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Tarsila do Amaral

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Tarsila do Amaral (born September 1, 1886, Capivari, Brazil—died January 17, 1973, São Paulo) was a Brazilian painter who blended local Brazilian content with international avant-garde aesthetics .

Amaral, who is usually simply called Tarsila, began studying academic painting in 1916. In 1920 she traveled to Paris, where she took classes at the Académie Julian, returning to Brazil just after São Paulo’s 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna (“Week of Modern Art”), a festival of modern art, literature, and music that announced Brazil’s break with academic art.

In December 1922 Tarsila returned to Paris, where she studied with the Cubist André Lhote and briefly with Fernand Léger (whose work would prove influential to the development of her own), as well as with Albert Gleizes . She was accompanied on this trip by poet Oswald de Andrade , whom she would eventually marry. In Paris she turned to Brazilian culture for artistic inspiration, painting The Black Woman (1923), a flattened, stylized, and exaggerated portrait of a nude Afro-Brazilian woman against a geometric background. The painting marks the beginning of her synthesis of avant-garde aesthetics and Brazilian subject matter.

Tarsila returned to Brazil the following December, followed by Andrade and the avant-garde French poet Blaise Cendrars . The three visited Rio de Janeiro during Carnival ( see carnival ) and baroque mining towns during Holy Week . These trips inspired Tarsila and Andrade to delve further into the characteristic aspects of Brazilian culture. That year she began her Pau-Brasil phase, named after Andrade’s Pau-Brasil manifesto , a call for a truly Brazilian art and literature. Her paintings depicted Brazil’s landscapes and peoples in a way that reflected Léger’s organic approach to Cubism. Paintings such as E.F.C.B. (Central Railway of Brazil) (1924) and Carnival in Madureira (1924) depict Brazil’s industrial development and its rural traditions in planar compositions in which roads, buildings, and figures are reduced to their essential outlines and basic forms.

In 1928 Tarsila painted what is perhaps her best-known work, Abaporú (“Man Who Eats” in the Tupí-Guraraní language), a cartoonlike human figure seated next to a cactus under a burning sun. The painting inspired Andrade’s “Anthropophagite Manifesto,” which described Brazil’s digestion and transformation of European culture in terms of cannibalism . In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tarsila painted other Anthropophagite-style figures, often set into surrealist landscapes, as in Anthropophagia (1929).

Tarsila traveled to the Soviet Union in 1931. She was affected by the Socialist Realist painting she saw, and her work in the 1930s and ’40s conveyed a deeper interest in social issues. She once again painted recognizable figures, as in Second Class (1933), an image of a working-class family in front of a train car. In the 1950s Tarsila returned to the semi-Cubist landscapes of her Pau-Brasil phase, a style she used to the end of her life.

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On The Site

Tarsila do Amaral. Original Illustration for the book Pau Brasil, 1925. Coleção de Arte da Cidade/DADoC/CCSP/SMC/PMSP. © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos.

Brazil’s First Art Cannibal: Tarsila do Amaral

December 1, 2017 | yalepress | David Ebony and ARTbooks

Interview with curators Stephanie D’Alessandro and Luis Pérez-Oramas by David Ebony

The paintings of Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973)—simply known as Tarsila—and the theory of Anthropophagy, or the philosophy of “cultural cannibalism,” introduced in 1928 by Tarsila’s first husband, Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), were for me a major mystery and an obsession for years. Her work especially haunted me after it was featured in the Guggenheim Museum’s massive survey of Brazilian art, Brazil: Body and Soul , in 2002. Tarsila’s paintings of the 1920s seemed to me to represent a rather bizarre mix of Brazilian folk art, baroque Latin American colonial art, and half-baked Cubism, with Fernand Léger riffs, some touches of Surrealism, and Art Deco motifs thrown in.

My Brazilian friends and acquaintances, including a number of influential artists, such as Tunga, Beatriz Milhazes, and Nuno Ramos, would mention Tarsila or Anthropophagy to me in conversation casually, as if a deep knowledge and appreciation for these things were a given, part of a Brazilian’s DNA, and something I was simply not privy to, although they tried to explain. For them, Tarsila’s paintings and Oswald’s philosophy were major inspirations. Frustrating, however, was the fact that there was next to nothing available in English on either Tarsila or de Andrade, including any accessible English translation of his legendary 1928 Manifesto of Anthropophagy .

On one of my visits to Brazil I was very glad to discover a handsome little volume in Portuguese, Tarsila do Amaral: a modernista by Nádia Battella Gotlib. My grasp of Portuguese is barely rudimentary, however, so the book did not greatly advance my understanding of the subject—although it did earn a prominent and permanent place on my “favorite books” shelf.

