Bilbao,
Sixteen years ago, on these same dates, the Juan March Foundation presented the first exhibition in Spain of Tarsila do Amaral, already in life and today emblematic figure of Brazilian modern art and sophistication and cosmopolitism that the avant -garde could reach when its coexistence with an indigenous, exotic root creation from the European point of view. This author, born and killed in São Paulo, lived with one foot in that city and another in Paris, although it also resided for a while in Moscow, and combined the Cubist principles he met in the French capital already root of his ties with painters like André Lhote and Fernand Léger, and with poets like Blaise Cendars, with the colors and shapes linked to the lands of the interior of their country or plumary Amazon and the ceramics of the virgin jungle.
From this weekend, it is the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum that reviews his work, in an exhibition, “Tarsila do Amaral. Painting modern Brazil ”, which has been organized together with the Grand Palais of Paris and that affects the link between said work and its time and its constant efforts to renew and maintain its independence.
Throughout six sections ordered thematically, we will attend the evocative coexistence in its legacy of the Brazilian popular imaginary (in a time, from the twenties, in which this country knew transformations of all kinds) and of the cubism and primitivism that he found in vogue in Paris; of both sources would be nourished according to approaches to those of Corrientes such as Pau-Brazil or anthropophagy, which proposed a re -foundation, a new beginning of Brazil’s links with European countries that in the past had been metropolis. Until the sixties, and with an accently militant character in the thirties, the compositions of Tarsila – that was his artistic name – accompanied that moment, and those debates of identity and social Cariz still susceptible to being analyzed.
Amaral was able to undertake a trip to Paris, initially in 1920, thanks to the possibilities of his family (of landowners); The visit to France was, in any case, a habitual step for Brazilian artists who wanted to form according to an academic course. There he then remained two years, already his return could appreciate notable changes: he had started the week of the modern art of São Paulo, from the desire to propose a contemporary creation at a cosmopolitan time and distant from imported models, and in that company you They had embarked, not only plastic artists, but also poets or musicians.
With some of them (Menotti del Picchia, Anita Malfatti, Oswald of Andrade and Mario de Andrade) Tarsila integrated the Group of fivebecoming part of a project born with the purpose of being national and of highlighting, above all, in favor of modernity in Brazil, a modernity that would not have to express themselves with the same codes as in Europe. Without these stops being interested: in 1923 he returned to Paris, where he could enter the workshops of Lhote, Léger or Gleizes and appropriate an open way to conceive of Cubism, as a school of invention where to put aside conventions and develop a style a style free. Among the clearest fruits of that learning is The doll (1928), a personal interpretation of the languages of Gleizes and Léger: an autonomous organism in which the reason represented and the balanced management of colors and shapes did not matter.
Even of the stereotypes that the French press applied (freshness, exoticism, delicacy) was worth tarsila, to put them in question, in self -portraits in which he made his face his brand, as a well -known 1924; He managed to respond in him to Parisian taste, but also to the weight of his origins, on which he could reflect from distance beyond any prejudice. On his return to São Paulo, in that same year 24, he rediscovered a city that offered him lush landscapes, colonial and baroque traces and the dynamism of the twenties, and dissected it in ink and pencil by choosing those pieces that, from his point of Vista, they responded better to their notion of authentic Brazil. He transferred them to rigorous composition lines and geometries in which trains used to be present, for their rapid expansion at that time.
When facing that reason, and also characters, he had to face a double challenge: his French audience demanded exoticism, preconceived peculiarities; His Brazilian love, participation in the construction of an imaginary where the cultures of which Brazil was fruit converge was fruit: the indigenous, the Portuguese and the African. That was when he joined that movement Pau Brazilfor which he illustrated a poems of the same name; And when he worked in idyllic carnival and favelas scenes, of living tones, in which he wanted to find indigenous forms of primitivism. Social reality was obviously more ambiguous and complex, unequal, than these sublimations. The Guggenheim has arrived for the costumes of a Brazilian ballet that did not become, of Swedish and Russian inspiration, or Carnival in Madureirapopular neighborhood of his city where he discovered a replica of the Eiffel Tower and where he returned to idealize that carnival as a romantic space in which he can live together in peace.
At the end of the twenties, the indigenous figure of Abaporu (Man who eats man), the anthropophagic movement, inspired by the indigenous practice of devouring others to absorb their qualities and, above all, in a Brazilian culture arising from the assimilation and reworking of other foreigners. Gradually, Tarsila put aside the carnivals and geometries based on cubism to digest a repertoire of both Brazilian and European motifs that underwent transformation. They do not lend themselves, the new pieces, to simple interpretations; She herself described them as Brutal and sincere: Naturals and architectures merge, open to magic and sleep and any creature that we can find will not appear in biology books.
Two of his fundamental works of that period have arrived in Bilbao and both dated in 1928: Uratuin which a snake alludes to the Brazilian symbol of the Great Cobra that would embody the spirit of deep waters, and that curls around an egg associated with the origins; and Distancea dreamlike representation that we cannot qualify as surreal but that obviously, in account those references.
The artist would suffer from the Crack of 29: newly separated from Andrade’s Oswald, had to mortgage her properties and start a more modest life; It was then that, together with his new fellow Osorio Cesar, he became interested in the Soviet economic model, moved to the USSR and turned his style towards the aesthetics of socialist realism. In Workers (1933), that influence intermingles with traits of Mexican muralism in a tribute to the ethnic pluralism of his country, while in Seamstresses (1936-1950) claims the importance of women in that sphere of work. Land (1943) points out how, however, neither anthropophagy nor metaphysical painting had detached themselves from their imaginary.
The fifties brought to Tarsila do Amaral commission, their participation in collective samples (such as the first two editions of the São Paulo Biennial) and an update of their past interests, both thematic and formal. He remained attentive to the urban transformations of his hometown, to land changes, to new visual codes. Swallowing them.
“Tarsila do Amaral. Painting modern Brazil “
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
Bilbao
From February 21 to June 1, 2025
