1933 - "Mês das Crianças e dos Loucos", exhibition organized by Flávio de Carvalho and Osório César

This exhibition, 'Month of Children and Madmen', was organized in 1933 by Osório César and Flávio de Carvalho at the Club of Modern Art in São Paulo, Brazil. In an article published in the magazine Rumo, Flávio de Carvalho stated that "children's drawings, when teachers do not stupidly control them, have an importance that we still do not know in all its scope. They bring to our reflection the force of the primitive man [...]. The drawings of mad persons give us the path to find the genesis of the torture that shakes the soul of the insane. [....] The drawings of children [...] when they get rid of the influence of teachers, have great psychological importance because they are a free association of ideas, bringing a sequence of ancestral facts of evolution, some of them close to a panorama of species".
The equivalences between children and madmen were articulated by equivalence with the 'primitive'. This equivalence allowed the association with an idea of ​​nature and strength that the recapitulationist ideology deposited in child development. Thus, we see children trapped in an idea of ​​evolutionary development and the naturalization and universalization of a child's idea.

CM