Between February 13 and 17, 1922, the Theatro Municipal in São Paulo became the stage for an event that would shake the foundations of Brazilian culture. Known as Modern Art Week—or simply Week of 22—it brought together painters, writers, sculptors, musicians, and architects determined to challenge the prevailing artistic standards in the country and advocate for a new way of creating, thinking, and feeling. The event was primarily funded by members of São Paulo’s coffee elite, who provided resources and prestige to an initiative that, at the time, few imagined would acquire the historical resonance it eventually did.
Brazil in 1922 was far from culturally homogeneous. São Paulo was undergoing rapid expansion driven by coffee profits. The vast plantations of western São Paulo had turned the state into the world’s leading producer of the commodity, and the wealth generated by this activity financed railways, banks, and the city’s early industrialization. The arrival of European immigrants—many of them literate and skilled—infused the capital with a diverse cultural dynamic, contrasting with the more traditional ways of life inherited from the colonial period.
In the artistic and literary scene, movements that the future modernists saw as outdated dominated. Parnassianism reigned in poetry, with its demand for formal perfection, grammatical purism, and emotional detachment. Academic methods in the visual arts preached faithful reproduction of reality, leaving no room for experimentation. Even Symbolism, which coexisted with Parnassianism to a lesser extent, could not escape the air of exhaustion that hung over the artistic trends of Brazil’s Belle Époque. For a group of young intellectuals who had traveled to Europe and encountered Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Dadaism, these movements sounded like relics of another century.
The tension between the old and the new erupted in 1917 when painter Anita Malfatti returned from a stay in the United States and presented her Expressionist works to the São Paulo public. The reaction was hostile. Critics and a significant portion of the educated public received her experiments with suspicion and mockery. That rejection, however, had the opposite effect: it united the young artists who sympathized with the European avant-garde and accelerated the planning of what would become the Week of 22. Figures like Oswald de Andrade, who had already encountered the Futurist Manifesto upon returning from Europe in 1912, and Manuel Bandeira, influenced by French Neo-Symbolism, began working together toward a broader cultural renewal.
The event itself lasted five days and combined lectures, concerts, and exhibitions. On the three special evenings—February 13, 15, and 17—the theater hosted performances that blended poetry recitals, musical compositions, and debates. The participants advocated for creative freedom in all arts, the abandonment of rigid metrical rules, a break from academicism in the visual arts, and, above all, the creation of an art that was truly Brazilian—connected to the country’s landscape, people, and contradictions, rather than simply importing European models.
The immediate reception was turbulent. Part of the audience expressed loud disapproval, and newspapers at the time recorded reactions ranging from enthusiasm to ridicule. The impact, in that moment, was limited and localized. The Week of 22 did not overthrow Parnassianism overnight, nor did it instantly transform public taste or cultural institutions. The Brazilian Academy of Letters, guardian of the dominant literary standards, did not surrender to modernism without resistance.
What the event planted, however, took root throughout the 1920s. The ideas debated in their early stages in February 1922 were deepened and expanded in groups, manifestos, and publications that emerged in the following years. Oswald de Andrade’s *Anthropophagy*, which advocated the "devouring" of foreign influences to produce something genuinely national, and *Verde-Amarelismo*, with its emphasis on valuing Brazilian roots, were two of the most significant developments of that initial impulse.
After Mário de Andrade’s death in 1945, a movement to recover and celebrate the legacy of the Week of 22 began, positioning it as the starting point of Brazilian modernism. São Paulo was identified as the epicenter of all the period’s cultural transformations, and the event took on an almost mythical aura. This interpretation, however, has since been questioned by scholars who point to the limitations of such a centralized and elitist view. The event was, above all, organized by and for the elite—the audience at the Theatro Municipal was not the Brazilian people, but the privileged class that could afford tickets and frequent refined cultural spaces.
Furthermore, recent historiography emphasizes that cultural renewal in Brazil did not begin in 1922. Figures like Pixinguinha, Donga, João da Baiana, and writers such as João do Rio had already been forging original and experimental paths before the Week, without the prestige or resources enjoyed by the São Paulo modernists. The Week of 22 remains a highly symbolic event for Brazilian modernism—but its significance must be assessed within a broader, more plural, and complex framework than the one official history has long upheld.