Old images, new problems: the rediscovery of Debret in modernist Brazil (1930-1945)

Author(s)

Anderson Ricardo Trevisan

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2011-04-29

Examining board members

Paulo Roberto Arruda de Menezes; Jens Michael Baumgarten; Glaucia Kruse Villas Bôas; Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz; Marco Aurélio Werle

• Advisor: Paulo Roberto Arruda de Menezes

Abstract

This work investigates the rediscovery of the work of French painter Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768-1848) in Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century, especially from 1930 to 1945. A neoclassical educated artist, Debret lived in Brazil from 1816 to 1831, period in which he created a multitude of images of the country, including contemplative watercolors of its everyday life and historical paintings for the Portuguese monarchy. Rarely considered by Brazilians during the nineteenth century, Debret would be particularly appreciated in the following century. Analyzing the nineteenth-century literary criticism of Debrets work, the collectors and the modernist critics it received in the twentieth century as well as the publishing market of the time (considering especially the Revista da Semana), the thesis aims to understand the most significant events of this rediscovery and its implications. (AU)