As máscaras e os mitos: tensões entre modernidade e intemporalidade na pintura modernista em São Paulo

Abstract

This text deals with the painting produced in São Paulo around the 1922 Modern Art Week. What took place in that period clearly shows there was a singular view of what was modern. The modernist artists were split between European models of that time: the internationalism of the vanguards and the nationalism of the return to order movements. The search for a Brazilian identity – modern, current, timeless and mythical at the same time – raised doubts and contradictions. That can be clearly seen in modernist paintings, as they depict myths of belonging and mask faces, symbols and symptoms of tensions underlying those paintings, poised between confl icting principles.