"This book is volume 2 - complementing volume 1: HM 137 The Conspiracy of Modern Art, by Luiz Renato Martins, edited and introduced by Steve Edwards, ISBN 9789004280045 (Brill 2017)."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Acknowledgements (and Some Welcome Words to the Reader) -- Credits -- Introduction / Alex Potts -- From Formation to Dismantling -- Strategies of Occupying Space in Brazil, from Tarsila to Oiticica -- ‘Free Form’: Brazilian Mode of Abstraction or a Malaise in History -- All This Geometry, Where Does It Come from, Where Does It Go? -- Trees of Brazil -- The Situation of Art and the ‘Pensée Unique’ -- Formation and Dismantling of a Brazilian Visual System -- From Dismantling to Struggle -- From the Debate about Formation to Strike as Formation -- The Indignity of São Paulo -- Art against the Grain -- Against Formalism: Art, History and Criticism -- Work, Art and History: A Counterpoint between Periphery and Centre -- Notes on Modernisation, from the Periphery: On David Craven’s ‘Alternative Modernism’ -- Art as Work (Interview) -- International Benefit Society of Friends of Form and Bulletin on the Brazilian Division -- Back Matter -- Index of Artworks, Architectural Works and Songs Cited -- Bibliography -- Index.

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The present studies on Brazilian modern art seek to specify some of the dominant contradictions of capitalism’s combined but uneven development as these appear from the global ‘periphery’. The grand project of Brasília is the main theme of the first two chapters, which treat the ‘ideal city’ as a case study in the ways in which creative talent in Brazil has been made to serve in the reproduction of social iniquities whose origins can be traced back to the agrarian latifundia. Further chapters scrutinise the socio-historical basis of Brazilian art, and develop, against the grain of the most prominent art historical approaches to modern Brazilian culture, a critical approach to the distinctly Brazilian visual language of geometrical abstraction. The book contends that, from the fifties up to today, formalism in Brazil has expressed the hegemony of the market.