TARSILA DO AMARAL

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 TARSILA DO AMARAL
INVENTING MODERN ART
IN BRAZIL
STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO

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AND LUIS PÉREZ-ORAMAS

The Art Institute of Chicago / The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London

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 11 FOREWORD
13 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
16 TARSILA DO AMARAL:
DEVOURING MODERNIST
NARRATIVES
STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO
AND LUIS PÉREZ-ORAMAS

27 PLATES
38 A NEGRA, ABAPORU, AND
TARSILA’S ANTHROPOPHAGY
STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO

57 PLATES
84 TARSILA,

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MELANCHOLIC CANNIBAL
LUIS PÉREZ-ORAMAS

PLATES
125 CHRONOLOGY
131 PHOTOGRAPHS AND DOCUMENTS
155 HISTORICAL TEXTS
178 CHECKLIST
182 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
186 INDEX
191 PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

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 At the Art Institute of Chicago, major support is generously provided by the
Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation.
 
Additional funding is contributed by the Morton International Exhibition Fund,
Robert J. Buford, Noelle C. Brock, Constance and David Coolidge, Margot
Levin Schiff and the Harold Schiff Foundation, the Jack and Peggy Crowe Fund,

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and Erika Erich.

Annual support for Art Institute exhibitions is provided by the Exhibitions Trust:
Neil Bluhm and the Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation; Jay Franke and David
Herro; Kenneth Griffin; Caryn and King Harris, The Harris Family Foundation; Liz
and Eric Lefkofsky; Robert M. and Diane v.S. Levy; Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff;
Usha and Lakshmi N. Mittal; Thomas and Margot Pritzker; Anne and Chris Reyes;
Betsy Bergman Rosenfield and Andrew M. Rosenfield; Cari and Michael J. Sacks;
and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

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 This exhibition catalogue is made possible by the Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation.

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 Major support for the New York presentation is provided by The International
Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Additional support is provided by the Annual Exhibition Fund.

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 FOREWORD

The Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, are proud to present the work of Tarsila do Amaral,
which has been included in only a handful of group exhibitions
on Latin American and Brazilian art and has never been the sole
subject of an exhibition in North America. The Art Institute has
a special connection to Tarsila, as she is affectionately called
in Brazil, in that the museum’s permanent collection includes
a painting she purchased for her own collection in 1923, the year
she began to develop a modern art for her country. Robert
Delaunay’s Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911/23) graced
works during the many months of this exhibition’s tour. Thanks are
also due to Douglas Druick, former president and director of the
Art Institute of Chicago, for his early and enthusiastic support of
this project.
We acknowledge the generous donors who have made possible
the organization of this exhibition. In Chicago, major funding was
provided by the Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation. In New York,
the exhibition was made possible by The International Council of
The Museum of Modern Art and the Annual Exhibition Fund.

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Tarsila’s home in Paris and also traveled to São Paulo, where
it inspired her own work as well as that of many of the young
modernists in the city. Tarsila sold the painting in the early 1950s; James Rondeau
it eventually joined the museum’s collection, and her legacy is President and Eloise W. Martin Director
now a part of our story. The Museum of Modern Art is the only The Art Institute of Chicago
institution in North America where the three major works by
Tarsila that constitute the core of our project’s narrative—A Negra Glenn D. Lowry
(1923), Abaporu (1928), and Anthropophagy (1929)—have been Director
shown together before this exhibition: in 1993 they were united The Museum of Modern Art, New York
in Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century. For an institution
that has collected Latin American art for almost ninety years, it
was imperative to produce a monographic exhibition devoted to
Tarsila’s most significant production and that will include her first
work to enter MoMA’s collection, a recently gifted drawing from
1930. To present Tarsila’s oeuvre to North American audiences,
and especially young artists, at this time in our own histories is
particularly poignant for both institutions.

We are grateful to Stephanie D’Alessandro, former Gary C. and

Frances Comer Curator of International Modern Art at the Art
Institute of Chicago, and to Luis Pérez-Oramas, former Estrellita
Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at The Museum of
Modern Art, for their dedication to the artist and her work, for
their perseverance on this complex project, and for the great
attention and care they brought to both the catalogue and the
exhibition. We extend our thanks to Tarsila’s family, and especially
to Tarsilinha do Amaral, who generously facilitated Stephanie
and Luis’s research and enthusiastically supported our institutions’
efforts. We are additionally indebted to the many private and
institutional lenders who have entrusted us with the care of their

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil is the first exhibition
in North America exclusively dedicated to the pioneering work of
one of the greatest Brazilian artists of the last century. Our project
not only traces the path of Tarsila’s groundbreaking art but also
clarifies its power to inspire others. In January 1928 she painted
Abaporu—a curious canvas of an elongated, isolated figure with a
blooming cactus—that soon spawned Anthropophagy, a powerful
artistic movement that sought to overcome outside influences
and make an art for and of Brazil itself. By the 1960s and 1970s, a
new generation of young artists rediscovered both Antropophagy
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and Tarsila’s art. The subjects of her paintings and drawings were
recuperated as part of a lost national imaginary, resuscitated and
restored by Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticia, Lygia Pape, Caetano Veloso,
and other artists whose work is associated with the Tropicália
movement. Even today, nearly ninety years after the production
of Abaporu, Tarsila’s art retains its formidable call.
Although the artist’s work is of foundational importance to contem-
porary Brazil, its almost complete invisibility to North Americans
has made organizing this project a serious challenge. In navigating
a sometimes uncertain and rocky path, we have depended on
the assistance and collaboration of many individuals. First and
foremost, we want to thank the artist’s heirs and recognize the
unwavering commitment of her great-grandniece, Tarsilinha do
Amaral. Without their enthusiasm and support, this exhibition and
catalogue could not have happened.
We are also grateful for the essential contributions of colleagues
in museums, universities, libraries, archives, government agencies,
galleries, and auction houses, as well as of many other individuals
who helped us to locate and secure loans or who shared their
knowledge and expertise. From across Brazil, Argentina, Europe, and
the United States, more than forty-eight institutions, organizations,
and private collectors graciously agreed to share their most cherished
works with us, in many cases to be shown for the very first time
in North America. We are profoundly indebted to all the lenders for
their immense generosity and trust.
While our work on the exhibition and catalogue stretched over
four years, the idea was born much earlier, and we want to thank
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the many international colleagues who shared information, advice,
and their passion and expertise with us as we developed this
project, including Waltercio Caldas, Pedro Corrêa do Lago, Lenora
de Barros, Marco Augusto Gonçalves, Marcelo Mattos Araújo, Ivo
Mesquita, Adriano Pedrosa, and Carlos Zilio. Like all those seeking
a greater understanding of the artist, we are grateful to many
scholars, among them most especially Aracy Amaral, Beatriz
Azevedo, Juan Manuel Bonet, Estrella de Diego, Michele Greet, Paulo
Herkenhoff, Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, Sônia Salzstein, Jorge
Schwartz, Lilia Schwarz, Megan Sullivan, Regina Teixeira de Barros,
and others noted in the bibilography for their many contributions.
An exhibition such as this would not have been possible without
the assistance of numerous individuals who helped us locate
works, secure critical loans, and identify essential research and
photographic materials. In particular, we thank Antonio Almeida,
Raquel Arnaud, Carlos Dale, Paulo Kuczynski, André Millan,
Max Perlingeiro, Marilia Razuk, Ricardo Ribenboim, Renata Viellas
Rödel, and Monica Tachotte.
A great many institutions demonstrated remarkable generosity
in making their objects available for loan to the exhibition. For their
essential cooperation and support, we extend our thanks to the
following colleagues: Carlos Adão Volpato, Marcio Harum, Eduardo
Niero, and Pena Schmidt, Arte da Cidade/DADoC/CCSP/SMC/
PMSP; Ana Cristina Barreto de Carvalho, Acervo Artístico-Cultural
dos Palácios do Governo do Estado de São Paulo; Bianca Dettino,
Sandra Margarida Nitrini, Elisabete Marin Ribas, and Paulo Teixeira
Iumatti, Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros da Universidade de São
Paulo; Cristina Antunes, Biblioteca Mindlin, Universidade de
São Paulo; Marie-Christine Doffey and Fabien Dubosson, Fonds
Blaise Cendrars, Archives littéraires suisses; Deirdre Lawrence
and Anne Pasternak, Brooklyn Museum; Aude Bodet, Juliette Pollet,
and Yves Robert, Centre National des Arts Plastiques; Lina
Gomes Amadeo and Helena Severo,Fundação Biblioteca Nacional;
Fernando Mauro Barrueco, Fundação José e Paulina Nemirovsky;
Carlos Alberto Gouvea Chateaubriand and Luiz Camillo Osorio,
Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Paulo Roberto Amaral
Barbosa, Carlos Roberto Brandão, Katia Canton, Ana Gonçalves
Magalhães, and Hugo Segawa, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da
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 Universidade de São Paulo; Eduardo F. Costantini, Victoria Giraudo,
and Agustín Pérez Rubio, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de
Buenos Aires–Fundación Costantini; Živé Giúdice, Sandra Regina
Jesus, and Marcelo Rezende, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia;
Scott Krafft, Sarah Pritchard, and Morton O. Schapiro, Charles
Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern
University; Marcelo Araújo, Tadeu Chiarelli, Fernanda D’Agostino,
Ivo Mesquita, Valeria Piccoli, and Joachim Volz, Pinacoteca do
Estado de São Paulo; Monica Alarcon, Peter Hanff, Janet Napolitano,
and Elaine Tennant, the Bancroft Library, University of California,
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Berkeley; Andrew Ashton, Jonathan L. Chenette, Elizabeth Howe
Bradley, and Ron Patkus, Vassar College Libraries; and Peter
Salovey, E. C. Schroeder, and Timothy Young, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
We also acknowledge the valued role played by our funders. At
the Art Institute of Chicago, major support for the catalogue
and exhibition is generously provided by the Diane & Bruce Halle
Foundation. Additional funding is contributed by the Morton
International Exhibition Fund, Robert J. Buford, Noelle C. Brock,
Constance and David Coolidge, Margot Levin Schiff and the
Harold Schiff Foundation, the Jack and Peggy Crowe Fund, and
Erika Erich. Annual support for Art Institute exhibitions is pro-
vided by the Exhibitions Trust: Neil Bluhm and the Bluhm Family
Charitable Foundation; Jay Franke and David Herro; Kenneth
Griffin; Caryn and King Harris, The Harris Family Foundation;
Liz and Eric Lefkofsky; Robert M. and Diane v.S. Levy; Ann
and Samuel M. Mencoff; Usha and Lakshmi N. Mittal; Thomas
and Margot Pritzker; Anne and Chris Reyes; Betsy Bergman
Rosenfield and Andrew M. Rosenfield; Cari and Michael J. Sacks;
and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation. Major support for
the New York presentation is provided by The International Council
of The Museum of Modern Art. Additional support is provided
by the Annual Exhibition Fund.
The realization of this project depended on many talented people
at the Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Modern
Art, and we have been gratified by their immediate enthusiasm
for Tarsila’s work. First and foremost, we want to acknowledge
the support of our museums’ directors—James Rondeau and
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his predecessor Douglas Druick in Chicago and Glenn D. Lowry
in New York. We should also recognize former Art Institute
colleagues who provided essential support—Erin Hogan, Gordon
Montgomery, and Martha Tedeschi—and Christophe Cherix,
Kathy Halbreich, Jay Levenson, and Ann Temkin at the Museum
of Modern Art.
At the Museum of Modern Art, we would additionally like to
acknowledge Peter Reed and Ramona Bannayan. We should also
thank Milan Hughston and Jennifer Tobias in Library and Museum
Archives; Anny Aviram and Erika Mosier in Conservation; Rachel
Kim, Jennifer Cohen, and Erik Patton in Exhibition Planning and
Administration; Matthew Cox in Exhibition Design and Production;
Nancy Adelson in General Counsel; Rob Jung, Caitlin Kelly, Tom
Krueger, Susan Palamara, Stefanii Ruta-Atkins, and the team
of art handlers and preparators in Collections Management and
Exhibition Registration; Kim Mitchell, Margaret Doyle, and Sara
Beth Walsh in Communications; Shannon Darrough and Maggie
Lederer in Digital Media; Leslie Davis, Ian Eckert, Allison LaPlatney,
and Kathryn Ryan in Collections and Exhibitions Technology; Sara
Bodinson, Pablo Helguera, Sarah Kennedy, Jess Van Nostrand,
and Wendy Woon in Education; and finally, Todd Bishop, Bobby
Kean, Sylvia Renner, and Anna Luisa Vallifuoco in Development.
In Drawings and Prints, Karen Grimson attended to every detail
of the exhibition, from inception to realization, with a distinguished
spirit of commitment and enthusiasm, and was instrumental to
the success of the project; Jodi Hauptman provided brilliant support
and insight; John Prochilo supported and guided the project with
skill and intuition; Jacqueline Cruz lent a valuable hand at crucial
moments; Jerónimo Duarte-Riascos supported, encouraged, and
disseminated our discussions; and Lilia Taboada made flawless
contributions to the project. Additionally, Emily Edison and Emily
Cushman offered critical support to the exhibition.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, this project has benefited from
the extraordinary dedication, support, and enthusiasm of Sarah
Guernsey and Ann Goldstein. We must also acknowledge Zahra
Bahia, Jennifer Draffen, and Jennifer Paoletti in Exhibitions; Julie
Getzels, Troy Klyber, and Maria Simon in the General Counsel’s
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 Office; Sally-Ann Felgenhauer, Darrell Green, Susanna Hedbloom,
and Anna Simonovic in Registration; John Molini and his team
in Art Handling and Preparation; Samantha Grassi and Sara Urizar
in Design and Construction; Emily Lew Black Fry, Nenette Luarca,
Fawn Ring, and Jacqueline Terrassa in Learning and Public En-
gagement; Eve Jeffers, Jennifer Moran, Jennifer Oatess, George
Martin, Jonathan Kinkley, Anna Maria Carvallo, Nina Yung, and
James Allan in External Affairs; Amanda Hicks and Katie Rahn in
Marketing and Communications; and Jeff Wonderland in Design.
We wish to also thank Christine Fabian, Douglas Litts, and
the book’s production. Jena Sher created an elegant and intelli-
gent design, and we are grateful for her inventiveness, care, and
keen eye.
And last but never least, we want to offer our heartfelt thanks to
our friends and families, who supported our work, delighted in our
progress, and offered us the greatest inspiration, most especially
David and Maisie Rownd, and Samuel Guillén.

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Stephanie D’Alessandro
Autumn Mather in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries.
Luis Pérez-Oramas

In Modern and Contemporary Art, Katja Rivera worked with intel-

ligence and precision, contributing to every effort of our project in
innumerable ways. With remarkable ease and good humor, she
took on additional responsibility late in the project and coordinated
it all with great dedication and care. Allison Hoffmann handled the
many aspects of managing such a complicated exhibition with
energy, efficiency, and skill. Special thanks go to colleagues Ionit
Behar, Tyler Blackwell, Orianna Cacchione, Jadine Collingwood,
Robyn Farrell, John McKinnon, Jennifer Moon, Nora Riccio,
and Lekha Waitoller. Nicholas Barron and Jason Stec oversaw the
installation with great skill and finesse. Maggie Borowitz, Abby
Bresler, and Cecilia Santos provided essential support for our wide-
ranging research needs. In addition, we wish to acknowledge
the essential contributions of Sylvie Penichon in Photography,
Antoinette Owen and Chris Connif-O’Shea in Prints and Drawings,
and Allison Langley, Kirk Vuillemot, and Frank Zuccari in
Conservation and Science.

Colleagues in Publishing, led by Greg Nosan, have been valued

partners in the conception and realization of this book. In addition
to supporting the project within the department, Greg has led the
editorial enterprise with intelligence, skill, and good humor, and we
are also thankful to his gifted colleague Amy Peltz and freelance
editor David Frankel, who have improved this catalogue in countless
ways. We must also acknowledge the fine translations, generous
insight, and spirited collaboration of Stephen Berg, who brought
life to Tarsila and Oswald, as well as their milieu. Lauren Makholm,
Joseph Mohan, Rachel Edsill, and Katie Levi expertly supervised

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 TARSILA DO AMARAL:
DEVOURING
MODERNIST NARRATIVES
STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO AND LUIS PÉREZ-ORAMAS

PRESS USE ONLY It is the habit of North Americans to regard our sister
republic of the Southern hemisphere as a fabulous
region of mighty rivers, impenetrable forests, rich and
rare dye-woods, fantastic vegetation, and incalculable
resources in the way of rubber, coffee, and kindred
commodities. Such impressions, however picturesque,
It is hard to shake the figure of the Brazilian actress Carmen
Miranda (see fig. 1), “the lady in the tutti-frutti hat” who danced
the samba all the way onto the North American popular film
screen in the 1940s. A manufactured fantasy of Brazil’s plenitude
and fecundity amplified in the saturated tones of Technicolor,
Miranda became to non-Brazilian observers an embodiment of the
country, an object of desire, and a spectacle, as well as—especially
fall short of simple justice to Brazilian culture.
since her death in 1955—a code word for kitsch, for a lack of taste
and knowledge. Worse, as time has revealed her complicity in
—Christian Brinton, “Brazilian Art Comes to America,” 19301
the propaganda of the Good Neighbor Policy; her appropriation of
authentic cultural markers (especially the distinctive clothing of
the bahiana, or woman from the state of Bahia) into a revealing,
exoticized costume used to sell bananas; and her transformation
into an ethnic and comedic spectacle, Miranda has come to
demonstrate the problems of difference in the face of persistently
inflexible canons of art and culture.2

Unlike Miranda, Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) did not travel to the

United States and, apart from a handful of exhibitions, her work
has not been promoted in North America with nearly the same
singularity or sustained attention.3 Her reception, however, has
been entangled in some of the very same expectations: in the 1920s,
she was engaged in the project of Brasilidade, part of the larger
search in Latin America for national identity, artistic legitimacy, and
freedom. Her works championed native colors and vernacular
subjects that lay decidedly outside the mainstream of modern
European art, celebrating her country’s lush natural environment in a
way that paralleled tourist and promotional materials (see figs. 2–3).

