The Bauhaus in Brazil Pedagogy and Practice Adele Nelson
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ARTICLE Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/5/2/27/1816613/artm_a_00146.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 the BAuhAus In BrAZIL pedAgogy And prACtICe aDELE nELsOn On seeing the recent Brazilian works on view as a juror at the fourth Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo Biennial) in 1957, Alfred H. Barr Jr. notoriously characterized them as “Bauhaus exercises” and mere “diagrams.”1 Geometric abstract works by Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hermelindo Fiaminghi, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Luiz Sacilotto, Franz Weissmann, and others prominently displayed at the exhibition were undoubtedly the target of Barr’s dismissal of Brazilian contemporary art.2 Instantly controversial in Brazil, the remark was understood, then as now, as a dismissal of Brazilian abstract art as a latter-day, derivative replaying of the innovations of early-20th-century European modernism—by no one less than the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.3 In his rebuke of Barr’s assessment, prominent Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa noted the neocolonial attitude at work in the demand by foreign critics that Brazilian art either parrot the currently favored style in New York 1 C.A., “Conversa com Alfred Barr Jr.,” O Estado de São Paulo, September 28, 1957, Suplemento literário, 7. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. 2 IV Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de S. Paulo: Catálogo geral (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1957), 58–70, 73–81. 3 For analysis of the reaction to Barr’s remark in Brazil, see Ana Cândida de Avelar, “Controversies of a Juror: Alfred Barr Jr at the 4th São Paulo Bienal,” Third Text 26, no. 1 (January 2012): 29–39. © 2016 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00146 27 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/5/2/27/1816613/artm_a_00146.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Installation view of the Brazilian representation at the fourth Bienal de São Paulo, 1957. From left to right, the works are by Hermelindo Fiaminghi, Elide Monzeglio, Franz Weissmann, Raymundo Nogueira, Luiz Sacilotto, and Lygia Clark. Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. and Paris, in this case gestural abstraction, or literally include “flocks of parrots.”4 Barr was not wrong in identifying the German school and its philosophy of design as an important reference for Brazilian artists, a relationship made all the more vivid by the biennial’s special exhibi- tion dedicated to the Bauhaus. What he failed to recognize or value were the ways artists in Brazil were engaged not in imitation but in transformation. Barr judged the Brazilians with a suspicion similar to that evinced by Peter Bürger in his 1970s analysis of the avant-garde, which viewed the neo-avant-garde as depoliticized imitators of the his- torical avant-garde.5 Though, as Barr’s comments also make clear, art- ists working in a developing nation placed claims on the history of European modernism in a context of particular contestation. Benjamin Buchloh, in his critique of Bürger, has called for an investigation of “the actual conditions of reception and transformation of the avant- garde paradigms” on the part of the European and U.S. postwar avant- gardes, a project equally crucial for study of the postwar avant-gardes 4 Mário Pedrosa, “Brazilian Painting and International Taste” (1957), trans. in Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents, ed. Glória Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 192. 5 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: artmargins 5:2 University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28 of Latin America and beyond.6 Engagement with Bauhaus ideas, at the institutional and individual levels, proved a key forum for Brazilian actors in the 1950s to articulate tactics of citation and adaptation and to assert nonderivative, radical conceptions of modernism.7 In their respective landmark studies from the 1970s, Brazilian art historians Aracy Amaral and Ronaldo Brito established that European constructivist tendencies, including De Stijl, the Russian avant-garde, and the Bauhaus, found a powerful resonance and redefinition in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/5/2/27/1816613/artm_a_00146.