[1][2] Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1897, Di Cavalcanti was influenced by the intellectuals he met at his home of his maternal uncle, a figure of the abolitionist movement.
[3] This would provide the basis for a lifelong politically driven artistic career, which would start by the production of a drawing published by the magazine fon-fon.
[2] This movement along with the Group of Five wished to revive the artistic environment in São Paulo at the time and had as its main interest to free Brazilian art from the European influences found within it.
This can thus be seen as a continuance of European stylistic influences and this would not change until Di Cavalcanti returned from Paris in 1925 to live in Rio de Janeiro once again.
During this time he was employed as a correspondent for the newspaper Correio da Manhã and attended classes at the Académie Ranson in Paris, which led him to meet European modernists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger.
In 1932, another large group was established by Lasar Segall, Anita Malfatti, and Vitor Becheret which was the Sociedade Pró-Arter Moderna also known as SPAM.
He met his wife-to-be, painter Noêmia Mourão (he was previously married to his cousin Maria in 1921) after his first incarceration in 1932 for supporting Revolução Paulista.
[3] In 1937, Di Cavalcanti and his wife Noêmia Mourão would set sail to Paris to stay there until the outbreak of World War II in the start of 1940.
During this three-year stay abroad he was awarded a Gold medal in the Art Technique Exhibition in Paris for his murals in the French-Brazilian Coffee Company.
The friendship with Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho was a direct effect to the donation of 559 drawings by Di Cavalcanti himself to the Museu de Arte Contemporânea which was founded by Ciccilo.
The Museu de Arte Contempemporânea is also better known as the MAC and currently has 564 drawings by Di Cavalcanti in its possession of which only 5 were acquired through purchases and the others through the donation by the artist himself.
Di Cavalcanti on the other hand refrained from overt political representations, although he himself was in a pursuit of perfecting a pure Brazilian art which had a clear break with European influences.
This was a dream and philosophy which can be seen as an ideal for Di Cavalcanti which was never found as one can see stylistic influences from the Italian Renaissance, Muralism, and the European Modernists.
The artworks below are all on display in the Museu de Arte Contempemporânea (MAC) in São Paulo, Brazil The logo in front of the fabric focuses around the found m-two girls.
A three-day event held at São Paulo’s Municipal Theater, the Modern Art Week provided a point of connection for different artists and also displayed a new phenomenon to Brazil’s bourgeois public: the heady mix of ‘‘isms’’ which were circulating in cosmopolitan European circles, including Expressionism, Surrealism, and others.
The Modern Art Week incorporated dance, music, theater, literature, visual arts, and architecture, and featured artists and writers who would become some of the most influential in the boom of Brazilian modernism that was to follow, among them Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Anita Malfatti, and Tarsila do Amaral.