Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Writer Clóvis Gusmão writes to Joaquim Inojosa about the Movimiento Antropofágico and takes the opportunity to clarify some parts of its agenda. Its principles include: the idea of establishing distance from European civilization by creating new [...]

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 [...]

In this communiqué-style essay written in Rio de Janeiro, Oswald de Andrade calls for the axiological rehabilitation of primitive man—understood as the communities or people that lived on this continent before the Eurocentrically-named & [...]

In this text, Jorge Mautner looks at Brazilian artists working in different disciplines (in the visual arts, music, literature, film, and theater), and the parallels between their past and present work. His thesis is that there is a liberating [...]

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 exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira was installed at the MAM-Rio (Museu de Arte Moderna, in Rio de Janeiro) from April 6 through 30, 1967, and it came to be considered a landmark event that exposed the various forms of art being produced in [...]

Abguar Bastos offers his interpretation of Brazilian modernism as a “yearning for the liberation of national thought.” The writer understands modern art as a “process” that takes on various forms throughout its course. In Brazil, for example [...]

The synopsis in English are coming soon [...]

A manifesto in which the writer Oswald de Andrade proposes the notion of anthropophagy as a possible paradigm on which to build a Brazilian cultural identy. From that point of view, he emphasizes a “pre-logical mindset” and a return to “natural [...]

  In this text, Oswald de Andrade updates the “Manifiesto Antropófago” (1928), suggesting new ways in which to associate it with contemporary philosophical ideas. In a parody of Hamlet’s existential question (“ [...]

Writer Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote this tribute to Oswald de Andrade, “the poet of anthropophagy,” shortly after his death in 1954. According to the author, Oswald’s cultural philosophy based on the notion of “anthropophagy” puts forth [...]

This essay analyzes images of Brazil created by song writers who compose in the Tropicália style, expressing aspects of the country’s cultural past from a modern perspective. Like surrealist works—as in the case of the “Jeu du cadavre exquis [...]

This article, published in the Revista de Antropofagia, reported that the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret was in Brazil. The text stresses the importance of understanding the functions of the subconscious, going so far as to refer to [...]

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 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 article, the artist and engineer Flávio de Carvalho outlines his thoughts on a “city of the future” inhabited by “naked men,” members of a society that has “stripped” itself of western taboos, and is finally, “free from [...]