"Mário de Andrade I" , 1921 ," Anita Malfatti"
Reprodução fotografica: "Leonardo Crescenti"

Por: "Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda"

Mário de Andrade was born in 1893, in São Paulo, and died in 1945, in the same city. During his childhood, he has studied piano and, when he was a teenager, started writting poems. When Mário de Andrade became older, he founded, with a group of friends and intellectuals, spread all over the country, a movement of art called modernism. After it, he travelled to Brazil North and Northeast, in order to learn more about the land and to collect information about the people from that region.

At the time he came back to the southeast, with a lot of experiences, Mario de Andrade wrote many books and, then, got a respectful job as a diretor of the Institute of Heritage, History and Culture, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the former capital of the country. Some months after the end of the Second World War, Mario de Andrade passed away with 52 years old.

Known as a sentimental person, with a lot of prolific and original ideas, the Brazilian author was one of the creators of the Modern Arts Week, in 1922, na event inspired in the European vanguards of painting and literature, as Dadaism and Cubism. Sponsored by nacionalists points of view, the movement, whose leaders were him and Oswald de Andrade, wanted to change the art aesthetic's face, with its excessive formalism and erudition.

The main desire of Mário de Andrade and his colleagues was to discover and research the roots of popular culture, integrating the knowledge of the artists with the folklore of the people. A portrait of Brazil should include, like a Picasso's paint, tortuous geometrical lines of the human bodies and many angles of a landscape, joining cities with forests, machines with indian's mythology. Above all, Mário de Andrade managed to fix the Brazilian language, instead of the Portuguese colonial language. To achieve that, he did not respect the conventional and traditional grammar rules.

Guided by this impetuous, he published his most importante book, the masterpiece Macunaíma, a hero without character, written in 1928, which until nowadays is considered an uncommon and a revolutionary work of literature. Beside it, years before, appeared To love: intransitive verb, a precious story about the relationship between a boy and his private German teacher, book influenced by Freud's psychoanalyst theory. Behind the fictions, there were many poems and essas about English and French poets.

His critics studies included Music, sweet music and, as a folklorist, his activities centered on the elaboration of some dictionaries. After his death, his intimate writings were published,

although he had not agreeded with it, as many letters adressed to Cecília Meireles, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Câmara Cascudo and Anita Malfatti.

After many decades without him, it's possible to express that Mário de Andrade was a very clever human being, devoted into his passion of understanding Brazilian people and supporting new perspectives in the traditional currents of his epoch. The speaking, the food, the dance, the history were the purpose of his brief life, which at the present days tells us much more about the Brazilian cultural identity.

Edição: Guilherme Mazzeo