Oswald de Andrade

Oswald de Andrade was a Brazilian writer and editor, one of the founders of Brazilian modernism and a member of the Group of Five, along with Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral and Menotti del Picchia. He was born in São Paulo, in 1890, into a wealthy and aristocratic family. He studied law, but never practiced it, and instead devoted himself to literature, journalism, and politics. He traveled extensively in Europe, where he came in contact with the avant-garde movements of the time, such as Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism. He brought back to Brazil the ideas and influences that shaped his own style and vision. He participated in the Modern Art Week (Semana de Arte Moderna) in 1922, where he presented his Manifesto of Pau-Brasil, a manifesto that advocated a new Brazilian culture, based on the fusion of the indigenous, the African, and the European elements. He also published his first novel, Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar, in the same year, a novel that broke with the traditional narrative form and used a collage of different genres and languages. He was married to Tarsila do Amaral, one of the most prominent Brazilian painters, and together they created the Anthropophagist Movement, a movement that proposed the cultural cannibalism of the colonizer by the colonized, as a way of affirming the originality and autonomy of Brazilian art. He wrote the Anthropophagist Manifesto in 1928, one of his most influential and controversial works. He also wrote several other novels, such as Serafim Ponte Grande (1933) and The Marble and the Star (1945), as well as poems, essays, and plays. He was involved in several political and social causes, such as nationalism, communism, and education reform. He joined the Communist Party in 1931, but left it in 1945, disillusioned by the Stalinist regime. He died in 1954, at the age of 64, after suffering a heart attack. He is regarded as one of the most important and innovative Brazilian writers of the 20th century, and his works have influenced many generations of artists and intellectuals.