Resumen de Paris as Periphery: Vicente do Rego Monteiro and Brazil's discrepant cosmopolitanism
Competing constructions of modernity emerged in Brazil in the 1920s, accompanied by artistic and ideological debates over the significance of the Indian. Long revered as a symbol of Brazilian republicanism, in the twentieth century this Brazilian “noble savage” became subject to modernist parody and derision. Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s modernist reworking of the Indian challenged Parisian avant-garde primitivism and Brazilian academic aesthetics. Rego Monteiro’s participation in transatlantic aesthetic dialogues and his emphasis on the circular networks of influence and meaning underpinning the imagined Indian reflect a specifically Brazilian cosmopolitanism at the core of an avant-garde counternarrative of national modernity.