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 Fig. 1 Carmen Miranda singing
“The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” in
Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All
Here (Twentieth Century Fox, 1943).
Fig. 2 Tarsila do Amaral (Brazilian,
1886–1973). Fruit Seller, 1925. Oil on
canvas; 108 × 84 cm (42 1/2 × 33 1/16
in.). Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand,
Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de
Janeiro. Unless otherwise noted, all
works of art in the catalogue are by
Tarsila.
Fig. 3 The Street Market I, 1924.
Oil on canvas; 60.8 × 73.1 cm
(23 15/16 × 28 3/4 in.). Private collection.
Fig. 4 Brazilian Religion I, 1927.
Oil on canvas; 63 × 76 cm (24 13/16 ×
29 15/16 in.). Acervo Artístico-Cultural
dos Palácios do Governo do Estado
de São Paulo.

Furthermore, through her paintings and drawings, she both

proclaimed and participated in the founding of Anthropophagy,
a movement that imagined a specifically Brazilian culture arising
from the symbolic devouring, or artistic “cannibalism,” of the
Other, including the colonial Other (which included the traditions of
European taste as well as the formal characteristics of Modernism).4
Indeed, focused on the subject of Brazil and acting, especially in
the case of Tarsila’s landmark 1928 canvas, Abaporu (pl. 54), as
a standard for the nation’s modern artistic project, her works
speak of and celebrate singularity as a marker of identification and
powerful difference.

In Brazil this has made Tarsila, as she is known affectionately, the

most popular and beloved artist of the twentieth century. By contrast,
in the United States, her work was until recently so unfamiliar that
it seemingly had no place, so different that it appeared suspiciously

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close to the spectacle of Miranda. Indeed, difference was a prized
quality in 1930, the first time a handful of Tarsila’s paintings was

presented in North America along with the work of other Brazilian

artists. Then, a review in the New York Times praised Tarsila’s
canvas Brazilian Religion I (fig. 4) for its newness and its quality of
being “fundamentally ‘of the land.’”5 Over the years, however,
this difference has also led to isolation and a major disparity in
reception: her work is passionately regarded in Brazil (see fig. 5),
while in North America it has not been the subject of even one solo
exhibition until now. Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in
Brazil is more than an overdue introduction to the artist’s oeuvre—

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 Fig. 5 A performance at the closing
ceremony of the 2016 Summer
Olympics in Rio de Janeiro featuring
elements from Tarsila’s Setting Sun
(1929; pl. 69).
Fig. 6 Cover of Alfred H. Barr’s
Cubism and Abstract Art (Museum
of Modern Art, New York, 1936).

it is a crucial opportunity to question and challenge not only received
canons of art and culture, but also the structures and institutions
that reinforce them.
— the bond,” as she phrased it, between their two countries.9 In
Tarsila’s work, and by extension the artist herself, have been
challenged by varied, traditional, and narrowly defined sets of
Eurocentric binaries around culture—mainstream and margin,
France and Brazil, colonizer and colonized, male and female, high
and low—and also by the strictly formal approach to the develop-
ment of modern art typified by the famous diagrams of Alfred H.
Barr (see fig. 6).6 Set within this context, her story could therefore
be read equally simplistically: the dramatic tale of an artist over-
coming a dominant culture and system of values to achieve creative
emancipation. Tarsila herself would sometimes depend upon such
binaries, writing in 1946, for instance, of a Brazilian childhood in
identified by degrees as Latin American, Brazilian, and an “exotic.”
She wore Parisian couture (see pl. 95) but served her French
guests the popular Brazilian spirit cachaça in order to “reinforce
São Paulo, meanwhile, she was characterized as a part of the
local avant-garde, a member of the upper class, and a represen-
tative of French culture; in her first interview upon returning to
Brazil in late 1923, she was described as belonging to “the group
descended from the illustrious Cézanne.”10 A little more than a
year later, however, she was identified as a resolutely Brazilian artist
and heralded for her “extraordinary capacity for assimilation” in
regard to her “concern for nationalism,” as the Brazilian journalist
Assis Chateaubriand termed it, or her sympathetic absorption of
Brazil as the subject of her art (see fig. 7).11

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which she roamed freely through nature “like a wild goat, jumping
here and there between rocks and cacti,” only to return to
a refined home filled with French music, literature, and food.7
She and her oeuvre, however, are multifaceted and unfixed,
and these qualities make the experience of looking at them all the
more important for us today.8 Even within this project’s decade
of focus, the 1920s, we can witness Tarsila’s desire, ability, and
willingness to shift and change her artistic identity—and allow
others to do so as well—depending on audience and environment.
In Paris in 1923, for instance, when she was decidedly engaged
with avant-garde cultural circles (p. 42, fig. 7), she was variously
The artist also actively re-presented her aims and roles depending
on the context: as just one example, for over forty years, she
perpetually recast her place in the formulation of Anthropophagy,
sometimes describing herself as collaborating with the poet
Oswald de Andrade, who wrote the movement’s manifesto (and
also happened to be her husband), and at other moments claiming
only the role of sympathetic transmitter or benevolent observer.12
This may be due to the artist’s similarly shifting performance of
her gender and social roles. Writing to her family, for instance, she
credited Oswald for the bold, exotic frames that decorator Pierre
Legrain created for the paintings in her 1926 (and 1928) Paris
exhibitions (see pl. 44): he, she reassured them, “does not neglect
a single arrangement . . . he talks to the photographer, to the

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 Fig. 7 Assis Chateaubriand, “Como
São Paulo está cultivando a arte
moderna,” O Jornal, May 30, 1925,
p. 1.

Fig. 8 Self-Portrait I, 1924. Oil on card

mounted on fiberboard; 38 × 32.5 cm
(14 15/16 × 12 13/16 in.). Acervo Artístico-
Cultural dos Palácios do Governo do
Estado de São Paulo.

typesetter . . . to the framer, etc.” But in reality, it was Tarsila who

commissioned and paid Legrain.13 In fact, it is clear not only that
Tarsila was the sole visual artist deeply associated with the inception
of Anthropophagy, but also that she exercised an exceptionally
high degree of creative and personal freedom. Indeed, her biog-
rapher, the eminent art historian Aracy Amaral, has stated, “As
a woman, she always managed to do exactly what she wanted,
even while always trying to keep up appearances.”14

Tarsila practiced self-censorship as well as self-promotion, and a

fascinating example of the latter can be found in her self-portrait
of 1924 (fig. 8), in which she appears sphinxlike, her detached
head hovering against a bare background with pulled-back hair,
dramatically outlined eyes, and long, dangling earrings. The artist
made two versions of this picture, which was likely based on

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a photograph (pl. 96), and in the 1920s she used it on the cover
of the catalogues for all but one of her solo exhibitions in both
France and Brazil (see pls. 97, 111, 112). This image became her
public persona, decidedly different from the woman we see
photographed at her family’s fazenda, or large estate that is a farm,
with relatives and friends (see pl. 91). Such conflicting presentations
further complicate Tarsila, her voice, and our understanding of
her work—but they allowed her to fashion a productive space in
which she could test and forge her national, modernist project.
We can appreciate the artist both for the specific accomplishments
of her vibrant canvases and elegantly refined drawings, and for
the ways in which she navigated the crucial decade of the 1920s,
working to invent her own modern art.

While Tarsila has been included in only nine North American group
exhibitions since 1930, in Latin America she is a central figure of
Modernism—actively exhibited, the subject of countless publica-
tions, and part of a highly select group of artists that includes
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Mexico, Joaquín Torres-García in
Uruguay, Armando Reverón in Venezuela, Andrés de Santa María
in Colombia, and Tarsila’s peer and contemporary in Brazil, Anita
Malfatti, among others. Her current centrality, however, is the result
of a complex series of deferments. We might argue that this is
true of any artist whose legacy is predicated on history, as both
centrality and relevance are concepts and values constructed through
contemporary critical reception and later theoretical appropriation.
The belatedness of Tarsila’s recognition is, however, more complex
than a simple delayed or posthumous reception. The artist under-
stood the enormous symbolic treasure of her own land while living

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 Fig. 9 Waltercio Caldas (Brazilian,
born 1946). Tarsilas, 1997. Ink on
paper; 27 × 21 cm (10 5/8 × 8 1/4 in.).
Patricia and Waltercio Caldas 
Collection, Rio de Janeiro.

in Paris in the early 1920s, engaging with and committing herself to

the utopian project of Anthropophagy. This endeavor, as outlined
in Oswald’s 1928 “Manifesto antropófago” (Manifesto of Anthro-
pophagy), became one of the earliest modern sources for the
production and understanding of Brasilidade. However, it was not
until decades later that the country would truly embrace it (indeed,
Oswald himself seems to have abandoned this call while briefly
flirting with Marxism in the 1930s, revisiting it only in 1950).15 The
true realization of Anthropophagy’s project only became critical to
Brazilian culture at the end of the 1960s, with the birth of Tropicália,
a movement centered in theater, music, and film that sought to
bridge mass culture and high culture, embracing marginality and
cafonice (the Brazilian equivalent of kitsch). Tropicália’s seminal
theoretical program appeared in the artist Hélio Oiticica’s well-known
1967 essay “Esquema geral de Nova Objetividade” (General
Scheme of the New Objectivity), in which he wrote that “the avant-

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garde in Brazil is no longer the concern of a group coming from an
isolated elite, but a far-reaching cultural issue of great amplitude
tending toward collective solutions.”16 Then, notably, through the
Tropicália movement and in the work of a handful of other key
artists from that time—Waltercio Caldas, Lygia Clark, Antonio
Dias, Nelson Leirner, Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Pape, and Tunga—
Tarsila and her oeuvre found vindication and indeed became the
heart of a renewed national cultural project (see fig. 9). Today, her
works from the 1920s, praised at the time of their inception by an
intellectual elite, are the popular emblems of modern Brazilian
identity she originally envisioned them to be, her iconography and
palette the very elements of a national self. Universally known
in Brazil, Tarsila’s work knows no social, political, gender, or racial
distinctions; instead, it is a symbol of communal belonging.

The belated reception of Tarsila’s work, and its nearly complete

lack of reception in North America, also overlap with a complex set
of personal, cultural, and political circumstances. The artist’s
1929 exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo constituted the
first monographic presentations of her work in Brazil, featuring
catalogues that are dense anthologies of quotations from critics
praising her work throughout the decade. Soon after, however,
Tarsila’s life and the broader cultural landscape abruptly changed,
shaped by a series of profound events, including the 1929 crash
of the United States stock market, which destroyed her family’s
fortune; the dissolution of her marriage and artistic partnership
with Oswald that same year; and, in 1930, the Brazilian Revolution,
which begot a series of authoritarian governments that would
last until 1956.

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 Fig. 10 Second Class, 1933.
Oil on canvas; 110 × 151 cm
(43 5/16 × 59 7/16 in.). Private
collection, São Paulo.
Fig. 11 Page from Hélio Oiticica’s
notebook with a list that includes
the item “9) Tarsila’s painting: will write
‘bout it,” 1975. César and Claudio
Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, AHO/PHO,
1376.75–p5.

In 1931 Tarsila traveled to the Soviet Union and exhibited her work
there. A year later, as punishment for this trip and for her leftist
activities in São Paulo, she was incarcerated for a month at the
Presídio do Paraíso in São Paolo, where a number of revolutionaries
were imprisoned in the 1930s. This experience profoundly affected
the artist, and although she now turned to subjects of social realism
(see fig. 10, pl. 82), she also began to create a rotating repertoire that
included new versions of earlier paintings mixed with religious and
folk themes. She also began to contribute many essays on art and
culture to newspapers and journals; continuing through the 1950s,
this endeavor contributed substantially to her public presence.17

While her work appeared in a 1933 solo exhibition in Rio de

Janeiro and sporadically thereafter in group shows in Brazil and
elsewhere in Latin America, Tarsila’s next major monographic
exhibition in her own country was only in 1950, when she was

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given a retrospective at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo.
In the catalogue, her longtime friend, the author Sérgio Milliet,
wrote that Tarsila’s work had been treated unfairly, reprimanded
for its “decorativism” and characterized as “European” by the
public, who “scarcely recognized their own motifs.” He argued that
the exhibition offered a chance to reassess not just the artist’s
work, but the country’s cultural heritage: “A retrospective exhibition
of Tarsila do Amaral’s work is not only a well-deserved tribute
to a pioneer of the Brazilian artistic liberation movement, it is also
a first attempt to review values after the anarchy of two decades.
It is currently about seeing what deserves to stay and what place
it should occupy.”18

This landmark exhibition sparked a number of projects and publi-

cations that culminated in the reclamation of Tarsila and her work,
and her conversion into a national artistic figure in the 1960s by
such artists as Clark and Oiticica, whose correspondence and notes
(see fig. 11) are peppered with references to her, as well as by
Caldas, Maiolino, Pape, and Tunga; theatrical figures including José
(Zé) Celso Martinez Corrêa; and musicians such as Caetano Veloso.19
Indeed, it was Veloso who acknowledged the transformative
effect that the rediscovery of Anthropophagy had on his generation
and, in particular, the 1967 staging of the avant-garde Teatro
Oficina’s production of Oswald’s 1933 play O rei da vela (The Candle
King ) as the first step in reviving the cultural legacy of “Tarsiwald”
(as Tarsila and Oswald were called by poet Mário de Andrade in the
1920s). Hélio Eichbauer’s radical scenography (see fig. 12) was
explicitly inspired by Tarsila’s powerful paintings and drawings.
Following this moment, and especially after the foundational
writing of Aracy Amaral and the 1998 São Paulo Biennial devoted

