Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art

By Kaira M. Cabañas

Throughout the history of European modernism, philosophers and artists have been fascinated by madness. Something different happened in Brazil, however, with the “art of the insane” that flourished within the modernist movements there. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the direction and creation of art by the mentally ill was actively encouraged by prominent figures in both medicine and art criticism, which led to a much wider appreciation among the curators of major institutions of modern art in Brazil, where pieces are included in important exhibitions and collections.
   
Kaira M. Cabañas shows that at the center of this advocacy stood such significant proponents as psychiatrists Osório César and Nise da Silveira, who championed treatments that included painting and drawing studios; and the art critic Mário Pedrosa, who penned Gestaltist theses on aesthetic response. Cabañas examines the lasting influence of this unique era of Brazilian modernism, and how the afterlife of this “outsider art” continues to raise important questions. How do we respect the experiences of the mad as their work is viewed through the lens of global art? Why is this art reappearing now that definitions of global contemporary art are being contested?

Learning from Madness offers an invigorating series of case studies that track the parallels between psychiatric patients’ work in Western Europe and its reception by influential artists there, to an analogous but altogether distinct situation in Brazil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226556314

Book preview

Learning from Madness

Learning from Madness

Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art

Kaira M. Cabañas

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55628-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55631-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226556314.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press extends its appreciation for the support of the University of Florida College of the Arts and School of Art + Art History.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cabañas, Kaira Marie, 1974– author.

Title: Learning from madness : Brazilian modernism and global contemporary art / Kaira M. Cabañas.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018006266 | ISBN 9780226556284 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226556314 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Art and mental illness—Brazil. | Outsider art—Brazil. | Art—Brazil.

Classification: LCC N71.5.C33 2018 | DDC 709.81—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006266

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Jesús

Contents

Introduction: Toward Discomfort

1  Clinical-Artistic Tableaux

2  Common Creativities

3  Physiognomic Gestalt

4  Bispo’s Contemporaneity

5  Monolingualism of the Global

Coda

Acknowledgments

Notes on the Text

Illustration Credits

Notes

Index

Introduction: Toward Discomfort

When first approaching the relation between art and madness, I turned, perhaps inevitably, to the writings of Michel Foucault. But visual art makes few appearances in the course of his History of Madness. When it does appear, it serves as a privileged witness, showing how madness as the subject of painting coincides with specific worldviews. According to Foucault, images such as Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools (c. 1490–1500) and Pieter Brueghel’s Mad Meg (1562) express how, during the Renaissance, the fantasies born of madness held a power of attraction.¹ In contrast, in the classical age such creative expressions of madness in representation disappeared, to be replaced by asylums, houses of confinement, gaols and prisons.² Foucault thus illustrates through painterly representations the difference between a time when madness was contiguous with life and the subsequent confinement of madness to the realm of unreason.

In the concluding pages of his volume, Foucault invokes painters on the other side of the great confinement; namely, painters of the modern age. Here he no longer deals primarily with madness as painting’s theme but engages the status of the subject who paints. Foucault observes that the number of artists who have ‘lapsed’ into madness has multiplied.³ But he ultimately holds at bay an artist’s madness to instead speak to a historical reversal inaugurated by the work of modern artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Antonin Artaud. Foucault writes, "Hence-forth and through the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes guilty . . . in relation to the oeuvre: it is now arraigned by the oeuvre, constrained to speak its language, and obliged to take part in a process of recognition and reparation, to find an explanation for this unreason, and explain itself before it."⁴ Here painting reveals neither the truth of madness nor the truth of reason but serves as a medium through which to challenge reason’s silencing of madness. Consequently, such paintings put us on trial.

