The manifesto shown here uses the term “aesthetic revolution” to refer to the steady discarding of perception (specifically visual) in modern art, and on the other hand, to the resulting development of the “psychological and mental perception” of the world. In the manifesto, these interconnected phenomena function as separate parts of the same process of “dehumanization of art,” which in turn contributes to a convergence with the movement for abstraction. In that same year of 1939, the III Salão de Maio became an internationalist movement, according to Flávio de Carvalho.

La deshumanización del arte [The Dehumanization of Art] (1925) by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was a radical book for its time that for the first time exposed the vein of negativity in the European avant-garde that had emerged during the previous decade. Latin America spawned a variety of readings—some of them openly tendentious—concerning this approach to modern art that in theoretical terms, upended all previous readings. In Brazil in general, and for Flávio de Carvalho in particular, the “dehumanizing” process that was unleashed on an international level meant that art would cease to have a ritual quality and would instead become a “problem of major sensitivity.” 

Including a quote from the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, the author writes: “We should paint and build with our heads;” in other words, “with the mind and the emotions.” In Flávio de Carvalho’s opinion, the art critic had never probed “so deeply” into the heart of things that plumb the depths of the psyche and the human mind. In his opinion, there were two very important movements at that time: abstraction and Surrealism. 

RASM— Revista Anual do Salão de Maio—was part of the catalogue for the III Salão de Maio, held in São Paulo (1939), and coordinated by Flávio de Carvalho (1899–1973). This architect, who was also an artist, studied in France (Paris, 1911–14), and after the World War I, in England (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1922).