Crossroads in modern art writing:

Mário de Andrade’s “Odomador” and Luis Vidales’ “Cuadrito de movimiento”

Abstract

Pauliceia desvairada(1922), by Mário de Andrade, and Suenan timbres(1926), by Luis Vidales, are two poetry volumes that, both for their polemic character and their creative force, have had an impact, although differently, on the literary history of Brazil and Colombia. This work establishes a dialogue between those works resulting from the analysis of two poems: “O domador”(the tamer)and “Cuadrito de movimiento”(motion painting). The poems are chosen because they exhibit some key characteristics that aid in understanding the “writing of modern art” (as defined by Mário de Andrade), which is intimately linked to, but distinct from, the modernization processes that hit the major Brazilian and Colombian cities throughout the twentieth century. This reading reveals both the similarities and differences in the cultural environment and in the poem’s construction techniques, with the goal of constructing a nexus, even if fragmented, within Latin American cultural histories.