Born in the state of São Paulo to a prosperous family, Tarsila spent several of her formative years in the early 1920s in Paris, where she studied art, and met Picasso, Brancusi, Léger, and many other prominent artists and writers of the day. While studying the modernist visual vocabulary of the European avant-garde, she sought in her work to affirm her Brazilian heritage. “I am profoundly Brazilian,” she proclaimed in an early essay, “and will study the taste and the art of our caipiras [referring to the rural folk of central Brazil]. In the hinterlands, I hope to learn from those who have not been corrupted by the academies.”

She developed a refined painting style, based in part on European modernism, but deeply inspired by vernacular Brazilian culture, folklore, handicrafts, and folk art. For a time, she commissioned designer Pierre Legrain to create elaborate Art Deco-like frames for her paintings. Over the years, almost all of them were eventually removed, and either lost or destroyed, except for one splendid example that frames A Cuca (1924). One of the highlights of the current exhibition, the painting features a jungle scene with highly stylized animals and insects.

In 1926, Tarsila married the prominent poet and philosopher Oswald de Andrade. They traveled together for long periods of time throughout Brazil, and abroad, and within two years developed the concept of Antropofagía or Anthropophagy. The concept was inspired by the Tupi—a once cannibalistic tribe of the Brazilian rainforest—and it centers on the notion of cultural cannibalism in which the Brazilians, or all Latin Americans, could devour progressive European cultural concepts, ingest them through a local filter, and produce something that would be entirely new and vibrant, and specific to Latin American culture.

Tarsila enjoyed some success as an artist from the mid 1920s through the early ’30s, when she began to adopt a quasi-Socialist-Realist painting style centered on socialist themes. Her early career culminated in a major solo exhibition at the Museum of Western Art in Moscow, in 1931. Upon her return to Brazil from the USSR, newly installed right-wing government officials arrested Tarsila, and jailed her for a time because of her ties to the Soviet Union and her left-wing sympathies.

Her work was seen less often in Brazil in the 1940s, but by the 1960s, she was rediscovered by the avant-garde artists of Brazil’s revolutionary Tropicália movement. The artists, writers and musicians associated with that energetic group looked to the Anthropophagy experiment of Tarsila and de Andrade as a means to absorb and reprocess the international political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Since then, Tarsila has been elevated to a near mythical status at home, and her work, beginning with this exhibition and accompanying book, will now finally receive due attention abroad. Recently, I joined D’ Alessandro and Pérez-Oramas at a café at The Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss the phenomena known as Tarsila do Amaral, and Anthropophagy.

David Ebony : How would you briefly characterize Tarsila do Amaral’s work?

Stephanie D’Alessandro : Tarsila’s work is vibrant and mesmerizing. It was informed by the currents of modernism as we know them in Europe and the United States. But at its best, it’s absolutely Brazilian, part of the place of Brazil.

Luis Pérez-Oramas: Tarsila is a classic example of a transatlantic modern artist—someone who is in constant dialogue with Europe, but from her point of view as a Latin American, a Brazilian in this case. Among the many ways that she managed that exchange, she framed it within the history of Brazilian modernism, and the Antropofagic movement, the cannibalistic project. This meant that Brazilian artists and writers would digest European culture, and metabolize it into something new, and specifically Brazilian. In many ways, Tarsila seems to be the artist for that.

Ebony: Could you talk a bit about her background?

D’Alessandro Tarsila was born and raised in the state of São Paulo. Her family was quite cultured, and wealthy—they owned a coffee plantation. She often spoke fondly about her childhood—outside, in nature, running around like a goat, and then inside, enjoying a refined existence, with French music, literature and food. That experience led her on her path toward being an artist later in life. She studied in São Paulo for a while, and then went to Europe. She studied for a time in Paris, and then came back to São Paulo in June 1922, after the Week of Modern Art ( Semana de Arte Moderna ), held in São Paulo in February 1922. That event had a similar kind of impact on Brazil as the 1913 Armory Show in the United States. She missed the firsthand experience of the event, but her friends were all inspired by it, and she soon caught on.

Ebony: Can you say a little more about the Semana de Arte Moderna and its significance?

Luis Pérez-Oramas: I often think of it as the clearest birth certificate of a modern art movement in Latin America. Other similar events in other countries were far more complicated. Here you see clearly a moment, and a will to embed modernism into a Latin American country. The fact that Tarsila was not present in Brazil at that moment is interesting because there is a sort of belatedness about her entry into the movement. Yet she ended up embodying the most important message that comes after  Semana de Arte Moderna, which is Antropofagía.

