Retrato pictórico no modernismo literário brasileiro

Abstract

We investigate a phenomenon associated with the history of portrait paintings during modernism in Brazil ⎯ the portrayal of writers and poets by painters, their contemporaries. Portraits often orient our expectations about the social position, historical period, political context, physical attributes, psychological properties of the portrayed. A supposition about modernist portraits which hasn’t been detailed yet is that a receptor or interpreter doesn’t examine portrayed individuals, but certain patterns of aesthetic activity related to the portrayed individual. Such patterns may originate in the source-system or source-entity, which is the writer or poet. This work will be developed in three directions: (i) we offer an exhaustive list of cases of a phenomenon still poorly understood: the pictoric portrayal of Brazilian modernist writers and poets; (ii) a hypothesis that what the portraits represent is not just individuals, but patterns of activity associated with artistic movements; (iii) an indication of the need to build a typology that includes new classes or categories of portraits.