Pau-Brasil: Getting to know Brazilian culture through Tarsila do Amaral’s unique paintings
If you don’t know Tarsila do Amaral yet, then you’re missing out: she’s one of the most important painters in Latin American modernism, and certainly the most famous painter in Brazilian art history. Recently, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City gathered Tarsila’s main works and put together an exposition called “Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil”, which later traveled around the world.
Born in 1886 in Capivari, a small town in the state of São Paulo, daughter of a wealthy farmer, Tarsila was able to study and make art in times where women weren’t supposed to be out of the house that often. She only started painting in 1917, and in 1920 she moved to Paris to study at Académie Julian and with Émile Renard, returning to Brazil only in 1922. Her return changed her life forever, because that’s when she met the people who would influence her work the most: the modernists Anita Malfatti, Menotti Del Picchia, Mário de Andrade and her future husband, Oswald de Andrade. After getting married, Tarsila and Oswald traveled together around Europe, getting to know better some European movements such as modernism and cubism.
When they returned to Brazil, the two of them got together with their modernist friends and decided to travel around the country. That trip inspired Tarsila to paint the Brazilian daily life, forests, people, religion and animals. She fell in love with her country after getting to see what was considered to be the best place in the world (Europe), because she understood that it didn’t matter that the Brazilian people didn’t have as much money, museums or art academies (after all, Brazil was colonized and was never able to recover from European imperialism), but culturally, Brazil had a lot more to offer than any European country could ever dream of having.
In 1924, Tarsila came back to Brazil after spending some time in Paris and spent the carnival in Rio de Janeiro with Oswald and French poet Blaise Cendrars. In this painting, we see the famous Eiffel Tower right in the middle of a neighborhood in Rio. There are several interpretations for what the tower represents, one of them is that it represents Tarsila herself, displaced in her own country after returning from abroad. She used strong colors and geometric shapes, acknowledging the cubist movement.
Here we have a simple country family with their pets. It’s a portrait of a black family living in Brazil when the country had just banned slavery, and they didn’t know yet what step to take next. If you pay attention to their faces, you can notice their expression of grief for their past and concern for their future. This work carries a strong social critic of the situation in which some families lived in Brazilian cities, and sadly, still do.
Tarsila painted “The Cuca” in the beginning of 1924, describing it as “a weird wood animal, a frog, an armadillo, and another animal I made up”. According to the urban tale, Cuca is an old alligator-shaped, ugly woman, who steals disobedient children and is often used as a way of frightening the ones who do not want to sleep. Tarsila used cheerful and Brazil-like colors, using stylized images and multi-tinted colors, leaving a childhood-like image.
Tarsila was, and still is, a Brazilian icon. Her work amazes children, adults and elders, for her ability to make strong, fun and political paintings using the best thing that Brazil has to offer: our culture and our selves.
