Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), whose work is on show at the Musée du Luxembourg until February 2025, is a painterly personality of special vision and real skill. Were she a man, she would by this time be eponymous for a genre, like Magritte or Braque. I say that flatly, with a cowboy hat and boots, bold and belligerent. Through a series of quirks of family life and 20th century politics, a sufficient oeuvre of a truly original (woman) painter has managed to survive the Woman Invisibility (Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 25/5/2023) process.
The bulk of the work in the exhibition, about 150 pieces, mostly dates from do Amaral’s mid-30s to late-40s and includes works such as Auto-retrato (Manteau rouge) 1923, A Negra, 1923 or A Cuca, 1924 that have been appreciated, but outside an oeuvre.
Tarsila do Amaral’s painterly skill and particular ability to project a personal vision is patent the moment you walk into the exhibition. To the left, sure lines of Academia n°4, 1922 put an “academic” nude into sublime motion. To the right, a top-prize exercise of the expressionist-cubist-surrealist environment she’s working in.
A bit further on, I am especially touched by portraits of herself and her second husband, Oswald de Andrade.
Do Amaral's portrait, Auto-retrato I (Self-portrait 1), 1924, composed photo-realistically, has an indefinable but unmistakable trace of tough brushed into it.
Oswald’s portrait, Retrato de Oswald de Andrade, 1923, photo-realistic under an expressionist composition, layers in tender. I say “tough”, “tender” trying to convey the idea that do Amaral fuses in a sensibility rather than a feeling or a label: angry, easy, butch, femme.
Other faces show this same kind of subtle fusion of sensibility into the composition. I am thinking of the foregrounded face of a worker in a rice field in “Trabalhadores, 1938”. I say to myself, working for peanuts in water up to his knees to support a large family, not, Despair. Despair is too broad and too narrow for what do Amaral draws my attention to.
Many if not most paintings that caught my attention are composed of well-defined, brightly-colored shapes and forms that are arranged in, often enough, dreamy-versions of otherwise typical scenes – garden, street, figure in a (desert) landscape, for instance.
These compositions engage me on two levels. On the first level the elements compose a narrative, conjure a visual place. The narrative is structured to point a parallel second level of engagement where all the different elements of the first exist independently, in un-narrative space.
Though it’s a first impression, it seems to me that this quality of pointing from element of composition to thing for itself, from place to space, distinguishes do Amaral from the scrum and ruck of the approaches in her time, especially Cubist or Surrealist work.
It seems to me the colorful reductions and fabulous arrangements of, say, Picasso’s Cubism underline the narrative quality of composition. De Chirico’s or Magritte’s Surrealism or distortion of forms and de-familiarization tend to question the on-looker’s interpretation of visual narrative rather than assert the act of composition-imagination, as Tarsila do Amaral does.
The documentation makes a strong case for do Amaral as an actor on a broader artistic scene in Paris from the turn of the century into the 20-30s of the previous century. She situates, according to this, in a cultural climate where an interest in African and other indigenous arts give her permission to use her personal – but what they call “Brazilian” – experience in her own art.
Husband Oswald even wrote a pamphlet for do Amaral’s little group of Paris Brazilians proclaiming “cannibal art” – meaning that it is by “eating up” (absorbing) European painterly nous, the Brazilians, including do Amaral, create a syncretized, unique, “Brazilian” form of art.
So, building on her ability to depict her lived cultural environment in modern/European style, as a subject of art commentary, Tarsila exists as a “national Brazilian”. However, even if she did fit herself into this national identity story, I am not convinced by it.
Looking around, I just don’t think there is much of anything other than Tarsila do Amaral that is especially or exclusively “Brazilian” in her work. Otto Dix, who was from Germany and served in the German Imperial army and painted all those shocking World War 1 scenes from German trenches and German streets, is not classed as a “national German” painter but known rather as a particularly acute observer and Expressionist painter of war, like Goya.
I say, let do Amaral be Tarsila and let’s let her paint her vision of her experience, wherever she acquired it. I say, she tagged herself as Brazilian because she could exist publicly in it, and, between her sex and her family and her society, there weren’t many places she could do that – the label protected her work from Woman Invisibility. That’s enough.
Tarsila do Amaral is an artist, a painter, a woman, a Brazilian for the whole world.
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Cecilia Braschi is the curator of “Tarsila do Amaral: Peindre le Brésil moderne” at the Musée du Luxembourg until 2 February 2025. The show will move to the Guggenheim Bilbao for an exhibition that begins in February and lasts into June 2025. Tarsila do Amaral’s works previously figured in a 2018 solo exposition in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Latin American painter series that featured Diego Rivera, Cândido Portinari, Roberto Matta, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Armando Reverón, José Clemente Orozco and Joaquín Torres García.