This manifesto by Oswald de Andrade suggests that Brazilian art and literature should take positions vis-à-vis European culture that would privilege the cultivation of invention and an illogical, “agile and candid” attitude. The duty of the artist is “to see with free eyes” (“like a child”)—that is, “naturally and neologically.” Formal and linguistic inventions would therefore become the essential heart of writing, and in particular, of the movement that grew out of the personal relationship between Oswald and the painter Tarsila do Amaral, and in general, of works such as A Negra [The Black Woman] and O abaporú [The Anthropophagus] that were painted during that period. Openly disdaining naturalistic and photographic representation, art should instead be “regional and pure,” and express a sense of its time. There should be a return to the essence of the disciplines, so that specialists take care of their area whose aesthetic characteristics would express its essential poetics or would be a program of modern artistic action: “synthesis, balance, invention, surprise, new perspective, and new scale.” In Oswald’s opinion, everyday culture (from construction sites to the kitchen) should be acknowledged as Brazil’s main source of wealth.

This manifesto was written in 1924, after a trip to the state of Minas Gerais taken by the so-called modernist group that included the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, and his son Noné, Tarsila do Amaral, the millionairess Olívia Guedes Penteado, René Thiollier, and Godofredo da Silva Telles. During Holy Week, the group visited the state’s baroque cities, São João del Rei, Tiradentes, Ouro Preto, and Congonhas do Campo, as well as the state capital. There, at the Grande Hotel in Belo Horizonte, they met the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who in those days, was still in step with the avant-garde. The group referred to their trip as the “Discovery of Brazil” caravan, an idea that was no doubt the origin of the Pau-Brasil Movement that sought an intrinsically local approach that not only identified with Indian culture, but with the rural landscape (whether in Minas Gerais or in São Paulo) through a “caipira” [rural, interior, ranch] art style. In his manifesto, and keeping in mind the colonial past, Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) caustically suggested that Pau-Brasil poetry should be “poetry for export,” because the tree that gave its name to both the movement and the country [palo-del-brasil = Brazilwood], was one of the major exports from this Portuguese colony.