13442

SoSe 21: Brazil-Europe: Crosscurrents in Modern and Contemporary art

Eric de Bruyn

Information for students

languages: German and English

Additional information / Pre-requisites

online, Webex

Comments

This course will examine the development of modern and contemporary art in Brazil starting with the birth of the modernist movement in the 1920s and ending with the period of the dictatorship which lasted into the late 1970s. In particular, we will look at the complicated relationship between the Brazilian and the European context, focusing on the significant role of Brazilian artists in developing counter-hegemonic practices which both absorb and counter the dominance of European modernism. Starting, for instance, with the Manifesto Antropófago (1928) of the critic Mário de Andrade, we shall move onto the emergence of so-called arte concreto and the poet Ferreira Gullar’s Theory of The Non-Object, addressing the reception of European modern art in 1940s and 1950s Brazil and the role of Gestalt theory, phenomenology and existentialism in these debates. We shall then consider the reconfiguration of the Brazilian neo-avantgarde during the 1960s, with artists coming from Concrete/Neoconcrete period such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape mixed with the younger generation of Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman and Antonio Manuel, among others. Here the cultural-political concept of Tropicália will be discussed as well as the renewed debate apropos of new forms of realism, which frequently acted in opposition to international tendencies such as Pop art and Noveau Réalisme. As we will see, the category of underdevelopment played a crucial role for artists and critics seeking to emphasize the particularity of their stance in an increasingly politicized arena. Further topics will include Brazilian-European exchanges on the level of art schools (e.g., Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung and ESDI), the São Paulo Biennial as well the work of Brazilian artists and critics who lived in exile during the dictatorship. close