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"This book fills an important gap in contemporary art historiography. It brings together significant findings regarding the postwar art movement, which is today still too much dominated by European and North American references."—Ricardo Basbaum, artist, Professor, Department of Art, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
"Mariola V. Alvarez's study brings new objects into the dialogue on Neoconcretism and offers novel readings of familiar ones, weaving in sociopolitical context to complicate the understanding of Neoconcretism in relation to Brazil's concurrent drive to modernization."—Lynda Klich, author of The Noisemakers: Estridentismo, Vanguardism, and Social Action in Postrevolutionary Mexico
List of contents
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
1. The Anti-Dictionary: The Verbal Non-Object and Neoconcrete Poetry, Books, and Installation Art
2. Experiência Neoconcreta: Jornal do Brasil and Its Cultural Supplement, Graphic Design, and the Modern Public
3. A Synergistic Phenomenon: The Neoconcrete Ballets and Abstraction
4. New Monumentality and Collaboration: Neoconcretism and Architecture
Conclusion
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INDEX
About the author
Mariola V. Alvarez is Assistant Professor of Art History at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. She is the coeditor of New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America.
Summary
The 1950s and early 1960s in Brazil gave birth to a period of incredible optimism and economic development. In The Affinity of Neoconcretism, Mariola V. Alvarez argues that the Neoconcretists—a group of artists and poets working together in Rio de Janeiro from 1959 to 1961—formed an important part of this national transformation. She maps the interactions of the Neoconcretists and discusses how the artists and poets collaborated to challenge existing divides between high and low art and between fields such as fine art and dance. This book reveals how art and intellectual work in Brazil occurred within a local political and social context and also emerged from the transnational movement of artists, artworks, published materials, and ideas.
