From São Paulo to Paris and Back Again: Tarsila do Amaral

Camila Maroja

doi:10.54533/stedstud.vol009.art07

Abstract

At the closure of Tarsila do Amaral’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) at the end of July 2019, a total of 402,850 visitors had viewed the exhibition (fig. 1). Tarsila Popular thus fittingly became the most visited show in the museum’s history, displacing a 1997 Monet blockbuster.[1] The show had followed shortly upon the well-received Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, the first monographic exhibition of the painter in the United States, which was co-organized by the Chicago Art Institute (October 8, 2017–January 7, 2018) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (February 11–June 3, 2018). This recent spotlight on the Brazilian artist joins a series of institutional efforts to make modernism more global by emphasizing previously overlooked geographies and artists’ mobility between different parts of the globe.

Highlights

Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), who would become her husband
What most accounts fail to note, is that do Amaral, or Tarsila, as she is often referred to,[6] had been first exposed to modernism in São Paulo a year earlier, in 1922, when her peer and friend Anita Malfatti (1889–1964) introduced her to the modernist crowd in the most populous city in South America.[7]
While European modernists appreciated depictions of locality that could fit into the broader umbrella of primitivism, Brazilians were interested in creating a national modernity that could be viewed as authentic and freestanding

Summary

Introduction

Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), who would become her husband. In Brazil, she and Oswald would start the Anthropophagic movement in 1928, which has since been widely recognized as inaugurating a postcolonial approach toward culture in the country.

Results

Conclusion