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 Fig. 12 Hélio Eichbauer’s staging
of Oswald de Andrade’s 1933 play
O rei da vela (The Candle King )
in Teatro Oficina’s 1967 production.
to the anthropophagic project, Tarsila’s name became inextricably
linked with the discourses of Brazilian modern and contemporary art.
Against this background, and taking into account these various
histories and structures of reception, the present catalogue and
exhibition seek not only to introduce the artist to those unfamiliar
with her work, but also to set aside her often mythologized persona
in order to consider afresh her formulation of a modern art for Brazil.
To do this, the project focuses primarily on the works the artist
executed in the second decade of the twentieth century, the heroic
years of the development of an independent, modern Brazilian
idiom. This moment is unlike any other in Tarsila’s career, and com-
mentators have long recognized its importance. Surprisingly few,
however, have considered the technical and material connections
between her works and her life, especially against the backdrop
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of the available first-person accounts.20 Although this remains an
22 Tarsila do Amaral
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open field for future scholars, we have begun this research for some
of the most critical works of the 1920s, including City (The Street)
(pl. 70) and most especially Tarsila’s seminal canvas A Negra (pl. 13).
Tarsila found a unique place in the visual arts of Brazil. Most impor-
tantly, she alone gave visual shape to the verbal forms of her fellow
Anthropophagists, especially Oswald and Mário. Without her
paintings and drawings, the most important cultural movement in
modern Brazilian history would have had a very different effect
on artistic production in the 1920s and the national imagination in
decades to come. This project explores the evolution of Tarsila’s
vision during this time, charting her innovative paintings and
drawings, collaborations, and inspirations. In doing so, it considers
the deep connections between certain works, the fluid application
of ideas and art across cultures, and the deeply performative role
she played as she toggled between artistic circles and the cities
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 of São Paulo and Paris. Indeed, this project takes on Tarsila’s
mythology and, rather than revealing a single figure, appropriately
complicates her story. The essays that follow reflect our differing
perspectives on her work, her context, and her legacy, and we
hope that they work together in a productive and dynamic way to
challenge the traditionally univocal reading of the artist.
— ticularly Tarsila’s contemporary statements about her work, that
Our story begins in 1923, when Tarsila arrived in Paris, determined
to become a modern artist just after the Semana de Arte Moderna
(Modern Art Week) of 1922, and continues until about 1929,
when she painted her major canvas Anthropophagy (pl. 77), which
celebrated her discovery, after years of artistic searching, of a
Brazilian artistic Arcadia. It ends with a kind of coda: Workers (pl. 82),
her great 1933 painting, which gives form to the next chapter
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of Tarsila’s career, in which she moved away from the project of
Anthropophagy. The exhibition considers her early works, which
were informed by the figurative European academic tradition and,
a bit later, the influences of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
It then charts the path she forged, spurred by artistic heroes
(especially Paul Cézanne), avant-garde developments (particularly
Cubism), and popular manifestations of European primitivism.
We consider her work between 1924 and 1927, when she was
emboldened to add to her palette the pinks and turquoises remi-
niscent of Brazilian country homes and the polychromed Baroque
sculpture of colonial towns, as well as religious themes taken
from vernacular sources and folk types—all subjects outside the
paradigm of European Modernism. In reclaiming these, Tarsila
gave such apparently primitive elements a new power and made
her work uniquely her own and her country’s. This exhibition also
examines the period between 1928 and 1929, when she focused
on single subjects, giving them an uncanny presence; often she
depicted them in heavy outline and with repeated forms that almost
impart a sense of pace or tempo, an incessant and unstoppable
beat that proclaims their existence. These were the subjects made
at the height of Anthropophagy; but sadly, soon after, her leading
position and the passion of the movement would wane. This period
of remarkable creativity ended due to the personal and historical
events already mentioned: the dramatic effects of the Great
Depression on the Brazilian economy; the brutal rise of a nationalist
government centered on the military figure of Getúlio Vargas, a
leader close to the European fascists and deeply opposed to the call
for Brasilidade implicit in the anthropophagic project; and Oswald’s
and Tarsila’s separate embraces of Marxism.21
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This exhibition and catalogue unite close to one hundred of Tarsila’s
paintings and drawings, offering new art historical and technical
information as well as fresh perspectives on the artist. In addition
to the artworks are included nearly fifty historical documents that
function in different ways: some illuminate Brazil’s artistic milieu in
the 1920s, while others reveal aspects of the artist’s life, working
processes, and collaborations. Readers will also find texts, par-
capture her voice in changing contexts; many of these have been
translated into English for the first time. Together, these materials
relate the intricate and sometimes conflicting demands placed
upon the artist and her work. Indeed, in a more general way, this
project takes on the issues of race, class, and gender in Brazil and
between Brazil and France, as well as larger matters of nationalism
and internationalism, primitivism and colonial history, and the rela-
tionship between high art and low, regional, folk, or vernacular art.
Embedded in Tarsila’s story are the deeper issues that artists
face still outside the North American and European mainstream—
specifically, how to negotiate the mechanisms and institutions
that make meaning and value, and how to make a place for different
conversations, different art, different understandings.
At its core, Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil ques-
tions the traditional perception of the “wholeness” of modernity
and its “universal” meaning; in looking at Tarsila’s work as an
alternative to this perception, the exhibition offers an understanding
of modernity as a fractured, multiple process rather than one
exclusively driven by the idea of progress or the forces of colonialism
and cultural domination—key issues in our globalized age. Her
story offers much to consider about what was at stake for artists in
the 1920s as they forged their own paths on an international stage,
what challenges they faced, and how they negotiated between
various art worlds.
Tarsila and her work offer even more poignant lessons that are of
urgent importance now: mainly, how is it, exactly, that we have
not known about them in North America and are only introducing
her art monographically nearly a century after it was made? What
structures, invisible or not, have inscribed Tarsila’s art as a local
one, a feminine one, or a decorative one, and what strictures do
we operate under that compel us to make the judgments we
have—and will continue to have—about her work today? These
questions imply the intertwinement of art history and an increasingly
fractured, multicultural world. The historical indifference of main-
stream institutions to the art produced in communities that fall
D’Alessandro and Pérez-Oramas 23
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 outside the cartography of hegemonic countries is both a political
and moral question that cultural institutions must urgently address.

In 1975 the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard proposed

a reading of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass; 1915–23,
Philadelphia Museum of Art) as a metaphor for the changing
political power structure of the contemporary world.22 Lyotard
claimed that the idea of political reality mirroring a homogeneous,
linear, two-dimensional structure had reached its end. Citizens
of the world, he posited, were similar to but not replaceable with
each other, and a “politics of incommensurables” should supplant
the old structure. Still unrealized, this challenge implies an under-
standing of politics and art history as capable of dealing with
objects that resist assimilation into ready-made categories and
whose symbolic relevance cannot be compared with that of

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the standard protagonists of canonical art historical narratives. Also
in 1975, Aracy Amaral published the first major monograph on
Tarsila, bringing her legacy forward in an unprecedented way.
Amaral, to this day the most rigorous interpreter of Tarsila’s
oeuvre, was part of a generation ofBrazilian intellectuals and artists
contemporary with the Tropicália movement, and her ground-
breaking work paralleled the embrace of Tarsila’s legacy by
Oiticica, Pape, Veloso, and others.

Tarsila, in some sense, stands as the embodiment of the incon-

gruences and incompatibilities within the modern canon, which
are similar to those evoked by Lyotard in reference to politics and
his demand for a paradigm shift. Tarsila’s legacy is a testimony
that modern art—and art history for that matter—are not perfect
Euclidean spaces in which everything can be measured and
equated. On the contrary, Tarsila’s work—and the significance of
her legacy for an entire continent—reveal that modern art is
made of singularities and is always resistant to the hegemonic,
flattened categories that characterize stereotyped versions of
Modernism. Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil is
an invitation to see Modernism again, and still again, from a less
comfortable yet more intellectually potent point of view—one
that matches the real texture of our very complex world.

24 Tarsila do Amaral

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 NOTES
Unless otherwise specified, all Portuguese translations
are by Stephen Berg.
1 Christian Brinton, “Brazilian Art Comes to America,”
in International Art Center of Roerich Museum,
The First Representative Collection of Paintings by
Contemporary Brazilian Artists (International Art
Center of Roerich Museum, 1930), n.p.
2 The Good Neighbor Policy (1933–1945), inaugurated
by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, rejected
interventionist tactics in the hope of establishing a
closer relationship with Latin American countries.
Intended to maintain political stability, the policy also
ensured U.S. economic leadership in the region. See
Fredrick B. Pike, FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty
Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (University of Texas
Press, 2010); and Amy Spellacy, “Mapping the Meta-
phor of the Good Neighbor: Geography, Globalism,
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and Pan-Americanism during the 1940s,” American
Studies 47, 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 39–66. For more on
Carmen Miranda and her significance, see Shari Roberts,
“’The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat’: Carmen Miranda, a
Spectacle of Ethnicity,” Cinema Journal 32, 3 (Spring,
1993), pp. 3–23; Bianca Freire-Medeiros, “Star in
the House of Mirrors: Contrasting Images of Carmen
Miranda in Brazil and the United States,”LIMINA:
A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 12 (2006),
pp. 21–29; and Martha Gil-Montero, Brazilian Bombshell:
The Biography of Carmen Miranda (Donald I. Fine, 1989).
3 In the United States, beginning with its first presen-
tation in 1930, the work of Tarsila do Amaral has been
included in only nine group exhibitions, all general
surveys of Brazilian or Latin American art: The First
Representative Collection of Paintings by Contem-
porary Brazilian Artists (International Art Center of
Roerich Museum, 1930); Exhibition of Latin American
Art (Riverside Museum, 1939); The 1955 Pittsburgh
International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting
(Carnegie Institute, 1955); Art of Latin America since
Independence (Yale University Art Gallery, 1966);
Artists of the Western Hemisphere: Precursors of
Modernism (Inter-American Art Center, 1967); Art of
the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987 (Indianapolis
Museum of Art, 1987); Latin American Artists of the
Twentieth Century (Museum of Modern Art, 1993);
Latin American Women Artists: 1915–1995 (Milwaukee
Art Museum, 1995); and Brazil: Body and Soul (Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, 2001).
4 Anthropophagy was the term used in colonial
narratives to describe the purported practice among
native Brazilians of eating human flesh—in other
words, cannibalism. Aside from the many accounts
and mythologies about it during the time of the
colonial conquest, cannibalism was also the object of
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a modern interest from European intellectuals
connected with Dada and Surrealism, including Tristan
Tzara and Georges Bataille. Oswald de Andrade was
certainly aware of this modern fascination with canni-
balism and likely read Revue Cannibale, Francis Picabia’s
1920 journal that opposed civilized conventionality and
sought provocation. Breaching these European sources
with his own Brazilian cultural upbringings, Oswald
wrote the “Manifesto antropófago.”
5 This was in The First Representative Collection of
Paintings by Contemporary Brazilian Artists; Ruth
Green Harris, “News of Exhibitions: A Briskly Moving
Week in the Galleries of New York—Group and One-
Man Shows,” New York Times, Oct. 19, 1930, p. 124.
6 For more on Barr’s historic diagram, see Alfred
H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat. (Museum of
Modern Art, 1936); and Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H.
Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of
Modern Art (MIT Press, 2002).
7 Tarsila do Amaral, “França, eterna França . . . ” Revista
Acadêmica, Nov. 1946, p. 74, repr., Crônicas e outros
escritos de Tarsila do Amaral, ed. Laura Taddei Brandini
(Editora da UNICAMP, 2008), p. 725.
8 A critical text representing this perspective is Esther
Gabara, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography
in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008).
See also Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures:
Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity
(University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Randal Johnson,
“Brazilian Modernism: An Idea out of Place?” in
Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural
Modernity from Spain and Latin America, ed. Anthony
L. Geist and José B. Monleón (Routledge, 1999),
pp. 186–214; and Andreas Huyssen, “Geographies
of Modernism in a Globalizing World,” New German
Critique 100 (Winter 2007), pp. 189–207.
9 Tarsila do Amaral, “Tovalu,” Diário de São Paulo,
Dec. 8, 1937, repr., Brandini, Crônicas e outros escri-
tos, p. 299.
10 “Tarsila do Amaral, a interessante artista brasileira,
dá-nos as suas impressões,” Correio da Manhã, Dec.
1923, repr., Aracy A. Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu
tempo, 3rd ed. (Editora 34 / Editora da Universidade
de São Paulo, 2003), p. 417; translated in the present
publication, pp. 155–57.
11 Assis Chateaubriand, “Como São Paulo está
cultivando a arte moderna,” O Jornal, May 30, 1925,
p. 1.
12 Compare, for example, Tarsila’s description
in Revista anual do Salão de Maio 1 (1939), n.p., and
her interview published in Veja 181 (Feb. 23, 1972),
pp. 3–6, as but two examples of her shifting story of
the making of the canvas titled Abaporu, which sub-
sequently accompanied the “Manifesto antropófago,”
and its place in the general project of Antropophagy.
Both of these texts are translated in the present publi-
cation, pp. 167–69 and 162–65, respectively.
13 Tarsila do Amaral to Lydia Dias do Amaral and José
Estanislau do Amaral Filho, May 13, 1926, in Aracy
A. Amaral, Tarsila do Amaral: Sua obra e seu tempo,
p. 229.
14 Aracy A. Amaral, “Study of an Oeuvre: And a
Biography,” in Aracy A. Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral,
exh. cat. (Fundación Juan March, 2009), p. 14.
15 See, for example, Oswald’s 1950 essay “Um
aspecto antropofágico da cultura brasileira—O
homem cordial” in Oswald de Andrade: A utopía
antropofágica (Globo, 1990), pp. 157–59.
16 Hélio Oiticica, “Esquema geral da Nova
Objetividade,” in Nova Objetividade Brasiliera (Museu
de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro), Apr. 1967. For an
English translation, see Guy Brett et al., Hélio Oiticica,
exh. cat. (Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art/
Walker Art Center, 1992), pp. 110–20. For more on
Tropicália, see Carlos Basualdo, “Tropicália: Avant-Garde,
Popular Culture, and the Culture Industry in Brazil,” in
Basualdo, Tropicália: A Revolution In Brazilian Culture
(Cosac Naify, 2005), pp. 11–28; and Cynthia Canejo,
“The Resurgence of Anthropophagy: Tropicália, Tropical-
ismo and Hélio Oiticica,” Third Text 18, 1 (Jan. 2004),
pp. 61–68.
17 For a full bibliography, see Brandini, Crônicas
e outros escritos.
18 Sérgio Milliet, “Uma exposição retrospectiva,”
in Tarsila: 1918–1950, exh. cat. (Museu de Arte Moderna,
São Paulo, 1950), n.p.
19 Thanks to Ionit Behar for bringing Oiticica’s
document to the authors’ attention. Another example
of Tarsila’s influence can be found in Lygia Pape’s
film Catiti-Catiti (1978).
20 An important source of research on individual works
exists in Maria Eugênia Saturni and Regina Teixeira
de Barros, eds., Tarsila: Catálogo raisonné, 3 vols.
(Base 7 Projetos Culturais/Pinacoteca do Estado de
São Paulo, 2008).
21 Sônia Salzstein, “A audácia de Tarsila,” in Paulo
Herkenhoff and Adriano Pedrosa, XXIV Bienal de
São Paulo: Núcleo histórico; Antropofagia e histórias
de canibalismos, exh. cat. (Fundação Bienal de São
Paulo, 1998), p. 362.
22 Jean-François Lyotard, Writings on Contemporary
Art and Artists, vol. 6, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers
(Leuven University Press, 2010).
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26 Tarsila do Amaral

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 1 Colored Study of Cubist
Composition III, 1923 (cat. 3)

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27

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 2 Cubist Composition II, 1923
(cat. 5)

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28

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 3 Two Studies (Academy No. 1
and The Model), 1923 (cat. 15)

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29

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 4 Study for La Tasse, 1923 (cat. 13)

5 Study (Academy No. 2), 1923

(cat. 12)

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 6 Cubist Composition (Hands 7 Study of a Hand II, 1923
at the Piano), 1923 (cat. 4) (cat. 14)

8 Sketchbook with Notes and

Drawing for Caipirinha, 1923
(cat. 10).

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 9 The First A Negra, 1923
(cat. 8)

10 Sketch of A Negra I,
undated (c. 1923) (cat. 11)

11 A Negra III, c. 1923

(cat. 7)

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35

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 12 Sketchbook with a Drawing of 13 A Negra, 1923, (cat. 6)
A Negra, undated (c. 1924) (cat. 9)

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 A NEGRA, ABAPORU,
AND TARSILA’S
ANTHROPOPHAGY
STEPHANIE D’ALESSANDRO
PRESS USE ONLY In December 1922 Tarsila do Amaral arrived in Paris. Although it
was not her first trip to that city—indeed, just five months earlier
she concluded a two-year sojourn there—and it would certainly not
be her last, the year-long visit would prove to be the most
important of her career.
There are many reasons to single out this particular stay, including
Tarsila’s expanded artistic and social circle and the emergence of
her persona as the “caipirinha dressed by Poiret,”1 but the most im-
portant is a surprising painting that is seemingly without precedent
or peer in her oeuvre: the bold, mysterious, and hieratic A Negra
(pl. 13).2 By far the largest Tarsila produced during her time in Paris,
it occupies a singular place in her work; she herself acknowledged
its importance in 1939, when she described the “seated figure
with two crossed, robust tree trunk legs, a heavy breast hanging
over her arm, huge, pendulous lips, [and] a proportionally small
head” as “announcing Anthropophagy” and serving as a forerunner
to the landmark canvases Abaporu (pl. 54) and Anthropophagy
(pl. 77).3 A Negra’s connection to Tarsila’s later works has been
noted previously—especially since the painting’s re-presentation
to the public in the early 1950s.4 However, its iconic status and
long-rehearsed significance have masked, and even resisted,
critical issues of its origin and context. This essay seeks to explore
those aspects in order to offer a more nuanced understanding
of Tarsila’s aims, not only for her 1923 stay in Paris, but also for
her particular form of Modernism that depended on a kind of
artistic cannibalism—not yet named Anthropophagy—to create
38
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something wholly new. The canvas embodied this impulse even
before it had a name in Brazilian modern art, and it fueled all of
Tarsila’s production immediately following its making. To consider
the environment in which A Negra was made is to uncover the
artist’s deep-seated practice of aesthetic ingestion and digestion,
which would itself become the subject of her artistic appetite
later in the decade and the paintings Abaporu and Anthropophagy.
Indeed, seen in this light, the story of A Negra is the story of
Anthropophagy as well as, in many ways, Tarsila’s true invention
of modern art in Brazil.
“CONTAMINATED BY REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS”
To appreciate the importance of Tarsila’s 1923 Paris trip and the
central place of A Negra in her work, we must return to the last
months of her stay in that city the year before. The artist’s thoughts
are sometimes difficult to document, as her descriptions of events
often postdate them by at least fifteen years or more, but her
art from this moment makes her goals quite clear.5 For her first
exhibition opportunity in the city, she submitted Portrait of a
Woman (fig. 1) to the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français.
Although the canvas was accepted by an established organization,
both the venue and the painting did not reflect her awareness
of the current and more experimental styles to which she was
exposed while studying at the Académie Julian. As she reported
to the Brazilian artist Anita Malfatti, “Almost all of it runs to Cubism
or Futurism. Lots of impressionist and Dadaist landscapes.”6 She
confided to her friend, however, that she did “not approve of
2017-08-14 9:29 AM
 Fig. 1 Portrait of a Woman, 1922.
Oil on canvas; 61 × 50 cm
(24 × 19 11/16 in.). Private collection,
São Paulo.
Fig. 2 Portrait of Mário de Andrade,
1922. Oil on canvas; 53 × 44 cm
(20 7/8 × 17 5/16 in.). Acervo Artístico-
Cultural dos Palácios do Governo
do Estado de São Paulo.

exaggerated Cubism and Futurism,” and her work—as Portrait of a

Woman suggests—remained in a generally more naturalistic style.7
Weeks later she returned to São Paulo, joining Anita and the poet
Oswald de Andrade—with whom Tarsila would begin a relationship
soon after— as well as authors Mário de Andrade (who was
unrelated to Oswald) and Menotti del Picchia to form the Grupo dos
Cinco (Group of Five). In February 1922 Tarsila had missed the
momentous Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week; see
pls. 86, 87), a public series of exhibitions, poetry readings, concerts,
lectures, and debates that would prove to be as inspiring for the
development of modern art in Brazil as the 1913 Armory Show
was in the United States. Coinciding with the centenary celebration
of the country’s political independence from Portugal, the rebel-
lious events of the Semana announced a desire for independence
from artistic conventions but promoted no single, unified style and
would remain one of a series of isolated events in the history of

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Modernism in Brazil.8 Tarsila, however, quickly absorbed the spirit
of the Semana through her Grupo dos Cinco colleagues, who had
participated. “[We were] kooks,” she recalled in 1950, “tearing
deleriously and joyfully around in Oswald’s Cadillac, conquering
the world in order to renew it. It was Paulicéia desvairada [Mário’s
1922 book, Hallucinated City ] in action.”9 While such experiences
powerfully fueled the artist’s motivation, they are hardly the visual
equivalent of Mário’s revolutionary, form-challenging poems; rather,
as her portrait of him (fig. 2) suggests, her relatively naturalistic
painting style changed only slightly, with more solidified brush-
work and an intensified palette.