Ebony: Stephanie, you mention in your essay that when Tarsila returned to Paris in December 1922, she was “contaminated by revolutionary ideas,” but there and then constructed her own visual vocabulary. How did that come about?

D’Alessandro: When she was in Paris earlier, just before she returned to São Paulo, she had opportunities to see works of Dada, Cubism, German Expressionism, and other avant-garde movements firsthand, but as she wrote to her friends, she didn’t like those modernist styles very much at the time. She wasn’t receptive to them because she was working out different ideas in her head as to what kind of artwork she should be making. [Her earliest works were engaged with a form of late Impressionism.] When she went back to São Paulo, she spent time with her artist-friends who eventually called themselves the Group of Five, and they discussed the Week of Modern Art. They would ride around in Oswald de Andrade’s green Cadillac, drunk with these ideas of a new, young art that they would create. But at that particular moment, Tarsila had no visual sources to do that. She begins to look for sources—not sources to copy, but sources to “ingest,” in order to make something for herself.

Ebony: In Paris, though, she studied with Léger.

D’Alessandro: Yes, and with Albert Gleizes, but only for short periods of time. I would say that a larger part of her study had to do with visiting artists such as Picasso and Brancusi, going to galleries, and meeting people like Erik Satie and Blaise Cendrars.    

Ebony: In your essay, Luis, you write about whether or not she really absorbed or understood the ideas of Cubism, Futurism, and the other avant-garde movements in Paris.  

Pérez-Oramas: There’s a whole discussion of Tarsila’s Cubism. I align myself with the group that thinks that while she trained under Cubist artists, she was never a Cubist herself. She went through that phase very quickly. What she might have gotten from Cubism is a certain forcefulness in her art that is specific to the local—a concrete approach to reality that is simple and direct. Cubism enabled her to get this synthetic, almost “haiku-like” configuration of the Brazilian landscape. That is one of her legacies—a kind of absolute simplicity in her representation of a very complex and exuberant reality.

Ebony : Stephanie, you make a compelling argument in your essay for A Negra (1923) , which is widely regarded as Tarsila’s first mature painting. One revelation for me in the book was seeing its relationship to Brancusi’s 1923 marble, White Negress. Do you think she may have seen that?

D’Alessandro: I think she had to have seen it. We know that it was in his studio when she visited him. And she likely visited more than once, as we know that they saw each other on a number of other occasions. What is interesting about A Negra is that it seems to come out of nowhere. If you consider other works she did in Paris, they look like as she was creating something, as she put it, “under the military exercises of Cubism.” But something different happens with A Negra. There’s no preparation or precedent for it. It’s the largest canvas she painted that year, and it feels like a very intentional image.

Ebony : If we can skip to 1927, that’s when Tarsila takes a trip through Brazil with the Group of Five, through Bahia, and many other places. After they returned to São Paulo, in 1928, Oswald de Andrage began his Manifesto of Anthropophagy , inspired in some way by Tarsila’s painting Abaporu (1928).

Pérez-Oramas: Yes. She offered Oswald Abaporu as a gift, and they immediately went to a dictionary and constructed this title, meaning the man who eats men. When the manifesto was first published, Tarsila’s drawing for Abaporu accompanied the text. It demonstrates an absorption of Brazilian baroque culture, the vernacular and the local, plus modernism, which was actually just beginning in Brazil. In the painting, all of these elements are clearly “anthropophagized” by Tarsila. Three paintings by Tarsila from the period— A Negra (1923), Abaporu (1928) , and Anthropophagy (1929)—signaled a new kind of Arcadian imagination for Brazil, a new kind of paradise, a new kind of Utopia.

Ebony: Why was the metaphor or image of the cannibal so appealing? Was it a specific reference to the Tupi tribe of the Amazon?

D’Alessandro: I think there are many answers to that question. One initial idea is that when Oswald and Tarsila were in Paris they played at being part of society, but they were not. To Parisian society, they were exotic; and in many ways they enjoyed that status. In that sense they claimed cannibalism, as it is associated with Amazon tribal ritual, as part of their own heritage as Brazilians.  

Pérez-Oramas: Also, in another sense, Tarsila allowed her work to be cannibalized by high modernism, and in turn, she cannibalized the dissemination of high modernism through Art Deco. The elaborate Art Deco frames she commissioned for her paintings could be seen as an example of that process.

Ebony: In Paris, she befriended André Breton, and some of the Surrealists; and in some way she and Oswald remind me of the Brazilian counterparts to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. But it seems that Tarsila’s work was not embraced by Breton and the Surrealists in the way that Frida’s was. What was the reason for that?

