Setorial Panorama of Brazilian Culture - 2011|2012

Mário de Andrade, to conceive a project proposal for the creation of a federal body to preserve
these assets. However, Mário does not implement the project because of his political profile
and willingness to promote a decentralized debate on the proposals for listing buildings and
valuation and hierarchization of assets. He believes in culture as something vital, like daily
bread, proposing a state intervention that encompasses its various areas of expression. He
proposes ethnographic missions to the Amazon and Northeastern regions, reinforcing its intention
to value popular cultures, diversity and heterogeneous characteristics of the Country. He was
an advocate of the importance of culture as an immaterial, intangible and relevant patrimony
to all socio-cultural spheres.
In 1937, the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Service (SPHAN) was created. The
lawyer Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade elaborates the final format of the legislation for SPHAN
and is named its director, thus remaining until 1967. With a team formed by architects Lúcio
Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Carlos Leão, José de Souza Reis, Paulo Thedim Barreto, Renato Soeiro
and Alcides da Rocha Miranda, the project begins. Although it also had the collaboration of
personalities such as Mário, Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira and Afonso Arinos, the
predominance of architects established the initial priority of the entity: the assets of lime and
stone.
A few months after the creation of SPHAN, under the pretext of a communist conspiracy
to take control of the country, the military closed the National Congress, Legislative Assemblies
and Municipal Councils, and extinguished political parties and civil organizations, giving
Getúlio Vargas absolute power over the state.
In the Proclamation to the Brazilian People, when Vargas announced the new Constitution
of 1937, he defended: "Between the national existence and the chaos, irresponsibility and
disorder situation in which we were, there could be no compromise. When political competitions
threaten to degenerate into civil war, it is a sign that the constitutional regime has lost its practical
value, subsisting only as an abstraction." It was the beginning of Estado Novo, which would
last until 1945.
Vargas continues the search for the creation of a national identity, now anchored in a
new ideology in relation to work, which sees the Brazilian as a working citizen. To this end,
culture is conceived as a political issue; a process is started to develop the country by art, music,
literature, heritage, preservation of artistic and historical monuments, architecture, in an
institutionalizing movement, with the foundation of institutions of art, science and education. The
National Institute of Educational Cinema, the National Theater Commission (later called the
National Theater Service), the Instituto Nacional do Livro, among other departments linked to
the Ministry of Education and Health are created at this point, departments which will collaborate
in the diffusion of ideology and contribute to the interpretation of the State as a promoter of
culture, starting from a new relationship with society.
With strong influence of the government models applied in Germany and Italy, where
control over the media and censorship of artistic production were part of the strategy to maintain
civil order, it did not take long for the totalitarian character of Estado Novo to be reflected in the
management of culture. On July 1st, 1938, Vargas signed the decree creating the National
Council of Culture (CNC). The document, signed by the President and Minister Gustavo
Capanema, gives the Council the power to "balance public and private activities carried out
throughout the Country in terms of cultural development, in order to delineate the types of cultural
institutions and the guidelines of action, so that they can get the most out of them; suggest to the
public authorities measures to extend and improve the services they maintain for the performance
of any cultural activities; in addition to study the situation of private cultural institutions, with a
view to giving their opinion on the subsidies that should be granted to them by the Federal
Government."
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