Changes in the Iconographic Representation of Brazil between the Tropical Belle Époque and Modernism (1900-1945)

Abstract

In a country marked the sign of the new, we highlight the change and overlapping of images and discourses about Brazil, especially its iconographic representation of the country in two moments: the Belle Époque and Modernism. In the first of them, in the midst of a process of modernization of the country forged by the implantation of the Republic in 1889 and materialized in the urban reform of the then capital, Rio de Janeiro, we see the work of the painter Pedro Américo (1843-1905) Paz e Concórdia (1902) as a symbol of the country's official civilization project. Subsequently, in the midst of the controversial modernist movement of the 1920s, we see the painting A Negra, by Tarsila do Amara (1886-1973), launching a new paradigm that would consolidate in the following decades, substantially altering the country's representation.