These modern artists, each of whom literally went mad, embody the return of madness by making visible its exclusion through their painting and drawing. Foucault, however, does not dwell on how this making visible is formally achieved in their work.⁵ What is more, in the context of Foucault’s discussion, modern art such as that produced by Van Gogh and Artaud remains on this side of reason by the very fact that the works constitute an oeuvre, a body of work, and respond to what Foucault elsewhere describes as the author-function—the various social and institutional arrangements that give life to an author’s work.⁶ Foucault insists, "Where there is an oeuvre, there is no madness.⁷ And in reference to Van Gogh: [He] knew very well that his oeuvre and his madness were incompatible."⁸

By attempting to trace how madness was silenced, Foucault’s archaeology poses the problem of how to find a language other than that of reason, a language that might allow madness to speak. Foucault would insist on writing a history not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in its most vibrant state, before being captured by knowledge.⁹ Much ink has been spilled in the ensuing debate between Foucault and Jacques Derrida as to the possibility of even writing such a history. In this context, I do not intend to take a side in the debate or rehearse its primary terms, which includes Derrida’s engagement with the conditions of possibility for philosophical thought, given the extensive commentary in the critical literature.¹⁰ Derrida identifies those moments in which Foucault inscribed a difficulty or impossibility within the very language he used to write his history. Ultimately what I would like to isolate is Derrida’s observation that by the simple fact of their articulation the proceedings and the verdict unceasingly reiterate the crime.¹¹ That is, Foucault repeats the initial act of separation his book aims to trace. He silences the silences he hopes to reveal. Foucault unwittingly isolates madness, makes a claim for it to speak for itself, without accounting for how he speaks from this side of reason.

· · ·

Beyond the scope of Foucault’s study (as well as the terms of the Foucault-Derrida debate) and crucial to the history of modern art is the creative expression of psychiatric patients, subjects diagnosed with a mental illness (most commonly, schizophrenia) and whose work, produced within the walls of psychiatric hospitals and asylums (and at times as part of occupational or art therapy workshops) became the object of scientific and aesthetic scrutiny in the course of the twentieth century, including in the pages of Hans Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 1922). Given the more familiar history of psychiatric patients’ work in Western Europe and its reception by the dadaists and surrealists as well as postwar French artists like Jean Dubuffet, one could suggest, albeit as a kind of shorthand, that with this study I track a similar history in the Brazilian context. This is in part true. But the book’s larger stake is to make a case for the singularity of Brazilian modernism in its approach to the so-called art of the insane, as well as to track the afterlife of this reception for contemporary art in a global context.

Furthermore, with Derrida’s critique present, I confess that when describing psychiatric patients’ works, I do so from this side of reason. What I offer is an account, which at times might be more appropriately singled out as a projection. Therefore, in what follows I do not speak about madness, nor do I explain what madness, or its subsequent delimitation as mental illness, is. I do, however, describe how art professionals and psychiatrists, and their respective discourses and institutions (the art museum and the asylum), often spoke for madness and how their statements reveal discursive differences and overlaps in orientation and approaches to madness and, more specifically, patients’ creative expression.

Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art proposes a historical and theoretical account of how modern and contemporary art developed in dialogue with the creative work of psychiatric patients. Through a series of case studies in part 1, the book aims to discover the highly mediated and largely unexplored ways that the exhibition of patients’ work converged with modernist understandings of artistic creativity, consequently inflecting the teaching and practice of art and art criticism from the 1920s through to the 1960s. At the center of this interdisciplinary account stand two prominent psychiatrists: Osório César and Nise da Silveira. Both advocated nonaggressive psychiatric treatment, principally through the creation of painting studios for their patients. In the 1920s and 1930s in São Paulo, César’s publications and collaborations with avant-garde artists such as Flávio de Carvalho had profound effects on discussions of modern art and creativity, and his patients’ work was summoned as an example of how to move beyond academic conventions in art (chapter 1). In the 1940s in Rio de Janeiro, the leading art critic Mário Pedrosa’s reception of the work of Silveira’s patients deeply informed his theorization of Gestalt and modern aesthetic response. I argue that his ideas contributed to an understanding of geometric abstraction as expressive, thereby challenging the alignment of abstract geometry with rationality in the dominant art historiography and reception of concrete art (chapter 3). Consequently, this chapter also demonstrates how patients’ work is not uniformly aligned with a surrealist or art informel aesthetic, as continued to be the case in Western Europe.

