Tarsila do AMARAL — one of the leading Latin American modernist artists
Disclaimer: The information provided in this episode comes from multiple sources and are not my scientific studies or discoveries. Bear with me as I am editing all the texts and crediting the authors. Thank you!
Welcome to HerArt podcast, a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. In our ninth episode, we will talk about Tarsila do AMARAL — one of the leading Latin American modernist artists. My name is Nata Andreev and I am going to tell you seven curious facts that you didn’t know about the artist that led Brazilian art into modernism. In her home country, she is a household name, leaving behind 230 paintings, five sculptures, and hundreds of drawings, prints, and murals.
Curious Fact #1
Tarsila do Amaral was born at the end of the 19th century, in the town of Capivari, three years before the transformation of Brazil from a monarchy to a republic and two years before the abolition of slavery in her homeland. She came from a well-off family, owners of coffee plantations in the rich state of Sao Paulo. Her family owned 22 haciendas and around 400 slaves. Her grandfather had a nickname: Milionario.
Curious Fact #2
In the 1920s, artists across Brazil began exploring modernism as a means to escape the strict academic system, promoted by Brazil’s Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, which had dominated national artistic production since the early nineteenth century. Artists such as Tarsila had traveled to Europe and made contact with different avant-garde movements that were already well underway there, such as Cubism, Fauvism, and German Expressionism. After all they were convening in large urban centers such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, and Recife, they developed new modernist movements that significantly altered the landscape of Brazilian art.
Curious Fact #3
After she came back home from France, Tarsila joined the Grupo Dos Cinco (Group of Five), invited by her friend, also a painter: Anita Malfatti. This art collective was responsible for the most recognized and influential art pieces, which created a modern national culture, neither Tupi, nor European, nor Luzoafrican, but rather a Brazilian hybrid that emerged from the local circumstances: natural, traditional, industrial, bourgeois, racist, socialist. They stirred up the city of São Paulo culturally with meetings, parties, and conferences. The group overall was fonded by Anita Malfatti, Mário de Andrade, Paulo Menotti Del Picchia, Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila. She commented on the group once: “We seemed crazy, racing around in the Cadillac of Oswald, with delirious joy, to conquer the world, to renew it”. The power couple that she formed with the writer Oswald de Andrade was named by his brother Mario “Tarsiwald”.
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Curious Fact #4
In January of 1928, Tarsila presented Abaporú as a birthday gift to her husband, the prominent modernist writer Oswald de Andrade. By their own accounts, de Andrade was fascinated by the painting and proclaimed that he would create a movement around it. Using a dictionary of indigenous Brazilian languages, Tarsila and de Andrade named the painting “Abaporú,” a combination of words that can be roughly translated as “man who eats.” Abaporú, which is today in the collection of the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires (MALBA), has become an icon of twentieth-century Brazilian art. This is both because the painting employs unique visual strategies — a bright palette, exaggerated forms, and collapsed perspective — and because it inspired the writing of one of the most important documents in the history of Brazilian art: de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto), written in 1928. The Cannibalist Manifesto presented a strategy for producing artworks that were both culturally authentic to Brazil and engaged with these broader international narratives of modernity.
Curious Fact #5
She was hugely influenced by cubism, and to some extent by surrealism. These European stylistic influences were organic; when in France, she hung out with her masters Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși, Jean Cocteau and Eric Satie. Tarsila had a couple of solo exhibitions in Paris, the City of Light, which only proved her status in this men’s world. She was a Caipirinha (a girl from São Paulo) conquering the social and artistic circles of Paris. This is how Alicja Gluszek described this experience in an article for Daily Art Magazine: “She used the perfumes of Jean Patou and she dressed at the most en vogue fashion house of that time, the Paul Poiret Couture House. She leveraged her exoticism for self-promotion, as she recognized that the Europeans craved for something new, fresh, different, and natural. To some extent, she played this card to raise her attractiveness, but on the other hand, she performed the racist and caricatured ideas that many Europeans had of Brazil.”
Curious Fact #6
At the age of 43 years old Tarsila had her first solo exhibitions in Brazil, with two shows organized in Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo. They received mixed reviews, since most of the public and art critics did not yet understand modern art, and the political atmosphere favored traditional artists. A year later her works were shown in group exhibitions in Paris and New York, where her style and attitude towards Brasilidade (Brazilianness) received a better reception and better recognition. Although she remained artistically active up to the sixties, the roaring twenties were the period when she was the most active and prolific as a painter and graphic designer.
Curious Fact #7
Tarsila, who died at the age of 87 years old, is today an iconic figure in Brazil. Her works are seen everywhere, in contemporary design, public art, and marketing outlets. What is often omitted in this popularization of her art is that she was a complex woman, a brave artist and a trailblazing creator of modern Brazilian identity and aesthetics.
Thank you so much for listening to the ninth episode of HerArt podcast — a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. If you want to follow more of what we do, find us on Facebook and Instagram. Tune in next month, when I am going to tell you about Zaha HADID — the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. See you later!
