Performing Sao Paulo: Vanguard Representations of a Brazilian Cosmopolis

Abstract

In the twentieth century, São Paulo experienced successive waves of development schemes, modernization, and artistic response. In the 1920s, this site of ever-increasing industrialization and urban evolution witnessed the emergence of nationalist aesthetic thought in modernismo, or Brazilian Modernism. The inaugural publication and œuvre par excellence of the combative phase of this movement was Paulicéia desvairada (1922) by Mário de Andrade. This collection of avant-garde verse initiated, with musical flair, a city/artist-in-the-city thread in Brazilian lyric that passes through other principal modernistas and finds pointed expression both in the mid-century neo-vanguard of poesia concreta and in diverse output of the later twentieth century. 1