Engagement and Sacrifice the Aesthetic Thought of Mário de Andrade

Abstract

Mário de Andrade conceived and organized his whole work as a means of social praxis. He therefore developed a profound and dramatic thought about the difficult relation between art and society in Brazil. Especially from 1930, when the Brazilian ideological life became strongly politicized, Mário seeks to develop an aesthetic thought centered on the idea of art’s social function, in order to promote forms of political intervention through culture. Mário however could not overcome in theory the idea that the aesthetic and the political elements of artworks contradict one another. This article intends to expose the movement and paradoxes of the writer’s aesthetic thought,as well as those of the solution that Mário finds for his torturous dilemmas – that is, sacrifice. Mário’s ideas are studied here in their relations with history, especially with the process – carried out by the State during the 1920s and the 1930s – of dismantling the incipient Brazilian labour movement, which started to organize class struggle in the country.