Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (October 9, 1893 – February 25, 1945) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, music expert, art historian, critic, and photographer. He wrote one of the first and most important collections of modern Brazilian poetry, Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated City), which was published in 1922. His work greatly influenced Brazilian literature. As a scholar and writer, he helped start the field of studying music from different cultures, known as ethnomusicology, and his impact extended beyond Brazil.
Andrade was an important figure in the modernist movement in São Paulo for twenty years. He was trained as a musician and is best known for his work as a poet and novelist. He was involved in many areas connected to São Paulo’s modernist movement. His photographs and writings on topics like history, literature, and music were widely published. He played a key role in organizing the Modern Art Week, a major event in 1922 that changed literature and visual arts in Brazil. He was also part of the avant-garde "Group of Five." Ideas from the Modern Art Week were discussed in the introduction to his poetry collection Paulicéia Desvairada and in the poems themselves.
After working as a music teacher and writing for newspapers, he published his famous novel, Macunaíma, in 1928. His later work on Brazilian folk music, poetry, and other subjects was often interrupted by changes in his relationship with the Brazilian government. In his final years, he became the first director of São Paulo’s Department of Culture, a role that formalized his long-standing influence in helping the city and the nation embrace modern art and culture.
Early life
Andrade was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and lived there almost all of his life. As a child, he was a piano prodigy and later studied at the Music and Drama Conservatory of São Paulo. His formal education focused only on music, but he also studied history, art, and especially poetry on his own, as Albert T. Luper noted. Andrade had a strong knowledge of French and read works by Rimbaud and other major Symbolists. Although he wrote poetry during his musical training, he did not consider writing professionally until becoming a professional pianist was no longer possible.
In 1913, Andrade’s 14-year-old brother, Renato, died suddenly during a football game. Andrade left the Conservatory to stay at Araraquara, where his family owned a farm. When he returned, his piano playing was sometimes affected by shaking in his hands. Although he eventually earned a degree in piano, he did not perform in concerts and instead began studying singing and music theory with the goal of becoming a music professor. At the same time, he started writing poetry more seriously. In 1917, the year he graduated, he published his first book of poems, Há uma Gota de Sangue em Cada Poema (There is a drop of blood in each poem), using the name Mário Sobral. The book shows early signs of Andrade’s growing interest in Brazilian identity, though it was heavily influenced by European, especially French, literature.
His first book did not gain much attention, so Andrade expanded his writing. He left São Paulo for the countryside and began a lifelong effort to carefully record the history, people, culture, and especially music of Brazil’s interior, including areas in São Paulo and the northeastern regions. He wrote essays for São Paulo magazines, sometimes including his own photographs, but mostly collected large amounts of information about Brazilian life and traditions. Between these trips, Andrade taught piano at the Conservatory and became one of its professors in 1921.
The Modern Art Week
During these trips, Andrade formed a group of friends among young artists and writers in São Paulo, who, like him, were aware of the growing modernist movement in Europe. Several of them later became known as the Grupo dos Cinco (the Group of Five): Andrade, poets Oswald de Andrade (no relation) and Menotti del Picchia, and artists Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti. Malfatti had traveled to Europe before World War I and introduced São Paulo to expressionism. Jack E. Tomlins, the translator of Andrade's second book, describes in his introduction a significant event in the development of Andrade's modernist philosophy. In 1920, he had recently met the modernist sculptor Victor Brecheret and bought a sculpture titled "Bust of Christ," which depicted Christ as a Brazilian with braided hair. His family (apparently to his surprise) was shocked and furious. Andrade retreated to his room alone and later recalled, in a lecture translated by Tomlins, that—still "delirious"—he went out onto his balcony and "looked down at the square below without actually seeing it."
Noises, lights, and the casual conversations of taxi drivers: they all floated up to me. I was apparently calm and thinking about nothing in particular. I do not know what suddenly happened to me. I went to my desk, opened a notebook, and wrote down a title that had never before crossed my mind: Hallucinated City.
Retaining that title (Paulicéia Desvairada, in Portuguese), Andrade worked on the book for the next two years. He quickly produced a "barbaric canticle," as he called it in the same lecture, and then gradually edited it down to half its original size.
These poems were entirely different from his earlier formal and abstract work. The lines of verse vary greatly in length and in syntactical structure, consisting primarily of impressionistic and fragmented descriptions interspersed with seemingly overheard, disconnected bits of speech in São Paulo dialect. The speaker of the poems often seems overwhelmed by the maze of dialogue that constantly interrupts him, as in "Colloque Sentimental":
The street all naked … The lightless houses … And the myrrh of unwitting martyrs … Let me put my handkerchief to my nose. I have all the perfumes of Paris!