Accordingly, Learning from Madness offers a crucial transnational and global perspective, placing these moments in Brazilian art history in direct relation to European developments and, more specifically, in relation to France and Germany. The work of Silveira’s patients was exhibited in a groundbreaking exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 1949, while in the postwar years in Europe psychiatric collections such as the notable Prinzhorn Collection and Dubuffet’s collection of art brut, were not featured in art museums until the 1960s.¹² Hence another aim of Learning from Madness is to track how Brazilian patients’ art was put to work by artists, critics, and institutions in ways that avow the continuities and discontinuities between Brazil and Western Europe. In so doing, I also engage the different receptions of patients’ work within Brazil, as evinced in the competing responses from avant-garde artists based in São Paulo and those in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

From the perspective of psychiatry and the emergence of patients’ work as an object of scientific study, the principal European and Brazilian psychiatrists of the 1920s engaged in this study (Prinzhorn and César) do share a general turn away from an exclusively diagnostic approach to this art in order to focus on the work’s intrinsic qualities (through psychological and aesthetic approaches attuned to the question of creativity), but they differ in their reception and application of Freudian psychoanalysis. Both contexts also demonstrate a turn away from the discourse of degeneration, which in psychiatry has its origin in the work of Cesare Lombroso,¹³ and toward an understanding of what I call common creativities shared by the sane and insane. Such an understanding of a shared source of creativity came to the fore with the exhibition of patients’ work in both France and Brazil in the 1940s (chapter 2). To be sure, the visual evidence of a common creativity was often underwritten by discussions of artistic quality and how the patients’ work looked futurist or surrealist. But such presumed formal similarities also became the target of conservative art criticism.

In the Brazilian context, one might recall Monteiro Lobato’s inaugural and infamous polemic against Anita Malfatti’s painting in 1917, on the occasion of her second solo exhibition. Writing for the O Estado de São Paulo, the critic compares modern art to abnormal art, and in his article, also known under the title Paranóia ou mistificação? (Paranoia or mystification), the author displays knowledge of the work produced by patients as well as its link to psychiatric studies: Psychiatrists study their patients, documenting the numerous drawings that adorn the inner walls of asylums. The only difference is that in the asylums this art is sincere, the logical product of a brain disturbed by the strangest psychosis; and outside of them, in public exhibitions ballyhooed by the press and absorbed by crazy Americans, there is no sincerity, no logic, being pure mystification.¹⁴ The support of artists who see normally and make a pure art also reverberated in the European context, where such concepts had repeatedly informed the rejection of modern art since its inception. From impressionism to expressionism, modernism in its many manifestations was met with antagonism and incomprehension.¹⁵ Often subtending this response was a negative view of both the art of psychiatric patients and modern art, views frequently tied to cultural notions of degeneracy, perhaps nowhere more so than in the notorious Nazi-mounted exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art), which opened in Munich in 1937.

In Brazil, a few key studies have been published that address the emergence of art therapy studios and the historical crossovers with the visual arts. To this end, this study has benefited from the dedicated research of several individuals whose books provide an invaluable entrée into this history. On César, Heloisa Ferraz’s book Arte e loucura: Limites do imprevisível (Art and madness: Limits of the unpredictable, 1998) is an important resource, especially in the wake of the fire that destroyed César’s library and archive in 2005. On Silveira, Luiz Carlos Mello’s various publications, especially his recent Nise da Silveira: Caminhos de uma psiquiatra rebelde (Nise da Silveira: Paths of a rebel psychiatrist, 2014), provide a wealth of insight and information.¹⁶ Given the difficulty, at times, of accessing archival evidence as well as the threats to continued conservation of already archived materials, the archival digitization that accompanies Marcas e memórias: Almir Mavignier e o ateliê de pintura de Engenho de Dentro (Marks and memories: Almir Mavignier and the painting studio at Engenho de Dentro, 2012), edited by Lucia Riley and José Otávio Pompeu e Silva, is a significant contribution.¹⁷ Additional histories, largely written from the perspective of psychology and occupational therapy, also have provided useful background, describing how art emerges in the realm of psychiatry. These studies, however, do not necessarily engage how asylum art might be seen to impinge on understandings of modern art and its institutionalization from the perspective of art history.¹⁸

