{"id":429232,"date":"2022-04-06T17:09:54","date_gmt":"2022-04-06T20:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=429232"},"modified":"2022-04-06T17:11:45","modified_gmt":"2022-04-06T20:11:45","slug":"the-role-of-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-role-of-women\/","title":{"rendered":"The role of women"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a result of the historiographical transformation driven by feminist theories that emerged in the 1970s, recent studies have sought to deepen our understanding of the role of women in the literary and artistic context of the Week of Modern Art. Researching the subject since 2005, sociologist Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni, of the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (IEB-USP), developed her qualifying thesis for professorship around the analysis of the careers and artistic production of painters Tarsila do Amaral (1886\u20131973) and Anita Malfatti (1889\u20131964), and the textile artist Regina Gomide Graz (1897\u20131973). The results come together in her book Mulheres modernistas: Estrat\u00e9gias de consagra\u00e7\u00e3o na arte brasileira<\/em> [Modernist Women: Strategies for respect and recognition in Brazilian Art], which will be published in early 2022 by EDUSP, with support from FAPESP.<\/p>\n

Read more:<\/strong>
\n– Articulated modernisms<\/a>
\n– Contested significance<\/a>
\n<\/div>\n

In the book, Simioni reconstructs Graz’s biography, focusing on the dialogue her work established with the European avant-garde that she encountered during her education in Geneva, Switzerland, and expanded on during a visit to the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, held in Paris in 1925. \u201cShe and her husband, John Graz [1891\u20131980], were responsible for bringing the modernist renewal of decor to Brazil. Understanding the place of textiles in modernist design and the way in which they are crossed by historical processes of gender inequality is something relatively new in the field of art history,\u201d Simioni says.<\/p>\n

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Private collection (Schwartz, EDUSP: 2021)\u2002<\/span><\/a> Estudo do homem<\/em> (Male study), painted by Anita Malfatti in 1915\u201316Private collection (Schwartz, EDUSP: 2021)\u2002<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

She adds that in the case of the two other artists, the challenge was to understand how they managed to gain recognition during their lifetimes. \u201cThis is an unusual feat in the history of art, especially modern art, in which men are generally considered ‘school headmasters,’\u201d she says. \u201cMalfatti and Amaral’s cases challenge that. Here we have women artists at the center of the modernist renewal scene, being recognized in their own time,\u201d she adds. In the book, the researcher shows that this recognition nonetheless fluctuated. \u201cDuring the Vargas period, they were marginalized. This is evident in the fact that the Museum of Modern Art in New York didn’t even consider acquiring their works for the collection of modern art from Latin American they were building,\u201d she notes. \u201cI maintain that Tarsila was elevated to the status of muse and Anita to that of victim, two archetypal polarities of the traditional discourses on femininity, which is completed by Graz’s third position, seen as the collaborating wife,\u201d she says. Pointing out research gaps, Simioni indicates important artists of the first half of the 20th century that are still under-researched, such as Helena Pereira da Silva Ohashi (1895\u20131966), Edith Behring (1916\u20131996), Adriana Janacopulus (1897\u20131978), Regina Veiga (1890\u20131968), and Lucy Citti Ferreira (1911\u20132008).<\/p>\n

Dedicated to the literary aspects of the issue, historian Maria de Lourdes Eleut\u00e9rio, of Funda\u00e7\u00e3o Armando \u00c1lvares Penteado (FAAP), has been studying Brazilian women writers for over 20 years. During a more recent stage of her research, she sought to understand the historical and sociological context from which the Week of Modern Art emerged, which, according to her perspective, was \u201cmarked by an idea of the triumph of modernity,\u201d in an intellectual environment distinctive for its conservative stance in relation to women. \u201cFor example, Luc\u00edlia Guimar\u00e3es Villa-Lobos [1886\u20131966], wife of the composer, while attending the National Institute of Music in Rio de Janeiro was always accompanied by a chaperone,\u201d she comments.<\/p>\n

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Visual Arts Collection \/ IEB-USP <\/span><\/a> Caipirinha<\/em> (Country girl), a 1923 work by Tarsila do AmaralVisual Arts Collection \/ IEB-USP <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Eleut\u00e9rio observes that writers such as Maria Lacerda de Moura (1887\u20131945) and Maria Cec\u00edlia Bandeira de Melo (1870\u20131948)\u2014who used the pseudonym Chrysanth\u00e8me\u2014challenged this conservative context, writing and publishing on a wide range of topics such as the right to vote, divorce, and female autonomy, but have been forgotten in the literary historiography. The results of her study on the role of women writers in the historical context of the Week of Modern Art is scheduled to be published in the form of an essay during the first half of 2022, as part of a book being released by Companhia das Letras.<\/p>\n

Book<\/strong>
\nSIMIONI, A. P. C. Mulheres modernistas: Estrat\u00e9gias de consagra\u00e7\u00e3o na arte brasileira<\/strong>. S\u00e3o Paulo: EDUSP\/FAPESP, 2022.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Uncommon in the history of modern art, in Brazil some women artists gained recognition during their own lifetimes","protected":false},"author":601,"featured_media":428327,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[156,165],"tags":[241,245,204],"coauthors":[1600],"class_list":["post-429232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cover","category-humanities","tag-history","tag-literature","tag-visual-arts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429232"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":431043,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429232\/revisions\/431043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429232"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=429232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}