“Era a poesia plástica da vida, era a festa da forma e era a festa da cor”: uma análise retórica das pinturas da exposição de Anita Malfatti em 1917

Abstract

Anita Malfatti was an artist from São Paulo, Brazil. In 1917, after intense study in the field of art, especially the vanguard, she returns from Europe and presents to our country 53 of her works in an exhibition entitled Exposição de Pintura Moderna Anita Malfatti, which is considered the start for the modernization of plastic arts in Brazil. Critics and future modernists reacted in distinct ways to the artists’ plastic proposal, oscillating from pathe of anger, indignation, irritation and envy to devotion, love, friendship, calmness and amiability for her works and for the artist. An example of adverse reaction is the fierce and irascible criticism of the writer Monteiro Lobato, presented in the article A propósito da Exposição Malfatti, published in the Journal O Estado de SP, in 1917, which presented Malfatti as “crazy” and her works as “strange psychoses”. As sample of approving reactions there was the designation of “new art” of some artists, such as the writers and artists Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Di Cavalcanti e Menotti Del Picchia, who favorably joined Malfatti’s work, defining it as the “initial mark of modernist movement”, considering her as pioneer of Modern Art, and her work as “water divider”. This study aims to comprehend rhetorically the artistic production of Anita Malfatti, taking as corpus her exhibition of 1917, here understood as a rhetorical-argumentative text. As snippet, only the paintings that were part of the exhibition (except for the drawings, engravings, caricatures and other exposed works) are analyzed, considering the rhetorically significant ones and the ones that justify this research. Of the twelve paintings originally presented, six are lost and our snippet contemplates only the six remaining ones (The yellow man, The Japanese, The green hair woman, Lalive, Tropical and The Russian Student). As specific objective, this work aims to understand the pathe aroused in the auditoriums of the time, composed by critics and future modernists, through analysis of written documents about Malfatti and her works, such as articles, letters and reports reunited over the years. It also aims to analyze and identify the pictorial, rhetorical and argumentative techniques used in the paintings, here approached as a text; as well as to verify how the intertextuality of the works with European modernist paintings (of Expressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism) were used argumentatively and aroused passions in the auditorium. Finally, in a general context, it will be demonstrated how the exhibition as a whole can be seen and analyzed as a rhetorical discourse. This research is based on theoretical basis of rhetoric, with study of authors such as Aristóteles (2015), Meyer (2007), Reboul (2004), Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (2005); and textual Linguistics, with Koch and Bentes (2004), Cavalcante (2013) and Tavares (1978); as well as authors that deal with rhetoric of image and painting, such as Barthes (1982) and Carrere and Saborit (2000). About Malfatti, her work and the cultural context of her time, it will be considered the works of Batista (2006) and Amaral (1970), as well as historians of the plastic arts like Gombrich (1950). As an analysis result, the works reveal Malfatti's intentionality in presenting to the Brazilian auditorium a new aesthetic standard through an innovative discourse, dissociating herself from the art schools of the time, which had as present school the academic school. With this, Malfatti's exhibition opposes the doxa of the time and reorganizes the plastic values of society, acting argumentatively as a new proposal for the directions of the plastic arts in Brazil.