Timbaúba, 1900 – Río de Janeiro (Brasil), 1981
By Francisco Alambert
One of the most engaged intellectuals in Latin America, Mário Pedrosa created a trajectory in which radicalism in political militancy and in the defense of modern art and its developments coexisted. Between 1920 and 1923, after studying in Switzerland, he studied law in Rio de Janeiro and began to take an interest in social causes and Marxism. In 1924, in São Paulo, he collaborated with Diário da Noite, writing literary criticism. There, he met intellectuals connected to the São Paulo modernist group, such as Mário de Andrade. In 1925, he joined the Communist Party and, the following year, was one of the founders of Revista Proletária, which was shut down by the police after its first issue.
In 1927, the Party sent him to study at the Leninist School in Moscow, but Pedrosa got sidetracked in Berlin, where, in addition to participating in street battles against the Nazis, he attended philosophy and sociology courses and learned about Gestalt theories. In Europe, he made contact with German modernist avant-gardes and the surrealists (his sister-in-law was married to the poet Benjamin Péret), including Louis Aragon, André Breton, and the leftist group that edited the journals Clarté and Lutte de Classes. In Germany, he joined the Trotskyist opposition and, in 1929, upon returning to Brazil, he was expelled from the Party. In 1930, he founded the workers’ newspaper Luta de Classes and was arrested for the first time in Rio de Janeiro. In 1931, he returned to São Paulo, where he worked as a journalist and continued his Trotskyist activism.
In 1933, he began his work as an art critic with a lecture presented at the Clube dos Artistas Modernos (CAM) about the German engraver Käte Kollwitz. It was considered the first Brazilian Marxist critique essay. In 1934, after being shot during an anti-fascist street demonstration, he took refuge at Galeria Itu, where a show of Portinari’s paintings was being held. The incident led to a series of texts about the painter that were published in the press and later in his first collection of essays, Arte, necessidade vital (1949). The following year, back in Rio de Janeiro, Pedrosa was again persecuted by the police, which forced him to hide for more than a year. In 1937, he went into exile in France and participated in the foundation of the Fourth International.
Pedrosa moved to New York in 1939, where he worked as a secretary for an organization he abandoned the following year after disagreements with Trotsky. In 1944, he wrote two essays about Alexander Calder, which marked the beginning of their collaboration and Pedrosa’s militancy in favor of abstractionism. The following year, upon returning to Brazil, he founded the periodical Vanguarda Socialista. In 1947, already writing regularly for newspapers, he began to show interest in the artistic production of the mentally ill and children. The following year, he joined several artists to found the Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro, the first abstract-concrete nucleus in Brazil, which gave rise to the neoconcretist movement. He was one of the theorists of this movement alongside Ferreira Gullar, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Clark.
In the 1950s, in addition to creating the column on visual arts for Correio da Manhã and the Jornal do Brasil, he also taught Art History at the National Faculty of Architecture and History of Brazil at Colégio Pedro II, both in Rio de Janeiro. From 1953 to 1962, he participated in various ways in all the São Paulo biennials and was directly responsible for the VI Biennial (1961). In 1957, after being elected vice-president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), he received a UNESCO grant to study the relationship between Japanese art and Western art. Between 1961 and 1962, he directed the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo (MASP). In 1964, the year of the military coup in Brazil, he published his critique book Dimensões da arte and, the following year, wrote the political essay A opção imperialista, while also presiding over the jury of the IV Paris Biennale (he was a juror at several biennials worldwide). In 1969, he led the boycott of the X São Paulo Biennial in protest against the censorship of the military dictatorship.
Persecuted by the military government, Pedrosa sought refuge in 1970 at the Chilean embassy, where he stayed for three months. In response, the New York Review of Books published an open letter to the Brazilian government, headed by Calder and Picasso, with over a hundred signatures demanding the preservation of his physical integrity. In 1971, he went into exile in Chile and began working for the government of Salvador Allende, tasked with setting up the Museum of Solidarity. After the Chilean military coup in 1973, he sought refuge first in Mexico and then in Paris. In Europe, he wrote about art and also about politics, returning to Brazil in 1977.
From 1978 onwards, the Brazilian critic began writing essays like Variações sem tema or A Arte de retaguarda, in which he expressed pessimism about the direction of modern art. The following year, with little interest in art, he began advocating for the founding of the Workers’ Party (PT) and published the political-sociological essay A crise mundial do imperialismo e Rosa Luxemburgo. In 1980, the São Paulo Biennial created the Mário Pedrosa Award, given to a Latin American artist for the body of their work. His last public act in life was being the founding member no. 1 of the PT, which in 2002 elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva president of Brazil. In 1991, Otília Arantes published the study Mário Pedrosa – itinerário crítico. Most of his essays on art were organized into several volumes by researchers Aracy Amaral and Otília Arantes.
