The second part of Magalhães Drummond’s essay on modernism in Brazil—[this version of “modernism” had nothing to do with the literary movement headed by Rubén Darío that followed European avant-garde ideas]—was published in this issue of A Revista magazine. The author confirms that artists of his period were keen to express the “Brazilian psyche,” the “spirit,” and the “intelligence” that contributed to the so-called “nationality in the making” (according to the writer Euclides da Cunha). Drummond claims that contemporary artistic expression is concerned with the “Brazilian question,” and a “Brazilian (artistic) technique” that is developing. Magalhães Drummond notes that this trend is no longer solely interested in indigenous subjects; the focus today is on an “ethnic sedimentation,” a projection of the Brazilian point of view based on what he describes as a “racial mishmash, secular transfusions and permutations.” In terms of technique, the author does not identify any such principles, but he does lean toward media and solutions that are compatible with the “aspirations and dreams of today’s Brazil.” It was by then the mid-1920s and Magalhães Drummond closely scrutinizes what he considers to be Brazil’s time. A time when great changes were under way and Brazil was striving to put some idiomatic distance between itself and its mother country, Portugal; a time when the “false and unfortunate Indian-ism” was being challenged and marginalized to make way for a new mestizo approach. The author blindly believes in the existence—within what was called the Escola Paulista [São Paulo School]—of a number of writers whose work was “in close spiritual harmony with Brazil’s moment in the sun.” The creative brilliance that transcends the colonial period is discernible beyond the fields of poetry and the novel. The author can see those same sparks in painting, and particularly in music, most specifically in the works of the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos whose music is without doubt, “a form of Brazilian liberation.”      

The “Brazilian-ism” that Magalhães Drummond references is the subject of his relentless search for “Brazilian character” in every form of expression, artistic or not, of national life. The country—at that uniquely Brazilian time—was a seething convergence of conflicting trends which, although opposed to each other, sought by any means possible to find an essential core of identity that could help to relieve them of the heavy burden of Portuguese colonialism (at a political level) and French influence (at a cultural level).

A Revista was a monthly literary magazine devoted to Brazilian modernism that was published in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais) in 1925; only three issues actually appeared. Its editorial board included intellectuals who went on to later make a name for themselves, such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who that year published his radical poem Uma pedra no meio do caminho [A Stone in the Road]; the memorialist Pedro Nava; the journalist and politician Milton Campos; and the future minister of education (during the Estado Novo regime) Gustavo Capanema, who was the guiding force behind the construction of the Ministério da Educação e Saúde [Ministry of Education and Health] (1936), the historical harbinger of modern architecture in Brazil. The Swiss architect Le Corbusier was involved in its design, and it was built by the Brazilians Lúcio Costa, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, and Oscar Niemeyer, among others.