The writer Mário de Andrade reviews Feuilles de route [Leaves of the Road], the book by the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, illustrated by Tarsila do Amaral. The reviewer refers to the Brazilian countryside, which he compares with Cendrars’ writing and Tarsila’s drawings, whose “constructive naivety expressed with firm, calm strokes” he calls remarkable. De Andrade associates the vignettes in the book with the towns the group of intellectuals visited during their sojourn in the country, highlighting the sensitive, subtle connection between the Swiss poet’s work and the visual and tactile intensity of the tropical landscape. De Andrade describes the poet as a visual artist, explaining that his poems express what can be found in conventional poems.    

This is a review written by the writer, musicologist, critic, and poet Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) about the book Feuilles de route I. Le Formose (1924), which documents the close relationship that existed between the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) and the modernist Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) during the 1920s. The review was published in the second issue of the literary magazine A REVISTA.

A REVISTA was published in Belo Horizonte (the capital of the state of Minas Gerais). It was edited by Francisco Martins de Almeida (1904–83) and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–87), who was considered one of the greatest Brazilian poets of the twentieth century. The magazine’s writers were Emilio Moura (1902–71) and Gregoriano Canêdo (1904–68). It appeared on an irregular basis, and only published a total of three issues, in July and August, 1925, and January 1926.

Mário de Andrade was one of the founders of Semana de Arte Moderna (1922), the historic arts festival that had a profound impact on Brazilian arts and music (see “Semana de Arte Moderna” [doc. no. 781808]). The festival’s most celebrated participants were Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfatti (1889–1964), Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), and Menotti del Picchia (1892–1988)—known as the Grupo dos Cinco. Mário de Andrade was one of the group that sojourned in the interior of the state of Minas Gerais in 1924, mainly visiting the baroque places that inspired the book by Cendrars. In his review, de Andrade discusses the illustrations and poetic references in the book. This book was influential among Brazilian poets in the early days of the Pau-Brasil literary movement that was based on Oswald de Andrade’s poetry and Tarsila do Amaral’s painting, to which they added a certain spontaneous primitivism and a critical assimilation of the European heritage in Brazilian art circles.