Rather than remain other to the institutions of modern art, and therefore in contrast also to other Latin American countries, in Brazil the creative work of psychiatric patients was claimed as art and exhibited in modern art venues as early as 1933, such that the history of the patients’ work is the constitutive inside of aesthetic modernism, rather than its outside. This has, now and again, also been the case with the work of children as well as naïf painters (e.g., Elisa Martins da Silveira) and self-taught artists (e.g., Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, José Pancetti, José Antonio da Silva, Alfredo Volpi). The persistence of the latter group’s production within the canon of Brazilian modernism is an important chapter of this history. But for purposes of this study, I have chosen to focus on patient-artists, who may be self-taught or work in a naïf style. Accordingly, I focus on the crossovers between two modern institutions and their discourses: the psychiatric hospital and the modern art museum and the tensions that ensue between the clinical and critical discourse concerning how patients’ work was and is understood.¹⁹

The discursive framing of psychiatric patients’ work as art is a key to understanding genealogies of contemporary art in Brazil as well as contemporary art exhibitions. When viewed from the perspective of institutional exhibition practices, there is technically no art brut, or outsider art, in Brazil, at least in the specific way that this category was defined and redefined by Dubuffet and relies on the psychiatric patient’s work as an absolute alterity to the spaces of official artistic culture (see chapter 2). As a result, the institutional definition of modern art to which European and American modernisms have largely laid claim is put under pressure when one approaches the subject of what constitutes outsider art in Brazil. Psychiatric patients’ work, rather than exclusively remain within the purview of the country’s folk, naïf, or hospital museums, survives in the collections and exhibition programming of the principal institutions of modern and contemporary art, including the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP), the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ), the Bienal de São Paulo, and, more recently, the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR).²⁰ Each is addressed in these pages. These collections and institutional histories are being revisited today: for example, during the writing of this book, MASP exhibited for the first time 102 works by psychiatric patients from Juquery hospital outside São Paulo, works that César had collected in the 1930s and 1940s and then donated to the museum in 1974. In this way, the reception of psychiatric patients’ work is as vital to modern art institutional practices as Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto antropófago (Cannibalist manifesto, 1928) is for aesthetic modernism, whereby he critically played on modernist primitivism by calling for the cannibalization of European influences. What is more, psychiatric art in Brazilian museums and Andrade’s manifesto each have afterlives in present artistic and cultural practices.

While the history of psychiatric patients’ art forms part of important collections in both the art and psychiatric contexts, the theme of madness also has a presence in Brazilian literature, perhaps most prominently in Machado de Assis’s satiric novella O alienista (The Psychiatrist, 1881–1882), although the subject appears to have been more personal for Lima Barreto, whose own internment was the subject of his autobiographical Diário do hospício (Journal of an asylum, 1919–1920) and the unfinished novel O cemitério dos vivos (Cemetery of the living). Beyond the visual and literary arts, patients’ creativity has a high degree of visibility in the country’s popular culture. Silveira’s history is almost mythic, the subject of theatrical plays and most recently a film: Nise: O coração da loucura (Nise: The heart of madness) was released in April 2016. Directed by Roberto Berliner, the film stars Glória Pires as Silveira. (One might think of Pires as akin to French actress Juliette Binoche in the realm of art film, but the Brazilian also enjoys pop celebrity status thanks to her work in television dramas, or telenovelas). Arthur Bispo do Rosário (commonly known as Bispo), perhaps Brazil’s most famous patient-artist, was also the subject of another film, O senhor do labirinto (The lord of the labyrinth), which was released in late 2014. Beyond these Hollywood-inspired renditions, the figure of the eccentric or mentally unstable individual who produces art is also common in the popular telenovelas, including the character Tonho da Lua in Mulheres de areia (Women of sand, 1993), which also stars Pires playing identical twins, and Domingos Salvador in Império (2014–2015). While I do not engage such representations in this book, they nevertheless point to the visibility of the subject as well as its currency in the popular imagination.

