Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) is the major figure of artistic creation in Brazil between the wars. 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 almost 150 works and documents. But because it is quite exhaustive, it gives rise to conflicting thoughts, to the point of discomfort.
The artist was born in 1886 into an upper middle-class family in the state of Sao Paulo, at the head of the fazendas, these large estates devoted to coffee. His childhood and adolescence conform to this comfortable situation: a good education, a Belgian tutor to speak French, piano lessons, a first trip to Europe at 16 and a marriage at 18 to a cousin of his mother’s, a union that lasts little. The young woman preferred piano painting, which she studied in Sao Paulo, then in Paris, where she went in 1920. Académie Julian, Louvre, the first painting accepted at the Salon of the Society of French Artists in 1922, late impressionism: first of all, it is far of what agitates Parisian intellectual life. But she quickly figures it out.
Returning to Sao Paulo in 1922, she joined the writers who called themselves “moderns”, founded a group with them, connected with the poet and essayist Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) and returned with him to Paris in 1923. March, enrolled in classes with André Lhote, who claimed to be a cubist. The couple met Blaise Cendrars, thanks to whom they met Constantin Brâncusi, Georges Braque, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Pablo Picasso… In October, she briefly followed the teachings of Fernand Léger. His financial ease allowed him to purchase works from his new friends. The initiation is therefore quick and its effects are clearly seen: geometric lines, frontal planes of color and modulated curved volumes à la Léger. She applied these plastic solutions to the landscapes of Brazil, where she returned in December 1923 and where Cendrars stayed in early 1924.
Serpent and primordial egg
In the years that followed, the Amaral-Andrade couple embodied Brazilian modernism in Brazil and France, she in her intensely colored canvases composed of a few straight or curved lines, and he through his poems and essays. They live alternately in the two countries, where they exhibit successfully.
Beneath trees with cylindrical trunks and oval palms, it reveals half-real, half-imaginary fauna and grossly 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 next to a cactus under a round sun. The drawing is published in the center Manifest anthropophagus published by Andrade in May 1928. This text, more lyrical than lucid, is intended to be the birth certificate of a Brazilian art in which indigenous Indian cultures and Western culture would come together. Andrade cites the myth of the great serpent and extols the Indian peoples’ resistance to colonial acculturation. The cannibalism invoked in the title would be the metaphor of this resistance. This “anthropophagy” hybrid, Amaral paints it: ox with very long horns in the forest, serpent and primordial egg, vegetation with sexual forms. And, always, deep green and blue.
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