In this article, art critic Jacob Klintowitz discusses the international boycott of the São Paulo Biennial in the late sixties. He suggests that the Associação Brasileira dos Críticos de Arte and the AIAP—the two Brazilian institutions that could take a stance on the boycott—failed to take a position on the issue and also dissuaded their members from taking one. Klintowitz considers the reasons for the boycott beyond the overall political situation in Brazil that started in 1964, and were mainly the censorship of some art exhibitions. He wonders if acts of censorship are enough to justify a boycott of the country’s most important art event, which he considers a “gateway to culture.”  

The tenth São Paulo Biennial (1969) was subject to an international boycott in response to the harsh military dictatorship in power in Brazil from 1964 to 1985. In 1968, five years after the coup and following the rise of urban and rural guerrilla groups, the de facto government enacted Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5), suspending individual rights and imposing censorship in a number of spheres. The boycott of the biennial began to take shape when the Ministério das Relações Exteriores (Itamaraty) censored a show at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio) of work that was to represent Brazil at the VI Biennale de Paris. The military police stormed the museum, which was forced to close the exhibition of contemporary artists. The leader of the boycott in Brazil was art critic Mário Pedrosa, the president of the Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte (ABCA) at the time. The boycott gained support from critics, as well as important artists, based in the United States, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Argentina. This tenth biennial would come to be known as “The Boycott Biennial.”

Intellectual and politician Mário Pedrosa (1900–81) was unquestionably the pivotal figure in twentieth-century Brazilian art theory and criticism. During the Estado Novo under dictator Getúlio Vargas, Pedrosa lived in exile in France and New York, returning to Brazil after World War II. A contributor to Correio da Manhã, he later founded the weekly Vanguarda Socialista due to his anti-Stalinist position. He wrote the art column for Tribuna da Imprensa from 1950 to 1954, and was a member of the organizing committee for the second and third São Paulo Biennials (1953 and 1955 respectively) before becoming the director of MAM-SP (1961–63). During the military dictatorship in Brazil, he sought exile in Chile where he directed the Museo de la Solidaridad in Santiago. After the coup under Pinochet (1973), he went to Havana where he was the secretary of the Museo de la Resistencia Salvador Allende. He did not return to Brazil until 1977. In 1980, he was the first person to sign the manifesto founding the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). Part of his vast library (some eight thousand volumes) is available at the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.

Journalist and art critic Jacob Klintowitz (b. 1941) was a contributor to the newspapers Tribuna da Imprensa (Rio de Janeiro) and Jornal da Tarde (São Paulo). Since 2007, he has been the curator of the Museu Brasileiro de Escultura (MuBE), founded in São Paulo in 1995.

For another article by Jacob Klintowitz on the international boycott of the São Paulo Biennial in 1969, see “Por falar em restrição” [doc. no. 1111046].