Pérez-Oramas: I think that Tarsila’s work of the early 1920s, at the time she met Breton, was not something that Breton and Surrealists could easily embrace.

D’Alessandro:  And there is much more research to be done in certain areas like that. Our book, the exhibition, and this project is really the first of its kind—as an in-depth exploration of her work. The doors for further research are open now—and can’t be closed.

Pérez-Oramas: Also, the real reception and understanding of Tarsila’s work didn’t occur until very late. Her work was not fully embraced even in Brazil until the 1960s.

Ebony: At the time of the Tropicália movement in Brazil? That is another important question, how and why was Anthropophagy suddenly embraced by the Brazilian avant-garde of the 1960s? What did it mean to them?

Pérez-Oramas: As with the Surrealism question, the relationship of Anthropophagy to Tropicália is complex. By 1965 you had in Brazil prominent cultural figures, musicians—singers like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil—and artists, such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, as well as writers, who are thinking about how to develop “Brazilian” as a universal message, something that can actually go beyond the frontiers of Brazil. All of them found in the work of Oswald and Tarsila in the 1920s, a foundation to begin with; and so Tarsila, Oswald, and Anthropophagy became an obsession.

D’Alessandro: It is also important to keep in mind that for a long period of time Tarsila’s work was not really accessible to most people. Few saw the work until 1950, when she had a major retrospective in Brazil. From that point on, the work finally began to become known to the public, and appreciated.

Ebony: What would you say is most important or relevant about Tarsila’s work today? Why should young artists, art historians, and all art enthusiasts pay attention to it now?  

Pérez-Oramas: I think she was a courageous artist. She showed courage in the way she embraced her local context with a universal will.   

D’Alessandro: In the introduction to the book, we quote the great art historian Aracy Amaral, who said that Tarsila always managed to do exactly what she wanted. As a woman, as an artist, and despite many challenges, she was always able to accomplish what she wanted. That’s a universal lesson for any artist, art historian, or whatever you choose for your own path; and it becomes a very powerful lesson when you see Tarsila’s work. She had a clear vision. It took her a long time to find her voice, her vision. But once she did, she stayed true to it, true to her own path.

David Ebony  is currently a Contributing Editor of  Art in America  magazine. Among his books are  Arne Svenson: The Neighbors (2015);  Anselm Reyle: Mystic Silver  (2012);  Carlo Maria Mariani in the 21st Century  (2011);  Emily Mason  (2006);  Botero: Abu Ghraib  (2006);  Craigie Horsfield: Relation  (2005); and  Graham Sutherland: A Retrospective  (1998). He lives and works in New York City.

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Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil

Oct 6, 2017 – Jan 7, 2018

Tarsila do Amaral.  Abaporu , 1928. Colección MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos.

Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) was a central figure in the development of Brazil’s modern art, and her influence reverberates throughout 20th- and 21st-century art. Although relatively little-known outside Latin America, her paintings and drawings reflect her ambitions to synthesize the currents of avant-garde art and create an original modern art for her home country.  Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil , the first major museum exhibition in North America devoted to the artist, focuses on her work in the 1920s, when she traveled between São Paulo and Paris, participating in the creative and social lives of both cities and forging her own unique artistic style.

The exhibition begins in Paris with what Tarsila, as she is affectionately known in her home country, called her “military service in Cubism.” Her rich involvement with European modernism included associations with artists Fernand Léger and Constantin Brancusi, dealer Ambroise Vollard, and poet Blaise Cendrars. The presentation follows her trips to Rio de Janeiro and the colonial towns of Minas Gerais and charts her expanding and vital role in Brazil’s emerging modern art scene and with its community of artists and writers, including poets Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade. It was during this period that Tarsila began combining the visual language of modernism with the subjects and palette of her homeland to produce a fresh and uniquely Brazilian modern art. The exhibition celebrates Tarsila’s most daring works and her role in the founding of Antropofagía—an art movement that promoted the idea of devouring, digesting, and transforming European and other artistic influences in order to make something entirely new. Tarsila’s contributions include the landmark 1928 canvas  Abaporu , which was the inspiration for the Anthropophagous Manifesto and came to serve as an emblem for the movement.

Featuring over 120 paintings, drawings, and historical documents related to the artist,  Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil  is a rare opportunity to experience the artist’s work, which is held mostly in Brazilian collections.

Works by Tarsila do Amaral

Tarsila do Amaral.  City  ( The Street ), 1929. Collection of Bolsa de Art. © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos.

Tarsila do Amaral.  Postcard , 1929. Private collection, Rio de Janeiro. © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos.

Tarsila do Amaral.  Setting Sun , 1929. Private Collection. © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos.

Installation Photos

Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Major support is generously provided by The Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation.