Tarsila’s Brazilian experience and transformation would visibly

register only later, in France. Indeed, she returned to Paris in
December 1922 “contaminated,” as she described herself, “by
revolutionary ideas,” and it was there that she identified and
constructed a visual vocabulary that matched her objectives.10 She
was purposeful, forging an artistic and social path quite different
from those of her previous visits and pursuing a rich range of
experiences and sources from which she could choose to realize
her goals. That work began in February 1923, after a two-month
trip to Spain and Portugal with Oswald. Settling in Paris, she moved
into an apartment at 9, rue Hégésippe Moreau, which she was
delighted to learn was a former studio of the artist Paul Cézanne.11
This discovery was more than a historical curiosity, however, and
the inspiration it provided would be the first of many points on
Tarsila’s complex journey to produce A Negra.

39

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 Fig. 3 Paul Cézanne (French, Fig. 4 Paul Cézanne. Bathers,
1839–1906). The Large Bathers, 1902–06. Oil on canvas; 73.5 × 92.5 cm
1900–06. Oil on canvas; 210.5 (29 × 36 3/8 in). Private collection.
× 250.8 cm (82 7/8 × 98 3/4 in.).
Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach
Fund, 1937, W1937-1-1.

In March she began three months of study with André Lhote,

the Cubist artist and theoretician whom she would later describe
as “the bridge between classicism and Modernism.”12 Lhote’s
teaching and writing stressed the techniques and compositional
methods of the Old Masters, as well as of Jacques-Louis David,
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Gustave Courbet, but it was
to the lessons of Cézanne that he gave the most attention. Lhote
praised the solidity and weight of Cézanne’s forms and—using
the specific example of his bathers, especially The Large Bathers
(fig. 3), then owned by the Paris collector Auguste Pellerin—ex-
tolled the artist’s particular will to ugliness, forcing and deforming
bodies for an overall composition.13

Near the end of her instruction with Lhote, Tarsila met Blaise
Cendrars, the novelist, poet, and author of the 1921 Anthologie
nègre, who would prove to be a trusted friend and advisor in

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the years to come. Cendrars welcomed Tarsila and Oswald into
his social circle and facilitated many introductions over the next
months, including to the dealer Ambroise Vollard, whom Tarsila
would visit at least once in 1923. She shared this rarified
encounter in a 1936 article for the Diário de São Paulo:

Vollard only opens his doors to friends . . . if you want to see

Cézanne up close . . . you must visit his apartment . . . He has
a magnificent collection of Cézanne, who was his very close
friend. He can talk about the artist’s life in great detail, about
his art, and then he’ll go and get a canvas, one that no one
is allowed to touch, and adjust it upon the easel to catch
the most favorable light and tell you where and under what
circumstances he obtained it. In his book on Cézanne, he
deals with the most curious details of such things.14

It is certain that among the canvases that Tarsila saw there was
Cézanne’s intimate Bathers (fig. 4), as well as the photograph
of the artist before his great Large Bathers (1895–1906; Barnes
Foundation), which Vollard had published in his 1914 monograph.15
Cézanne’s challenge to traditional perspective and his use of
proto-Cubist construction and figural deformation might well have
influenced Tarsila’s springtime output, especially as she continued
to wrestle with what she would later describe as Cubism’s
“military service,” but it was the artist himself and his compositions
of bathers that would prove most galvanizing for her work.16
In experiencing these paintings, Tarsila joined her artistic peers—
many of whom would become part of her circle in Paris—who had
been similarly motivated, since at least the 1907 commemorative

40 A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy

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 Fig. 5 Pablo Picasso (Spanish, active
France, 1881–1973). Seated Nude
Drying Off Her Foot, 1921. Pastel on
paper; 66 × 50.8 cm (26 × 20 in.).
Museum Berggruen, Nationalgalerie
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,
NG MB 38/2000.
Fig. 6 Paul Gauguin (French,
1848–1903). Arearea (Joyousness),
1892. Oil on canvas; 75 × 94 cm
(29 1/2 × 37 in.). Musée d’Orsay, Paris,
RF 1961 6.

exhibition of Cézanne’s work at the Salon d’Automne, to produce
their own bathers compositions. This group included Pablo Picasso,
whom Tarsila would visit in late May orearly June 1923; both
Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger, with whom she would study in
June and October of that year, respectively; and others (Georges
Braque, Robert Delaunay, André Derain, and Henri Matisse) whose
bathers could be seen in Paris at the time.17 Situated within this
expanded group of artists looking to break free from tradition, she
would make A Negra, and, in producing her own version of a modern
bather, find both the means to communicate membership in a
vanguard (at the time read as a “Cubist” community, especially for
its esteem for Cézanne) and the path for her own modern art.18
By 1923 bathers compositions summoned up a number of related
and competing associations: connected to the Roman poet Virgil’s
theme of Arcadia, such images had existed since antiquity, and
compositions had renewed currency in the post–World War I
return to order. Tarsila would have experienced this directly when
she visited Picasso’s studio in late May or early June 1923:
introduced by Cendrars, she arrived hoping to better understand
“the hieroglyphic world of Cubism” but was surprised to see, in
addition, what she described as the artist’s “Pompeian-style paint-
ing.”21 Her 1936 recollection of her first visit to Picasso’s studio,
published in Diário de São Paulo, mentions a portrait of the artist’s
son, but it is also likely that Tarsila saw Seated Nude Drying Off
Her Foot (fig. 5) and Large Nude with Drapery (1923; Musée
de l’Orangerie, Paris) there.22 Such massive, weighty figures set
against spare, banded backgrounds were surely yet another
inspiration on her journey to A Negra.23
Although poignant representations of Arcadia, modern bathers
compositions also drew upon the concept of the noble savage

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French artists from Nicolas Poussin to Ingres to Pierre Puvis de
Chavannes had explored them as powerful symbols of an idyllic
golden age unspoiled by civilization.19 In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the theme was also a popular choice
for décorations, large-scale paintings that promoted tranquility
and uplift through their mythical subject matter.20 While it never
completely waned in popularity, the Arcadian nature of bathers
and its long and complicated history of colonialist and primitivist
associations, as well as its dialectical and romanticized interactions
with the concept of the Other. Reminders of this legacy were
omnipresent but not consistent in 1923, and Tarsila would have
encountered them many times in Paris: for instance, in April and
again in July, Paul Gauguin’s powerful scenes of exotic, preindustrial
idyll (see fig. 6) were on view at the Galerie Dru as well as available

D’Alessandro 41

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 Fig. 7 From left: Oswald de Andrade,
Tarsila do Amaral, Yvette Farkou,
Fernand Léger, Constantin Brancusi,
and an unidentified man in Paris,
1923.
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42 A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy
001-192 CC.indd 42
Fig. 8 Photograph of Constantin
Brancusi’s Paris studio with
White Negress, 1923.
to see in the private collections of her acquaintances, including
Vollard.24 On July 3, through the introduction of Cendrars, Tarsila
also called upon Constantin Brancusi (see fig. 7), who had recently
completed the spare, compact White Negress in his studio (fig. 8).
According to his friend Eileen Lane, the hieratic sculpture was
inspired by an African woman whom Brancusi had seen at the
1922 Exposition Coloniale in Marseilles and from whom he had
purchased some postcards. Tarsila’s encounter with Brancusi as
well as with White Negress should not be underestimated, as she
zealously reported her experience to her family at the time: “You
cannot imagine how much I learned from talking to this man.
He . . . lives holed up in his studio, like some apostle . . . making a
true religion of his art.”25 Both Tarsila and Oswald were aware of
the importance of primitivist sources for contemporary art as well
as their own potentially exotic presence in Paris. They had seen
examples of African and Oceanic works in the homes and studios
of their friends, and just months earlier Oswald lectured at the
Sorbonne on African art’s influence on modern painting, citing the
examples of Derain, Lhote, Picasso, and “other celebrated artists
of Paris.” He discussed Cendrars’s Anthologie nègre and praised
Tarsila’s work, stating, “Never before has the suggestive presence
of the Negro drum and of the Indian song been so strongly felt in
the ambiance of Paris. These ethnic sources are right in the middle
of modernity.”26 Such associations are certainly at play in Brancusi’s
later depiction of Tarsila and Oswald, in which he transformed his
own roughly hewn sculpture, The Kiss, into a primitivist portrait of
the young married couple (see pl. 100).
A particularly noteworthy example of this association as it merges
the subject of origin and genesis with the primordial—and accen-
tuates the popularity of African themes in France at the time—is
the ballet La Création du monde (The Creation of the World  ), which
was inspired by Cendrars’s Anthologie nègre and brought to life
by Léger, the Ballets Suédois’s Rolf de Maré, and composer Darius
Milhaud.27 Based on Cendrars’s libretto, which celebrated African
folk myths of humanity’s origin, the production combined de Maré’s
interpretation of African dance and Milhaud’s modern jazz rhythms
with Léger’s Cubist scenery and costume designs. Through her
friendship with Cendrars, Tarsila surely knew about the ballet for
several months before the October premiere. In fact, in early
July she visited Léger’s studio, where she likely saw designs for
costumes that made the dancers resemble African sculptures
come to life (see fig. 9).28 Tarsila and Léger forged a friendship,
and at the start of October, just weeks before the premiere, she
even brought some of her recent work to his studio for review.
According to art historian Aracy Amaral, who interviewed Tarsila on
2017-08-16 8:28 AM
 Fig. 9 A scene from La Création
du monde (The Creation of the World )
at the Theâtre des Champs-Élysées,
Paris, 1923, showing Fernand Léger’s
set design and costumes. Stockholm
Dance Museum Archive.
numerous occasions, among those canvases was A Negra, and the
artist was thrilled to report to her parents that Léger had found her
work “very advanced.”29 At the end of October, the dealer Léonce
Rosenberg visited Tarsila’s studio and probably saw the canvas;
at this time he offered her an exhibition when she “was ready.”30
In reconstructing some of Tarsila’s experience at this moment, it
is important to note that the subject of the bather was not a
stable or fixed one. Rather, it drew upon multiple, overlapping, and
sometimes conflicting associations of Arcadia from classical to
modern times and upon exotic, erotic, and even aesthetic notions
of primitivism.31 The bather’s fluid nature made it an appealing
subject for the artist to adopt in her search for a new art and to
depend upon in the following years, as additional associations and
identifications came to expand and complicate its initial meanings,
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and especially when she produced the canvases Abaporu
and Anthropophagy.
It is also worth underscoring that these complex, unfixed associ-
ations extended beyond the bather to include the artist herself.
Although Tarsila was living in Paris, Brazil was never too far from
001-192 CC.indd 43
her thoughts, and even after two months of new experiences in
the French capital, she wrote to her family in April about feeling
“increasingly Brazilian.”32 It was in finding a visual form in France for
the goals announced in Brazil by the Semana de Arte Moderna—
and, to a certain extent, by reinforcing that language in the acquisition
of works by many of the artists she visited and studied—that Tarsila
assembled the aesthetic means to make a modern art for Brazil.33
This process of ingesting and digesting a variety of influences and
identities from many sources would come to form the basis of
Anthropophagy, and these coalesced for the first time when she
painted A Negra.
ROAD MAPS
The first impression of A Negra calls to mind Tarsila’s description
of Brancusi’s work as “primitive purity that has nothing to do with
naturalism.”34 There is a wholeness in the seated figure’s naked
form, a volumetric concentration in her bald head and tubular neck,
broad shoulders, and solid limbs. Part of the effect is due to
Tarsila’s fine brushwork and careful tonal modeling on the edges
of body parts; in contrast, the flat bands of color and the diagonal
leaf in the background resist and push the figure forward. The body
D’Alessandro 43
2017-08-16 8:28 AM
 Fig. 10 Plate from Cesare Lombroso,
La donna delinquente: la prostituta
e la donna normale, 4th ed. (Fratelli
Bocca, 1923), Tav. II a. Lombroso’s
1893 publication was translated into
many languages and widely circulated
by the 1920s.

is smoothly painted—its surface seems almost stonelike, possibly
the result of the artist adding extra medium to her paint to produce
a glaze-like effect.35 This quality recalls Oswald’s reaction,
commemorated in a draft stanza of his poem “Atelier,” in which
he introduced Tarsila as the “caipirinha dressed by Poiret”:
The excitement
Of this negress
Polished
Lustrous
Like a billiard ball in the desert36
In contrast to the bather’s full form, her outlined and pronounced
lips are disjointed, as if they were cut and pasted onto the canvas.
Even as they seem to lie upon the surface, an indeterminate
pencil-and-ink sketches and studies, as well as one tracing of the
figure (see pls. 10–12 and fig. 11).40 Until scientific examination
can be undertaken to determine the exact relationship between
these works, we might imagine them as points on a journey in
the production and reproduction of the painting. The most detailed
is an undated watercolor (pl. 10) once owned by Mário that may
represent Tarsila’s next complicated step. It is a more worked image
than The First A Negra, particularly with its delicate additions of
color, and more recognizably related to the painting. Within the
darkened contours of the figure we can yet again identify Tarsila’s
discarded pencil lines that relay the changing placement of body
parts, widening limbs, and altering shape of the head. Most
significant is the torso, where we can distinguish the forms of two
breasts: the one on the proper left was abandoned, while the
other was reinforced with heavy pencil. The artist employed water-

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dark space, bordered by the breast, arm, hand, and leg, exists
below the surface; in place of the body, there is a mysterious
and suggestive void.37 Behind the figure, the artist has painted a
series of bands of varied colors, widths, and lengths, which recalls
the pattern of non-Western as well as modernist textiles. This
element acts as a signifier of primitivist and exotic associations
and as the background before which the figure sits; it also locates
the bather within the landscape of European Modernism.
color to refine forms, whittling down the size of the head and
revising its once oval shape. In fact, she applied the paint in a way
that is quite different from—even the opposite of—her usual
approach to building form. In the oil painting, Tarsila created
volume by paying careful attention to the inside edges of forms,

Part of the shock of A Negra derives from its hermetic subject,

resistant to narrative and opposed to the still life, portrait, and
landscape genres Tarsila had chosen until that time. It also arrived
in her production without much foretelling.38 The first appearance
of the subject comes in the form of a large graphite drawing
(pl. 9). Placed squarely in the middle of the sheet is the heavily
outlined form of a woman of African descent, her broad features
slightly off-center on her face, which is framed by an irregular
hairline. The angled eyes and brows, matched with heavy eyelids,
echo the figure’s sloped shoulders and downturned hand, giving
her a stoic impression that recalls similar representations of ethno-
graphic types in popular European anthropological texts of the
period (see fig. 10). Within the network of lines that make up the
figure’s body, we can discern Tarsila’s efforts to position her on
the page, firm up and smooth the face, build the mass of the torso,
and once set, leave the rest of the pose for later consideration.
At bottom left is an annotation, likely written by the artist’s niece,
that records the work as 1a Negra (First Negra)— her first drawing
made in advance of the canvas.39

There are as many as eight other known drawings related to

A Negra, which take the form of similarly scaled, single-sheet,

44 A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy

001-192 CC.indd 44 2017-08-16 8:28 AM

 Fig. 11 Sketch of A Negra II,
1923. Pencil and India ink on paper;
22 × 17 cm (8 11/16 × 6 11/16 in.).
Private collection, São Paulo.
Fig. 12 X-radiograph of A Negra,
1923. Oil on canvas; 100 × 81.3 cm
(39 3/8 × 32 in.). Museu de Arte
Contemporânea da Universidade
de São Paulo.

meticulously applying color in graduated layers of light to dark and

then pulling her loaded brush inside the edge of contours to leave
a slim ridge of medium. Here, in the watercolor, she built form
by means of reduction, removing and covering mass with dense
paint around the proper right shoulder and head, working on the
outside of contours. She also used color to cover an earlier hairline
drawn on the figure’s head that is similar to the hairstyle in The
First A Negra. Like the painting, this composition includes a tropical
leaf—possibly from a banana tree or African traveler palm—but
it is shown complete; this element is the only bit of background.
There are other differences from A Negra, particularly in the pose,
and they hint that Tarsila was continuing to consider the figure
long after she moved it to the canvas.

