by Tadeu Chiarelli in the ICAA digital archive: “15 artistas brasileiros: colocando dobradiças na arte contemporânea” (doc. no. 1110500); “Amanhã hoje: Casa triângulo de 1988 a 1995” (doc. no. 1111344); “Apontamentos para um mapa das artes plásticas em São Paulo durante 1985” (doc. no. 1111351); “Apropriações: o lugar da arte como questão” (doc. no. 1111252); “Armadilhas para Narciso” (doc. no. 1111253); “Considerações sobre o uso de imagens de segunda geração na arte contemporânea” (doc. no. 1110502); “Emmanuel Nassar: erudito e popular” (doc. no. 1110457); “Fotografía en Brasil: años 90 = Photography in Brazil in the 1990s” (doc. no. 1110894); “A gravura no espelho” (doc. no. 1111250); “A gravura paulista significa” (doc. no. 1111251); “Jac Leirner” (doc. no. 1111254); “La mirada contaminada: otras fotografias = The Contaminated Gaze: Other Photographies” (doc. no. 1110893); “Realidade e simulacro” (doc. no. 1111255); “Uma realidade... dilacerante: a produção de Nazareth Pacheco = Nazareth Pacheco’s output: a lacerating reality” (doc. no. 1111059); “Sobre a fotografia brasileira atual = On Current Brazilian Photography” (doc. no. 1110895); “Sobre as pinturas de Mônica Nador” (doc. no. 1111256); and “O tridimensional na arte brasileira dos anos 80 e 90: genealogias, superações” (doc. no. 1111352)].