Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) is the main figure of artistic creation in interwar Brazil. Although he had visited France many times, he had never been the subject of a retrospective there. The one presented by the Luxembourg Museum in Paris brings together nearly 150 works and documents. But, being quite exhaustive, it gives rise to contradictory thoughts, to the point of being uncomfortable.
The artist was born in 1886 into an upper-middle class family in the state of Sao Paulo, running fazendas, large land properties dedicated to coffee. His childhood and adolescence fit into this comfortable situation: a good education, a Belgian teacher to speak French, piano lessons, a first trip to Europe at the age of 16 and a marriage at 18 with his mother’s cousin, a union that lasts a short time. The young woman preferred painting on the piano, which she studied in Sao Paulo and then in Paris, where she entered in 1920. Julian Academy, Louvre, first painting accepted at the Salon of the Society of French Artists in 1922, late impressionism: first above all, It is far from what agitates Parisian intellectual life. But she quickly realizes it.
Upon returning to Sao Paulo in 1922, he joined the writers who called themselves “modern”, founded a group with them, linked up with the poet and essayist Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) and returned with him to Paris in 1923. In March he enrolled in classes with André Lhote, who claimed to be a cubist. The couple met Blaise Cendrars, thanks to whom they met Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Pablo Picasso… In October, they briefly followed the teachings of Fernand Léger. His financial ease allowed him to acquire works from his new friends. The beginning, therefore, is quick and its effects are clearly seen: geometric lines, frontal color planes and curved volumes modulated a la Léger. He applied these plastic solutions to the landscapes of Brazil, where he returned in December 1923 and where Cendrars stayed in early 1924.
Primordial Serpent and Egg
In the following years, the Amaral-Andrade couple embodied Brazilian modernism in Brazil and France, she in her intensely colored canvases composed of few straight or curved lines, and he through his poems and essays. They live alternately in the two countries, where she exhibits successfully.
Under trees with cylindrical trunks and oval palm trees, it reveals a fauna that is half real, half imaginary, and very disproportionate human forms, like Picasso’s nudes. Abaporu (1928) is the archetype: a body with enlarged straight legs and feet and a tiny head, sitting near a cactus under a round sun. The drawing is published in the center of Anthropophagous manifesto published by Andrade in May 1928. This text, more lyrical than limpid, aims to be the birth certificate of a Brazilian art in which indigenous indigenous cultures and Western culture would be united. Andrade cites the myth of the great snake and exalts the resistance of the Indian people to colonial acculturation. The cannibalism invoked in the title would be the metaphor for this resistance. This “anthropophagy” hybrid, Amaral paints it: ox with very long horns in the forest, snake and primordial egg, vegetation with sexual forms. And, always, intense greens and blues.
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