Três trópicos da tropicália

modernisms of 22

Oswald was, with Mário de Andrade, the intellectual leader of Brazilian modernism, a movement launched to great scandal in São Paulo in 1922, with a week of recitals and exhibitions that provoked awe, fright, and horror – and established the basis for a natural culture. The painters Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti, and the composer Villa-Lobos, as well as other poets and writers like Menotti del Picchia, Plínio Salgado, and Cassiano Ricardo, were also central figures. While Mário de Andrade, whose name I heard constantly among my nationalist friends, had been the responsible, normative, and organizing figure of modernism, Oswald represented radical fragmentation, an intuitive and violently iconoclastic force.