Recent X-radiograph examination of the painting (see fig. 12)

permits us to better understand for the first time how this process

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of translation occurred.41 In X-radiography, dense paint layers
and heavy brushwork read as white marks and signal where an
artist reworked forms; here, these include the elongated breast,
thickened limbs, and sharpened proper right elbow. Some of these
changes relate to forms in The First A Negra, most significantly
on the chest: on the figure’s proper left side, we can see an earlier
rounded breast form that was later painted over, and along the in-
side of the proper right arm, we can identify an abandoned contour
that mimics the proper left breast on the drawing. These changes
suggest that Tarsila may have looked to her drawing to initiate
A Negra but then made notable alterations, like the orientation of the
exposed breast, as she worked.42

When comparing the X-radiograph with the watercolor, we can also

identify significant similarities and differences. The compositions
demonstrate that Tarsila approached the final form of the head in
related ways. Working on paper, she eliminated the hair with careful
layers of watercolor to arrive at the figure’s final smooth pate; the
X-radiograph shows no evidence that the artist included hair when
she painted the figure on canvas. She likely borrowed the finished
form from the watercolor and perhaps even found inspiration for
her fine, glaze-like application of oil paint in the delicate layers of her
watercolor. Elements on the lower half of the composition, how-
ever, differ substantially between the two works.43 In the watercolor,
the figure’s legs are crossed, proper left over right; in the painting,
we find the opposite. No earlier poses have been revealed, so we
must assume that the artist chose an independent path on canvas,
which produced the present network of limbs and an interior,
shadowy cavity. Likewise, the hips of the figures differ: in the water-
color, light pencil lines echo the proper right hip in the painting;

D’Alessandro 45

001-192 CC.indd 45 2017-08-14 9:31 AM

 darker ones, however, extend and reinforce an elongated hip
that is not replicated on the canvas. Again, there are no changes
around the hip on the canvas to indicate that Tarsila followed the
watercolor. Instead, the repeated and reinforced quality of the hip
in the watercolor suggests a revision after the fact; indeed, it is
noteworthy that although the reversed legs and elongated hip are
not common between the watercolor and the painting, they are
shared among the watercolor and the other known drawings of
A Negra.
These common characteristics urge us to consider whether Tarsila
might have produced the watercolor in two different campaigns—
one focused on the head before she started the canvas and another
at some point after the completion of A Negra—as she continued
to explore the composition. As proof of a possible extended period
of production, only some of the drawings are annotated with the
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year and location in which they were made. Taken as a group, these
sheets, with their abbreviated, cleaner lines of pencil and ink,
reveal Tarsila’s process of inscribing the path to A Negra again and
again onto the page and, by extension, into her mind and body.
Put differently, Tarsila sated her artistic appetite initially by ingesting
a great variety of sources to produce A Negra; her continued
reconsideration depended on digesting the painting itself.
Such repetition of forms recalls the advice of the artist’s early
teacher in São Paulo, Pedro Alexandrino, who encouraged her to
preserve works through copying: “It is always good to keep
things. You might need them someday.”44 These drawings, in fact,
could have functioned as road maps back to this originary moment
as well as toward the future, to a time when the canvas might
no longer be present but was nonetheless needed for a new goal.
Alexandrino, for instance, copied compositions before delivering
them to collectors. Tarsila, who finished A Negra by early October,
had, during the summer, acknowledged her plans to return to Brazil.45
With her departure on her mind, the artist may well have been
following a similar process, preserving the form of her bather in order
to use it again at a later date.46 Remembering Rosenberg’s offer of
an exhibition in Paris, Tarsila might have left the work there, reserving
it for a future presentation.47 If this were the case, it is possible
that she brought only her related watercolor and some of her line
drawings to Brazil for, as we shall see, she was hardly finished
with A Negra.
ITINERARIES. ITINERARIES. ITINERARIES.
Tarsila returned to Brazil in December 1923. Arriving in Rio de
Janeiro, she was met aboard the Orânia for an extended inter-
46 A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy
001-192 CC.indd 46
view with the local newspaper Correio da Manhã, and it was on
this occasion that she announced her new goals. Couched within
the legacy of Cézanne and the development of Cubism, which
she defended for its ability not to “destroy the old schools” but
to reject “the continuation of those very schools in a century in
which they no longer have any reason for being,” the artist stated
her purpose plainly:
I am profoundly Brazilian and will study the taste and the art
of our caipiras. In the hinterlands, I hope to learn from those
who have not been corrupted by the academies. Painting
Brazilian landscapes and caboclos doesn’t make one a Brazilian
artist, just as one who paints machines realistically and dis-
torts the human figure is not necessarily a modern artist.48
Although she announced them publicly in a Brazilian newspaper,
Tarsila had formulated these ideas earlier in Paris, and we can
chart their development in her letters to her family. In August she
reported that she hoped to “bring back all kinds of Brazilian
topics,” and that her plan upon returning to Brazil was to visit the
northeast state of Bahia, a place of lush vegetation and seacoasts,
and a center of sugarcane production and the African slave trade
from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. It was here, she
believed, that she would find “precious examples of [the type of]
Brazilian art that is my present direction.”49 Although she did
not visit Bahia for some time, she soon embarked on a course of
rich experiences related to the discovery and rediscovery of her
homeland. Much of this was rooted in a sense of nostalgia for a
lost Brazil that she initially associated with her childhood. Earlier,
in April 1923, she had written to her family wistfully, “I want to be
the painter of my country. I am so thankful to have spent the
whole of my childhood on the fazenda. My memories of that time
have grown precious to me. In art, I want to be the caipirinha of
São Bernardo, playing with straw dolls.”50 In this respect, it is no
surprise that even though Tarsila and Oswald resided in the city of
São Paulo in 1924 and celebrated the growing metropolis and
its modern innovations and industry in their work, they also spent
much time at the fazendas of family and friends in surrounding
small towns of the state.
Embellished or not, Tarsila’s nostalgia extended beyond herself
and her own experience, tapping into a larger cultural memory of
another kind of lost Brazil that she had never known, a country
whose native artistic traditions were judged and devalued from
both within and without. The artist was not alone in her wide and
unrestrained hunger for her land, its people, and their vernacular
2017-08-14 9:31 AM
 art and culture. Mário, for instance, had urged her just months
earlier, while she was still in Paris, to “come to the virgin forest,
where there is no black art, where there are no gentle streams
either. There is VIRGIN FOREST. I have created virgin-forestism.
I am a virgin-forester.”51 His work depended upon the recovery
of Brazilian folklore, neologisms, proverbs, and colloquialisms—
another kind of reconstruction of a lost history or memory—as
a specific strategy for modern prose. In Paris, Oswald had been
similarly focused, and soon after his return home, he published
his “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil” (Manifesto of Pau-Brazil
Poetry). His declaration, written in a free-flowing style, announced,
“Poetry exists in the facts. The shacks of saffron and ochre in
the green of the Favela, under cabralín blue, are aesthetic facts.”
Oswald rejected traditional Brazilian culture as a product imported
from Europe; he implied this by referring to the first Portuguese
navigator, Pedro Álvares Cabral, to describe the sky. Instead, he
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called for the production of uniquely Brazilian work that—like the
prized pau brazil (brazilwood) tree itself—could only come from
Brazilian soil. To reach such a place of production, he declared in a
telegraphic method that artists would need to seek originary,
unspoiled experiences:
No formula for the contemporary expression of the world.
See with open eyes.
This step realized, the problem is other. To be regional and
pure in our time.
Merely Brazilians of our time. The necessary of chemistry,
mechanics, economy and ballistics. Everything assimiliated.
Without cultural meetings. Practical. Experimental. Poets.
Without bookish reminiscences. Without supporting compari-
sons. Without ontology.
Barbarous, credulous, picturesque and tender. Readers
of newspapers. Pau-Brasil. The forest and the school.
The National Museum. Cuisine, ore and dance. Vegetation.
Pau-Brasil.52
Fueled by the idea of an unknown Brazil, Tarsila and her friends,
like many Latin American artists in their own countries at this
time, embarked on a thrilling voyage of discovery reminiscent of
the kind undertaken by foreign travelers.53 Indeed, while seeing
her country with fresh eyes, she also experienced it through the
perspective of the Swiss poet Cendrars, who came to Brazil at
Oswald’s suggestion in early February 1924. It was in his company
001-192 CC.indd 47
that Tarsila, Oswald, and other friends traveled to Rio de Janeiro
to experience Carnival. In mid-April, along with Mário; Gofredo
Teixeira da Silva Telles, a politican and the son-in-law of patron and
art collector Olívia Guedes Penteado; René Thiollier, a writer and
one of the organizers of the Semana; and the young artist Nonê de
Andrade, who was Oswald’s oldest son, they toured the historic
cities of the southeastern state of Minas Gerais. Confronted with
Brazil’s colonialist history while visiting the forgotten towns of
Congonhas do Campo, Lagoa Santa, Ouro Preto, Sabará, São João
del Rei, Tiradentes, and the state capital of Belo Horizonte, Tarsila
felt “dazzled” and inspired. She recalled her experience vividly
in 1939:
The mural decorations in the modest corridor of a hotel;
the room ceilings, made of colored and braided bamboo; the
church paintings, simple and moving, made with love and
devotion by anonymous artists; Aleijadinho, with his statues
and the brilliant lines of his religious architecture. Everything
caused us to cry out in admiration. In Minas I found the colors
I loved as a child. Later, I was taught that they were ugly and
caipira. I followed the hum of refined taste . . . But later, I took
my revenge on that oppression, transferring them to my
canvases: purest blue, violet pink, vivid yellow, strident green,
all in various grades of strength according to how much white
was mixed in. Clean painting above all, without fear of con-
ventional canons. Freedom and sincerity, a certain stylization
that adapted it to the modern age.54
While the poets worked—Oswald on a collection of poems “on
the occasion of the discovery of Brazil” entitled Pau Brasil, Mário
on the ode “Noturno de Belo Horizonte” (Night Train to Belo
Horizonte), and Cendrars on the travelogue Feuilles de route (Road
Maps)—Tarsila registered her experiences in countless graphite
notes and sketches as well as elegant ink drawings (see pls.
25–29). Employing an organic, animated line, the artist conveyed
her enthusiastic ambition to record the details of her visions.
As documents, these works recall the productions of European
artist-travelers who visited Brazil from the seventeenth through
nineteenth centuries, detailing their romantic excursions in the
academic styles of the time and sharing their adventures in widely
distributed illustrations and popular travel journals (see fig. 13).
Tarsila made many of her drawings in notebooks, and they are
intimate in scale and detail; some later served as inspiration for
paintings or as illustrations in Pau Brasil (pls. 30–32, 34, 92) and
Feuilles de route (pls. 17–19, 28, 35–37, 39–43, 93). From her
first impressions to the production of such canvases as Carnival
D’Alessandro 47
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 Fig. 13 Jean-Baptiste Debret Fig. 14 Blaise Cendrars (Swiss,
(French, 1768–1848). Indian Village 1887–1961). Draft cover for Feuilles
in Cantagalo, plate 6 from Voyage de route (Road Maps), 1924. Pen on
pittoresque et historique au Brésil paper. Collection Oswald Estanislau
(Firmin Didot Frères, 1834–39), do Amaral.
vol. 7. New York Publlic Library,
Special Collections.

bather was first located in the immediate cultural landscape of

1920s France, but now, subjected to the artist’s continued process
of cultural digestion, the figure came to be simultaneously situat-
ed in 1920s Brazil as well. A Negra became a kind of talisman,
integral to Tarsila’s project of rediscovering and recovering
memories of Brazil.

Noteworthy in this context is a fascinating album (see pl. 99),

in Madureira (pl. 21) and Hills of the Favela (pl. 24), we can also
stained and dog-eared from use, in which Tarsila organized
photographs and mementos of her trips in Europe, North Africa,
and the Middle East during the 1920s. Previously this book was
dated to about 1926, but this is challenged by the contents of its
pages—a photograph of the participants in the Semana de Arte
Moderna from 1922; an Italian document from 1923; and inscribed
postcards, marked invoices, and casual snapshots of her visits
to the interior of Brazil and various fazendas, all from 1924. Such

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trace Tarsila’s digestion of her country’s African heritage and her materials suggest that Tarsila either started to assemble the
expansion of A Negra’s connections from Europe to Brazil. album in the years before 1926 or, at the very least, incorporated
preexisting materials into it at that time. In either case, she
A previously undocumented notebook that Cendrars inscribed for
Tarsila while in Brazil (pl. 12) holds the key to this understanding:
nestled within the pages of her illustrations of people and places,
we again find A Negra. This time the figure is composed in quick,
assured lines, reduced to shorthand elements—bald head, en-
larged lips, breast, and leaf—and colored with dark pencil. Freed
from the original banded background, she floats on the page. On
the opposing side of the spread, we see a similarly spare colored
pencil and ink drawing that features a colonial church and the
stylized profile of the artist herself in the foreground. Although the
two pages might have been drawn independently, seen together
side by side, they present A Negra like a vision, a dream in the
artist’s mind.

A Negra would also appear as the cover of Feuilles de route

(pl. 93), published in Paris later that year. Cendrars, of course, was
with Tarsila during her travels, and we might imagine that the
painting arose at this time as an idea for the cover and that the
sketchbook drawing was a result of their conversations. While in
São Paulo, Cendrars also drafted a number of related covers that
feature A Negra; one of them (fig. 14), signed and dated São
Paulo 1924, closely follows Tarsila’s watercolor and her use of
shadow around the figure, and suggests that it did, in fact, travel
to Brazil with Tarsila.55 Regardless, we can be certain that, in its
reappearance in the midst of these voyages of discovery and in
its final installation on the cover of a book of poems about travels
through the country, A Negra came to stand for Brazil.56 This African