Additional funding is contributed by the Morton International Exhibition Fund, Robert J. Buford, Noelle C. Brock, Constance and David Coolidge, Margot Levin Schiff and the Harold Schiff Foundation, the Jack and Peggy Crowe Fund, and Erika Erich.

Annual support for Art Institute exhibitions is provided by the Exhibitions Trust: Neil Bluhm and the Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation; Jay Franke and David Herro; Kenneth Griffin; Caryn and King Harris, The Harris Family Foundation; Liz and Eric Lefkofsky; Robert M. and Diane v.S. Levy; Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff; Usha and Lakshmi N. Mittal; Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel; Thomas and Margot Pritzker; Anne and Chris Reyes; Betsy Bergman Rosenfield and Andrew M. Rosenfield; Cari and Michael J. Sacks; and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

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(1886 – 1973), Brazil

Exhibitions, tarsila do amaral biography.

Tarsila do Amaral was a Brazilian painter known for her contribution to Brazil's 'Cannibalist' movement. Regarded as a pioneer of modern art in Latin American, do Amaral provided a unique perspective on the modernist art movement of the mid-20th century. Her richly coloured paintings incorporate elements of Cubism and Latin American iconography.

Early Years

Tarsila do Amaral was born in Capivari, a small town on the outskirts of São Paulo. Her Brazilian bourgeoisie family brought her up in rural surroundings.

In 1920 she moved to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, a recognised modern art school. At this school she studied with André Lhote , Albert Gleizes, and Fernand Léger , French artists that were deeply rooted in the Cubist movement. Do Amaral's training in Paris influenced her distinct style that fused European Cubism with Brazilian iconography.

In 1923 São Paulo hosted Modern Art Week, a celebration of Brazil's arts scene that was organised to commemorate the country's anniversary of independence. When do Amaral returned from Paris, she felt inspired by the event's impact on her friends—artist Anita Malfatti and novelists Paulo Menotti del Picchia, Oswald de Andrade, and Mário de Andrade. In the same year, these artists and writers formed the Grupo dos Cincos (the Group of Five), a group dedicated to the development of ideas in Brazilian modern art.

Tarsila do Amaral's Artworks

During the early 1920s, Tarsila do Amaral drew inspiration from her native country. She studied the culture and landscape of Brazil and began painting her observations as a way to convey her nationalistic expressionism.

Abaporu (1928)

Arguably do Amaral's most famous artwork, Abaporu (1928) was a birthday gift to her husband Oswald de Andrade. In this painting, do Amaral depicts a seated nude figure beside a blooming cactus. The title is from the South American Tupi-Guarani language and translates to 'Man Who Eats Man'.

After receiving Abaporu as a gift, do Amaral's husband wrote the Manifesto of Anthropophagy (1928), a publication that considered Brazil's colonial suffering and proposed the country assert its independence through the 'artistic cannibalism' of exterior influences. Do Amaral's painting became the centrepiece for this significant Latin American arts movement.

Lonely Figure (1930)

Do Amaral's painting style began to change after she divorced de Andrade in 1930. In Lonely Figure (1930), do Amaral paints a figure facing away from the viewer with hair that flows out of the frame. The figure is facing a minimal yet infinite landscape and appears to be in a state of contemplation.

Lonely Figure is a figurative self-portrait that explores simple form of representation. Do Amaral's painting signifies her move away from creative portrayals of nature and wildlife. Lonely Figure was the only painting she produced in 1930.

Operários (Workers) and Segunda Classe (Second Class) (1933)

In the 1930s do Amaral's practice became focused on social themes. Her paintings Operáios (Workers) and Segunda Classe (Second Class) (both 1933) portray dimly lit migrant workers grouped together in grim surroundings.

Do Amaral's paintings highlight the racial diversity amongst migrants in Brazil. The paintings also reflect on the subordinated position of the working class in the world's modern industrial society.

Awards and Accolades

In 1998 Tarsila do Amaral's work was featured in the 24th São Paulo Art Biennial.

Her paintings are in the collections of major museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and MALBA in Buenos Aires. Her artwork has been included in group shows at galleries including Palais De Tokyo in Paris , Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo.

In 2018 the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited 120 works by Tarsila do Amaral in the exhibition Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil . This was the first exhibition in the United States exclusively devoted to the artist.

Other exhibitions include Brazilian Print Masters , LAART, São Paulo (2021); Landscapes of the South , Mendes Wood DM , New York (2020); Women Artists in Brazil, LAART, São Paulo (2020); #ArtWiseUP: The Way of Animals , ArtWise, New York (2018); Anthropophagy and Modernity: Brazilian Art in the Fadel Collection , MALBA, Buenos Aires (2016).

