The Art of Diplomacy Restaging a Wartime Brazilian Initiative of Public Diplomacy in the United Kingdom

Abstract

The show ‘The Art of Diplomacy – Brazilian Modernism Painted for War’ was opened on 5th April and displayed until 22nd June 2018 at the Sala Brasil, the exhibition space of the Brazilian Embassy in Trafalgar Square, London. This was a partial restaging and tribute to the 1944-1945 ‘Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings’, held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and seven other major galleries across the United Kingdom. Out of the one-hundred-sixty eight original artworks, twenty-four paintings by twenty artists were found in the public galleries of seventeen cities throughout the UK. They were shown, together with a video produced for this occasion and several historical documents unearthed during a four-year academic research project. The investigation for this meta-exhibition inspired this author’s PhD dissertation on “Public Diplomacy on the Front Line: The Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings within Brazil’s Second World War Foreign Policy”, for which this essay serves as a sort of epilogue. The dissertation hermeneutically examined the diplomatic motivations and outcomes of this wartime initiative, concluding that it was a public component of a foreign policy designed to increase Brazil’s prestige in the aftermath of WW2. It also demonstrates that the exhibition was a successful endeavour, although its outcomes were weakened by the political discontinuity that followed the replacement of its mastermind, Minister Oswaldo Aranha (1894-1960), and President Getúlio Vargas (1882-1954). The TAoD, which was diplomacy-driven as much as the exhibition that it celebrated, took place within a historical, political and cultural context entirely different from the one in which the original show came into existence. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the 2018 project evolved vis- à -vis its diplomatic background, while also forming a corpus for future analyses and interpretations.