In this article, the art critic Lourival Gomes Machado elaborates on the work by Francisco Rebolo and Clóvis Graciano. It is significant, in his opinion, that both artists would start their artistic careers ten years after the Semana de 1922,thus showing an affiliation with the Brazilian “modernist” tradition of the previous decade. However, both artists lacked the destructive impetus characteristic of the 1920s. Gomes Machado understands that Rebolo’s proposal focuses on the reality of his surroundings, while Graciano’s work is only preoccupied with art itself. It was the Second World War, in his opinion, that diminished the artistic exchanges at an international level and which affected Brazil by causing its isolation. A good portion of its painting—that previously copied foreign examples—had lost quality, although this was not the case when it came to Rebolo and Graciano. In his opinion, the country’s art was not in a period of decline but rather, on the contrary, it was experiencing a period of great refinement in the arts.

In his article, the art critic Lourival Gomes Machado (1917–67) comments on the exhibition by Francisco Rebolo [Gonsales] (1902–80), at the Livraria Brasiliense, as well as the exhibition by Clóvis Graciano (1907–88), at his own workshop (both held in 1944 in São Paulo). From Gomes Machado’s writings, we perceive the importance he gives to the “modernist” tradition, in an effort to create an affiliation of both exhibitions to the Semana de 1922. He was of the opinion that Rebolo and Graciano would be the ones to continue the search for a perfected adjustment to that pictorial legacy. These ideas, only outlined in this article, were expanded in the book he wrote in 1947, Retrato da Arte Moderna no Brasil, where he describes what he understood to be the history of “modernism,” also discussing in passing the antecedents and consequences of this core event in 20th Century Brazilian Art.

Lourival Gomes Machado was a journalist, a critic and an art historian. Around 1941, together with prominent intellectuals such as Antonio Candido, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, and Décio de Almeida Prado, he launched the magazine Clima (São Paulo), with the primary objective of promoting the renovation of critique in the areas of literature, cinema and theatre in Brazil. At the time, he was the art critic for the newspaper Folha da Manhã, and the editor of international politics at O Estado de S. Paulo. He also became the curator at MAM/SP (Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1949–51), after the Belgian curator Léon Degand abandoned his post, apart from being the chief curator of the first and fifth international biennials of São Paulo. His most famous text, Barroco Mineiro (1969), is a collection of articles on that topic, previously started in 1953 in the book Teorias do Barroco.

[For additional reading and other texts by Gomes Machado, see in the ICAA digital archive: “Ainda não é amanhã” (doc. no. 1110722); “Apresentação” (doc. no. 1110834); “Bienal: significação do novo” (doc. no. 1110723); (untitled) [“Caberá abrirmos, nesse passo (…)”] (doc. no. 1110358); “A crítica sitiada, cá e lá” (doc. no. 1110725); “IV Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna” (doc. no. 1232311); “Nem todo número é de ouro” (doc. no. 1110828); “O outro cavalo de Tróia” (doc. no. 1110724); “A pintura ainda tem função” (doc. no. 1110721); “A presença dos concretistas” (doc. no. 1110728); “Rebolo” (doc. no. 1091476); “Retrato da Arte Moderna do Brasil” (doc. no. 1110720); “Sobre nós mesmos” (doc. no. 1110726);  and “Teoria inviável” (doc. no. 1110729)].