48 A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy

001-192 CC.indd 48 2017-08-14 9:31 AM


demonstrated care, thought, and sometimes even whimsy as she
selected and placed documents and photographs on each page.
Found among these artifacts is an intriguing photograph of a woman
(p. 89, fig. 6), who, according to scholars, was a former worker
on one of the fazendas belonging to Tarsila’s family.57 She is posed
in a way that recalls A Negra, and her long white dress gives her
body the concentrated form of the painted bather; the wall and stair-
case behind her also mimic the banded background of the canvas.
Although undated, the photograph may have been taken—and
perhaps even staged—during Tarsila’s 1924 visit to São Paulo, since
so many other similar photographs from the album date to this
time. The artist placed this image on a page just below Cendrars’s
French identity card, thus reinforcing specific associations dating
to after A Negra’s completion in Paris and expanding them with
specifically Brazilian-focused travel and cultural memory.
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Over time, as Tarsila carried the book between Paris and São Paulo
and added more mementos, this photograph would accumulate
and amplify its meanings through connections to new places and
events. A similar kind of accretion took place with A Negra itself,
as the artist continued to suggest new memories and links even
in the last years of her life. In a 1972 interview, for example,
she stated:
One of the most successful paintings I exhibited in Europe is
called A Negra. Because I have recurring memories of having
seen one of those old female slaves when I was a five- or six-
year-old, you know? A female slave lived on our fazenda, and
she had droopy lips and enormous breasts because (I was
later told) in those days black women used to tie rocks to their
breasts in order to lengthen them, and then they would sling
them back over their shoulders to breastfeed the children
they were carrying on their backs.58
Despite our possible reaction to the subject of Tarsila’s recollec-
tion, it is nonetheless an example of the powerful process of
accumulation, or continued ingestion, that was at the root of her
conception of A Negra as a bather. This continued in a new yet
simultaneous direction in 1924, when the figure became known
primarily as an illustration for Cendrars’s Feuilles de route and,
by association, as an image denoting discovery and travel. The
painting was not shown to the public until three years after its
conception, when it was included as La Négresse in the artist’s
long-awaited first solo exhibition at the Galerie Percier. Here,
reinforced with Cendrars’s poems that celebrated São Paulo—
001-192 CC.indd 49
Fig. 15 Johann Moritz Rugendas
(German 1802–1858). Praia Rodriguez,
near Rio de Janeiro, plate 1 from
Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil
(Engelmann & Cie, 1835). Special
collections, Getty Research Institute.
the only texts in the catalogue—the image of a woman of African
descent became firmly associated with Brazil. Critical attention to
the painting, although minimal in comparison to that devoted to
Tarsila’s other works, reflected the original context in which she
conceived it and in which critics received it, namely European
associations of the bather with Arcadia and the primitive. The critic
Georges Remon recognized the “curious figure” as Eve, while
the writer Gaston de Pawlowski simply called her “buttocks and
lips.”59 José Severiano de Rezende, a critic for the Gazette du Brésil,
countered these responses by reading into A Negra a romanti-
cized connection with Brazil, and he praised Tarsila’s portrayal of
“the old Black-mother, with breasts full of tenderness and thick
lips so touching in their mystical retreat” as a sign of the artist’s
true and sensitive understanding of African-Brazilians. No doubt
thinking of this reception, and this tension between notions of
European discovery (exoticism) and Brazilian memory (nostalgia),
years later the artist would call A Negra at this time “a very
controversial picture.”60
Such contradictions perhaps suggest why the artist chose to
exhibit the painting only once more, in 1928, not in her second
show at the Galerie Percier, which featured clearly Brazilian
subjects (cats. 53, 54, 58, 60, 61, 63), but rather in a more
conservative presentation of the Association Artistique des Vrais
Indépendants (Artistic Association of the True Independents).
By then, La Négresse received no critical attention whatsoever,
and a year later, when she was preparing for her first-ever solo
exhibition in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Tarsila elected not to
include it.
D’Alessandro 49
2017-08-14 9:31 AM
 Fig. 16 José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior
(Brazilian, 1850–1899), The Guitar
Player, 1899. Oil on canvas; 141 × 172
cm (55 1/2 × 67 3/4 in.). Pinacoteca do
Estado de São Paulo (former collection
of Tarsila do Amaral).
It is clear that although its continued digestion from 1923 to 1928
granted A Negra a fluid status in Tarsila’s work, its multifaceted
yet specific nature at this point also led to a gap in its reception.
Indeed, by 1928 Tarsila’s bather—and its bold announcement of
her artistic identity and path—had gone mute. But even though
missing from view, the canvas was hardly absent from the artist’s
attention: it would now itself become subject to her own artistic
cannibalism, emerging as a new Brazilian bather and a product of
her specific artistic process—the very origin of and inspiration
for Anthropophagy.
ONE WHO EATS
In the years between 1924 and 1929, Tarsila would move fluidly
between Paris and São Paulo, and the focus of her artistic appetite
slipped, shifted, and expanded. For instance, in an unpublished
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manuscript written about 1925, Oswald offered insight into one
aspect of this development: in outline form, he noted Tarsila’s
growing interests in “the issue of Brazilian painting” and cited as
examples the engravings of nineteenth-century artist-travelers
Jean-Baptiste Debret and Johann Moritz Rugendas (see fig. 15);
the illustrations of José Wasth Rodrigues, who documented
colonial art and architecture; and the portraits of Brazilian types by
the late nineteenth-century painter José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior
(see fig. 16).61 For Tarsila, Brazilian culture and history were not
just issues of intellectual study and artistic recovery, but subjects
also to be physically consumed. By 1927, for example, the artist
was intimately engaged in the repair and repainting of the folk art
murals at the Santa Teresa do Alto fazenda in Itupeva that she
50 A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy
001-192 CC.indd 50
shared with Oswald; the work was so successful that the poet
Manuel Bandeira would later describe their home as “a little
Brazilian trunk painted blue and the color of pink.”62 A number
of Tarsila’s own works from this time present an increasingly
vernacular, folk, and even naïve style adapted from sources such as
the murals. In many ways, the experience recalls Tarsila’s repeated
compositions of A Negra and the physical retracing and mental
inscribing—ingesting—intrinsic to the process.
In reclaiming their country’s past, Tarsila and other Brazilian
modernists yearned for still more immediate, visceral, originary
experiences in order to reconnect with both a personal and
national beginning—a childhood—unfiltered by outside sources.63
In 1927 Mário, Olívia Guedes Penteado, her niece Margarida, and
Tarsila’s daughter, Dulce, traveled to northeastern Brazil, where
they were later joined by Tarsila and Oswald. During their journey
to the historic towns of Recife and Salvador and then along the
Amazon, Mário took more than six hundred photographs and
voraciously recorded the local myths and legends that fed his
radical 1928 novel Macunaíma.64 Tarsila, for her part, fixed on
indigenous subjects in her research and produced such paintings
as Manacá (pl. 50), a stylized portrait of the Amazon plant used
by the Tupi people for medicinal and magical purposes. She also
focused on acquiring art that reflected the cultural heritage of
Brazil: a photograph (pl. 113) taken of the artist in her São Paulo
home, probably in 1930, records the presence of ethnographic
material alongside works by Brancusi, Delaunay, and Léger. Although
not well documented, records indicate that Tarsila also owned at
least one object from the northwestern state of Pará, which she
later donated to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.65
The ambition for Brasilidade, expressed in Brazil through the
search for real indigenous character but felt in analogous form in
Latin American countries generally at this time, demanded trans-
formation, something Mário and Oswald recognized in their poem
“Homenagem aos homens que agem” (Homage to People
Who Act) of 1927, which contains this stanza devoted to Tarsila:
Tarsila paints no more
With Paris green
She paints with
Cataguazes Green66
In the remainder of the poem, the poets, who signed themselves
with the combined pen name “Márioswald,” lauded themselves—
as well as the sculptor Victor Brecheret and the composer Heitor
2017-08-16 8:28 AM
 Villa-Lobos—for overcoming the influence of outside sources and
embodying the native qualities represented by the town of
Cataguases in Minas Gerais. In seeking an authentic character and
national heritage, Tarsila and other Brazilian modernists—whose
goals would soon be formalized into the movement known as
Anthropophagy—came to define their own golden age and imagine
a truly Brazilian Arcadia.
It is in this context that Tarsila made Abaporu (pl. 54). The canvas
presents a lone figure turned in profile against a clear blue sky. A
subject of extreme deformation, the nude appears like an extension
of the earth or at least is bound to it, as its heavy right hand and
grotesquely outsized foot are weighted to the green mound on
which it sits. The figure’s right arm covers much of its body,
while its miniature left arm and hand support the absurdly small
head. Opposite, as if the object of its contemplation, stands a
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cactus with a bright yellow flower. According to the artist, when
she presented this as a birthday gift to Oswald on January 11,
1928, he and their friend, the poet Raul Bopp, were “shaken” and
concluded “that an important intellectual movement could come
of this.”67 Together, in a process reminiscent of Tristan Tzara’s
naming of Dada, they consulted a Tupi-Guarani dictionary to find
a title, settling on the combination of the words aba, meaning
“person,” and poru, signifying “who eats.”68
Tarsila later described this figure as a “cannibal: a solitary monstrous
figure,” but nothing in its visual attributes—especially its lack of a
mouth—suggests this. Rather, it is as the inspiration for Oswald’s
April 1928 “Manifesto antropófago” and through its presence as a
line drawing in its published form (pl. 104) that the painting acquired
its cannibal status. Oswald’s notion of Anthropophagy pushed
beyond the vision of Pau Brasil, imagining a violent culmination of
Brazilian Modernism in extreme artistic appropriation, embracing
destruction and consumption as a means of new production:
Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically.
Philosophically.
The one and only world principle. Disguised expression
of all individualisms, of all the collectivisms.
Tupi or not tupi, that is the question. [ . . . ]
We have never been catechized. We really made Carnival. [ . . . ]
We already had Communism. We already had the Surrealist
language. The golden age.69
Seen in this context, as a visual announcement of a new artistic
identity and direction, we might consider Abaporu a Brazilian bather
001-192 CC.indd 51
composition and the successor to A Negra. Indeed, when the
work was shown in Paris in 1928, it was called Nu (Nude ) and not
by its invented Tupi title. We know the painting was significant to
the artist, as it, like A Negra, was subjected to multiple redrawings
and retracings (see pls. 51–53). The compositions are, in fact,
related: both feature figures with disproportionately small heads
and elastic bodies that Tarsila pressed and pulled as she applied
compositional pressure. As solitary individuals set in distinct envi-
ronments, they are rooted, anchored even, to place: A Negra’s
abstract, banded background connotes the European modernist
context of its making, whereas Abaporu’s tropical signifiers point to
a primordial Brazilian origin. It is also in this comparison that Tarsila’s
removal of the grotesque aspects of A Negra’s sexuality and race
become evident, underscoring the figure’s transformation. If,
therefore, A Negra was a bather that announced Tarsila’s member-
ship in a community of modern artists, Abaporu proclaimed that
Modernism specifically for Brazil.
Tarsila’s final step on this path seems to have coincided with her
preparations for her first solo exhibition in her home country in
1929. There, she would present neither A Negra nor Abaporu, but
a new work entitled Anthropophagy (pl. 77). In a literal culmination
of her journey, documented in numerous drawings in preparation
(pls. 75, 76), Tarsila painted the figures from A Negra and Abaporu
together, physically transformed and united.70 Rooted by the earth,
the faceless forms, which might now read as female and male, are
set against a thick green wall of cacti and a banana plant. The
vegetation protects them just as Cézanne’s many trees functioned
in his bathers compositions, and we might now imagine that we
are witnessing Tarsila’s long-sought Arcadia, a modern art made by
her own means.
In 1923, the year that Tarsila first arrived at A Negra, Oswald
gave a lecture on Brazil at the time of the nineteenth-century
artist-traveler Debret, noting in his depictions the always present
“obsession of Arcadia, with its shepherds, Greek myths, then
imitation of the landscapes of Europe with docile roads and well
combed fields, in a country where nature is unconquered, vertical
light and life in full construction.”71 In the process of inventing
her own form of modern art for Brazil—of ingesting and digesting
inspiration from many sources at many times and repeatedly
subjecting them to her artistic appetite thereafter—Tarsila had
succeeded in realizing the goals of the Semana, announcing her
creative identity, and discovering her own artistic Arcadia. Her
process gave rise to the movement of Anthropophagy. The key
to this was the fluid, shifting figure of A Negra.
D’Alessandro 51
2017-08-14 9:24 AM
 NOTES
1 The author wishes to thank Tarsilinha do Amaral,
Marcelo Mattos Araujo, Aracy Amaral, Ana Gonçalves
Magalhães, Jorge Schwartz, Michele Greet, Megan
Sullivan, Katja Rivera, Camille Grand-Dewyse, and
Cecilia Resende-Santos for their many contributions to
this essay. Unless otherwise specified, all Portuguese
translations are by Stephen Berg.
The identification of Tarsila as the “caipirinha
dressed by Poiret” derives from the poet Oswald de
Andrade’s “Atelier,” published in Pau Brasil (Au Sans
Pareil, 1925), pp. 75–76; it has come to be one of the
phrases that feeds her near-mythic reputation in Brazil.
In Portuguese, a caipirinha is a country girl (one of the
personae with whom Tarsila identified in the 1920s);
Paul Poiret was a leading French fashion designer who,
along with the designer Jean Patou, made dresses for
Tarsila, which helped shape another of her personae:
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the cosmopolitan figure. For more on Tarsila’s identity
in the 1920s, see the introduction to this volume,
pp. 16–25.
2 Throughout this catalogue, the reader will find the
French words nègre and négresse and the Portuguese
words negro and negra. In the early twentieth century,
the French words were used to designate all dark-
skinned people—whether Africans, colonial subjects,
or African Americans, for example—without regard
to national or cultural identity. In Brazil, since at least
the beginning of the twentieth century and continuing
today, negro and negra have had a different connota-
tion. Because of their mixed culture, which embraces
European, African, and native Indian elements, Brazilians
have a different sense of racial identity. The term is
still used in the Brazilian-Portuguese vernacular and
considered the most polite description (as opposed
to preto, or black, for example). Often, the term is used
as a form of familiar address and endearment, as in
“meu negro” (my dear, my friend, or old man), but it
can also be used ironically. The authors have elected
to keep the title of A Negra in the original Portuguese
to preserve the additional nuances of the word in its
original language, which are very different than in the
American usage of the term.
3 Tarsila do Amaral, “Pintura Pau-Brasil e Antropofagia,”
RASM—Revista anual do Salão de Maio 1 (1939),
n.p.; see pp. 167–69 in this publication for an En-
glish translation.
4 Tarsila kept A Negra until 1951, when it was
acquired by the Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo;
in 1963 that museum donated it to the Museu de Arte
Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. For
a fascinating recent study on the reception of A Negra,
52 A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy
001-192 CC.indd 52
see Renata Gomes Cardoso, “A Negra de Tarsila do
Amaral: Criação, recepção e circulação,” VIS: Revista
do Programa de Pós-graduação em Arte da UnB 15, 2
(July–Dec. 2016), pp. 90–110.
5 See, for example, Tarsila do Amaral, “Confissão
geral,” in Tarsila: 1918–1950, exh. cat. (Museu de
Arte Moderna, São Paulo, 1950); and “Recordações
de Paris,” Habitat—Revista das artes no Brasil 6
(1952). These sources are reprinted in Crônicas e
outros escritos de Tarsila do Amaral, ed. Laura Taddei
Brandini (Editora da UNICAMP, 2008), pp. 727–30
and 731–36, respectively, and translated in this
publication, pp. 169–73.
6 Tarsila do Amaral to Anita Malfatti, Oct. 26, 1920,
in Aracy A. Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo,
3rd ed. (Editora 34/Editora da Universidade de São
Paulo, 2003), pp. 48–49; for an English translation,
see Aracy A. Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, exh.
cat. (Fundación Juan March, 2009), p. 236.
7 Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo, p. 51.
8 For more on the Semana, see Mário Pedrosa,
“Modern Art Week,” in Mário Pedrosa: Primary
Documents, ed. Glória Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff
(Museum of Modern Art, 2015); and Aracy A. Amaral,
Arts in the Week of ’22, trans. Elsa Oliveira Marques
(BM&F, 1992). Given their antiacademic stance and
forward-leaning positions, organizers such as Mário
de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade were labeled
“Futurists” by the media, and the term was used in
general to stand for modernist artists. For more on
the nuances of the term in the Brazilian context, see
Stella M. de Sá Rego, “Tarsila/Pau-brasil, Her Sources
in the French Avant-garde and the Significance of Her
Work in the Context of Brazilian Modernism” (Master’s
thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1985), p. 22.
See also Rubens Borba de Moraes, “Recordações,”
repr. in Aracy A. Amaral, Artes plásticas na Semana
de 22 (Editora 34, 1998), p. 296.
9 Tarsila, “Confissão geral,” in Tarsila: 1918–1950,
exh. cat. (Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, 1950),
p. 727; translated in this publication, pp. 169–70.
Paulicéia desvairada (1922) was Andrade’s most con-
troversial and influential book of poems, introducing
the use of free meter into Brazilian modern poetry. For
an English translation, see Mário de Andrade, Halluci-
nated City, Paulicéia Desvairada, trans. Jack E. Tomlins
(Vanderbilt University Press, 1968).
10 Tarsila, “Recordações de Paris,” p. 731.
11 Paulo Prado, the Brazilian patron and writer who
was also living in Paris at the time, is responsible for the
discovery. Cézanne actually lived at 15, rue Hégésippe
Moreau from January 1898 until the end of June
1899. See RMN-Grand Palais, Cézanne and Paris, exh.
cat. (Éditions de la RMN–Grand Palais, 2011), p. 211.
