The first decades of the twentieth century were marked by intense artistic, social and political transformations in Brazil and in the world, boosted by industrialisation and the circulation of new ideas. Brazilian modernists, in dialogue with the European avant-garde, championed an aesthetic renewal that was characterised by a break with academicism and experiments with new visual languages. Artists sought to redefine notions of national identity by turning their gaze towards daily life and the cultural diversity of the country.
This section of the exhibition brings together works that foreground the exchanges that took place between Brazilian and international contexts during the formation of modern art. The foreign artists include Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi, Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, Lucio Fontana, Robert Motherwell and Serge Poliakoff. Alongside them appear inescapable figures of Brazilian modernism, such as Anita Malfatti, Di Cavalcanti, Portinari, Tarsila do Amaral and Vicente do Rego Monteiro, whose works contributed to aesthetic renewal and new approaches to culture and national identity. This grouping focuses on daily life and social dynamics, but also on views related to surrealism and abstraction, showing a diverse country in transformation, associated with formal experimentation and attentive to different contexts and environments.
In addition to canonical artists, contemporary readings of Brazilian modernism, defined by a critical perspective, have expanded the interpretation of the movement by highlighting the centrality of specific groups, regions and social circuits. In dialogue with these perspectives, this section considers trajectories and experiences that have remained relatively marginalised, incorporating artists and practices that contribute to a wider and more complex evaluation of modern art in Brazil, revealing the diversity of experiences that constitute it.