ABSTRACT

The present study has as its research subject the Neocolonial furniture, which was produced in Rio de Janeiro during the first half of the twenty century, mainly between the twenties and forties. The Neocolonial furniture represented, through the rescue of cultural heritages of the colonial past, a new stage of Brazilian furniture production.

The first part of this work presents a panorama of the Neocolonial Movement and how it was released in Brazil, specially at Rio de Janeiro, by architecture and decoration magazines.

Next, a formal and stylistic furniture analysis is made by way of pictures of those magazines and photos of antique furniture collected at antique shops and public and private archives.

In the last part, two fundamental ideological questions of the Movement are analyzed – the tradition and the modernity – related to the social and cultural context of Brazil at the time. Based on theories by Eric Hobsbawn and Antoine Compagnon, these two conceptions – which guided the Movement thought - were evaluated. Finally, the role played by the Neocolonial furniture at Rio de Janeiro and the participation in the construction of the national tradition and modernity is analyzed.