Tarsila do Amaral

Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) was a Brazilian modernist painter whose vivid, stylized images helped shape the Antropofagia movement and modern Brazilian art.

Abaporu: A 1928 painting by Tarsila do Amaral depicting a seated figure with an enormous foot beneath a small head. Its distorted body inspired Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto.
São Paulo Modern Art Week: A 1922 festival of modern art and literature in São Paulo that challenged academic conventions in Brazil. It established the modernist milieu that Tarsila joined after returning to Brazil.
Cubism: An art movement that represents subjects through fragmented forms and multiple viewpoints. Tarsila adapted Cubist structure without abandoning recognizable Brazilian subjects.
Anthropophagic Manifesto: A 1928 essay by Oswald de Andrade proposing that Brazilian culture absorb and transform foreign influences. Abaporu helped prompt the manifesto, which made Tarsila’s image central to its cultural argument.
A Negra: A 1923 painting by Tarsila do Amaral portraying a monumental Black woman against a stylized background. Its monumental figure exemplifies her early search for a distinctly Brazilian visual language.
Fernand Léger: A French modernist painter known for geometric forms and images of industrial life. Tarsila studied with Léger in Paris, where his formal experiments informed her painting.
Primitivism: A modernist tendency to idealize forms considered non-Western or culturally ancient. Her stylized figures engage a period-wide modernist interest in supposedly primitive forms.
Brazilian modernism: A movement that reshaped Brazilian art and literature by adapting modernist practices to local experience. Tarsila’s paintings became among its defining visual achievements.
Antropofagia: A 1929 painting by Tarsila do Amaral combining human figures, a cactus, and a moon in a dreamlike landscape. The painting gives visual form to the cultural synthesis associated with her Anthropophagic phase.
André Lhote: A French painter and teacher associated with Cubism and formal analysis of composition. His Paris teaching helped shape Tarsila’s approach to structure and pictorial form.

Linked from 6 pages