Book Review: Constructing an Avant Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949-1979 by S. Martins

To anyone unfamiliar with the interventions made by avant-garde artists into the art world and occasionally wider society during the middle of the 20th century, this volume delivers a very readable account. The artists, the objects they made and the discussions they generated are selected here in relation to the particular practices and contexts emergent in Brazil following the chaos of World War II (during which the country remained neutral). In keeping with a historiographical approach—rather than an art historical account—the author introduces an initial group of Brazilian artists attracted to ideas concerned with the nature of the object in art and the abstraction of space and time in two and three dimensions.