Por uma pedagogia da arte: a experiência estética de Orpheu

Abstract

The aim of this work is to introduce the concept of reverse education as the foundation of Orpheu’s aesthetic experience. In proclaiming the autonomy of the art work, the Orpheu Generation was rejecting the nineteenth-century thought that interweaves education and literature, which features in the projects of both the romantic and the realist aesthetics. By enacting the autoreferentiality in art, the Portuguese Modernism – running counter the great nineteenth-century tradition – casts aside the idea of the social mission of the artist. However, as the Orpheu artists created a literature meant to break with an engaged perspective by means of rebel, iconoclastic gestures, they eventually spread a longing for new authentic values, thus contributing in their own way to the renewal of the consciousness. Heir of the ethical and aesthetic reformulations of the late nineteenth century, Mário de Sá-Carneiro shapes an abstract, oneiric world with no place for logic or scientific rationality, and puts forward a new and perverse concept of education which operates in the reverse of the former model.