Cultural concepts and characteristics

Identity Brazil

Modernism and National Identity in Brazil, or How to Brew a Brazilian Stew -- Styliane Philippou

This article outlines some of the efforts that the Brazilian culture has made to separate themselves from the cultures of Europe and other influences. Brazil was granted its political independence in 1822 however the countries cultural emancipation came much later. Pilippou (2005) writes:

One hundred years after Independence (1822), the second discovery of Brazil aimed to couple political independence with cultural emancipation, and demanded the invention of an authentic hybrid Brazilian tradition on the basis of which to construct an autonomous Brazilian art. The quest of modernity was parallel to an intensified quest for brasilidade, which embraced all things that had remained relatively untouched by what was viewed as an intensive nineteenth-century re-Europeanisation of Brazilian society and culture with its consequent economic and cultural dependency. During the Empire which followed Independence, economic domination was British and cultural French (Pilippou, 2005).

There was a quest by the culture to regard a sense of identity that was all its own and it did so by looking at the local items that had been untouched by foreign cultures.

In the 1920s, groups began to become increasingly interested with India and Black members of their society. The white elites that were in power generally set the attitudes towards culture and these groups had never before gained a place in mainstream Brazilian culture. Tarsila do Amaral, daughter of wealthy Sao Paulo landowners and coffee-growers and trained in Paris, painted A negra (A Negro Woman) at the atelier of Fernand Le'ger (Pilippou, 2005). Her turn towards Brazilian themes was concurrent with her experimentation with new Modernist aesthetic trends. In 1922, she was the only woman to exhibit at the Salon Officiel des Artistes Francais; at that time, however, she was painting in an academic style however after her return to Brazil, she formed the Modernist Group of Five (Pilippou, 2005). The reappraisal of the Indian, the African and the popular did not overthrow the colonial and the artists and architects who embraced Modernism turned towards the colonial past in search of their cultural roots (Pilippou, 2005). This eventually led to recognition of a mixture of cultures that were present in the country.