Mário de Andrade

Mário de Andrade was a central figure of early twentieth-century modernism in Brazil who worked as a writer, poet, art critic, pianist, photographer, musicologist, and scholar. Over the course of his life, he avidly collected objects as diverse as his many pursuits: books, magazines, documents, manuscripts, correspondence, newspapers, music records, catalogues, as well as paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures. Among his vast art holdings—which included everything from popular culture, children’s drawings, sacred art, and illustrated manuscripts—he assembled significant collections of Brazilian and European modern art.

Andrade’s interest in collecting art can be traced to 1905. A creative child and a prodigy on piano, he framed one of his own drawings, Cabeça de tigre (Head of a Tiger; 1905), which he kept throughout his life and which is now housed at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros of the Universidade de São Paulo (IEB-USP). His natural inclination for collecting manifested itself in many ways through his early life, as evidenced by the expansive scrapbooks he kept on a variety of subjects starting in 1909, including several focused on the visual arts. In 1917, Andrade purchased his first painting, a landscape by the academic artist Torquato Bassi, which he later sold. That same year, he graduated from the Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo (São Paulo’s Drama and Music Conservatory) and published his first book, entitled Há uma gota de sangue em cada poema (There is a Drop of Blood in Every Poem). It was also at this time that Andrade encountered modern art in person for the first time at an exhibition in São Paulo of paintings by Anita Malfatti, who had just returned from Germany and the United States. While the exhibition received negative reactions from critics who decried the artist’s Expressionist strategies, Andrade was enthralled by Malfatti’s work. Andrade came to her defense and would later credit Malfatti with awakening in him and his colleagues the desire to renew the country’s art institutions and create a modernist movement in Brazil. In 1920 he acquired from Malfatti one of the works he had seen in that exhibition, the painting O homem amarelo (The Yellow Man; 1915–16; IEB-USP).

A committed modernist, Andrade was among the core artists and intellectuals to organize and stage the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) in São Paulo. This was the first multi-disciplinary exhibition of modern art to take place in Brazil and its profound impact has been productively compared to that of the 1913 Armory Show in the United States. Following the Semana, Andrade acquired works from several of the visual artists who participated in the event, including Zina Aita, Victor Brecheret, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Ferrignac, Yan de Almeida Prado, and Vicente do Rego Monteiro. In doing so, he not only assembled an important collection of Brazilian modern art, but also created an invaluable document of that moment of cultural ferment.

Although he came from a middle class background, Andrade built close relationships with wealthy artists, intellectuals, and patrons who shared his commitment to the cultural modernization of Brazil—figures such as painter Tarsila do Amaral, fellow writer Oswald de Andrade, and collectors and art patrons Olivia Guades Penteado and Paulo Prado. Andrade never traveled to Europe but assembled his collection of European modern art through these friends. In January 1923, for instance, he acquired a harlequin by Pablo Picasso through Tarsila; later that same year, he acquired Fernand Léger’s Composition (1921; IEB-USP) and Marc Chagall’s print Mariage (Wedding; n.d.; IEB-USP), possibly through Tarsila as well. In 1924, also with Tarsila’s assistance, he added André Lhote’s Les Footballeurs (The Football Players, 1918; private collection, São Paulo) to his collection. Finally, with the help of an intermediary, he purchased a Cubist collage by Georges Valmier, Composition (1921; IEB-USP), from Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie L’Effort Moderne.

After 1924, Andrade shifted his focus from acquiring more European modern art to building other areas of his collection, particularly those focused on the folk and popular arts of Brazil. He nonetheless continued to pursue his interest in the European avant-garde well into the 1930s. Through writer Sérgio Milliet, who was based in Paris, Andrade acquired a large collection of special edition books and manuscripts illustrated by some of the leading modern artists of the period, including Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, André Derain, Marie Laurencin, Léger, Picasso, and Francis Picabia. Through his eclectic and expansive collecting practices, by the time of his death in 1945, Andrade had built one of the most important art collections of the interwar period in Brazil.

Andrade is recognized as one of the most influential figures in the development and dissemination of modern art in Brazil. His 1922 book of poems Paulicéia desvairada (Hallucinated City), which can be read as a modernist manifesto, laid the foundations for the development of Brazilian modernism. In later works, such as his 1928 novel Macunaíma: o herói sem nenhum caráter (Macunaíma: The Hero Without Any Character), Andrade developed a highly original modernist prose style, using his extensive research into Brazilian regional dialects, myths, culture, and traditions to tell a story of Brazilian cultural formation. Beyond his works of fiction, Andrade conducted a number of studies on the history of Brazilian music and led expeditions to research and record Brazil’s folkloric and ethnographic traditions. He was also a prolific art critic and regular contributor to several newspapers. Andrade held several positions in universities and government offices, and founded important cultural organizations. His contributions to Brazilian culture cannot be overstated, and have been recognized through many awards and honors, including the naming of São Paulo’s largest public library after him. Andrade’s various collections, encompassing thousands of objects, were acquired by the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros of the Universidade de São Paulo from his family in 1967, where they are still housed today.