Semana de Arte Moderna, 1922

After World War I, with a growing middle class exerting a decisive force, Brazil's early modernists deliberately began to move away from the conservative art academies steeped in European tradition and to search for cultural self-definition in terms of their Indian and African roots. Included in this search was the desire to incorporate the uniqueness of their native land and their country's reaction to cultural influences from the United States and Europe. It was this desire which eventually led to the Semana de Arte Moderna--a visual arts exhibition and series of dance spectacles, literary readings, and concerts hosted and attended by painters, poets, novelists, critics, and musicians, held in Sao Paulo between February 13-17 of 1922. Thus, the central purpose of this investigation is not only to give a factual accounting of the Semana de Arte Moderna but to examine the definition of Brazilian Modernism in the context of its paradoxical relationship with Europe.