Amparo da Barra Mansa, 1899 – Valinhos (Brazil), 1973
By Francisco Alambert
Architect, engineer, painter, sculptor, playwright, set designer, writer, decorator, and performer (before this concept was coined), Flávio Resende de Carvalho moved with his family to São Paulo in 1900. In 1908, he studied at the American School of São Paulo, then in Paris (1911), and later in England (1914). In Newcastle, in 1918, he began studying civil engineering at Durham University and, after graduating in 1922, enrolled in the evening course at the King Edward the Seventh School of Fine Arts. In the same year, he returned to Brazil—shortly after the Modern Art Week in São Paulo—where he opened his architecture office. In 1927, he presented a controversial and innovative design for the São Paulo Government Palace, which was not approved. Flávio de Carvalho never won competitions, and only two of his architectural projects were realized.
In 1929, he strengthened his relationship with Le Corbusier, and the following year he participated in the Pan-American Architects Congress with the lecture “The City of the Naked Man,” in which he emphasized the need for a “new man,” stripped of the prejudices of bourgeois culture, echoing theses that animated the Brazilian anthropophagic movement. In 1931, based on studies in anthropology and psychoanalysis, he performed a controversial piece called Experiência N² in São Paulo, where he walked, wearing a cap, against the flow of a Catholic procession to study public reaction. He later published a book with the same title. He participated in the XXXVII National Salon of Fine Arts, known as the Modernist Salon.
Together with Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and others, Flávio de Carvalho founded the Modern Artists Club (CAM) in 1932, which was closed several times by the police. This club gathered avant-garde artists, Marxist thinkers, and the general public for discussions and performances. In 1933, he launched the Theater of Experience, which staged his experimental work The Dance of the Dead God, inspired by Dadaism and Surrealism. In 1934, his first solo exhibition was invaded and closed by the police (later reopened by court order) for obscenity. His portraits of artists (such as Pablo Neruda and Mário de Andrade) and his dramatic, expressionist self-portraits gained significant attention. Carvalho participated in the Venice Biennale in 1938 and 1950, as well as the São Paulo Salon of the Plastic Artists’ Union from 1939 to 1941.
In the drawings of the Tragic Series (1947), he recorded the agony and death of his own mother. From 1955, he contributed to the newspaper Diário de São Paulo, writing the column on fashion and behavior “House, Man, and Landscape.” In 1956, he held an event in São Paulo called Experiência N° 3, which consisted of a walk through the city center while wearing a skirt and a loose short-sleeve blouse, a transparent hat, fishnet stockings, and leather sandals, a set called Tropical Outfit.
In 1968, he completed the Monument to García Lorca, which was destroyed by an armed group in 1969 during the Brazilian military dictatorship (the monument was later rebuilt). He exhibited in all the São Paulo Art Biennials of the 1950s, then again in 1963, 1965 (when he won an award), 1967, 1971 (when he received a special room), and 1973. Posthumously, he exhibited in 1979, 1983 (the year a retrospective of his work was shown), 1985, 1987, 1989, 1994, and 1998. In 1999, a major exhibition titled “Flávio de Carvalho – A Romantic Revolutionary” was inaugurated at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro, in celebration of his centenary.