Phoebe Bradford | Ocula | 2021

Tarsila Do Amaral featured artworks

Tarsila Do Amaral recent exhibition

Tarsila Do Amaral in Ocula Magazine

Tarsilia do Amaral Brazilian, 1886-1973

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"My intention is to  study the taste and art of our caipiras. In the countryside, I hope to learn from those who have not yet been corrupted by the academies.”   — Tarsila do Amaral

Amaral began her artistic education in São Paulo in 1916, training at the conservative Academy of Fine Arts, before moving to Paris in 1920 to study at the Académie Julien.[3] But upon returning to Brazil in the wake of the "Semana de arte moderna"—one of the first events that truly immersed Brazilian audiences in avant-garde practices—Amaral met key figures involved in the event and became a convert to modernism.[4] In 1923 her schooling was put to the test as she returned to Paris and worked in the studios of André Lhote and Fernand Léger while also studying under Albert Gleizes. Through these experiences, Amaral developed a profound appreciation for the possibilities provided by Cubism, so much so that she likened it to “military service” in the education of young painters.[5] 

The year 1923, however, also saw Amaral send a letter to her family in Brazil in which she proclaimed “I feel increasingly Brazilian: I want to be the painter of my country.” Indeed, as a South American abroad among artists who were turning toward “primitivism” in order to further their own practices, she became more aware of her identity as a Brazilian.[6] Arriving back in her native country at the end of the year, Amaral announced her intention to “study the taste and art of our caipiras. In the countryside, I hope to learn from those who have not yet been corrupted by the academies.”[7] In 1924, she traveled widely in the company of Andrade, the French-Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, and many others, visiting the Carnival celebrations in Rio de Janeiro and making their way through the small towns in the state of Minas Gerais. Amaral found inspiration throughout these travels, developing Cubist-inspired compositions of Brazilian cities and the countryside representative of what is now known as her Pau-Brasil period (1924–27). The term, which translates to “brazilwood,” comes from the title of Andrade’s 1925 manifesto calling for a national literature distinct from European traditions.[8]  

As the decade progressed, Amaral’s compositions became increasingly indebted to elements of Surrealism, having previously familiarized herself with the work of artists like Jean Arp, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy.[9] The imaginative landscapes and creatures found in her paintings from the Anthropophagic period (1928–30) come together to create verdant images of a timeless, dreamlike quality. Rounded and bulbous forms underscore an otherworldly appearance. By the turn of the decade, however, Amaral turned her eye to social and political issues within her country, deploying her unique visual vocabulary to complex issues of class and labor in a manner drawing from Social Realism.[10] 

After her death in 1973, the importance of Amaral’s work within art history has been increasingly recognized. In 1987, her work was included in  Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987 , which opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Art before traveling to the Queens Museum, New York, and the Center for the Fine Arts, Miami. In 2017, she was the subject of a major career retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, which traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2018. The potency of her concept of Anthropophagy retains currency at a time when art history—the way it is traditionally told and who tells it—is hotly contested; at a time when a female Brazilian artist, previously underserved in Western art history, can hold a major one-person exhibition in the United States and reclaim her place as one of the most influential artists of our time.  

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Tarsila do Amaral

Capivari, brazil, 1886–são paulo, 1973.

Tarsila do Amaral was one of the foremost visual artists of Brazil’s modernist movement during the first half of the twentieth century. With her partner, the poet Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila, as she is popularly known in her home country, was actively engaged in the 1920s in the development of a new visual language of Brazilian modernism. Together, they founded the Antropofagia movement, following the publication of the the Manifesto Antropófago ( Cannibalist Manifesto , 1928) by De Andrade. The manifesto employed the concept of anthropophagy as a metaphor and argued for artists to “cannibalize” the diverse cultural traditions that surrounded them in modern Brazil; after a process of “digestion,” or synthesis, this would yield original and authentic cultural products. During the 1920s, Tarsila’s most prolific decade, the artist traveled regularly between her native São Paulo and Paris. Each time, she returned from Europe bearing not only her own innovative paintings but also important examples of modernism, particularly Cubism, from abroad. Tarsila’s personal collection, one of the first in Brazil to feature European modernism, included works by many of the artists she met and befriended, such as Constantin Brancusi, Robert Delaunay, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Picasso. Tarsila also purchased artworks for the collections of Brazilian writer Mário de Andrade and patron Olivia Guedes Penteado.

