Tarsila and cannibal Brazil

At the end of February, a large retrospective of Tarsila do Amaral, the standard-bearer and icon of avant-garde Brazil, arrived at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao from Paris. An initiative that joins those pioneers who rediscovered the painter in our country (Fundació Juan March, Madrid, 2009) and Brazilian modernity (Brazil. From Anthropophagy to Brasilia, IVAM, Valencia, 2000-2001).

São Paulo-Paris: return itineraries

Paris, the real Paris, the one that left me with indelible impressions, was the Paris of 1923. I had already known it three years before [...] but it did not deeply flood my sensibility. Leaving Brazil in 1920 [...] I ended up in the Parisian pompier atmosphere. I had not visited any modern gallery.

Although Tarsila had settled in Paris in 1920, it was after a brief return to Brazil in 1922, in which she joined the renewal movement promoted by the Semana de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and with some of its participants—the painter Anita Malfatti and the poets Oswald de Andrade, Menotti Del Picchia and Mário de Andrade—that she formed the so-called Grupo dos Cinco, when, on her return to the French capital in 1923, she entered the most innovative circles of the capital on the Seine. In contact with Cubism, she refined her language, while the discovery of primitivism via avant-garde brought her closer to her Brazilian roots. If in São Paulo she had embarked on the path of modernity that led to Paris, in Paris she began a path back to her origins that would take her back to Brazil.

Estudo (Academia nº 2), Tarsila do Amaral (1923). © Tarsila do Amaral © Sergio Guerini

Rediscovering Brazil: the journey to Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro

We went in a group, to discover Brazil […] I found in Minas the colors that I loved when I was a child. Later, they taught me that they were ugly and caipiras […] But later I took revenge on the oppression, transferring them to my canvases […] Clean painting, above all, without fear of conventional canons. Freedom and sincerity, a certain stylization that adapted it to the modern era.

In this journey to the seed, in search of a cultural substrate, accompanied by Blaise Cendrars and the Pauline avant-gardes, which travels through Rio de Janeiro and the carnival and the 18th-century caipira Brazil of Minas Gerais, Tarsila rediscovers the colors and naive shapes of the baroque of her childhood. The fruit of this is A negra, which, with its direct and primitive sensuality, anticipates the anthropophagic stage. Tarsila's painting has swallowed European modernity in Paris and, nourished in Brazil by vernacular tradition, is ready for anthropophagic digestion.

A Metrópole, Tarsila do Amaral (1958). © Tarsila do Amaral © Marcelo Spatafora

From Pau-Brazil to the Anthropófago Manifesto

My painting, which they called Pau-Brasil, originated from a trip to Minas in 1924 […] Contact with that land full of tradition […] awakened in me the feeling of “Brazilianity”. Another movement, the Anthropophagic, had its origin in a painting from 1928 […] Faced with that monstrous figure with colossal feet, heavily supported on the ground […], to which they gave the name Abaporu – anthropophagous –, they decided to create an artistic and literary movement located on Brazilian soil.

The Peace-Brazil Manifesto (1924), signed by Oswald de Andrade —with whom Tarsila would form the brilliant Tarsiwald couple— inaugurated a nationalist and modern cultural awakening that would crystallize in the Antropófago Manifesto (1928). Tarsila's paintings would become the emblem of this cannibalistic movement of ingesting the alien for its metabolization in the mestizo forms of the first Brazilian avant-garde. As the manifesto preached: “Tupí or not Tupí, that's the question”.

Auto-retrato I, Tarsila do Amaral (1924). © Tarsila do Amaral © Artistic-Cultural Collection of the Governmental Palaces of the State of São Paulo / Romulo Fialdini