Pietro Maria Bardi discusses the alarming number of Brazilians leaving the country, specifically mentioning Eugênio Hirsch, who had worked as a graphic artist in Rio de Janeiro, and was in Madrid working as the art director of a collection of books on museums at the time of the writing of this text. Recalling a conversation with Hirsch while they were driving around Rome, Bardi expresses a sense of pride that a Brazilian museum—the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), which he founded and later directed—had been included in the collection. Indeed, Bardi asserts that including MASP was particularly original, since the museum was still under construction at the time. Bardi believes that one day, “when he has finally matured,” Hirsch will return to Brazil.

This article was written by Pietro Maria Bardi (1900–99), curator and director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) whose monumental structure, which opened in 1968, is a landmark on Avenida Paulista (Trianon). Bardi was also the editor of the magazine Mirante das Artes in which this text was published. At their own initiative or at the invitation of foreign art critics, a number of Brazilian artists went to New York, London, Paris, and Milan in the late sixties in order to launch international careers. The background to the decision made by many artists to leave the country was AI-5 (Institutional Act no. 5), a decree that eliminated the population’s political rights and individual freedoms, including the right to demonstrate. Issued in 1968, that decree marked the beginning of a harsher phase of the military regime in power from 1964 to 1985. Some of the artists who left Brazil did not return until after the amnesty was enacted in 1978.

The magazine Mirante das Artes was published in São Paulo in 1967 and 1968, at the height of the aforementioned political process. The contents of the twelve issues published while Bardi was editor were in logical agreement with the vision of MASP, since Bardi was the director of that institution. The indisputably democratic journal disseminated the ideas of an editor that opposed the art market that had taken hold in Brazil by this time. 

Born in Vienna, Eugênio Hirsch (1923–2001) was an illustrator and visual artist who settled in Brazil in the fifties. As the art editor of the publishing house Civilização Brasileira, he designed countless book covers. He was an indisputable pioneer of Brazilian design who transformed graphic arts in the country.

For additional information, see Pietro Maria Bardi’s “O artista que vai e o que fica na América Latina”, Mirante das Artes, São Paulo, no. 2, March?April 1967, p. 32.