Modern Art Week

The Week took place at the Municipal Theater in São Paulo, and included plastic arts exhibitions, lectures, concerts, and reading of poems.

It was organized chiefly by painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and poet Mário de Andrade, in an attempt to bring to a head a long-running conflict between the young modernists and the cultural establishment, headed by the Brazilian Academy of Letters, which adhered strictly to academicism.

Two divisions predominated: the Anthropophagics (cannibalists), led by Oswald de Andrade, wanted to make use of the influence of European and American artists but freely create their own art out of the regurgitations of what they had taken from abroad (thus the term anthropophagy: they would "eat" all influences, digest it, and throw out new things).

This group was led by writer Plínio Salgado, who later became a fascist political leader (Brazilian Integralism) and was arrested by dictator Getúlio Vargas after a failed coup.

However, the Week established São Paulo as the seat of the new modernist movement, against the far more culturally conservative Rio de Janeiro.