The player by the brush: audio, visual and sensoriality from modernism to the Vargas Era

Author(s)

Marcelo Róbson Téo

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2012-03-05

Examining board members

Ulpiano Toledo Bezerra de Meneses; Francisco Cabral Alambert Junior; Aracy Abreu Amaral; Domingos Tadeu Chiarelli; Annateresa Fabris

• Advisor: Ulpiano Toledo Bezerra de Meneses

Abstract

This research deals with the connections between the Brazilian artistic and intellectual production and the world of the senses during the decades of 1920-1940. Taken as a political and aesthetic motive, the sensorium was the raw material of the proposals for the artistic and cultural identity, connected to the ideal of popular culture, which undergoes significant changes from the beginnings of modernism to the Vargas Era. The relations between visual and audio worlds were privileged, especially in its written and pictorial demonstrations and its dialogues with music. This last emerges as representative of a nationalism based on sensorial materials that asserts itself throughout the 1920s. And it can also be mapped as early as a mid-century earlier, characterizing the perception of popular culture in the forms of scholarly expression. The world of the senses, represented largely by sound dimension, worked as part of ideological debates and as a political tool for social intervention. The inclusion of this issue in the interpretation of Brazilian modernism strengthens the ties between art, culture and politics by questioning the impact of their aesthetic formulations on the actions taken following the Estado Novo. In this scenario, painting, literature, criticism and intellectual production served as a viewing platform through which we can see the scope of the problem, highlighting the link between artistic and intellectual invention and the quarrels of cultural and political field of the time. (AU)