ABSTRACT

The study of Brazilian modernism often conjures up a litany repeated by historians and critics. Modernist ideas were allegedly an import from Europe, “out of place” with relation to Brazil’s sociopolitical and material realities.1 These ideas lacked some crucial or essential precondition, producing a paradoxical “modernism without modernity.”2 Brazilian modernism was out of time, lopsided, proposing forms and designs “well ahead of economic and technological realities.”3 It supposedly put the cart before the horse, introducing concepts and proposals that anticipated rather than expressed modernity and modernization.4 The implication is that modernism in Brazil was derivative, imitative, and subordinate to European modernism, and as such was doubly inauthentic: it neither expressed “genuine” Brazilian experiences, nor did it live up to the “original” European models.