Whether or not it was the same address, the connec-
tion with Cézanne was clearly important to Tarsila and
a point she referred to even late in life.
12 Tarsila, “Recordações de Paris,” p. 732.
13 On Lhote’s appraisal of Cézanne, see, for example,
“Fine Arts: A First Visit to the Louvre,” Athenaeum
4660 (Aug. 22, 1919), pp. 786–88; and “L’Enseignement
de Cézanne,” La Nouvelle revue française 8, 86
(Nov. 1, 1920), pp. 649–72.
14 Tarsila do Amaral, Diário de São Paulo, June 23,
1936, repr. in Brandini, Crônicas e outros escritos,
pp. 53–55; for an English translation, see Amaral et
al., Tarsila do Amaral, pp. 203–204.
15 Although the exact date of Vollard’s acquisition of
the painting is not documented, it was listed in Georges
Rivière’s 1923 chronology of Cézanne’s works as
“Collection A. Vollard” and was shown in a 1929
exhibition at Galerie Pigalle, which was a loan show
organized by Vollard. This information is based on
Jill Shaw’s entry on “Bathers” in Cézanne to Picasso:
Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, ed.
Rebecca A. Rabinow, exh. cat. (Metropolitan Museum
of Art/Yale University Press, 2006), p. 344. Vollard was
also a great collector of Renoir, another artist who
produced numerous images of bathers.
16 Tarsila used the phrase “Cubism is military service”
in the interview “Tarsila do Amaral, a interessante
artista brasileira, dá-nos as suas impressões,” Correio
da Manhã, Dec. 25, 1923, p. 2; translated in this
publication, pp. 155–56.
17 See, for example, Joseph J. Rishel and Katherine
Sachs, ed. Cézanne and Beyond, exh. cat. (Philadelphia
Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 2009).
18 For more on Cézanne’s bathers, see Christian
Geelhar, “The Painters Who Had the Right Eyes: On
the Reception of Cézanne’s Bathers,” in Paul Cézanne:
The Bathers, ed. Mary Louise Krumrine, exh. cat.
(Museum of Fine Arts, Basel/Eidolon, 1990), pp. 275–304.
19 Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of
the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War,
1914–1925 (Princeton University Press, 1989).
20 For more on the history of décoration as it pertains
to late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, see
Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in
France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (Yale University
Press, 1991); and Gloria Groom, Beyond the Easel:
Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and
Roussel, 1890–1930, exh. cat. (Art Institute of Chicago/
Yale University Press, 2001). Another example of a
modern artist’s adoption of Cézanne’s subject of the
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 bather can be found in Stephanie D’Alessandro and
John Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–17,
exh. cat. (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University
Press, 2010).
21 Tarsila memorialized her visit in a March 27, 1936,
article for the Diário de São Paulo as “Um mestre da
pintura moderna,” repr. in Brandini, Crônicas e
outros escritos, pp. 53–54; for an English translation,
see “A Master of Modern Painting,” in Amaral et al.,
Tarsila do Amaral, p. 203.
22 The exact date of Tarsila’s meeting with Picasso
is unknown, but she met Cendrars, who facilitated the
visit, on May 28, and she stated in “Um mestre da
pintura moderna” (see note 21 above) that it was before
her studies with Gleizes, which began sometime in
June (according to a letter from Mário de Andrade,
mentioned in Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo,
p. 400). According to the catalogue of the Berggruen
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collection, Seated Nude Drying Off Her Foot was with
Picasso until it was sold to Paul Rosenberg, Paris.
See Peter-Klaus Schuster, Picasso und seine Zeit: Die
Sammlung Berggruen (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—
Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Ars Nicolai 1996), p. 436.
23 At Picasso’s studio, Tarsila also likely saw Rousseau’s
Portrait of a Woman (1895; Musée Picasso, Paris) and
Renoir’s Seated Bather in a Landscape (1895–1900;
Musée Picasso, Paris), which the artist had acquired
from Paul Rosenberg in 1919 or 1920. For more on the
Rousseau canvas, see Roger Shattuck, The Banquet
Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885
to World War I; Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie,
Guillaume Apollinaire (Vintage, 1968), p. 66; for more
on the Renoir, see Anne Roquebert, “Seated Bather in
a Landscape,” in Rabinow, Cézanne to Picasso, p. 398.
24 Among the works by Gauguin that Tarsila might
have seen in Vollard’s home, for example, is Tahitian
Women Bathing (1892; Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York). It is also worth noting that at about
this time Gauguin was acknowledged in at least
one instance as a “painter of American subjects of
the south.” See Sérgio Milliet, “Feuilles de route: le
formose,” Revue de l’Amérique latine 9 (Feb. 1925),
pp. 170–71.
25 Tarsila to Lydia Dias do Amaral and José Estanislau
do Amaral Filho, July 5, 1923, in Amaral, Tarsila: Sua
obra e seu tempo, p. 408.
26 Oswald de Andrade lectured at the Sorbonne
on May 11, 1923; the lecture was published as
“L’Effort intellectuel du Brésil contemporain,” Revue
de l’Amérique latine 20 (July 1, 1923), pp. 197–207.
Cendrars specifically identified Oswald’s “Indian” char-
acter in his letter to the poet on April 1, 1926,
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exhorting him to facilitate Tarsila’s impending exhibition;
reproduced in Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo,
p. 230. A similar mixing of “exotic” (African and Indian)
characteristics was performed by all the modernists;
a different, but related, blending was paralleled
by Cendrars, who inscribed a copy of his Anthologie
nègre to the combined figures of “Tarsiwald.”
27 For more on the ballet, see Bengt Häger, The
Swedish Ballet, trans. Ruth Sharman (Abrams, 1989),
pp. 41–44; and Darius Milhaud (who himself traveled
to Brazil in the late 1910s while serving as secretary to
French ambassador Paul Claudel), Notes without Music:
An Autobiography, trans. Donald Evans (Knopf, 1953),
pp. 149–50, 152–53.
28 Tarsila mentions visiting Léger’s studio in a July 5
letter to her family. See Tarsila to Lydia Dias do Amaral
and José Estanislau do Amaral Filho, in Amaral, Tarsila:
Sua obra e seu tempo, p. 407.
29 Tarsila to her family, Sept. 29, 1923, as quoted in
Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo, p. 119n47.
30 Tarsila to Lydia Dias do Amaral and José Estanislau
do Amaral Filho, Oct. 31, 1923, in Amaral, Tarsila: Sua
obra e seu tempo, p. 130; Tarsila told her parents that
to have a show at his gallery (L’Effort moderne) would
be a “consecration.”
31 In an interview, Tarsila would soon even identify
herself as among “the primitives of a great century.”
See “Tarsila do Amaral, a interessante artista brasileira,
dá-nos a suas impressões.”
32 Tarsila to Lydia Dias do Amaral and José Estanislau
do Amaral Filho, Apr. 19, 1923, as quoted in Amaral,
Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo, pp. 101, 102; for an
English translation, see Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral,
p. 238.
33 Tarsila acquired a number of important paintings
and drawings during her time in Paris, including works
by Brancusi, Gleizes, Léger, Lhote, and Picasso. The
Art Institute of Chicago’s collection contains another
work formerly owned by the artist, Delaunay’s Red
Tower (1911/23; 1959.1). Tarsila also acquired works
for others in Brazil, including Mário de Andrade and
art patron Olívia Guedes Penteado.
34 Tarsila, “Brancusi,” Diário de São Paulo, May 6,
1936, repr. in Brandini, Crônicas e outros escritos, p. 73;
for an English translation, see Amaral et al., Tarsila
do Amaral, pp. 209–10.
35 Special thanks to Allison Langley for her insight
and expertise in the examination of A Negra.
36 This verse is from a discarded draft of the poem
“Atelier” by Oswald. For more on this subject, see Jorge
Schwartz, “Tarsila and Oswald in the Wise Laziness
of the Sun,” in Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, p. 101.
To read the other drafts of the poem, see Maria Eugênia
Boaventura, “O Atelier de Tarsila,” in I Encontro de
crítica textual: O manuscrito moderno e as edições
(Universidade de São Paulo, 1986).
37 A similarly suggestive shadowy space can be
found in the central seated figure of Gauguin’s Arearea
(1892; Musée d’Orsay), which Tarsila likely saw in the
collection of Vollard, who owned the canvas until 1928.
See Rabinow, Cézanne to Picasso, p. 358.
38 There is only one potentially related painting,
although different in composition and style: it is the
small canvas Bathers (1923), which Tarsila might have
made while she visited Portugal or Spain, but the
painting does not have enough evidence to be fully
accepted in the catalogue raisonné. It represents a far
more traditional Arcadian image than the composition
of A Negra. See Maria Eugênia Saturni and Regina
Teixeira de Barros, eds., Tarsila: Catálogo raisonné,
vol. 2 (Base 7 Projetos Culturais/Pinacoteca do Estado
de São Paulo, 2008), p. 157.
39 According to Maria Eugênia Saturni and Regina
Teixeira de Barros, the inscription A 1ª Negra in the
bottom left corner was written by Tarsila’s niece,
Helena do Amaral Galvão Bueno; see Tarsila: Catálogo
raisonné, vol. 2, p. 219.
40 See numbers AG005, D032, D033, D034, De171,
De172, De192, DI108, Dq001 in Tarsila: Catálogo
raisonné.
41 I would like to thank a number of individuals for
their valuable assistance in obtaining this X-radiograph.
At the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade
de São Paulo: Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, associate
professor, curator, and researcher for the Núcleo de
Apoio à Pesquisa de Física Aplicada ao Estudo do
Patrimônio Artístico e Histórico (NAP-FAEPAH); Paulo
Roberto do Amaral Barbosa, head of the Collections
Department; Ariane Soero Lavezzo, conservator; and
Fábio Ramos and Mauro Silveira, art handlers. I would
also like to thank, at the Physics Institute (NAP-FAEPAH):
Márcia Rizzutto, professor in the department of nuclear
physics and coordinator of the NAP-FAEPAH; Paulo
Costa, professor of nuclear physics; and Nemitala
Added, professor of nuclear physics; as well as Camila
S. Melo and Alejandro Heiner Lopez, technicians.
42 The many changes in A Negra are distinctly differ-
ent than those seen in recent X-radiographs of City
(The Street) (pl. 70) and Urutu Viper (pl. 58), in which
there are few revisions; examination reveals that
Tarsila carefully followed her original pencil sketch for
City (The Street) with thin layers of color. Visual ex-
amination of Tarsila’s other canvases from the 1920s
suggests A Negra’s reworking is unusual and that her
D’Alessandro 53
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 process more typically follows that of City (The Street)
and Urutu Viper. Thanks again to Allison Langley for
her study of these works.
43 The change in the position of the crossed legs
was first noted by Alexandre Eulalio; see A Aventura
brasileira de Blaise Cendrars: Ensaio, cronologia,
filme, depoimentos, antologia (Edições Quíron, 1978),
p. 87.
44 Tarsila, as quoted in Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e
seu tempo, p. 44n7.
45 Tarsila wrote to her family on October 8, reporting
that she began study with Léger and that on the previous
Saturday she had shared some of her works with the
artist in his studio. According to Aracy Amaral, who
interviewed Tarsila about many of her recollections,
A Negra was among the canvases she shared with
Léger (Tarsila do Amaral, p. 119n47). Without further
documentation, we can assume that if this is correct,
the painting was probably finished by Saturday, October
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6, 1923. Tarsila traveled to Italy in the late summer,
so it is likely that the majority of her work on A Negra
was completed in anticipation of this trip.
46 Tarsila would do the same years later, in relation
to the canvases Abaporu (pl. 54) and Anthropophagy
(pl. 77). These are reproduced in Tarsila: Catálogo
raisonné, vol. 2; for Abaporu, see numbers D228, D229,
D230, D231, and D232; for Anthropophagy, see D245,
D246, D247, and D248.
47 It is possible that Tarsila returned to Brazil with
some of the art she made in Paris—on January 3, Mário
wrote to Anita that Tarsila’s paintings were held in
customs and that he had witnessed her new “magnif-
icent drawings”; Mário de Andrade to Anita Malfatti,
Jan. 3, 1924, published in Renata Gomes Cardoso,
“A Negra de Tarsila do Amaral,” p. 94n9. Cardoso points
to the possibility that the large size of A Negra
prevented its shipment to Brazil and notes the lack of
commentary about the painting by Brazilian colleagues
upon her return; p. 99.
48 Tarsila do Amaral, “Tarsila do Amaral, a interessante
artista brasileira, dá-nos as suas impressões.” Caipira
means “country bumpkin”; a caboclo denotes some-
one of mixed race with Native and European ancestry
but is also a generic term in Brazilian Portuguese for
the rural poor. Thanks to Stephen Berg for sharing his
nuanced understanding of these terms.
49 Tarsila to Lydia Dias do Amaral and José Estanislau
do Amaral Filho, Aug. 12, 1923, as quoted in Amaral,
Tarsila do Amaral, p. 116; and Tarsila to Lydia Dias
do Amaral and José Estanislau do Amaral Filho, Aug.
5, 1923, as quoted in Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu
tempo, pp. 115–16.
54 A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy
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50 Tarsila to Lydia Dias do Amaral and José Estanislau
do Amaral Filho, Apr. 19, 1923, as quoted in Amaral,
Tarsila do Amaral, p. 102; for an English translation, see
Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, p. 238.
51 Letter from Mário to Tarsila, Nov. 15, 1924, as
quoted in Amaral, Tarsila do Amaral, p. 369; for an English
translation, see Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, p. 23;
and reproduced in this publication, p. 166.
52 Oswald, “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil,” Correio
da Manhã, Mar. 18, 1924, p. 5; as translated by Stella
M. de Sá Rego, “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry,” Latin
American Literary Review 14, 27 (Jan.–June 1986),
p. 184, and in this publication, pp. 174–75.
53 Stella M. de Sá Rego has pointed out that tourism
within Brazil was unusual for such artists and writers
at the time, and that this was also true of “upper-class
Brazilians wealthy enough to travel, a category which
included many of the Modernists.” Sá Rego also notes
that even to attend Carnival in the streets, rather than
in the society balls, “constituted a kind of ‘slumming’
for the aristocratic Brazilian group” and points to the
remark of Olívia Guedes Penteado to Tarsila after leaving
a celebration, “Thank god no one I know passed by.”
Sá Rego, “Tarsila/Pau-brasil,” pp. 49–50.
54 Tarsila, “Pintura Pau-Brasil e Antropofagia.”
55 For more on Cendrars’s experience in Brazil, see
Alexandre Eulalio, A Aventura brasileira de Blaise Cendrars;
his drawings after A Negra are reproduced on pp.85–87.
56 Tarsila also made covers for both publications—
a variation on the Brazilian flag for Oswald (pl. 92) and
a variation on A Negra for Cendrars. Both books were
published in Paris, and it is noteworthy, considering the
nationality of each author, how their books announce
“Brazil” differently.
57 The photograph is identified as a former worker of
the Amaral family (“Fotografia de funcionária da família
Amaral, que integra o album de viagens de Tarsila”) in
Regina Teixeira de Barros, “Tarsila Viajante,” in Aracy
A. Amaral and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Tarsila: Viajante,
viajera, exh. cat. (Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo,
2008), p. 31. The woman is also identified as a “former
slave of the Amaral family” in Regina Teixeira de Barros,
“Tarsila do Amaral: Chronology,” in Amaral et al.,
Tarsila do Amaral, p. 235.
58 Tarsila, “Entrevista: Tarsila do Amaral, ‘O que seria
aquela coisa?’” Veja 181 (Feb. 23, 1972), p. 6; translat-
ed in this publication, pp. 162–65.
59 Georges Remon, “Galerie Percier,” La Renaissance
de l’art français et des industries de luxe 9, 6 (June
1926), p. 368; and Gaston de Pawlowski, “Les Petites
expositions, Tarsila, 38, rue La Boétie,” Le Journal
(June 22, 1926), p. 3. Translation by the author.
60 José Severiano de Rezende, “L’Expédition Tarsila,”
Gazette du Brésil 4, 30 (June 17, 1926), pp. 1–2.
Translation by the author.
61 A document housed in the archives of Mário de
Andrade records Tarsila’s collection as including a
drawing of heads by Johann Moritz Rugendas as well
as O Violeiro (1899), a canvas by Ferraz de Almeida
Júnior once owned by her father, which she inherited
in 1906. Thanks to both Fernanda Pitta and Pedro
Nery, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, for sharing
documentation from the Museu Paulista Archives
of the University of São Paulo concerning Tarsila’s
donation in 1939.
62 Manuel Bandeira, “Felicidade perfeita” (Dec. 1927),
repr. in Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo, p. 257;
translated in Juan Manuel Bonet, “A ‘Quest’ for Tarsila,”
in Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, p. 84.
63 A fascinating related case can be found in the
Brazilian artist Rego Monteiro. See Edith Wolfe, “Paris
as Periphery: Vicente do Rego Monteiro and Brazil’s
Discrepant Cosmopolitanism,” Art Bulletin 96, 1 (Mar.
2014), pp. 98–119. This idea of origin and becoming are
further explored in Luis Pérez-Oramas’s essay in this
publication, “Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal,” pp. 84–99.
64 Such research into the language, culture, and
traditions of Brazil’s indigenous people would lead the
following year to Mário de Andrade’s novel Macunaíma,
which follows a young man born in the Brazilian jungle
and whose personality represents the country of Brazil.
For more on the novel, see Esther Gabara, Errant
Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and
Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 79–119.
65 The decorated ceramic cylinder is now catalogued
as Cylindre gravé in the collection of the Musée
du Quai Branly (71.1931.29.1). This was at odds with
a growing awareness in Paris of Latin American art,
a new kind of “exotic” identity that Tarsila would
negotiate in varying ways. By 1926 she was navigating
this gap, preparing for her first exhibition at the Galerie
Percier, when Cendrars advised Oswald to “make a
FRENCH, PARISIAN exhibition and not a South American
manifestation. The danger to you is to be understood
as official. . . . This time use your Indian character.”
Blaise Cendrars to Oswald de Andrade, Apr. 1, 1926,
repr. in Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo, p. 409.
66 Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade,
“Homenagem aos homens que agem,” Verde 1, 4
(Dec. 1927), p. 9, as translated in Amaral et al.,
Tarsila do Amaral, p. 83.
67 Tarsila do Amaral, “Pintura Pau-Brasil e Antropofagia.
” The exact chronology of events following Tarsila’s
painting and the actions of each protagonist shifted
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 even in the accounts she offered during her lifetime;
see the introduction to this publication, pp. 16–25.
68 Although it recalls the similar narrative of Tristan
Tzara’s naming of Dada, the idea also intersects with
Francis Picabia’s Dadaist publication Cannibale, which
promoted a primitivist sensibility to consume the
whole of the movement.
69 Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto antropófago,”
Revista de Antropofagia 1, 1 (May 1928), pp. 3, 7, trans-
lated by Hélio Oiticica in Carlos Basualdo, Tropicália:
A Revolution in Brazilian Culture (Cosac Naify, 2005),
pp. 205–207 and in this publication, pp. 176–77.
70 The united form of the figures of A Negra and
Abaporu into the new being in Anthropophagy parallel
the combined portmanteaux of “Tarsiwald” and
“Márioswald,” both invented by Oswald. For a consid-
eration of this invention as an extension of anthro-
pophagic practice, see Helba Carvalho, “Tarsiwald: O
Princípo da ‘Devoração,’” (paper presented at the XI

