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Mário Pedrosa: Participatory Art and the Nature of Knowledge

Mário Pedrosa is justly considered one of the foremost art critics in Latin America. A young Marxist from Rio de Janeiro who frequented the surrealists and discovered the Bauhaus while studying in Berlin in the late 1920s, he would play a key part in bringing modern art from Europe and the United States to Brazil. His numerous lectures, essays, and articles on the European, North American, and Latin American avant-gardes, written between the early 1930s and 1980, were pioneers of their kind in Brazil, formulating provocative suggestions on art’s role in society and its relations with politics and pedagogy. It was due to Pedrosa’s influence that avant-garde artists in Rio de Janeiro came together as the Grupo Frente in 1948 to develop their own form of geometric abstraction. He was the group’s mentor throughout the 1960s and 1970s when these artists, informed by his insight, shifted away from formal abstraction to create participatory experiments. This reassessment of the modernist vision marked the beginning of participatory art, an international phenomenon that is still at the forefront of discussions on contemporary art making. Pedrosa is also an important political figure. The beginning of his career was marked by his creation of Brazil’s first Trotskyist party in 1933, in conjunction with his publication of the first significant Marxist study of art in Brazil. Five years later, he became secretary of the Fourth International. He actively resisted Getúlio Vargas’s 1937 1945 Estado Novo and later the military dictatorship established in 1964, both of which forced him into exile in Paris, New York, Washington D.C., and Chile. In 1979, at nearly eighty years old and two short years before his death, he founded Brazil’s Workers’ Party, which has been in power since 2002. 1. For example, his 1933 lecture ‘‘As tendências sociais da arte e Käthe Kollowitz’’ (Art’s Social Tendencies and Käthe Kollowitz) was the first Marxist study of art in Brazil, and his 1949 thesis, Gestalt Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte (Gestalt On the Affective Nature of Form in the Work of Art), was the first text to broach the subject of art and Gestalt psychology in Brazil, and one of the first on an international level. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 83, Vol. 44, No. 2, 2011, 297 302