The “Week of Modern Art 100 Years Later” is a panel reflecting a century later on what is generally considered a watershed event in Brazilian cultural history. In February 1922, an arts festival took place in the São Paulo municipal theater that included exhibitions, lecturers, concerts, and readings, a series of events that subsequently came to define and mark Brazilian modernism. The four presentations in this panel all attempt to reconsider the legacy, the cultural influence, and the contemporary relevance of this historical moment. The panel questions established conceptions and highlights fallacies and complexities. By commemorating we can also correct and redirect our understanding of Brazilian modernism impelled by the week of modern art. The panel will include four short talks of 13 minutes each leaving between 15-20 minutes for questions and discussion at the end of the session. The panel includes three faculty members and a PhD student.

Luiz Fernando Valente, professor of Portuguese and Brazilian studies and comparative literature at Brown University, begins with an important examination of terminology. His talk, “The Week of Modern Art MODERNOS OU MODERNISTAS?” reconsiders the periodization in Brazilian literary history that resulted from the week’s cultural hegemony. The image created around the week has obscured our understanding of the complexities of certain terminology, especially the important differences between the concepts of modern and modernist. He points to important contradictions, that several of the participants were culturally conservative, and that much of the modernist thinking and artistic work was done outside and before the famous week.

The second presentation, “The Adequacy of Errors in Oswald de Andrade’s Poetic Voyage” by Isaac Giménez, a PhD candidate at UCLA, focuses on Klaxon, the modernist journal launched shortly after 1922. Besides celebrating experimentation, the members of the editorial board enthusiastically claimed their right to build from errors. This claims incompleteness, spontaneity, and non-permanence of artworks as creative praxis. Even if these principles already guided European Avant-guard movements, Giménez what are the implications of embracing errors as a creative principle from a peripheral perspective? This talk considers the concept of error as a discursive and poetic mechanism that sets the foundations for a marginal praxis within the Brazilian literary tradition.

The third talk by Marguerite Harrison, associate professor of Portuguese and Brazilian studies at Smith College, “Bold/Broad Brushstrokes: Women by Women and Anita Malfatti’s Painterly Legacy” will address the legacy of modernist painter Anita Malfatti; in particular, her portraits of women. Harrison’s presentation will apply Malfatti’s struggles against gender under-representation to those in current times. In Brazil today, women street artists are fighting gender discrimination and giving visibility to gender inequality and domestic violence through portraits of contemporary women. This analysis will position Anita Malfatti in alliance with several graffiti artists, drawing parallels and contrasts to their artistic goals, lexicons, and activist work. In the one hundred years since the week of modern art—and despite Anita Malfatti’s groundbreaking modernist achievements—many women artists in Brazil today are still striving toward full acceptance and recognition, pushing boundaries, fighting for women’s rights, and carving out their own artistic spaces.

The last talk by Paulo Moreira, associate professor at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, titled “Modernism’s Antropofagia: Walking the Thin Line Between Rescues and Abductions” will discuss the importance of the Manifesto antropófago published in 1928 and considered by many the best of the modernista manifestos. Written with the idiosyncrasy and sense of urgency that were typical of this quintessential modernist genre, the Manifesto antropófago was at first quickly forgotten by most and even repudiated by some of the members of the group. However, successive generations reread the Manifesto antropófago and reclaim it as their own. Moreira considers the history of the reception of this avant-garde manifesto and shows how it survived all of its counterparts by being reinvented over and over again until this iconoclastic text became part of the cultural establishment in Brazil.

During our discussion we hope to elaborate on how these research projects and new lines of inquiry allow us to open up and rethink the weight of this historical event. While recognizing its ongoing relevance we can also rectify and amend some of our ideas about the week of modern art.