SÃO PAULO

São Paulo’s rise to its current status as the largest industrial center in South America was the direct result of the late nineteenth-century coffee boom. The coffee trade contributed to the establishment of a cash economy, the use of paid immigrant workers instead of slave labor, and the development of industrial infrastructure. Those who eventually became São Paulo’s artistic patrons came from two elite groups: the families of coffee planters and immigrant entrepreneurs, the most successful of a vast horde of people who transformed São Paulo from a backwater town into a thriving city. The city’s population grew exponentially throughout the twentieth century. In 1872 São Paulo’s population was only 31,000; by 1950 it was almost 2.2 million; today it is over 18 million. The early twentieth-century wave of industrialization and modernization reached its peak in the mid-1950s.

During the early 1950s, the country had yet to achieve the vast industrial expansion that would occur during the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek from 1956 to 1960. Nonetheless, São Paulo already enjoyed  unprecedented optimism , which found artistic form in the pure geometry of Arte Concreta [Concrete art]. Many of the artists involved in Arte Concreta also worked as architects, chemists, designers, and in other fields directly related to São Paulo’s industrial growth. Their use of pure colors and hard-edged geometric forms, as well as materials such as enamel paint, Plexiglas, and aluminum, manifests their interest in constructing a new scientific and rational aesthetic.