· · ·

Art historian Rosalind Krauss’s account of the importance of the Prinzhorn Collection for the Euro-American (i.e., US) context helps to further distill how the reception of psychiatric patients’ work came to signify differently in theory and in practice for modern art in Brazil. During an interview, Krauss remarked:

Dubuffet’s interest in the Prinzhorn material arose from his conception of it as a corpus of radically anti-Duchampian possibilities. Fascinated, like so many other Frenchmen, by the parable of Robinson Crusoe, that tale of the shipwrecked sailor washed ashore with a few remnants of his culture, [Hubert] Damisch examines today’s artistic production and asks: If all else were washed away, would any of us, pressed against the very most extremes of necessity, expend any precious ounce of our remaining energy in the pursuit of art? That is to say, this parable sets up a model that is totally foreign to the promiscuity of the current institutional definition of art: this is art because it is in a gallery, because it is in a place that shows art; this is art because I, the artist, say so. To the contrary, Damisch goes on, "as for the art of the insane, these works were driven by necessity. There was no audience. There was no public, no museum, no exhibition—only an urgent drive to draw, to paint. What interested Dubuffet, was just this little guy in his tiny room obsessively scribbling or whittling and driven by necessity. And that’s what is interesting because Dubuffet too was obsessional, driven, or wanted to be. He constructed his own necessity. He tried to discover a form of art that would be necessary once again. That’s why the word art preoccupied him so." Thus the significance of Dubuffet’s connection to psychotic art comes from its contrasting energy within a situation where art has no reason for being, since it is made out of compulsion. The idea that it is simply there because of some kind of an institutional definition would be wrong. It is there because the person who is making it, cannot not make it.²¹

In the passage-within-the-passage by Damisch, he reiterates many of Dubuffet’s projections of what it meant to produce work in an asylum: no audience, no public, no museum, no exhibition. In short, no intention on the part of the interned subject to make art with a capital A.

Yet such a projection of isolation radically divorces this production from the history of psychiatric treatments and the active collection and exhibition of such works. As John MacGregor’s comprehensive volume The Discovery of the Art of the Insane illustrates, the histories of psychiatric institutions and asylum art reveal not only the presence of an audience (the psychiatrist) but also at times that of a public (often other patients, occasional visitors, or even the voices that many schizophrenics hear), a hospital museum collection with samples of asylum art, as well as exhibitions.²² One might recall here, for example, the evidence that shows how Dr. Auguste Marie encouraged his patients to collect objects from the grounds of the asylum and to arrange them for exhibition in his Musée de la folie at the Villejuif Asylum outside Paris (one of the earliest assembled collections of such work). Thus, for Allison Morehead, the patients engaged not only in the construction but also in the actual curating of their work.²³ Moreover, patients’ art often emerged in clinical contexts in which occupational therapy workshops—from shoemaking to sewing—already thrived; Juquery hospital even had a jazz band (fig. 1). While these practices inside the asylum do not present a perfect homology to the spaces and practices of the art world outside it, they nevertheless show that collections and workshops on the inside of the asylum often served as effective disciplinary techniques in the service of a patients’ treatment. In short, such art was not exclusively the outcome of (ahistoricized) necessity alone.

1. Jazz band, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery, São Paulo, c. 1930–1940. Núcleo de Acervo, Memória e Cultura, Museu Osório César, Hospital Psiquiátrico do Juquery.

Krauss’s comments, which develop those of Damisch, are also telling in that she ultimately positions necessity against the legacy of the institutional definition of art. For Krauss, the fact that she understands the Prinzhorn material as driven by necessity (whether real or imagined) is what makes it relevant, and she explains how it offers protection from the seductions of Duchamp’s institutional model. The latter had led to a historical situation in which almost anything could be called art under the banner of installation.²⁴ (Her arguments against post-medium installation in favor of reinventing the medium may be familiar to some readers.²⁵) What is curious is how the Prinzhorn material, insofar as it evinces an internal, psychological necessity, appears as a guise for supporting necessity in art’s production. To be sure, modernist accounts in the West (whether of Clement Greenberg or Michael Fried) once offered such models of necessity through attention to artistic conventions and medium specificity. For Krauss, Dubuffet saw psychotic art as breaking the rationale in which anything could be declared art and saw in this art a way to break through the smugness of the institutional definition.²⁶

