Quirino Campofiorito e Mário Pedrosa: entre a figuração e a abstração. A crítica de arte e o surgimento da arte abstrata no Brasil (1940 a 1960)

Abstract

This paper proposes a comparative reading of the critical works of Quirino Campofiorito and Mário Pedrosa, aiming to cover the study of the History of Art Criticism as well as proposing a new approach to the production of Brazilian art critics. The texts analyzed hereof date from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. The topics studied range from the function of art criticism for the critics - through the issue of landscape painting, raw art (or the art of "crazy"), the primitive or naive - resulting in the central discussion of this work: abstract art and avant-garde abstract-formal in Brazil. This work aims to present one of the great debates created by art critics - that of the abstract art - through a review of some aspects which are now important to the understanding of the concept of abstract art through the work of every critic, demonstrating how the emergence of Brazilian abstract art took place through the eyes of art criticism and how this relationship, both directly and indirectly, influenced the creation of abstract art in Brazilian artistic scene. The objective of this study is to provide the reader a comparative analysis and, through it, point out how important critical discourses are in order to fully understand how related art concepts change over the years and how these critics references are essential to understand such changes.