Art of Diplomacy
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
Art of Diplomacy
By (Author) Hayle Gadelha
Anthem Press
Anthem Press
14th November 2023
United Kingdom
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Social and cultural history
Paintings and painting in ink
759.98107441
Physical Properties
Hardback
202
Width 153mm, Height 229mm, Spine 26mm
454g
Description
The Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, held at the Royal Academy of Arts of London and seven other major venues throughout the United Kingdom in 1944 and 1945, was the first collective display of Brazils art shown in the United Kingdom and the largest ever sent abroad until then. It resulted from an initiative championed by the Brazilian Foreign Ministry and envisioned by 70 Modernist painters who donated 168 artworks as a contribution to the Allied War effort. Notwithstanding its historical relevance and unmatched scale, this event had never been academically investigated. Through exploring why and how successfully the Brazilian government devoted superlative efforts to this enterprise in the midst of World War II, this book is intended to fill this gap and gain an understanding of a largely neglected public aspect of a deeply studied period of Brazilian foreign policy.
The research unearthed abundant firsthand documents to reconstruct the episode, adopting the hermeneutic method and a theoretical framework from the Public Diplomacy and Cultural Diplomacy fields in order to interpret the circumstances that made possible this improbable and challenging endeavor. It contends that the Exhibition was a remarkably innovative action of Public Diplomacy avant la lettre, which aimed at engaging with British society and enhancing the image of Brazil and its culture. Its motivations must be understood within the broader foreign policy, focused on obtaining prestige and repositioning Brazil in the postwar international order, which encompassed the deployment of 25,000 troops to fight in Europe. The research further claims that the initiative was intended and managed to achieve a substantial impact on views about Brazil, by means of conveying a well-planned message.
Author Bio
Hayle Melim Gadelha has a Ph.D. in International Relations from Kings College London. His research focuses on the public and cultural aspects of Brazilian foreign policy.
