Retratos de escritoras no modernismo brasileiro: a montagem como método

Abstract

This thesis investigates the representation of Brazilian modernist women writers in the portraits produced during Modernism, analyzing how such images contributed to affirming, negotiating, or erasing the presence of women as intellectual and creative subjects. The research began with a survey of forty-three portraits of modernist writers made between 1920 and 1945, of which only four represent women — among them, Patrícia Galvão (Pagu) and Adalgisa Nery. This disproportion indicates a regime of visibility that consecrated the man as the central figure of artistic and literary creation, relegating the woman to the roles of muse or supporting character. The analysis is inspired by the montage method proposed by Aby Warburg in his Mnemosyne Atlas, reread by authors such as Georges Didi-Huberman and Giorgio Agamben. This approach makes it possible to understand images as fields of memory, in which displacements, continuities, and mechanisms of power are articulated. Through the montage of panels that bring together portraits, documents, and literary texts, the portraits of Pagu and Adalgisa Nery were especially examined, observing formal elements such as pose, color, and bodily fragmentation. The results demonstrate that the Brazilian modernist portrait, although it intended to be innovative, reproduced gender hierarchies and did not reflect the power of women writers as creative subjects in Modernism. However, in the fissures of these representations, we see traces of resistance and intellectual affirmation by the authors. Thus, the research proposes a reading through the portraits, displacing Modernism from a homogeneous narrative toward a plural and inclusive perspective.