Tarsila do Amaral

Tarsila de Aguiar do Amaral (; 1 September 1886 As a member of the Grupo dos Cinco, Tarsila is also considered a major influence in the modern art movement in Brazil, alongside Anita Malfatti, Menotti Del Picchia, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade. She was instrumental in the formation of the aesthetic movement, Antropofagia (1928–1929); in fact, Tarsila was the one with her celebrated painting, Abaporu, who inspired Oswald de Andrade's famous Manifesto Antropófago.

Early life and education Tarsila do Amaral was born in Capivari, a small town in the countryside of the state of São Paulo. She was born to a wealthy family of farmers and landowners who grew coffee, two years before the end of slavery in Brazil. At that time in Brazil women were not encouraged to seek higher education, especially if they came from affluent families. Despite coming from an upper class family, Tarsila had her family's support in obtaining higher education. As a teenager, Tarsila and her parents traveled to Spain, where Tarsila caught people's eyes by drawing and painting copies of the artwork she saw at her school's archives.

Career Beginning in 1916, Tarsila do Amaral studied painting in São Paulo. Later she studied drawing and painting with the academic painter Pedro Alexandrino. These were all respected but conservative teachers.

Brazilian modernism

Returning to São Paulo from Paris in 1922, Tarsila was exposed to many things after meeting Anita Malfatti, Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, and Menotti Del Picchia. These fellow artists formed a group that was named the Grupo dos Cinco. Prior to her arrival in São Paulo from Europe, the group had organized the Semana de Arte Moderna ("Modern Art Week")

During a brief return to Paris in 1929, Tarsila was exposed to Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism while studying with André Lhote, Fernand Léger, and Albert Gleizes. The principal subject matter of the painting is a large figure of a black woman with a single prominent breast. Tarsila stylized the figure and flattened the space, filling in the background with geometric forms. In works by both Andrade and Tarsila, the Pau-Brasil movement was a concept that sought to establish a modern art particular to Brazil. Tarsila painted several representations of large cities, like São Paulo, that combined small aspects of the city, like gas pumps, with broader urban scenes. Building on the ideas of the earlier Pau-Brasil movement, she appropriated European styles similar to those of her former teacher, Fernand Léger, but adapted them to the local cityscapes in order to develop modes and techniques that were uniquely Brazilian.

In 1926, Tarsila married Andrade and they continued to travel throughout Europe and the Middle East. In Paris, in 1926, she had her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Percier. The paintings shown at the exhibition, which marked the culmination of her Pau Brasil period, as well as her earlier stay in Paris, included São Paulo (1924), A Negra (1923),

Tarsila's first painting during this period was Abaporu (1928), which had been given as an untitled painting to Andrade for his birthday. The subject is a large stylized human figure with enormous feet sitting on the ground next to a cactus with a lemon-slice sun in the background. Andrade selected the eventual title, Abaporu, which is a Tupi-Guarani term for "man who eats", in collaboration with the poet Raul Bopp. Upon her return to Brazil in 1932, she became involved in the São Paulo Constitutional Revolt against the dictatorship in Brazil, led by Getúlio Vargas. Along with others who were seen as leftist, she was imprisoned for a month because her travels made her appear to be a communist sympathizer.

The remainder of her career she focused on social themes. Representative of this period is the painting Segunda Classe (1931), which has impoverished Russian men, women and children as the subject matter. She also began writing a weekly arts and culture column for the Diario de São Paulo, which continued until 1952.

In 1938, Tarsila finally settled permanently in São Paulo, where she spent the remainder of her career painting Brazilian people and landscapes. In 1950, she had an exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, where a reviewer called her "the most Brazilian of painters here, who represents the sun, birds, and youthful spirits of our developing country, as simple as the elements of our land and nature…". She died in São Paulo in 1973.

Legacy Besides the 230 paintings, hundreds of drawings, illustrations, prints, murals, and five sculptures, Tarsila's legacy is her effect on the direction of Latin American art. Tarsila moved modernism forward in Latin America, and developed a style unique to Brazil. Following her example, other Latin American artists were influenced to begin utilizing indigenous Brazilian subject matter, and developing their own style. The Amaral Crater on Mercury is named after her.

In 2018 MoMA opened a solo exhibition of her work, the eighth retrospective on Latin America artists following exhibitions on Diego Rivera, Cândido Portinari, Roberto Matta, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Armando Reverón, José Clemente Orozco and Joaquín Torres García.

In August 2022 several of her paintings were recovered in Brazil from criminals who had gained them from an art dealer and collector's widow by deception and force. This included Sol poente, O sono and Pont-neuf.

Major works An Angler, 1920s, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia "A Negra", 1923 Cuca, 1924, Museum of Grenoble, France Landscape with Bull, 1925, Private Collector O Ovo, 1928, Gilberto Chateaubriand, Rio de Janeiro Abaporu, 1928, Eduardo Constantini, MALBA, Buenos Aires Lake, 1928, Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro Antropofagia, 1929, Paulina Nemirovsky, Nemirovsky Foundation, San Pablo Sol poente, 1929, Private Collection, São Paulo Segunda Classe, 1933, Private Collection, São Paulo Retrato de Vera Vicente Azevedo, 1937, Museu de Arte Brasileira, São Paulo Purple Landscape with 3 Houses and Mountains, 1969–72, James Lisboa Escritorio de Arte, São Paulo

Exhibitions 1922 - Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in Paris (group) 1926 - Galerie Percier, Paris (solo) 1928 - Galerie Percier, Paris (solo) 1929 - Palace Hotel, Rio de Janeiro (solo) 1929 - Salon Gloria, São Paulo (solo) 1930 - New York (group) 1930 - Paris (group) 1931 - Museum of Occidental Art, Moscow 1933 - I Salon Paulista de Bellas Artes, São Paulo (group) 1951 - I Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (group) 1963 - VII Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (group) 1963 - XXXII Venice Bienalle, Venice (group) 2005 - Woman: Metamorphosis of Modernity, Fundacion Joan Miró, Barcelona (group) 2005 - Brazil: Body Nostalgia, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan (group) 2006 - Salão de 31: Diferenças em processo, National Museum of Fine Arts, Rio de Janeiro (group) 2006 - Brazilian Modern Drawing: 1917-1950, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (group) 2006 - Ciccillo, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, São Paulo (group) 2007 - A Century of Brazilian Art: Collection of Gilbert Chateaubriand, Museum Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba (group) 2009 - Tarsila do Amaral, Fundación Juan March, Madrid 2017 - Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (solo) 2018 - Brasil: Body & Soul, The Guggenheim, New York (group) 2018 - Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, Museum of Modern Art, New York (solo) 2019 - Tarsila Popular, São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo (solo)