Mário Pedrosa

This volume comprises some of Otília Arantes' texts on Mário Pedrosa that can be read as Appendices – initial drafts or subsequent supplements – to her book Mário Pedrosa, Critical Itinerary (from 1991, reproduced on this site). In the opening, a public intervention - tribute to the Critic on the occasion of his 80th birthday and the launch of the first edition of his thesis, On the Affective Nature of Form. Dated 1949, it had remained inexplicably unpublished until then, although pioneering (and not only in Brazil) in adopting Gestalttheorie as a key to understanding the work of art. The preface to this edition, organized by Otília, opens the second part of this volume. Speech and preface by which the Author begins her incursions into Mário's work, trying to discover in it a line of continuity given by his constant attempt to reconcile the rigor and universality of the artistic form with its at the same time particular, affective or expressive dimension, leading him to combine, for example, the lessons of the masters of Gestalt with those of other authors, more attentive to the specificity of artistic perception. A synthesis that will later find itself exemplarily realized in neo-concrete art. In that same period (early 80s), Otília, along with the CEAC group, was researching the artistic production of the 1960s, when Mário was the great intellectual mentor of the neo-avant-gardes of the Rio-São Paulo axis, which he preferred to call post-modern, at a time, moreover, when the expression had not yet been adopted by international criticism. Thus, in the Arte em Revista issue (published by the group) on Post-Modernity, a selection of texts by the Critic was included, preceded by an introductory note by Otília: "Mário Pedrosa in the face of the post-modern" (although partially resumed in the Conclusion of the book cited, it is reproduced here in its original, more detailed form). In sequence, still in the first part of this volume, a communication to the Seminar Art Studies from Latin America, from the Getty Foundation in Buenos Aires, from 1999, “Mário Pedrosa and the construction of Brazilian Modernity”. In truth, a recapitulation of the Critical Itinerary, but focusing on a theme as controversial as central in Mário's critique, especially with regard to our modernization: the national/international relationship in Brazilian art and architecture. In the second part, two more prefaces, from EDUSP collections, stand out for offering an overview of artistic production over the last two centuries. More specifically, both focus on the analysis of movements and Brazilian artists - "From Academics to Moderns" (from the French Mission to the neo-avant-gardes of the 60s/70s, architecture included) –, and foreigners, from the West and the East - "Modernity here and there". Closing, a small controversial Appendix, "Untimely Mário Pedrosa", a speech, in 2000, at the Latin America Memorial, on the occasion of Mário Pedrosa's centenary and the launch of the fourth volume of the EDUSP series, where the Author questions the amalgam, by the curators of the "500 years +" Exhibition, between what was being proposed as Rediscovery of Brazil and the Critic's positions in defense of primitive forms of artistic expression.

Keywords: Brazilian Modern Architecture, Abstract Art, Concrete Art, Japanese Art, Neoconcrete Art, Brazilian Artists, Brasília, Calder, Cézanne, Widener Collection, Di Cavalcanti, Artistic Form, Gestalt, Frente Group, Kandinsky, Käthe Kollwitz, Lygia Clark, Mário Pedrosa, Miró, French Mission, Modernity, Modernists, Morandi, Neo-avant-gardes, Oiticica, Pop'art, Portinari, Post-Modernity, Surrealism, Tachism, Visconti, Volpi, Worringer.