This text introduces the catalogue to the Exposição Nacional de Arte Abstrata held at Hotel Quitandinha in the city of Petrópolis, located near Rio de Janeiro, in February and March of 1953. Artist Edmundo Jorge, who organized the show, issues a “warning for laymen” about the directions taken by abstraction in “pursuit of the simplification” of art and “its basic elements: color and form.” The “death of painting,” where painting is understood as reproduction of nature, can be attributed, Jorge argues, to the invention of photography and to new technical and social factors relevant to art, as well as to research into problems specific to artistic language. Modern art is “alien to any [specific] theme”; it does not attempt to represent the visible world, but rather to forge “new universes, new natures, according to the laws of each painter.”  

The Exposição Nacional de Arte Abstrata was organized jointly by the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ) and the Associação Petropolitana de Belas Artes. The show attempted to provide an overview of abstract artists in Brazil, from those associated with “lyrical or informalist” tendencies to those associated with the constructivist geometric movement. While the exhibition catalogue contains images of fifty-three works by twenty-three artists, Eduardo Jorge points out in a text written in 1984 that some of the works were removed after the printing of the catalogue but before the opening of the show. At the same time, some artists not invited to participate in the show submitted work (this was the case of Aldo Bonadei). The participants in the show included artists who would form the Grupo Frente the following year, specifically Ivan Serpa, Décio Vieira, Aluísio Carvão, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, and Abraham Palatnik; all of those artists were, by this time, producing work with a constructivist bent. The following artists are also mentioned as participants in the show: Margaret Spence, Liú, Fayga Ostrower, Rossini Quintas Pérez, Anna Bella Waldman, Tomás Santa Rosa, Ramiro Martins, F. Dupaty, J. Jardim de Araújo, Zélia Salgado, Antonio Bandeira, Antonio Luz, J. Mattos, Evelyn Stupakof, Elemer Gollmer, and Jorge himself.

See as well the texts on the I Exposição nacional de arte concreta: artes visuais e poesía, a show held in 1956 in which most of the artists in the Grupo Frente participated: “Cartaz da I Exposição nacional de arte concreta: artes visuais e poesía” (doc. no. 1232176); Ferreira Gullar’s texts “I - O Grupo de São Paulo: I Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta (doc. no. 1087166) and “I Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta: 2 - O grupo do Rio” (doc. no. 1090217); Mário Pedrosa’s “Paulistas e cariocas” (doc. no.1085056); and José Geraldo Vieira’s “Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta” (doc. no. 1087109).