Luso-Brazilian Review

The centennial of the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna provided the occasion for an array of exhibits, commemorative events, publications, and polemics unfolding online and in the pages of Brazil’s leading newspapers. Rafael Cardoso’s new study, Modernity in Black and White, (published in Brazil as Modernidade em Preto e Branco in 2022), makes a timely contribution to these ongoing debates. Focused primarily on visual culture, the book engages a wide range of primary and secondary sources to propose a temporally expansive understanding of Brazilian modernism that defies what he calls the “myth of 1922.” The artistic achievements of the previous generation, he argues, have been overshadowed by the Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, a city characterized as a “very prosperous but still provincial capital” (7). Modernity in Black and White seeks to relativize the importance of the Semana, specifically, as well as São Paulo, generally, to Brazilian modernism, while highlighting the unique expressions of modernity, especially in visual culture, that emerged earlier in Rio de Janeiro. Well written and enriched with a beautiful collection of half-tone and full color illustrations, Modernity in Black and White deserves an extended consideration, both appreciative and critical, as a vital contribution to the study of Brazilian modernism. The first half of this review essay will comment on the book’s many qualities, especially those relating to his analyses of Carioca modernism, while the second half will offer a critique of some of its more provocative arguments.

Following Perry Anderson’s observation that we should speak of a “multiplicity of modernisms” in the plural, Cardoso rejects any formalist or evolutionist definition of modernism pertaining to aesthetic principles or stylistic categories. Modernism was instead a reaction to the condition of modernity marked by profound ambivalence as the promise of personal freedom, new job opportunities, and forms of democratic representation coincided with the capitalist exploitation of work, new technologies of violence, and the destruction of traditional ways of life, leading to a feeling of alienation and insecurity. With the advent of capitalist modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “all that is solid melts into air,” to recall Marx’s expression. Against the evolutionist narrative of art history, with its tidy periodization correlating to a succession of styles and movements, Cardoso points to a series of “alternate modernisms” with intersecting aesthetic interests that emerged during the final decade of the nineteenth century (5). [End Page 182]

The eruption of these plural modernisms in Brazil occurred within a broader historical context marked by the abolition of slavery, the end of the monarchy, and the founding of the First Republic, which coincided with parallel developments such as mass European immigration, incipient industrialization, urban electrification, and the establishment of new transportation and communication technologies. As in many other cities at that time, Rio de Janeiro’s “tropical belle époque” nurtured a Francophile elite culture in literature, visual art, architecture, and urban planning. A concomitant disdain for and fear of the vast population of brown and black people was premised on an ideology of white supremacy, which was also typical of intellectual elites during the age of scientific racism. The destruction of the downtown cortiços to make room for the Haussmann-inspired urban renewal projects led to the formation of hillside favelas, which became home to a large population of impoverished residents, including the formerly enslaved, recently arrived immigrants, and veterans of the Canudos war (1896–97). Despite the Eurocentric orientation of the elite, early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro was also home to Afro-descendent writers Lima Barreto and João do Rio, the first generation of modern samba musicians, such as Donga and Pixinguinha, and a lively interracial art community that was deeply engaged with local social life and expressive culture.

Cardoso critiques the tendency to understand modernism in relation to the linguistic spheres of English, French, or German, while ignoring that the term “modernismo...