Tarsila Do Amaral

Tarsila do Amaral (Capivari, São Paulo, 1886 - São Paulo, 1973). Painter and designer. Influenced by European avant-gardes, particularly Cubism, she created her own style, exploring forms, themes and colours in the search for a painting with a typically Brazilian character. In 1920, Tarsila went to Paris to get in touch with European production and perfect her technique. She enrolled in the Académie Julian, and also took classes with the French painter Emile Renard (1850-1930). She had her first contacts with modern art and the production of the Dadaists and Futurists. In June 1922, after the Week of Modern Art, he returned to Brazil to "discover modernism" in the country1. She met the writers Mario de Andrade (1893-1945), Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) and Menotti del Picchia (1892-1988), and with them and Anita Malfatti founded the Group of Five. Tarsila painted with bolder colours and more marked brushstrokes. She painted portraits of Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade with expressionist colours and marked gestures. In 1923, he returned to Paris and resumed classes, but distanced himself from conventional, academic education in order to study modern techniques. She came into contact with the great names of Parisian modernism, and this interaction had a profound influence on her. She took classes with, among others, the French painter Albert Gleizes (1881-1953), author of the first great treatise on Cubism, De Cubisme (1912). His painting was cubist in inspiration, but he became increasingly interested in typically Brazilian figuration, as can be seen in A Negra (1923) and A Caipirinha (1923). Both represent an important point in Tarsila's work: the popular character, which is present both in the figures and landscapes that star in the artist's paintings (blacks, Indians, farm, favela, plants and animals) and in the palette of colours explored by her, considered "ugly" or distasteful colours ("very pure blue, violet pink, bright yellow, singing green", as Tarsila herself calls them). The geometric approach to Brazilian iconography gave rise to the painting Pau-Brasil (1924). The art critic Sérgio Milliet (1898-1966) describes the works of this period as "the synthetic capture of a sentimental and naïve Brazilian reality, of which the artists of our country had previously been ashamed". In 1928, Tarsila gave Oswald de Andrade her most famous painting, Abaporu. The painting stimulated the writer to found the anthropophagic movement, whose central idea was to "swallow" the European culture of the time to produce a Brazilian culture. Abaporu synthesises this idea. It also makes a social criticism by representing the common Brazilian (with an undefined face), who has a small head but large arms and legs, because his manual labour is exploited, but not his intellectual ability. Abaporu became the most valuable Brazilian painting in the world. In works from this same period, geometry is softened. Shapes grow, become organic and acquire fantastic, oneiric characteristics. Canvases such as O Ovo, O Sono and A Lua, all from 1928, composed of wild and mysterious figures, bring Tarsila closer to surrealism. From 1933 onwards, her work took on a more realistic appearance. Influenced by socialist mobilization, she painted, in the same year, pictures such as Operários (Workers) and 2ª Classe (Second Class), which showed a concern for social ills. From 1936 onwards, her paintings took on a geometric shape. The colours lost their homogeneity and became more porous and mixed. In the second half of the 1940s, the concerns of the pau-brasil and anthropophagy periods were reformulated, and rural themes returned in a simple manner. In paintings such as Praia (1947) and Primavera (1946), the agigated figures evoke the anthropophagic period, but now appear in a more traditional form, with tonal passages of colour and a more classical modelling, characteristic of the neo pau-brasil phase.

Por: Galeria Gravura Brasileira