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| Author(s): |
Marcos Pedro Magalhães Rosa
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas |
| Defense date: | 2015-10-12 |
| Examining board members: |
Heloísa André Pontes;
Luiz Gustavo Freitas Rossi;
Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni
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| Advisor: | Heloísa André Pontes |
| Abstract | |
The painter Alfredo Volpi (1896-1999) was born in Italy and raised in Sao Paulo beside immigrant artists. He is also considered, by many scholars, one of the most important Brazilian painters. Several critics analyzed his work, almost always resorting to a narrative regarding his biography and personality. This way of analyzing Volpi, although still present nowadays, date back to Mario de Andrade (1893-1945) and Mario Pedrosa (1900-1981). More specifically, to the period between 1944 e 1957, when, in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, important exposées of Volpi¿s work took place. Respectively, his first individual display and the first retrospective. It is in this precise period that Volpi pointed Brazilian and ascend to our pantheon. I took this public personality as analytical focus, which means that I leaned over the relation between art critics and the artist himself, as well as the dialogue between their expectations and his artistic production. In this relatively tense conversation, the notion of personhood, a classical anthropological topic, is deployed to shuffle the subject¿s position and his work. In this dissertation, both painter and painting create themselves simultaneously and divide the heuristic prerogative for that process¿ apprehension. In making Volpi Brazilian, the critics manage to renew the history of art and render relative established canons. Put it differently, in instituting a specific personality ¿ an isolated proletarian man living in the Sao Paulo¿s suburbs with artistic penchant ¿ the artist and his critics uncoiled the national history of art. That process, viewed by another angle, revealed the importance of immigrant relation nets and also the centrality of institutions, such as the technical schools that, in sao Paulo, made possible the outcome of an Brazilian iconography created by immigrants and their children. The artist, through his work, and the art critic are mirrored in one another. They both reveal a negotiation surrounding ideas about nationalism and modernity that locate and consecrate Alfredo Volpi (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 13/09275-2 - Volpi's Mirror: the artist and criticism in São Paulo in the 1940s and 1950s |
| Grantee: | Marcos Pedro Magalhães Rosa |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Master |