In 1886, after earning a law degree, writer and diplomat [José Pereira da] Graça Aranha (1868−1931) was designated a judge in Rio de Janeiro. Pursuant to the proclamation of the República Federativa do Brasil in 1889, he became a magistrate. During the same period, he wrote the novel Canaã (1902), which indisputably marks the beginning of the pre-modern phase in Brazilian arts. From 1900 to 1920, he was a diplomat for Itamaraty (name of the headquarters of the Ministry of External Relations) in a number of important European countries. He returned to Brazil convinced of the need for radical change in the perception of Brazilian literature, and as a result, he became a crucial figure in the organization of the Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo. The text presenting the event is related to an essay he wrote in 1921 entitled “A estética da vida.”
The lecture Graça Aranha gave at the opening of the Semana de Arte Moderna held at the Teatro Municipal de São Paulo on February 13, 1922, indicates the important role he played for the first generation of modern artists from Brazil. That harmonic relationship, however, proved short lived: two years later, in 1924, Graça Aranha would level a personal attack on Oswald de Andrade, calling the artist and his work one of the most “dangerous cultural phenomena that an illiterate nation could face.” Sérgio Buarque de Holanda was also the object of his wrath. Graça Aranha accused him of being an “academic modernist.” Beyond the cosmic spirituality expressed by Graça Aranha in this lecture, the muddled and undeveloped ideas he puts forth to a certain extent, did capture the thinking of the participants in the Semana de Arte Moderna, especially regarding the “backwardness” prevalent in the Brazilian cultural scene in the early twentieth century.