3 - The Printing of Modern Life

Summary

Illustrated magazines provided some of the main vehicles for expressing ideas of modernity and modernism in the Brazilian context. The chapter focuses on three pioneering art nouveau magazines of the early 1900s (Atheneida, Kósmos, Renascença) and their mass-circulation successors (O Malho, Fon-Fon!, Careta, Para Todos) over the 1910s. The experimental work produced in the arena of design and photography by artists K. Lixto and J. Carlos, among others, is proof that an alternative version of modernism was already in place in Rio de Janeiro long before the modernist movement of 1922, focused not on fine art but mainly on graphic art and photography. By examining the complex linkages between the magazines and their personnel, the chapter demonstrates that this alternate modernism was a self-conscious and deliberate movement. The writings of leading art critic Gonzaga Duque provide the theoretical underpinnings that tie together the efforts of a broad group of practitioners. Interestingly, their vision of modern art weds the symbolist decadentism of Rubén Darío’s modernismo with a political outlook that ranges from anarchism to socialism and communism.