Tarsila’s personal collection was informed by the cross-cultural relationships that she cultivated throughout her career. In 1923 she settled in Paris for a time in order to learn the techniques necessary to advance her practice as a modernist. From June to November of that year, Tarsila attended classes for short periods in the studios of Albert Gleizes and Lhote. Although she was never a student in Léger’s school, she took classes with him for a few weeks and the two developed a close friendship. It was during this year that Tarsila also purchased a number of his works for Brazilian collections: The Cup of Tea (1921; private collection, Los Angeles) for her personal collection and Le compotier aux poires ( The Pear Dish , 1923, Museu de Arte de São Paulo) for Penteado. Her acquisitions led Léger and dealer Léonce Rosenberg to view Tarsila as an important link to potential new markets after World War I.

Even as she absorbed the forms and tenets of Cubism, Tarsila remained committed to an ongoing Brazilian national modern art project. When she returned to São Paulo in 1924, it was still a culturally provincial city. Young modernist artists working there were up-to-date on the activities of the Paris avant-garde, but many had never seen their work in person. Tarsila’s studio, in which she displayed her personal collection, became a gathering place for São Paulo-based artists and offered them a critical opportunity to experience European modernism, particularly Cubism, for the first time.

While Tarsila played a pioneering role in bringing modern European art to Brazil, only a very small portion of her important personal collection still remains in the country today. In the years following the market crash of 1929, Tarsila faced financial troubles and was forced to sell most of the works she had purchased in Paris. A handwritten inventory from 1930, housed in the Mário de Andrade Archives at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros of the Universidade de São Paulo, and possibly made for the purpose of the sale, shows that Tarsila’s collection not only contained the work of Léger, but also one painting and three drawings by Lhote, a painting by Marie Laurencin, four works by Picasso, one by Gris, one by Gleizes, and a drawing by Modigliani, among many others. Today, these works are scattered across museums in Europe and the United States. The centerpiece of her collection, Delaunay’s Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911/23), originally purchased from Léonce Rosenberg in 1923, is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Amaral, Aracy. Tarsila: sua obra e seu tempo . São Paulo: EDUSP, 2003.

Hedel-Samson, Brigitte, Paulo Herkenhoff, Jean-François Chougnet, Elza Ajzenberg, and Tarsilinha do Amaral. T arsila do Amaral: peintre brésilienne à Paris 1923-1929 . Paris: Maison de L’Amérique Latine, 2006.

Tarsila do Amaral . Exh Cat. Madrid: Fundacion Juan March, 2009.

How to cite this entry: Castro, Maria, "Tarsila do Amaral," The Modern Art Index Project (July 2017), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  https://doi.org/10.57011/SBUQ3525

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Tarsila do Amaral: the mother of Brazilian modernism

Abaporu (detail; 1928), Tarsila do Amaral. Collection MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos

‘I want to be the painter of my country.’ So wrote Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), in a letter sent to her family during a visit to Paris in 1923. The words are reprinted at the entrance to the exhibition, currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, of work by the artist usually known simply as Tarsila. As her pithy statement implies, Tarsila’s paintings proposed an alternative approach to modernism, one that synthesised European influences and the indigenous traditions and spirit of Latin America in the pursuit of a native model of the vanguard. The first survey in the United States dedicated solely to her work, ‘Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil’ follows the artist’s travels throughout the 1920s across her home country’s vast landscape. It recalibrates her impact on the nation’s search for an autonomous modern identity, as she toggled Europe’s strong cultural influences and Brazil’s repressive history of colonialism, slavery and Catholicism – all the while negotiating her own path towards both national expression and artistic selfhood.

Carnival in Madureira (Carnaval em Madureira) (1924), Tarsila do Amaral © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos

Tarsila’s education as an artist unfolded with frequent transatlantic journeys from São Paulo, where she was raised on her family’s large coffee plantation (fazenda) outside the city, to cosmopolitan Paris. The formative year of 1923 was spent fulfilling what she once described as her ‘military service’ to Cubism under the tutelage of André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Fernand Léger, and visiting the studios of Brancusi and Picasso. Her steady appraisal and application of Cubism’s planar, volumetric language is discerned in her early still lifes and figural studies. An equally significant influence, however, was Tarsila’s earlier association with an aspiring group of artists, writers and poets, including Anita Malfatti, Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, and Menotti del Picchia, who had participated in the celebratory Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) of 1922 in São Paulo, and subsequently formed the artist collective, Grupo dos Cinco (Group of Five). An eagerness to travel marked her return to Brazil in late 1923, first to experience carnaval in Rio de Janeiro followed by trips to the historic colonial towns in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais. Tarsila’s signature linear precision, bold colors and rudimentary contours coalesce in the vibrant landscapes depicting local residents among native fauna and flora.