After the poems were completed, Andrade wrote what he called an "Extremely Interesting Preface," in an attempt to explain in hindsight the poems' theoretical context (though Bruce Dean Willis has suggested that the theories of the preface have more to do with his later work than with Paulicéia). The preface is self-deprecating ("This preface—although interesting—useless") but ambitious, presenting a theory not just of poetry but of the aesthetics of language, in order to explain the innovations of his new poems. Andrade explains their tangle of language in musical terms:
There are certain figures of speech in which we can see the embryo of oral harmony, just as we find the germ of musical harmony in the reading of the symphonies of Pythagoras. Antithesis: genuine dissonance.
He makes a distinction, however, between language and music, in that "words are not fused like notes; rather they are shuffled together, and they become incomprehensible." However, as Willis has pointed out, there is a pessimism to the preface; in one of its key passages, it compares poetry to the submerged riches of El Dorado, which can never be recovered.
In 1922, while preparing Paulicéia Desvairada for publication, Andrade collaborated with Malfatti and Oswald de Andrade in creating a single event that would introduce their work to the wider public: the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week). The Semana included exhibitions of paintings by Malfatti and other artists, readings, and lectures on art, music, and literature. Andrade was the chief organizer and the central figure in the event, which was greeted with skepticism but was well-attended. He gave lectures on both the principles of modernism and his work in Brazilian folk music and read his "Extremely Interesting Preface." As the climactic event of the Semana, he read from Paulicéia Desvairada. The poems' use of free verse and colloquial São Paulo expressions, though related to European modernist poems of the same period, were entirely new to Brazilians. The reading was accompanied by persistent jeers, but Andrade persevered, and later discovered that a large part of the audience found it transformative. It has been cited frequently as the seminal event in modern Brazilian literature.
The Group of Five continued working together in the 1920s, during which their reputations solidified and hostility to their work gradually diminished, but eventually the group split apart; Andrade and Oswald de Andrade had a serious (and public) falling-out in 1929. New groups were formed out of the splinters of the original, and in the end, many different modernist movements could trace their origins to the Modern Art Week.
"The apprentice tourist"
Throughout the 1920s, Andrade kept traveling across Brazil, learning about the traditions and stories of the country’s interior regions. He developed a complex idea about how folk music connects to society, blending pride in Brazil’s culture with personal experiences. His main focus was studying how music made in cities and performed on the streets or in rural areas—such as Afro-Brazilian and Amerindian styles—related to more formal music. His work caused debate because he discussed dance and folk music in serious ways, and his writing style was both poetic and argumentative.
His trips through Brazil became more than just research. In 1927, he began writing a travel article called “The Apprentice Tourist” for the newspaper O Diário Nacional. This column helped people from other places learn about Brazil’s indigenous cultures. It also promoted Andrade’s own creative work. Many of his photographs were published with the article, showing landscapes and people. Sometimes, Andrade appeared in the photos, often blending into the background, like in a self-portrait where he is shown as a shadow. These images supported his modernist artistic goals while also helping to record folk traditions.
Although Andrade continued taking photographs later in his life, most of his famous work was created in the 1920s, especially the 1927 series. He was interested in how photographs could capture or remind people of the past, which he saw as deeply personal. In the late 1930s, he wrote:
“…the objects, the designs, the photographs from my past always have great power to help me recreate life. When I see them, I don’t just remember—I experience the same feelings and moments from the past as if I were living them again.”
In many of his photos, people appear blurred, shadowed, or nearly invisible. This style of photography became a way for Andrade to express a type of modernist art.
Macunaíma
At the same time, Andrade was learning a lot about the different languages and cultures in many parts of Brazil. He began using a writing style he had developed for his poems in Hallucinated City in his novels. During this time, he wrote two novels using these techniques: the first, Love, Intransitive Verb, was mostly an experiment in form. The second, Macunaíma, written shortly after and published in 1928, is a novel about a man (called "The hero without a character" in the book) from an indigenous tribe who travels to São Paulo, learns both Portuguese and Brazilian languages, and returns. The style of the novel mixes vivid descriptions of the jungle and city with sudden shifts into fantasy, a style later known as magical realism. The novel also combines different languages, showing how the rural hero interacts with the urban world. It uses ideas about primitivism that Andrade learned from European modernists, including descriptions of possible indigenous cannibalism, while also exploring Macunaíma’s life in the city. Critic Kimberle S. López has said that cannibalism is the main theme of the novel, showing how cultures can consume each other.
The novel’s writing style is a mix of many dialects and rhythms from both rural and urban areas that Andrade studied. It uses a new kind of prose that is musical, poetic, and filled with gods and almost-gods, while still moving the story forward. However, the novel is also pessimistic. It ends with Macunaíma destroying his own village, showing that the meeting of cultures described in the book leads to destruction. Severino João Albuquerque has pointed out that the novel shows "construction and destruction" as connected ideas. The story includes both power (Macunaíma has strange abilities) and feelings of not belonging.
