Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949-1979 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780262544108)

How Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives.

Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and North Americans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian avant-garde art; the unexpected familiarity of the works serves to make them unfamiliar. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, S駻gio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil's avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely renowned artists and groups--including H駘io Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and neoconcretism--but also important artists and critics who are less well known outside Brazil, including M疵io Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Am?car de Castro, Lu? Sacilotto, Antonio Dias, and Rubens Gerchman.

Martins argues that artists of Brazil's postwar avant-garde updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. He describes defining episodes in Brazil's postwar avant-garde, discussing crucial critical texts, including Gullar's "Theory of the Non-Object," a phenomenological account of neoconcrete artworks; Oiticica, constructivity, and Mondrian; portraiture, self-portraiture, and identity; the nonvisual turn and missed encounters with conceptualism; and monochrome, manifestos, and engagement.

The Brazilian avant-garde's hijacking of modernism, Martins shows, gained further complexity as artists began to face their international minimalist and conceptualist contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s. Reconfiguring not only art history but their own history, Brazilian avant-gardists were able to face contemporary challenges from a unique--and oblique--standpoint.

Author: Sergio B. Martins
ISBN-10: 0262544105
ISBN-13: 9780262544108
Publisher: MIT Press
Language: English
Published: 08/24/2021
Pages: 248
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 10.00h x 7.00w x 0.52d