A Negra (1923), Tarsila do Amaral. Museo de Arte Contemporânea de Universidade de São Paulo. © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos

It was also in 1923 that Tarsila produced the painting A Negra (The Black Woman) . The work’s formidable presence heralds the birth of the mature artist Tarsila would become. In this oil portrait actually created in Paris, the torso of a robust woman of African descent rests frontally and cross-legged against a single banana-tree leaf and textile pattern. The image invokes Brazil’s African and matricentric culture, recalling its long history, and late abolishment in 1888, of slavery. Simultaneously, we are confronted with an encyclopaedic array of potential ethnographic sources and modern references – a clear indication of the direction of Tarsila’s imminent production.

Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto antropófago’ (Manifesto of Anthropophagy), with drawing by Tarsila do Amaral, in  Revista de Antropofagia  1, no. 1 (May 1928). The Museum of Modern Art Library. Photo: John Wronn

Cannibalism functions as a powerful metaphor of cultural ingestion. Having feasted on the aesthetic cues of Western art history, from Dürer to Manet, Cézanne and Gauguin, in  Abaporu (1928) Tarsila converges on something both elementally Brazilian and mythical: a distillation of the country’s indigenous inheritance in the supple figure rooted beside a great cactus and crowned by the sun. The work’s name was drawn from the Tupi-Guarani Indian language meaning ‘aba’ (a person) and ‘poru’ (who eats human flesh). In this singular composition we find the genesis of Brazilian modernism, even before it inspired and was used to illustrate the ‘Manifesto antropófago’ (Manifesto of Anthropophagy) written in 1928 by Tarsila’s husband, Oswald de Andrade. Anthropophagy, in the definition provided by curator Luis Pérez-Oramas in the exhibition catalogue, ‘manifests a longing to devour an object of desire with which we identify’ – and for this longing Tarsila provided the seminal iconography. In her subsequent Antropofagia (Anthropophagy) of 1929, Tarsila delves further into the sexual and political dynamics of the metaphor in the sensitive interplay of two abstracted bodies, a male and female, placed in a stylised tropical landscape illuminated by a lemon-slice sun.

Anthropophagy (Antropofagia) (1929). Tarsila do Amaral. Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro. © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos.

In its reunion of the artist’s three major paintings, a generative triptych, MoMA’s exhibition animates the question of what it means to be the painter of her country. The numerous drawings, sketchbooks, and photographs on display in the exhibition provide an equally revealing insight into Tarsila’s working process and personality. Using a striking self-portrait for the cover of her exhibition catalogues from this decade, including her monographic presentations in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1929, she demonstrates a keen awareness, as a modern woman navigating her career, of her shifting public persona and artistic status.

The significance of the Anthropophagic movement was not fully appreciated in its time, before the postwar generation of Brazilian artists and composers such as Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Caetano Veloso came to recognise and recuperate its meaning in their own production. While Tarsila’s later career was motivated by political and social activism, her body of work from the 1920s shaped modernism as both a native and international language, one that absorbed and cultivated aesthetic influences without sacrificing its own identity. For many, Tarsila is the modern master for the past century and for the present one.

‘Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil’ is at the Museum of Modern Art , New York, until 3 June.

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Tarsila do Amaral

Sep 1, 1886 - jan 17, 1973, abaporu by tarsila do amaral, malba – museo de arte latinoamericano de buenos aires, zoom into 'são paulo' by tarsila do amaral, tarsila do amaral's 'o touro': a masterpiece unveiled, museum of modern art of bahia - mam, tarsila in quotation marks, museu da imagem e do som, discover this artist, related works from the web, workers (1933), www.wikiart.org workers, 1933 - tarsila do amaral - wikiart.org, a negra (1923), www.wikiart.org a negra, 1923 - tarsila do amaral - wikiart.org, o mamoeiro (1925), www.wikiart.org the papaya tree, 1925 - tarsila do amaral - wikiart.org, morro da favela, www.artsy.net tapestry tarsila do amaral - morro da favela (2016) | artsy, a caipirinha (1923), pt.wikipedia.org a caipirinha – wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre, família (1925), www.wikiart.org the family, 1925 - tarsila do amaral - wikiart.org, a cuca (1924), www.wikiart.org a cuca, 1924 - tarsila do amaral - wikiart.org, portrait of oswald de andrade (1922), www.wikiart.org portrait of oswald de andrade, 1922 - tarsila do amaral - wikiart.org, brazilian religion (1927), www.wikiart.org brazilian religion, 1927 - tarsila do amaral - wikiart.org, more art movements, 2,303 items, more mediums, 84,566 items, 221,465 items, 42,937 items, 172,292 items, 3,035 items, 76,144 items.