Exhibition "MARIA MARTINS: IMAGINANT DESIRE

MASP PRESENTS INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITION OF MARIA MARTINS

The exhibition is a partnership with the Roberto Marinho House (Rio de Janeiro) and seeks to revisit the work of one of the most instigating Brazilian sculptors

 

The São Paulo Art Museum presents, from 27.8.21, the exhibition Maria Martins: Imagining Desirecurated by Isabella Rjeille, MASP curator, the exhibition will feature 45 sculptures, prints, drawings and paintings by the artist from Minas Gerais, produced between the 1940s and 1950s, as well as documents, publications and photographs that narrate the artist's life story. The exhibition Maria Martins: Imagining Desire and its respective publication are the most comprehensive organized on the artist, seeking to reposition Martins in the history of Brazilian and international art. The result of a partnership with the Roberto Marinho House, the show will travel to the Rio de Janeiro institution, where it will be inaugurated on 12.3.2022 and remain on show until 26.6.2022. The exhibition at Casa Roberto Marinho will be presented by Fernanda Lopes, assistant curator of this project.

 

At MASP, the opening coincides with that of Gertrudes Altschul: filigreeabout the German photographer living in Brazil, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the institution, and Tomás Toledo, chief curator of the museum. This year, the museum, guided by the theme of Brazilian Stories, will feature exhibitions exclusively by women artists. On the same day, 27.8, MASP opens the Video Room: Zahy Guajajaracurated by Adriano Pedrosa, and Collection in Transformation: recent donations which brings together 13 works by artists incorporated into the museum's collection and expresses the ongoing work that has been carried out with the aim of strengthening the presence of women in the collection. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Amanda Carneiro.

 

The exhibition Maria Martins: Imagining Desire is divided into five nuclei - Amazonian imaginaries, Like a liana, For a long time I believed I dreamt I was free, Impossible doubles e Personal mythologies - which address how the artist articulated the various imaginaries about Brazil and the tropics throughout her production - a place claimed, reaffirmed and reinvented by her. "The fact that she developed much of her work abroad prevented her from actively participating in Brazilian modernist movements. However, Martins did not cease to carry out her unique readings and contributions regarding a certain national visuality, which eventually earned her the nickname 'sculptor of the tropics'. The artist used Amazonian mythologies and Afro-Brazilian culture as references for her early works, in dialogue with the Brazilian modernist tendencies of the first half of the 20th century. However, from the mid-1940s onwards, the artist put aside a certain visuality commonly associated with Brazil and began to create her own mythologies in medium and large bronzes", says Isabella Rjeille.

 

MARIA 

Maria de Lourdes Faria Alves (1894-1973) was born in Campanha, in southern Minas Gerais, and received a traditional education. Her second marriage, in 1926, to the ambassador Carlos Martins Pereira e Sousa (1884-1965) took her through decisive contexts for her experience as an artist. Because of her husband's diplomatic work, the artist spent much of her adult life outside Brazil, returning to the country only in 1950. If, on the one hand, this union provided financial resources, time and space to work freely as a sculptor, in addition to an intense international traffic that Martins used to

on her behalf and in favour of other artists, on the other, it gave her the title of "ambassadress", which sometimes overlapped with that of artist. The artist created strategies to detach these two images, preferring, for example, to be called only "Maria" in the artistic context, leaving aside her husband's surname.

 

INTERNATIONAL CAREER

After living in Quito, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo and Brussels, the couple settled in the United States in the late 1930s, and from then on the artist's career was consolidated. The early 1940s in the United States were marked by government policies of rapprochement with Latin American countries in the context of the Second World War. In Brazil, the then president Getúlio Vargas invested in the export of certain Brazilian culture as part of his state policy. It was a time when Brazil inhabited the international imaginary as a tropical, exotic and happy country, far removed from the horrors of war. In this context of political disputes, Maria Martins participated in her first group exhibitions in 1940 and held her first solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1941, where she achieved great success in terms of sales and the incorporation of her work into American institutional collections. Her work is present in the collections of several museums such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of New York and San Francisco, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum and, in Brazil, in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, Pinacoteca do Estado, among others. 

 

In 1942 and 1943 she held two more solo shows, this time at the Valentine Gallery in New York. She had established her studio in the city - physically distancing herself from the "official" climate of Washington, where her husband was ambassador, and moving closer to the vibrant New York art scene. There she had begun studying bronze casting with the Lithuanian artist Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973), using the lost wax technique, which was to become her principal language as a sculptor. 

