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She led Latin American art in a bold new direction

Recently, New York museums have presented retrospectives of all three of the most influential artists of Brazil’s postwar avant-garde. Lygia Clark, with her hinged-metal sculptures you can fiddle with at will, filled the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art. Lygia Pape, known for bold, participative performances and sculptures of iridescent gold filaments, appeared at the Met Breuer. And Hélio Oiticica was the man of the hour this summer at the Whitney, live birds and all.

You’ll have to go back to the Guggenheim’s 2001 blockbuster “Brazil: Body and Soul” for the last big-ticket appearance of modernist painters like Emiliano di Cavalcanti, Cândido Portinari and, above all, Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973): the most popular artist of the last century in her home country, but still little known in the United States. Her mature paintings, featuring oversize bodies in flowing, stylized landscapes, provoked the modern Brazilian penchant for antropofagia, or “cannibalism,” that Clark, Oiticica and Pape would all draw from. In the art of Tarsila (like a Brazilian soccer star, she is always called by her first name), Brazil found a new cultural confidence that said goodbye to European envy and consumed Western, African and indigenous influences with equal relish.

“Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil,” a belated but very welcome exhibition at the Modern, at last introduces New York audiences to the painter who, more than any of her contemporaries, forged a modernist vocabulary for the country’s art. Trained in Paris, enamored of rural Brazil, Tarsila moved quickly from folksy, idealized depictions of the New World to a brawny, confident biomorphism. Her three most important paintings have all been united in this show: “A Negra” and “Antropofagia,” on loan from museums in São Paulo, and “Abaporu,” which has traveled from Buenos Aires, Argentina. (This show appeared last year at the Art Institute of Chicago; it was organized by Luis Pérez-Oramas, who recently stepped down as MoMA’s curator of Latin American art, and Stephanie D’Alessandro, now at the Met but previously at the Art Institute.)

Tarsila was born into a family of wealthy landowners on a coffee plantation outside São Paulo in 1886 — two years before the end of slavery in Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abolish it. She received an art education in São Paulo, but she found the instruction traditionalist, so she left for Paris in 1920. There she learned from Fernand Léger, whose bold colors and rounded figures would be decisive for her mature art. There is much of Léger in a 1923 academy (or nude figure study) of Tarsila’s, in which the sitter’s contoured flesh pops against a backdrop of blue, green and beige.

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Paris had left her “contaminated by revolutionary ideas,” Tarsila later wrote, and, while still abroad, she would soon redeploy her French lessons in the service of a new Brazilian art. Her 1923 breakthrough, “A Negra” — “The Black Woman,” in English, though Brazilian racial taxonomies are quite different from American ones — pictures its nude subject sitting cross-legged, and her oversize feet, complete with toes of childlike chubbiness, take up much of the bottom of the composition. Her body is flattened; her right breast droops over her crossed arm; and her lips are so large that they run right off her face. Her flesh is a rusty orange, which darkens at the edges, as in Léger’s paintings. And note the background: an abstract arrangement of cool-colored stripes, indebted to Brazilian textiles but also to new European painting.

For contemporary audiences in New York, now hyper-attuned to white artists’ use and misuse of black bodies, “A Negra” will pose the toughest challenge in this exhibition. But context is critical here. In 1923, for a trained artist to imagine a black woman as the embodiment of a new national spirit would have constituted a direct attack on the old, wannabe-European establishment of Rio and São Paulo. (We might add that modern artists in 1920s Paris were besotted with African and Native American art, precisely what the Brazilian bourgeoisie disdained.) The modernist tropes of “A Negra,” with its scrambling of scales and its simplified graphics, were to be the building blocks for the art of a multiracial society.

Tarsila did not wholly commit to a new formal language after “A Negra.” There are landscapes and genre scenes, such as “The Papaya Tree” (1925), that appear very much like folk art — a good reminder, especially here at MoMA, that the development of modernism could proceed at different tempos and take nonlinear paths, in Brazil and elsewhere. But in 1928, Tarsila painted “Abaporu,” a landmark work of Brazilian modernism, in which a nude figure, half-human and half-animal, nuzzles his nose or beak into his bent knee, and looks down at his massive, swollen foot, several times the size of his head.

“Abaporu” inspired Tarsila’s husband at the time, poet Oswald de Andrade, to write his celebrated “Cannibal Manifesto,” which flayed Brazil’s belletrist writers and called for an embrace of local influences — in fact, for a devouring of them. The European stereotype of native Brazilians as cannibals would be reformatted as a cultural virtue. More than a social and literary reform movement, cannibalism would form the basis for a new Brazilian nationalism, in which, as de Andrade wrote, “we made Christ to be born in Bahia.” (A copy of the manifesto, illustrated with a line drawing of “Abaporu,” is on view beside the painting.)

The ornery nudes of “A Negra” and “Abaporu” unite in Tarsila’s final great painting, “Antropofagia,” a marriage of two figures that is also a marriage of Old World and New. The couple sit entangled, her breast drooping over his knee, their giant feet crossed one over the other, while, behind them, a banana leaf grows as large as a cactus. The sun, high above the primordial couple, is a wedge of lemon.

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But in October of 1929, the year she painted “Antropofagia,” New York’s stock markets crashed, and Brazil’s economy did, too. The next year a revolution brought to power Getúlio Vargas, who would eventually consolidate his power into a dictatorship. Tarsila, bankrupt, divorced from de Andrade and increasingly Marxist, would veer into a more politically engaged style. Her 1933 painting “Workers,” which closes the show, depicts a pyramid of male and female laborers of different races, standing before a factory that belches smoke.

This show is a bit too light on Tarsila’s later work, concentrating on the genesis moment of Brazilian modernism in the 1920s, rather than her 1930s engagement with socialist realism, a genre MoMA has always shied away from. That’s regrettable, especially if you look to today’s politically roiled Brazil. In the last six months, museums in São Paulo and Porto Alegre have faced a concerted campaign of censorship and intimidation; a show of queer art was forced to close early, and museum curators have faced verbal harassment. Tarsila, who served a month in prison in 1932, would certainly have condemned these efforts to tamp down Brazil’s full cultural diversity.

The New York Times

JASON FARAGO © 2018 The New York Times

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