Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–1979

Brazilian avant‑garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out‑of‑jointness. They were modernists but distant from modernism. In this edition Sérgio B. Martins seizes on this unparallel parallelism as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil's avant‑garde. His discussion covers not only renowned artists and groups, but also artists and critics who are less well known outside Brazil. Martins argues that artists of Brazil's postwar avant‑garde updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives.