Primary Documents ed. by Mário Pedrosa (review)

One of the most significant aspects of the programming activities of the MOMA, with all the influence that it has on the American grasp of the arts, has been its focus on Latin America, through its formal exhibits, its calendar of events, and its list of publications. This focus has corresponded, in general, to the opening toward Latin America that has occurred in the New York City arts scene in recent decades, but no metropolitan institution is better situated, both professionally and in terms of general public awareness, than the legendary MOMA. Thus, this volume of the writings of Brazilian arts scholars Mário Pedrosa (1900–81) is indeed a welcome event.

Pedrosa is considered to be a key figure in the criticism of contemporary Brazilian art, the sort of intellectual presence who both defines the parameters of the subject and establishes major theoretical foundations. Pedrosa’s life and his career were coterminus with Brazilian modernism, which was both a specific arts movement deriving from the program of the revolutionary Semana de Arte Moderna (February 1922) and a set of cultural horizons that articulated a uniquely Brazilian artistic consciousness. This consciousness, because it served to contribute to the still emerging (1889) republic’s quest for its cultural identity, continues to define the so-called Brazilian artistic way in the present, as much more sociohistorical and political factors may contribute to the sense of a need to move beyond Modernism as the singular basis for Brazilian artistic horizons.

One of the most distinctive features of Pedrosa’s work has been something like a Moebiusstrip relationship between arts and politics. Certainly, Modernism had from the start a strong political component, as part of the effort to wrest control of cultural production away from authoritarian aesthetes who saw art as a classically, academically dominated domain separate from the hurly-burly of contemporary life. That Modernism had its roots in São Paulo—by the third decade of the twentieth century, one of the most hurly-burly of Brazilian (and, indeed, Latin American) cities—is hardly circumstantial: the new languages of Modernism, in all realms of cultural production, echoed the new urban languages, in all semiotic orders, that could be heard and seen in what was touting itself (as could be seen in the self-proclamation of one of Hildegard’s most famous photographs of the city) “the major industrial center of Latin America”—that is, the major axis of Latin American modernity.

Pedrosa understood, and promoted, a consistently high-level of intellectual thought toward encouraging that understanding, of the complexity of the modern world, and his essential theoretical writings as well as his critical essays prompted by specific cultural phenomena always returned to the sense of a second order of complexity: the complexity of the domains of human experience and expression and, on an exponentially higher plane, the complexity of their interaction. As he wrote in 1967, precisely at a time when the authoritarian dictatorship was energetically combating the deeply social embeddedness of critical artistic activity, “The extreme complexity of modern civilization allows no activity of a scientific, cultural, or aesthetic order to unfold in isolation. It imposes a globalizing activity in all senses” (135). The denigration by the dictatorship of cultural production and the attempts to circumscribe it through censorship and other repressive measures were part of an effort to suppress the imbrication of art in the experiencing and comprehension of daily life, and Pedrosa’s scholarly and critical voice was key to refuting such efforts. Writing for the Associação Brasileira dos Críticos de Arte (ABCA), on the occasion of the censorship (1969) of a show at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio, Pedorsa states: “[It] is imperative that a stop be put to [the] practice of an official albeit anonymous censorship. The visual arts sector exercises no clandestine activity that might require control, vigilance, or combat through the state’s...