NEW YORK, NY.- With Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, The Museum of Modern Art presents the first monographic exhibition in the United States exclusively devoted to the pioneering work of Tarsila do Amaral (Brazilian, 1886–1973), a founding figure of Brazilian modernism. On view February 11 through June 3, 2018, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s production from the 1920s, tracing the path of her groundbreaking contributions through approximately 120 works, including paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and photographs drawn from collections across the US, Latin America, and Europe. Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil is organized by The Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, by Luis Pérez-Oramas, former Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Stephanie D’Alessandro, former Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of International Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago; with Karen Grimson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art. Prior to its presentation in New York, the exhibition was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from October 8, 2017, through January 7, 2018.

Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil explores the radical vision of an artist who profoundly shaped modernist practice in Brazil, and was a key figure for subsequent generations of Brazilian artists working across media, from literature and theater to fashion and music. A long-overdue introduction to this major Brazilian modernist for North American audiences, the exhibition surveys Tarsila’s career from her earliest Parisian works to the emblematic modernist paintings produced upon her return to Brazil, ending with her largescale, socially driven works of the early 1930s. Central to the exhibition is the reunion of three landmark paintings: The Black Woman (1923), Abaporu (1928), and Anthropophagy (1929), a transformational series of works that were last exhibited jointly in North America as part of the MoMA exhibition Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century in 1993.

Born in 1886 in the rural town of Capivari, on the outskirts of São Paulo, Tarsila—as she is affectionately known in Brazil—was raised among the plantation-owning bourgeoisie. Traveling in cosmopolitan circles between São Paulo and Paris, she enrolled at the Académie Julian, a Parisian art school that drew many international students.

1922–1927: São-Paulo to Paris, and Back
Tarsila was notably absent during the run of the seminal Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) in São Paulo, in February of 1922. Back in Brazil in June 1922, her friend, the artist Anita Malfatti, introduced Tarsila to the core group behind the modernist movement: the poets Mário de Andrade, Paulo Menotti del Picchia, and Oswald de Andrade, the latter of whom was immediately mesmerized by Tarsila. Together they formed Grupo dos Cinco (Group of Five), a rambunctious, galvanizing coterie that discussed poetry and the state of the arts in Brazil. By the end of the year, Tarsila went back to Paris, where De Andrade joined her.

Throughout 1923, Tarsila studied in the studios of French Cubist masters such as André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Fernand Léger. These apprenticeships led her to conclude that “Cubism is the artist’s military service. All artists must experience it to get strong.” Integrating her new knowledge, she began to formulate what would become her signature style of painting, employing synthetic lines, sensuous volumes, and a rich color palette to depict landscapes and genre scenes. In a letter to her family that year she wrote, “I feel increasingly Brazilian: I want to be the painter of my country. … In art, I want to be the caipirinha [country girl] of São Bernardo.” The painting The Black Woman from that year, on view in the exhibition, suggests these ambitions. Returning to Brazil in 1923, Tarsila sought inspiration from her country, its landscape and people, blending the innovations of the European avant-garde with a Brazilian vernacular sensibility to produce a distinctive body of work that was as personal as it was novel.

In February 1924 Tarsila and De Andrade traveled with the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars to Rio de Janeiro to attend the carnival festivities. During this trip, Tarsila sketched the drawings that would illustrate Cendrars’s Feuilles de route, which was published that year in Paris with a drawing of Tarsila’s Black Woman on the cover. At this time, she also painted Carnival in Madureira and A Cuca, which she described as “a very Brazilian painting.” In April 1924, she traveled with De Andrade, Cendrars, and others to Minas Gerais, visiting colonial towns along the way to the state’s capital, Belo Horizonte. The exhibition includes a selection of Tarsila’s many sketches from this trip, some of which resulted in later paintings such as Lagoa Santa, which is also on view. Oswald’s “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry,” which had first appeared in print a month prior, in an issue of the newspaper Correio da Manhã, called for a renewal of language, promoting a return to its primitive state. Tarsila’s production from this period, known as her Pau-Brasil phase, is reflective of Oswald’s project.

In September Tarsila and De Andrade—baptized by Mário de Andrade as “Tarsiwald”— returned to Paris, and they were engaged by the end of year. Following Tarsila’s first solo exhibition, at the Parisian Galerie Percier in June 1926, and a trip to the Middle East, Tarsila and De Andrade were married on October 30, 1926, and settled back in São Paulo. Living between the farm and the city, Tarsila’s paintings took on a more dreamlike tone (as seen in Sleep, 1928) and an increasingly surrealist bent (Urutu, 1928).

Anthropophagy and Beyond
One of the central works in the exhibition is Abaporu, which Tarsila painted in 1928 for De Andrade, depicting an elongated figure with a blooming cactus. The title combines two words from the language of the Tupi-Guarani Indians: aba (man) and poru (“who eats human flesh”).

This painting inspired De Andrade to write the “Manifesto of Anthropophagy.” Published in May of that year in the inaugural issue of the Revue of Anthropophagy, Tarsila’s painting quickly became the banner for a transformative artistic movement that imagined a Brazilian culture arising from the symbolic digestion—or artistic “cannibalism”—of outside influences.

In June, Tarsila’s second solo exhibition opened at Galerie Percier in Paris. After a pair of debut solo exhibitions in 1929 (in São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro), Tarsila left De Andrade, who had begun an affair with a younger actress. The exhibition includes the only painting she produced in 1930―Lonely Figure—a self-portrait rendered with her back to the viewer facing the sublime immensity of the landscape, her hair extending out of the frame. It marks the culmination of the most prolific period in Tarsila’s career, when her paintings and drawings became visual icons of Brazil’s modern identity. The exhibition also features Study for Composition (Lonely figure) III (1930), the first work by Tarsila to enter MoMA’s collection.

As Brazil sank into Getúlio Vargas’s nationalist dictatorial regime, Tarsila, captivated by the developments taking place in the Soviet Union, embraced Marxism. Together with her new partner, Osório César, she travelled to Russia, where she had a solo exhibition. On her return she was imprisoned for a month for being a leftist sympathizer. In the wake of this experience, Tarsila abandoned the imaginative depiction of nature for a more socially committed form of representation. One such example in the exhibition is Workers (1933), a group portrait of workers set against factory smokestacks, emphasizing the diversity of Brazilian society.

By the 1960s and 1970s a younger generation of Brazilian artists (including Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica), followed by those artists associated with the Tropicália movement (such as the musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil), rediscovered Anthropophagy and Tarsila’s art.