The Semana de Arte Moderna is considered the landmark event in Brazilian modernism; it was this festival that facilitated the transition from the modernist movement to the development of a sense of Brazilian identity at a national level. The movement’s evolving positions helped to define the country’s nationalist attitudes to modernism and to the European avant-garde. The Semana de Arte Moderna took place at the Teatro Municipal in the city of São Paulo from February 13 to 17, 1922. The three days (14?16) were devoted to specific art forms: painting and sculpture, poetry and literature and, on the final day, music. The event consisted of an exhibition and three festivals that included concerts, lectures, poetry readings, and dance. The Brazilian intellectuals who would become the country’s cultural leaders and who produced some of the defining work of the period in question were among the participants, such as: the painters Anita Malfatti (1889–1964) and Emiliano di Cavalcanti (1897–1976), the writers Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) and Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), and of course the famous musician Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959).
For more information on this subject, see the program for the second day of the major event at the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922 [doc. no. 781808], and the review that was written twenty years later (in 1942) as a sort of historical evaluation of the famous festival [doc. no. 781117].
