Making a vital contribution to the understanding of Latin American modernism, Esther Gabara rethinks the role of photography in the Brazilian and Mexican avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. During these decades, intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil were deeply engaged with photography. Authors who are now canonical figures in the two countries’ literary traditions looked at modern life through the camera in a variety of ways. Mário de Andrade, known as the “pope” of Brazilian modernism, took and collected hundreds of photographs. Salvador Novo, a major Mexican writer, meditated on the medium’s aesthetic potential as “the prodigal daughter of the fine arts.” Intellectuals acted as tourists and ethnographers, and their images and texts circulated in popular mass media, sharing the page with photographs of the New Woman. In this richly illustrated study, Gabara introduces the concept of a modernist “ethos” to illuminate the intertwining of aesthetic innovation and ethical concerns in the work of leading Brazilian and Mexican literary figures, who were also photographers, art critics, and contributors to illustrated magazines during the 1920s and 1930s. Gabara argues that Brazilian and Mexican modernists deliberately made photography err: they made this privileged medium of modern representation simultaneously wander and work against its apparent perfection. They flouted the conventions of mainstream modernism so that their aesthetics registered an ethical dimension. Their photographic modernism strayed, dragging along the baggage of modernity lived in a postcolonial site. Through their “errant modernism,” avant-garde writers and photographers critiqued the colonial history of Latin America and its twentieth-century formations.

Throughout the history of European modernism, philosophers and artists have been fascinated by madness. Something different happened in Brazil, however, with the “art of the insane” that flourished within the modernist movements there. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the direction and creation of art by the mentally ill was actively encouraged by prominent figures in both medicine and art criticism, which led to a much wider appreciation among the curators of major institutions of modern art in Brazil, where pieces are included in important exhibitions and collections. Kaira M. Cabañas shows that at the center of this advocacy stood such significant proponents as psychiatrists Osório César and Nise da Silveira, who championed treatments that included painting and drawing studios; and the art critic Mário Pedrosa, who penned Gestaltist theses on aesthetic response. Cabañas examines the lasting influence of this unique era of Brazilian modernism, and how the afterlife of this “outsider art” continues to raise important questions. How do we respect the experiences of the mad as their work is viewed through the lens of global art? Why is this art reappearing now that definitions of global contemporary art are being contested? Learning from Madness offers an invigorating series of case studies that track the parallels between psychiatric patients’ work in Western Europe and its reception by influential artists there, to an analogous but altogether distinct situation in Brazil.

Mario de Andrade is an international reference on the Brazilian modernist movement that began in 1922. This is the first English-language critical assessment of this Brazilian writer's poetry, novels, and short stories, all of which are examined within the development and framework of Brazilian Modernism.

"A cultural history and interpretation of Brazilian modernism in arts and letters demands a transatlantic point of view. Artists, writers, musicians, and architects from both sides of the Atlantic interact to create a modern style for Brazil that shapes national expression and self-definition for the twentieth century. The presence of Brazilians in Europe and of Europeans in Brazil and the intense interrelationships among them energize modernism from the century's first decades until the end of the 1920s. For the Brazilians, a main goal is to transform the historical transatlantic dynamic into international recognition for a Brazilian aesthetic in the arts, sharing the appeal of folk and musical traditions, indigenous cultures and societies, and the ideal of national modernization Many travelled to Europe to find their place in the world, with nothing to offer except their talent, their belief in themselves, and their desire to modernize their country. The 1928 Revista de Antropofagia (Cannibal Magazine), the theme of cannibalism codified in Oswald de Andrade's "Manifesto Antropófago" (Cannibal Manifesto), and the iconic image of the painting O Abaporu by Tarsila do Amaral are the works that orient a cultural history of the avant-garde. Through creative genius they shape the nature and definition of modernity for Brazil in the 20th century"--

Modernity in Black and White provides a groundbreaking account of modern art and modernism in Brazil. Departing from previous accounts, mostly restricted to the elite arenas of literature, fine art and architecture, the book situates cultural debates within the wider currents of Brazilian life. From the rise of the first favelas, in the 1890s and 1900s, to the creation of samba and modern carnival, over the 1910s and 1920s, and tracking the expansion of mass media and graphic design, into the 1930s and 1940s, it foregrounds aspects of urban popular culture that have been systematically overlooked. Against this backdrop, Cardoso provides a radical re-reading of Antropofagia and other modernist currents, locating them within a broader field of cultural modernization. Combining extensive research with close readings of a range of visual cultural production, the volume brings to light a vast archive of art and images, all but unknown outside Brazil.

I explore Art Deco in Brazilian Modernist illustration and graphic design and trace the chronology of the printing press in Brazil. The chronology is crucial to understanding the speed with which these changes in illustration and graphic design took place in a country that had experienced centuries of print culture stagnation.

"Rather than glorifying the phenomenon of popular modernism or holding it up to the paradigmatic examples of good architecture, this book serves as a bridge to understand the complexities of the phenomenon's location and context as well as how popular and how modern buildings labeled popular modernist really are." "Defining the phenomenon of popular modernism in architecture, Fernando Luiz Lara introduces its characteristic place and time. Based on an analysis of five hundred photographs, Lara then describes the physical characteristics of modernist buildings, locating popular modernism within the context of the challenges faced by architecture. Readers begin to discover how the meanings of modernism are specifically manifested in Brazil within the larger context of Latin American and global modernism."--BOOK JACKET.