Macunaíma changed Brazilian literature quickly, as Albuquerque calls it "the cornerstone text of Brazilian Modernism." The novel’s themes of cultural conflict and national identity were important because Modernismo was influenced by European literature but focused on Brazil’s unique culture and the effects of colonial history. The character’s complex inner life also introduced new themes in Brazilian literature, which critics say reflect Andrade’s own life. Though the novel is not strictly autobiographical, it shows Andrade’s experiences. Andrade was a mulatto; his parents were landowners but not part of Brazil’s Portuguese aristocracy. Some critics compare Andrade’s race and background to Macunaíma’s mixed identity. Macunaíma’s body is described as a mix: his skin is darker than his tribe members, and he has an adult body with a child’s head. He is a wanderer who never feels at home anywhere.
Other critics have linked Andrade’s sexuality to Macunaíma’s complex identity. Though Andrade was not openly homosexual, some friends said he was interested in men, a topic rarely discussed in Brazil. Andrade had a conflict with Oswald de Andrade in 1929 over a claim that he was effeminate. Macunaíma prefers women, but his inability to belong is tied to his sexual experiences. The character starts romantic relationships at age six, and his sexual choices often lead to destruction.
Over time, the controversial and unusual aspects of Macunaíma have become less noticeable as the novel became part of Brazilian culture and education. Once seen as more historically important than literary, it is now considered a modernist masterpiece, with its challenges being part of its artistic value. Andrade is a national cultural icon; his image appears on Brazilian currency. A film adaptation of Macunaíma was made in 1969 by director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, set in the 1960s in Rio de Janeiro. The film was re-released internationally in 2009.
Late life and musical research
Mário de Andrade was not directly involved in the Revolution of 1930, during which Getúlio Vargas took control of Brazil and became a leader. However, Andrade belonged to the group of wealthy landowners that the revolution aimed to remove from power. His job opportunities decreased during Vargas’s rule. He remained at the Conservatory, where he became the Chair of Music History and Aesthetics. This position made him an important national expert on music history. His work shifted from personal projects to writing textbooks and organizing timelines. He continued to record rural folk music, and in the 1930s, he collected many recordings of songs and other music from the countryside. These recordings were thorough, focusing on including a wide range of music rather than choosing based on artistic taste. They also included stories and other sounds related to the music. Andrade’s methods influenced the study of music from different cultures in Brazil and were done before similar work in other countries, such as the recordings by Alan Lomax. He created the term "popularesque," which he used to describe music by educated city musicians that imitated traditional Brazilian folk music. This term is still used today in discussions about Brazilian music.
In 1935, during a time of political uncertainty, Andrade and Paulo Duarte, a writer and archaeologist, helped create the São Paulo Department of Culture (Departamento de Cultura e Recreação da Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo). Andrade became the first director. The department had many responsibilities, including research, building parks, and publishing materials. Andrade used his position to expand his work on folklore and organize events like performances, lectures, and exhibitions. He moved his music recordings to the department, and growing the collection became one of its main tasks. His former student, Oneyda Alvarenga, oversaw this work. The collection, called the Discoteca Municipal, was likely the largest and most organized in the Americas.
At the same time, Andrade worked on developing a theory about music. He tried to combine his research into a general idea. He believed that modern Brazilian music should move away from classical European music and focus on new forms inspired by folk and popular traditions. He described past music as organized in space, such as counterpoint or symphonies, while future music would be organized in time, focusing on "moment by moment" changes. He linked this idea to the Portuguese word "saudade," which expresses deep longing.
During this period, Andrade helped Dina and Claude Lévi-Strauss with films they made about their research in Mato Grosso and Rondônia.
In 1937, Vargas returned to power, and Duarte was forced to leave the country. Andrade’s position at the Department of Culture was removed. In 1938, he moved to Rio de Janeiro to work at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. There, he led the Congresso da Língua Nacional Cantada, a major event about folklore and folk music. He returned to São Paulo in 1941, where he worked on collecting his poetry.
Andrade’s last major project was a long poem called "Meditação Sôbre o Tietê." The poem is complex and was criticized early on for being unclear. However, more recent studies have praised it. One critic compared it to the work of William Carlos Williams, a poet known for a difficult but influential unfinished poem. Like Williams’s poem, "Meditação" focuses on a city, São Paulo, and the Tietê River that runs through it. The poem reflects on Andrade’s earlier work and expresses love for the river and the city. It also compares the river to the Tagus in Lisbon and the Seine in Paris, suggesting Andrade’s importance on an international level. The poem connects Andrade’s voice and the river to "banzeiro," a term from Afro-Brazilian music that represents a connection between people and nature. The poem shows Andrade’s goals and his pride in Brazilian culture.
Andrade died at his home in São Paulo from a heart attack on February 25, 1945, at the age of 51. His relationship with the Vargas government was complicated, so his work was not widely recognized at first. However, after Vargas died in 1955, the publication of Andrade’s Complete Poems marked the beginning of his recognition as a key figure in Brazilian culture. In 1960, the municipal library of São Paulo was renamed Biblioteca Mário de Andrade in his honor.