Rio das Artes

In its last decade as the country's capital, Rio de Janeiro enters the 1950s under the cosmopolitan sign of technical development and the renewal of ideas. In the press, in architecture, in music, and in literature, these transformations consolidate the vision of a Brazil whose aesthetic modernity contrasted with persistent social and economic precariousness. The visual arts follow this vision by incorporating, in a belated way, the constructive perspective of European avant-gardes linked to geometric abstractionism, to collective movements and manifestos, and to a deepening of the critical-theoretical debate. The construction of the Museum of Modern Art consolidates the modernist project and becomes a landmark in Carioca architecture. At the same time, the social exclusion that worsens in the city opens fissures in the aesthetic purity of that generation and presents political tensions that would intensify in the following decade.