For the Brazilian artists and critics addressed in this study, the institutional definition of art was never quite so smug. In his lecture Arte, necessidade vital (Art, vital necessity, 1947), which was delivered in the context of an exhibition of Silveira’s psychiatric patients’ work, the modernist art critic Mário Pedrosa affirmed that all works, whether produced by children or patients, possess the same nature as works by great artists, conforming to an identical psychological process of creative elaboration.²⁷ Such vitality common to all provides a point of departure for thinking of the afterlife of a different type of necessity, one not so closely hewed to medium specificity and one that remained at the core of Pedrosa’s aesthetic thinking as well as his professional activities. Thirty years after the lecture’s delivery, upon his return from exile in 1977, Pedrosa turned his attention to politics. But when it came to art, he dedicated himself to the creative work of psychiatric patients. In 1979 he organized an exhibition of the work of Fernando Diniz at the Galeria Sérgio Milliet. The following year, he organized an exhibition of works by Raphael Domingues that was presented at MAM-RJ.²⁸ What I hope becomes clear in the course of this study is how, in contrast to the particular absence of psychiatric patients’ art from the spaces of Western European and North American modern art museums in the postwar years (at least until the mid-1960s), in the case of modernism in Brazil such patients’ art was internal and structural to the self-fashioning of aesthetic modernism in the writing of leading art critics such as Pedrosa, Sérgio Milliet, Theon Spanudis, as well as for modern art’s institutionalization.

Just as MASP revisited its collection history to bring to light an overlooked donation, it is also worth mentioning how Pedrosa imagined the role of the modern art museum in ways that cast in relief the unique characteristics of Brazilian art history and respond to the precariousness of the country’s material conditions. In the wake of the fire in 1978 that nearly destroyed all of MAM-RJ’s collection, Pedrosa suggested that the museum be reorganized through his proposal for a Museu das Origens. In addition to calling for state funding, his new concept for MAM-RJ included five museums: Museu do Índio, Museu de Arte Virgem (do Inconsciente), Museu de Arte Moderna, Museu do Negro, Museu de Artes Populares (Museum of the Indian, Museum of Virgin Art [of the Unconscious], Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Black People, and Museum of Folk Art). At the time, only the first three existed. As to why he advocated for such an association of museums, Pedrosa emphasized how all modern art was inspired by povos periféricos (peripheral peoples), and thus why not have MAM present that which we have in abundance alongside a collection of contemporary Brazilian and Latin American art.²⁹ Here we face a museum conception that regards these other arts as constitutive of (rather than other to) modern art and in which Pedrosa returns to the origins of his aesthetic thinking, affirming the affect underpinning nonrationalist worldviews, a subject I explore more thoroughly in chapter 3.

Pedrosa’s Museu das Origens posited a Brazilian break with the Euro-American model of a modernist art premised on its own autonomy. What I have elsewhere called Pedrosa’s strategic universalism also disidentifies with a European model of universality to respond to the historical specificity of Brazil, its populations, and the ways in which the interchange between the popular and modern, sane and insane, child and adult, as well as the legacy of colonization, is constitutive of both its modernity and a different understanding and practice of what is modern in the arts. In so doing, he is more aligned (although, to the best of my knowledge, this is nowhere explicitly stated) with the thinking of his contemporary Pietro Maria Bardi and with Bardi’s attempts at the helm of MASP to dehierarchize cultural production by working at the intersection of distinctions such as the modern and the popular in the name of a universal art production, a dehierarchization that also underpins the exhibition displays of Bardi’s life partner, the architect Lina Bo Bardi.

In 1950, on the publication of the book version of Pedrosa’s Arte, necessidade vital (Art, vital necessity), Bardi wrote, There is always an elegance of examination in Pedrosa’s way of observing.³⁰ Indeed, it is paradoxical that Bardi, formed by the struggle to modernize architecture under the fascist regime in Italy in the 1930s would support Pedrosa, an avowed Trotskyist who had recently returned from his first period in exile. In Italy, Bardi had responded to cultural debates about how to incorporate the past and the popular into a vision of romanità through his support of a modern, rationalist architecture subtended by rural and vernacular forms.³¹ In his newfound home in Brazil, his telescopic approach to cultural