This is a review of “La psychanalyse et l'esthétique dynamiste,” the article that was originally published in French in Cahiers idéalistes, the French magazine, in May 1924. According to Charles Baudouin, the Franco-Swiss psychoanalyst, our own intelligence is what “affirms our adaptation to reality.” In his opinion, art is therefore a “vital function” due to its ability to refresh our imagination. Based on that idea, Baudouin concludes that “dynamic art”—such as the poetry of Verhaeren—as distinct from Impressionism, is not content to be viewed passively. On the contrary, it follows the twists and turns (the curves) of our life, concerned with the law that generates “the curve;” that is, with the “forces that stimulate and illuminate the development of appearances.”     

For specialists in the field of psychoanalysis, the article is vaguely informative. It was ultimately far more interesting because it showed that writers and publishers were keeping up with matters of international importance—in this case, the emergence of psychoanalysis—and reporting on them in Brazilian literary magazine that were, in their own way, also involved in the “modernist” movement of the 1920s. On the subject of A Revista (Belo Horizonte, 1925) see the article by Sigmund Freud “Sobre a psycho-analyse” [doc. no. 781850].

Estética (Rio de Janeiro) enjoyed a brief lifespan of just three issues, published as a quarterly magazine between September 1924 and June 1926. Poets such as Mário de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira were among the contributors to this magazine. In addition to Brazilian literature it also published Anglo-Saxon writers (Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad) and French writers (Blaise Cendrars, Paul Valéry, and François Mauriac), among others. The “Revistas e Jornaes” section of the first issue of the magazine featured the article by L. Charles Baudouin (pp. 123–26) on “Dynamic Aesthetics,” which was part of his study of the symbolism to be found in the work of the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916). The article by Baudouin (1893–1963) was published in London in the book Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics (1924).    

The magazine’s publishers were Prudente de Moraes Neto and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, who intended it as a symbol of the transition from the so-called “polemic period”—the production of the Semana de 1922—to what they referred to as the “constructive affirmation of Brazilian modernism.”