 

The first exhibitions at the Valentine Gallery caught the attention of André Breton (1896-1966) and the group of surrealists who went into exile in New York during the Second War. At the time, Breton sought to include non-European artists and mythologies in the movement and Maria's work fitted this requirement perfectly. Some of these early bronze works by the artist were inspired by Amazonian indigenous mythologies, such as Amazonia (1942) e Cobra Grande (1943). The Amazon became an early reference for the artist, who gradually developed her own imaginary through the creation of sculptures in which figures seemed to blend humans, animals, plants and minerals.

"From 1944, Martins' imagined tropics take on a new layer of meaning. His titles began to take on a more 'literary' air, leaving aside Amazonian mythologies to work on his personal mythologies," says Rjeille. Issues related to desire, eroticism and a certain idea of the feminine - which have always been present in her practice - take on a "monstrous" and disquieting air, challenging the morality of the time and the expectations of a foreign public regarding the work of a Brazilian artist. Works such as O impossível (1940s), N'oublies pas que je viens

des tropiques [Don't forget I come from the tropics] (1945), Glèbe-ailes [Gleba-asas] (1944) are some of the most representative of the period and will be in the exhibition.

 

ARRIVAL IN BRAZIL

After almost a decade in the United States, the Martins move to Paris, where they live from 1948 to 1950. In the 1950s, Carlos and Maria returned to Brazil and moved to Rio de Janeiro. It was only in the 1950s, at the age of 56, that the artist had her works exhibited for the first time to the Brazilian public. Her first solo exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo and at the Brazilian Press Association (Rio de Janeiro). She also exhibited her sculptures at the 1st, 2nd and 3rd São Paulo Biennials, the latter being awarded the Regulatory Prize for National Sculpture (1955) and, later, at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (1956), her last solo exhibition in life. 

 

Here, however, she faced a lot of criticism. "She was seen as a madam, the ambassador's wife. Articles in newspapers and magazines referred to her most often as an ambassadress, not as a sculptor or artist," explains Fernanda Lopes in her text for the exhibition catalogue. "Maria annoyed Brazilian critics and the artistic milieu - patriarchal, basically composed of men - with her cannibalistic, aggressive eroticism. They were not used to violence and rawness like that, coming from a sculpture, especially because it was made by a woman, divorced, with many female figures or revolving around the presence, desire and feminine strength", he adds. The scenario was even more unfavourable as, around here, geometric abstract art, very different from the work developed by Maria, was beginning to emerge. 

 

ARTIST, ORGANISER AND WRITER 

Martins was also a central figure in the internationalisation of Brazilian art and played an important role as an articulator for the art institutions that were modernising in Brazil. She was involved, for example, in making possible the first editions of the São Paulo Biennial and in the acquisition of important works for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio), where she acted as an advisor. 

 

The artist also devoted herself to writing. While she was still alive, she published the books Greater Asia: Planet China (1958) - she was the first Latin American woman to interview the Chinese communist and revolutionary leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) - Greater Asia: Brahma, Gandhi and Nehru (1961) e Damned Gods I: Nietzsche (1965), besides keeping the column Dust of Life column in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Correio da Manhã.

 

CATALOGUE

The illustrated publication (with versions in Portuguese and English) aims to examine Martins' work as an artist and cultural intermediary, broadening the curatorial scope brought by the exhibition. The essays analyse the reception and dialogues that her work has established in the different contexts in which it has circulated, from Brazil, through other Latin American countries, to Asia, Europe and the United States. The texts are signed by the curators and by Tirza True Latimer, Beverly Adams, Terri Geis (the only unpublished one), Veronica Stigger, Alyce Mahon, Joanna Fiduccia, Mariola V. Alvarez, Marina Mazze Cerchiaro. The catalogue also includes a biographical note by Laura Cosendey. More information: on the website masploja.org.br and at the museum's physical shop. 

 

SERVICE

MARIA MARTINS: IMAGINATIVE DESIRE 

27.8.21 - 30.1.22

Address: avenida Paulista, 1578, São Paulo, SP

Telephone: (11) 3149-5959

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The museum also has free admission on the first Wednesdays of each month, all day, an offer from B3 (schedule subject to change).

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