Making the Modern and Cultured City: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in Postwar São Paulo, 1945 - 196

In the late 1940s, as Europe lay smoldering in the ashes of the Second World War, Brazil entered one of its most optimistic periods in recent history. Nowhere was this more evident than in São Paulo, where the local press crowed about the city's unprecedented growth with such headlines as “the locomotive of Brazil” and “the world's fastest growing city.” Paulistano pride was particularly strong among middle and upper class boosters, a category that included an array of urban professionals and cultural producers. Inspired by, and in dialogue with, individuals and institutions driving New York's own rise to international prominence, these Paulistanos envisioned São Paulo as the next world-class city. However, to become a New York in the tropics, elite Paulistanos believed that São Paulo had to undergo a drastic process of city remaking – both in terms of its aesthetic identity and built environment.;“Making the Modern and Cultured City” explores this complex process of city remaking through a transnational investigation of artistic production, architecture, and urban planning in order to elucidate the opportunities, challenges, and consequences of overlaying a particular vision of the city onto a dense, and rapidly changing socio-cultural ecology. I argue that the selective appropriation and reconfiguration of ideas and practices associated with New York that were circulating in the years after WWII enabled leading Paulistanos to pursue an idealized urban sensibility at home, while projecting São Paulo internationally as modern and cultured. To these actors, this meant a city with modern art museums where local artists could engage in abstract art, a city with modernist skyscrapers, and a city that embraced scientific urban planning. However, I contend that this process of transforming São Paulo – aesthetically, architecturally, and spatially – revealed anxieties about race, class, and culture among leading Paulistanos, exacerbated existing divisions within the city, and triggered a response from other sectors of society including the urban poor.;Equally important to this dissertation is an exploration of transnational currents flowing in both directions. Drawing on archival evidence collected in São Paulo and New York, this project uncovers the extent to which leading New York reformers and New York-based institutions not only inspired and collaborated with their Paulistano counterparts, but how their experience in and impression of São Paulo as a rising city and a center for the arts shaped developments in New York – from efforts to enhance MoMA's visibility abroad to the revitalization of Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas. By focusing on the networks of exchange between São Paulo and New York, and taking seriously the multidirectional flows of influence, this project illustrates how North-South elites worked together (not always harmoniously) to create a shared (but not identical) vision of the modern and cultured city in the postwar period.