M15 Grupo ruptura
ruptura Manifesto (1952)
In December 1952 members of the public attending the inaugural exhibition of Grupo ruptura at the Museu de Arte Moderne de São Paulo in Brazil received a controversial manifesto in the form of a flyer outlining the group’s ideology. Written by the experimental artist and theorist Waldemar Cordeiro (1925–73), it promoted a form of pure abstraction, widely known as Concretism, which the group based on mathematical and rational principles. For Cordeiro, art was truth, ‘in terms of lines and colours, that are nothing more than lines and colours, and have no desire to be pears or people’.
Cordeiro wanted to create a kind of Brazilian Bauhaus in São Paulo, where experimental art, technology, architecture and design could work together to support Brazil’s rapid industrialization. Yet the group’s dogmatic approach to abstraction, which rejected any notion of subjectivity, meant they alienated many Concrete artists in the country, in particular the Neo-Concretists, who sought a greater sensuality in abstract art. Even so, the radical vision of Grupo ruptura helped to shape the future of Latin American art.
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old art was great when it was intelligent.
however, our intelligence cannot be the same as Leonardo’s.
history has taken a qualitative leap:
continuity is no longer possible!
- those who create new forms out of old principles
now we can distinguish
- those who create new forms out of new principles
because the scientific naturalism of the Renaissance – the process of rendering the (three-dimensional) external world on a (two-dimensional) plane – has exhausted its historical task
it was crisis
it was renovation
today the new can be accurately differentiated from the old, when parting with the old, and for this reason we can affirm:
the old is
- all varieties of hybrids of naturalism;
- the mere negation of naturalism, i.e., the ‘wrong’ naturalism of children, the insane, the ‘primitive’, the expressionists, the surrealists etc.;
- the hedonistic nonfigurative is spawned by gratuitous taste that seeks the mere excitement of pleasure or displeasure
the new is
- all expressions based on the new art principles;
- all experiences that tend to renewal of the fundamental values of visual art (space-time, movement, and matter);
- the artistic intuition endowed with clear and intelligent principles as well as great possibilities of practical development;
- to bestow on art a definite place within the scope of contemporary spiritual work, while considering art as a means of knowledge deducible from concepts, situating it above opinion and demanding, for its review, a previous knowledge.
modern art is not ignorance; we are against ignorance