Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this text, painter Tarsila do Amaral provides an overview of her artistic career, specifically in relation to the Pau-Brasil movement and to cultural “anthropophagy.” She emphasizes the importance of the trip she took to Minas Gerais in 1924 [...]

This book of poetry was published a year after the 1924 Pau-Brasil manifesto. The book is divided into several sections: “História do Brasil,” a parodic version of the discovery of the country; “Roteiro de Minas” [ [...]

Questioning the exhaustion of Western civilization (specifically the European version), and basing his arguments on the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud—who wrote about the social life of primitive peoples in his book Totem and Taboo— Plí [...]

This document claims that one of the fundamental tenets of the so-called Movimento Antropófago is a return to a “natural state” (understood as a kind of “beauty with natural features” that is ugly, rough, barbaric, and [...]

This text is a report, possibly written in 1929, based on an exhibition of paintings by Tarsila do Amaral in São Paulo. The text establishes two distinctive periods in the artist’s work. One “with the universal, moving colors of the shantytowns [...]

In this interview the painter Tarsila do Amaral talks about Cubism and delivers a spirited defense of this modern movement. She sees it as an innovation that will lay the foundations for the art of the future. Just returned from Paris, she calls “ [...]

After his 1924 trip to Brazil, the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars wrote this book in which he describes the journey taken by the group of São Paulo modernists headed by Oswald and Mário Andrade. This sojourn within the Brazilian interior sowed the [...]

The catalogue for the Exposição de uma casa modernista was written by the architect Gregori Warchavchik, creator of this radical project. Although it was controversial in the conservative milieu of the period, the project was fairly significant in [...]

Cobra Norato, a book combining poetry and narrative, offers a version of the Portuguese language that is more in line with its sound than its grammar. It is a symbolic construction of the Brazilian forests whose characters (Curupira, Cobra Grande, [...]

The erudite music composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote a letter to a couple also staying in Paris, Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral. He comments on the difficulties involved in presenting different types of art produced in Brazil as [what is] “ [...]