Loyalty, ambivalence and rebelliousness: the relationship strategies of Oswald de Andrade and Menotti del Picchia in the construction of their sociability networks

Abstract

The objective of this article is to investigate how sociability networks are built from school experience, and the importance of school as a device for social ascension. To that end, we identify the relationship strategies developed by Oswald de Andrade and Menotti del Picchia, two of the fundamental authors of São Paulo’s modernism, in the establishment of their sociability networks based on the analysis of their school trajectories and family relations, as pointed out by their autobiographies. From the concepts of Sirinelli, we investigated the ways in which the authors perceived their own school experience as, a catalyst for the networking that enabled their social ascension, in the case of Menotti, a son of humble immigrants, or manifestly a space of maintenance of power in Oswald’s case who was from a rich and influential family. The analysis of the school paths shows how each one acted before their meeting in the modernist movement and allows to understand how their behaviors and practices, had weight in the social and political choices made by both, from their social places and other formative experiences, revealing strategies, pressures and relations of political and religious strength in the search for conquering their own spaces, especially with the advent of the Modern Art Week.