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Brazil following World War II among Concrete and Neo-Concrete art- ists.8 The claims on the Bauhaus, in particular, are ripe for reappraisal, as the manifold reinterpretations of the Bauhaus at mid-century, in Brazil and abroad, allow us to critically reflect on the postwar Brazilian avant-garde and its relationship to European modernism. Scholars have analyzed individual Brazilian artists’ transformations of the formal and conceptual ideas of Bauhaus students and teachers, including Josef Albers, Max Bill, and Paul Klee.9 Others have drawn attention to the effort in the late 1950s and early 1960s to create an art school in Rio de 6 Benjamin Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm of Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October, no. 37 (Summer 1986): 43. For extended considerations of Buchloh’s proposals regarding the neo-avant-garde, as well as those of Bürger and Hal Foster in relation to postwar Latin American avant-gardes, see Andrea Giunta, “Farewell to the Periphery: Avant-Gardes and Neo-Avant-Gardes in the Art of Latin America,” in Concrete Invention: Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Reflections on Geometric Abstraction from Latin America and Its Legacy, ed. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2013), 105–17; and Sérgio B. Martins, Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil 1949–1979 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 2–9. 7 Pedrosa identified a “radical attitude” toward modernism among Brazilian postwar art- ists as well as Alexander Calder and Paul Klee, artists he saw as models for young Brazilian artists. See Adele Nelson, “Radical and Inclusive: Mário Pedrosa’s Modernism,” in Ferreira and Herkenhoff, Mário Pedrosa, 35–43. Sérgio B. Martins and Irene V. Small use the notions of hijacking and destabilization, respectively, in their analysis of the Brazilian avant-garde’s relationship to modernism. See Martins, Constructing an Avant- Garde, 2; and Irene V. Small, “Pigment Pur and the Corpo da Côr: Post-Painterly Practice L and Transmodernity,” October, no. 152 (Spring 2015): 82–102. 8 See Aracy A. Amaral, Projeto construtivo brasileiro na arte (1950–1962) (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 1977); and Ronaldo Brito, Neoconcretismo: Vértice e ruptura do projeto construtivo brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1985). Portions of Brito’s text first appeared in the mid-1970s. 9 See, for example, Paulo Herkenhoff, “A aventura planar de Lygia Clark—De caracóis, bauhaus in brazi escadas e Caminhando,” in Lygia Clark, ed. Paulo Herkenhoff (São Paulo: Museu de Arte E Moderna de São Paulo, 1999), 21–22; Mari Carmen Ramírez, “The Embodiment of Color—‘From the Inside Out,’” in Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, ed. Mari Carmen | t h Ramírez (London: Tate, 2007), 37–38; and María Amalia García, “Max Bill on the Map of n O Argentine-Brazilian Concrete Art,” in Building on a Construct: The Adolpho Leirner s EL Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, ed. Mari n 29 Janeiro based on the Hochschule für Gestaltung (Institute of Design, HfG) in Ulm, Germany (1953–68)—an initiative that would result in the creation of the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (School of Industrial Design) in 1963.10 Emphasis on the figure of Bill and narra- tives of influence centered on Bill’s transmission of Concrete Art to Latin America, however, have overshadowed a nuanced interpretation of the context and stakes of artists’ considerations of Bauhaus pedagogy and practice. Yet important developments related to art education in the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/5/2/27/1816613/artm_a_00146.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 early 1950s, which had little direct connection to Bill’s activities or were positioned in opposition to them, are essential to understanding the conditions in which ideas about the Bauhaus became relevant and use- ful for artists in Brazil. To speak of the Bauhaus in the singular and to use the term both as a historical reference and as an ostensibly stable and unified set of design and pedagogical principles is, of course, inaccurate. Walter Gropius, the institution’s first director, aimed not simply to provide an alternative to traditional art academies, but to eschew the notions of art for art’s sake and of design in the strict service of industry. Indeed, the Bauhaus was to be an interdisciplinary and international school where creative expression engaged the “practical work of the world.”11 Hal Foster and Barry Bergdoll employ narrative metaphors— fiction and myth—to explain the capacities of Gropius’s “Bauhaus idea” not only to assimilate the artists and principles of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, the school’s historical contemporaries, but to endure and attract new adherents.12 From its inception in Weimar, Germany, Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea (Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 53–68. I discuss Oiticica’s evocations of Klee in my contri- bution to Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky, Elisabeth Sussman, James Rondeau, and Donna De Salvo (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Museum of Art; Munich: DelMonico/Prestel, forthcoming 2016). 10 See, for example, Silvia Fernández, “The Origins of Design Education in Latin America: From the hfg in Ulm to Globalization,” Design Issues 22, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 3–19; and Aleca Le Blanc, “Palmeiras and Pilotis: Promoting Brazil with Modern Architecture,” Third Text 26, no.