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Congresso Internacional da Associação Brasileira de
Literatura Comparada, Rio de Janeiro, July 13–17,
2008), http://www.abralic.org.br/eventos/cong2008/
AnaisOnline/simposios/pdf/026/HELBA_CARVALHO.pdf.
71 Oswald de Andrade lectured at the Sorbonne
on May 11, 1923; the lecture is published as “L’Effort
intellectuel du Brésil contemporain,” Revue de
l’Amérique latine 20 (July 1, 1923), pp. 197–207.
Translation by the author.

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 14 The Railway Station, 1925 (cat. 48)

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57

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 15 Landscape with Railroad
Car, c. 1924 (cat. 38)

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 16 Train Station, 1924 (cat. 23)

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 17–19 Drawings for Feuilles de route
(Road Maps), c. 1924 (cats. 31, 34, 30)

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 20 Sertão Farm III, 1924–30 (cat. 39) 21 Carnival in Madureira, 1924
(cat. 16)

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 22 Mantiqueira Mountains/
Rio de Janeiro, 1924 (cat. 24)

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64

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 23 The Papaya Tree, 1925 (cat. 47)

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 24 Hills of the Favela, 1924 (cat. 19)

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 25 Study of Mountains (Front
of Study of Landscape), 1924
(cat. 22)

26 Ouro Preto and Padre Faria

(Front of Sabará ), 1924 (cat. 20)

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67

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 27 Fragment of a Landscape, 1924
(cat. 18)

28 Drawing for Feuilles de route

(Road Maps), c. 1924 (cat. 37)

29 Pen with Ox and Piglets II, 1924

(cat. 21)

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69

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 30–32 Original illustrations for
Pau Brasil, 1925 (cats. 45, 44, 42)

33 Drawing for Feuilles de route

(Road Maps), c. 1924 (cat. 29)

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70

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 34 Original illustration for Pau Brasil,
1925 (cat. 43)

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71

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 35–37 Drawings for Feuilles de route
(Road Maps), c. 1924 (cats. 32, 25, 26)

38 Town with Tram, c. 1925 (cat. 51)

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72

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 39 Drawing for Feuilles de route
(Road Maps), c. 1924 (cat. 33)

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 40–43 Drawings for Feuilles de route
(Road Maps), c. 1924 (cats. 35, 27,
28, 36)

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 44 A Cuca, 1924 (cat. 17)

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 45 Saci-Pererê, 1925 (cat. 49)

46 Animal with Fat Stomach,

1925 (cat. 40)

47 Study for Blue Woman

(Water Spirit ) I, 1925 (cat. 50)

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 48 Lagoa Santa, 1925 (cat. 41)

49 Palm Trees, 1925 (cat. 46)

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 50 Manacá, 1927 (cat. 52)

51 Abaporu IV, 1928 (cat. 55)

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 52 Abaporu III, 1928 (cat. 54) 54 Abaporu, 1928 (cat. 53)

53 Abaporu V, 1928 (cat. 56)

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 TARSILA,
MELANCHOLIC
CANNIBAL
LUIS PÉREZ-ORAMAS
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and eternal Devouring.
—Oswald de Andrade, “Mensagem ao antropófago
desconhecido” (Message to the Unknown Cannibal), 1946
Cannibalism would therefore be the mythical
expression of a melancholy bereavement—a sort
of putting to death—for an object under whose
spell the self found itself and from which it cannot
resolve to separate itself.
—Pierre Fédida, “Le Cannibale mélancolique”
(The Melancholic Cannibal), 1972
I seen as a modern Brazilian version—brutal, barren, asexual, naked,
It was in 1972 that Pierre Fédida published his essay “Le Cannibale
mélancolique.” 1 That same year, in São Paulo, Tarsila do Amaral
was in the last days of her life, while another Brazilian artist, Lygia
Clark, was undergoing a decisive psychoanalysis with Fédida in
Paris, where the young Tarsila had devoured her entire experience
of European modernity.2 Years earlier, also in Paris, in different
decades but each at an early moment in her creative career, both
had been apprentices in the studio of the artist Fernand Léger,
Tarsila in 1923, Clark in 1950. There, both had learned to be some-
thing other than just one more of their teacher’s many followers,
just another “sub-Léger.”3
84
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Such coincidences might be no more than that but for the fact
that the two women not only may have been the two greatest
Brazilian artists of the twentieth century, but were among those
who, with respect to the modern period in Brazilian art, initiated
it (Tarsila) and brought it to a close (Clark).4 Equally significant, both
artists were closely linked to the image, the imaginary, perhaps
the myth, and certainly the representation—the very ability to be
represented—of the Brazilian aesthetic project of Anthropophagy,
whose foundational text is the 1928 “Manifesto antropófago”
(Manifesto of Anthropophagy), illustrated by Tarsila and written
by the poet Oswald de Andrade, the artist’s husband at the time.
On January 11, 1928, in celebration of his birthday, Tarsila gave
Oswald a painting (pl. 54) that, to say the least, was disturbing and
strange: a monumental elongated figure, in the canonical, cheek-
on-hand posture of melancholy dating back at least to Albrecht
Dürer’s Melancholy I (1514; fig. 1), of which this image can be
solar. Flaunting extremities now immense, now minute—an
enormous foot, a tiny head—the figure sits beside a monumental
cactus, potentially with sexual connotations, in the broad light
of midday.5 (The sun, at its zenith, marks the exact center of the
composition.) To title the work, Oswald and his friend the poet
Raul Bopp dove into the language of Brazil’s Tupi and Guarani
peoples, using the Tupi-Guarani dictionary published by the Jesuit
Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in 1640, and set about inventing
a word: aba, “person,” plus poru, “who eats”— Abaporu, “the one
who eats.”6 The work would come to be seen as the incarnation
of Brazilian anthropophagy. Paradoxically enough, many years later
2017-08-14 9:31 AM
 Fig. 1 Albrecht Dürer (German,
1471–1528). Melancholy I,
1514. Engraving; 24.5 × 19.2 cm
(9 5/8 × 7 9/16 in.). National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift
of R. Horace Gallatin.
Fig. 2 Lygia Clark (Brazilian,
1920–1988). Anthropophagic Drool,
1973, probably in use in Paris in
1973. The material is thread. 

Clark would describe to her friend the artist Hélio Oiticica the making
of a work (see fig. 2) that would come to be seen as incarnating
both the conclusion, and maybe the consecration, of the anthro-
pophagic project as myth and utopia of Brazilian Modernism, as
Abaporu had been for its beginnings:

I’m sending you a photograph of a work I call Anthropophagic

Drool. A person lies on the ground. Around him, kneeling
youths place multicolored spools of thread in their mouths.
With their hands, they begin taking from their mouths the
threads that fall upon the supine person until the spools have
been emptied. The regurgitated thread is moist with saliva,
and, although people initially feel they are merely pulling on
strands, they soon become aware that they are drawing out
their own entrails. It is actually the phantasmatics of the body
that interests me and not the body in itself.7

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In around the same period as this letter, Fédida, in “Le Cannibale
mélancolique,” was suggesting that whether as phantasm, dream,
or delusion, anthropophagy manifests a longing to devour an
object of desire with which we identify, in a primitive identification
infused by the anxious possibility of its own rupture. Among the
various manifestations of South America’s aspiration to modernity—
“utopic messianism,” “archaeological utopia,” “involuntary resid-
uality,” and “deforming indifference” are terms I have used
elsewhere to describe independent but visually related aesthetic
projects across the continent—perhaps none is more fascinating
than Brazil’s cannibalistic phantasmagoria, which becomes image in
Tarsila’s work, then later becomes body in Clark’s.8 The philosopher
Benedito Nunes saw Oswald’s “Manifesto antropófago” (Manifesto
of Anthropophagy) as simultaneously metaphor, diagnosis, and
therapy: the text set out to assert Brazil’s intellectual autonomy, to
diagnose its colonial trauma, and to transcend the collective super-
ego that had impeded the accomplishment of modernity in the
region since the early stages of the repression that colonialism had
imposed.9 The starting point of Oswald’s essay, as Nunes under-
stood, was a simplified, somewhat erroneous description of the
rituals of anthropophagy, which need not entail literal cannibalism
and does not appear as a generalized practice in the tribal cultures
that Claude Lévi-Strauss called “cold” societies.10 From here
Oswald made the argument that Brazil could and should cannibalize
other cultures, following in the footsteps of Nietzsche, by digesting,
“without a trace of resentment or spurious guilty conscience, the
inner conflicts and resistances of the exterior world.”11

85

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 Fig. 3 Anita Malfatti (Brazilian,
1889–1964). The Stupid
Woman, 1915–16. Oil on canvas;
61 × 50.6 cm (24 × 19 15/16 in.).
Museu de Arte Contemporânea
da Universidade de São Paulo.

This project, this utopia, would not find a responsive reception

until long after Oswald first articulated it. Nearly half a century
would pass before the idea would find real social resonance and
have a real effect on Brazilian culture. That delay is a concern of
the present essay, along with that of Tarsila herself, the “country
girl from São Bernardo” who, “dressed by Poiret,”12 teamed up
with Oswald in Paris and São Paulo during the long, heroic years
in which his invention won no direct audience or response.13

Remarkably, the first systematic monograph on Tarsila’s work

appeared only in 1975, contemporaneously, that is, with Clark’s
Anthropophagic Drool and Oiticica’s Parangolés.14 It had had to
wait, in other words, until after the late 1960s, when the generation
of artists and intellectuals linked to the Tropicália movement had
retrospectively embraced Oswald’s cannibalist message.15 In the
1970s, the first rigorous theoretical interpretation of Brazilian

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Modernism, written by the artist Carlos Zilio, cast Anthropophagy
as its birthplace, though the newborn had yet to grow up—the
Modernism that Oswald had conceived as a utopia had yet to be
realized.16 Earlier on, Oswald himself had abandoned Anthro-
pophagy for Marxism; only toward the end of the 1940s had he
returned to his ideas of the 1920s, but again without wide effect.17
The task of embodying the terms of Brazil’s anthropophagic utopia
had fallen, after a long wait, to later generations—to artists such
as Zé Celso, Gal Costa, Hélio Eichbauer, Gilberto Gil, and Caetano
Veloso.18 Just as significant, Oiticica, Clark, and Zilio had seen in
Oswald’s project the sign of a difference, the trace of a possibility
that might materialize as a Brazilian modernity, though one emerging
in unexpected places and forms—the “line” of color, moistened
with saliva, in Clark’s Anthropophagic Drool, for example. Thus
Oiticica could write to Clark in that galvanizing year of 1968:
Brazil is a form of synthesis of peoples, races, habits, where
the European speaks but does not speak so loudly; except in the
universalist, academic fields, which are not those of “cultural
creation” but those of closure. Creation, even in Tarsila and
especially in Oswald de Andrade, possesses a subjective charge
that differs extremely from the rationalism of the European,
this is our “thing,” that Guy Brett was able to understand
so well and that the Europeans will have to swallow, in fact
with appetite since they are fed up with everything and it
looks as if that saturated civilization is drying their imagination.19
Oiticica’s surprising metaphor inverts Oswald’s cannibalist
principle: instead of Brazil cannibalizing Europe, ancient (and new)
colonists—Europeans—should devour what has metabolized in
Brazil. They should eat up this unique and different culture, for
“before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered
happiness.”20 And before Oswald’s invented anthropophagic rite
kicked off the adventure of Brazilian modernity—even before that
adventure came to have a name, as Sônia Salzstein has shown—
Tarsila had already produced its image.21
II
The modernity foreshadowed in the swallowing of everything by
everyone (“The one and only world principle. . . . I am only con-
cerned in that [which] is not mine. Man’s law. The law of anthro-
pophagous,” as Oswald wrote) in actuality did not happen.22 It
did not happen during the event that the simpler art histories tend
to identify as the originary scene—the primal scene, the Urszene
in Freudian terms—of the modern in Brazil: the Semana de Arte
Moderna (Modern Art Week), a festival organized, and quite well
attended, by the coffee-producing elite of São Paulo in 1922 (see
fig. 4). It did not happen during that week’s pomp and circum-
stance at the city’s Teatro Municipal, nor did it happen earlier: in
1917, for example, when another of Brazil’s great modern artists,
Anita Malfatti (see fig. 3), having returned to São Paulo after work-
ing in Berlin with Lovis Corinth and in Maine with Homer Boss,
exhibited the work she’d been making—to no significant critical
reception. Nor did it happen in 1912, when Lasar Segall, an
avant-garde artist from Lithuania, brought to Brazil from Germany

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 Fig. 4 Photograph of a group at the
Semana de Arte Moderna from Tarsila
do Amaral’s travel album, c. 1922–28.
Thaís do Amaral Perroy Collection,
São Paulo. Left to right, starting at
far left, standing: Couto de Barros,
Manuel Bandeira, Mário de Andrade,
Sampaio Vidal, Francesco Pettinatti,
Cândido Motta Filho, Paulo Prado,
Flaminio Ferreira, René Thiollier,
Graça Aranha, Manuel Villaboim,
Gofredo Teixeira da Silva Telles;
seated: Rubens Borba de Moraes,
Luís Aranha, Tácito de Almeida,
and Oswald de Andrade (on floor).
Fig. 5 Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald
de Andrade in hammock, c. 1924.
Coleção de Artes Visuais do Instituto
de Estudos Brasileiros, Universidade
de São Paulo.
.

the results of his intense journey through expressionist painting.
Modernity did not depend on what was brought into Brazil and
what wasn’t; it wasn’t just a matter of cultured men and elegant
women being able to feel that they were ahead of local time.23
Nor was it yet the time for Modernisms elsewhere, such as the
one that would blossom in North America after World War II.24
Modernity had no place in Brazil’s Semana de Arte Moderna,
although an important public showing by many of the country’s
modern artists did take place there.
The argument that the Semana de Arte Moderna failed to accom-
plish its goals is far from new. Modernity—which in any case,
we know, is structurally always an unfinished project, insofar as
it feeds on utopia—requires a series of conditions of possibility
that were absent in the Brazil of 1922, or rather were only marginally
present in meaningful combination. Because modernity must consist
inextricably linked to the fate of Brazil’s modern project and to the
image of modernity there. For the moment, we must distinguish
image from text—the images of Brazilian modernity from its ex-
pressions in texts and manifestos.27 There are many reasons for
this, but we can begin with one: the fundamental program of that
modernity, Oswald’s “Manifesto antropófago”— a text that is less
a series of arguments than a series of verbal images—has as its
frontispiece and emblem a drawing by Tarsila.28 We must begin,
then, by establishing one condition: we must attempt to see that
image—and Tarsila’s work of the 1920s more generally—independ-
ently of that text, independently of that word and everything its verbal
images impose upon us, because Tarsila literally precedes them all.
In a beautiful reflection on the art of antiquity, Pascal Quignard
weaves his arguments around two assumptions: behind every
image is another image, fading into absence; and behind every

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of something other than an elitist skirmish, it did not happen in
Brazil in 1922, or in Russia in 1915,25 or during the rest of that intense
decade of the 1920s, in which Tarsila produced her greatest
iconographic arsenal: “The historic solitude of Tarsila’s work,”
Salzstein writes, “the fact that the peculiar modern visuality that
she mounted from an astute dialectic of tradition and experimen-
tation did not become generalized for Brazilian art, is due perhaps
to the work’s profound engagement with the utopian project of
modernity, which in the end was not realized for the country, at
least, in its utopic dimension.”26
The present essay does not set out to resolve the question of what
modernity was or was not in Brazil, but it does examine an artist—
Tarsila—whose work, artistic personality, and very being are
word is someone lost, someone missing. Behind any image rests
a secular sediment of images, forgotten or lost, unknown or un-
differentiated, that can somehow return to life in any given image;
behind any word rests the absent that the word names.29 What
absent image hides behind the organic ampleness of Tarsila’s
anthropophagic repertoire? What is the absent image behind
Abaporu (1928; pl. 54) or Anthropophagy (1929; pl. 77), or, before
them, behind A Negra (1923; pl. 13), that absolute mother?30
Behind these devouring figures, what is the scene of devouring
that we do not see? And if behind every word is someone lost,
who is the one hidden in the lines of the “Manifesto antropófago”
written by Oswald—who by then had been named “Tarsiwald”
in a poem by Mário de Andrade, making Oswald and Tarsila
(see fig. 5) inseparable doubles in that cannibalistic plot?31

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 Before addressing these questions, I would like to stress one fact:
if the Semana de Arte Moderna was the Urszene of Brazilian
modernity, as its program claimed and as some narratives still claim,
it is nevertheless the case that Tarsila was not there. In February
1922 she was in Paris and would not return to São Paulo until
this foundational event was over. I’d like to begin, then, with this
particular delay, before getting to any others: Tarsila was not
there. Tarsila came later.
Tarsila, like modernity, came later: for our current purposes her
embodiment of modern art crystallized between A Negra and
Anthropophagy, which, with Abaporu, constitute an emblematic
series of transformations and can be interpreted as such.32 What
is there of each of these paintings in the other two? How do
they mutually transform one another? We might perhaps think
of them as three distinct sites of articulation: I—mother, black
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woman, slave (A Negra ); you—uncertain of gender, devourer of
humans (Abaporu ); he and she—a strange, deformed, monstrous,
copulating couple who condense the previous two characters into
a third person yet to come (Anthropophagy ). Following Hubert
Damisch—who, analyzing the practice of perspective in Western
art, replaced the word mask with the word painting in a text by
Lévi-Strauss—we might perhaps then suppose “that one painting
responds to another by assuming its individuality” and that what
matters “is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms,
that is to say what it chooses not to represent.”33
We might perhaps interpret this transformation literally: as an
engendering, an act of conception or impregnation. And the issue
of engendering (in this case also the engendering of the modern
in Brazil) naturally implies, we know, the complex issue of a primal
scene—a scene, an image, that is always missing, always absent—
as well as maternity, infancy, childhood, emergence, blossoming.
In the light of these paintings, such issues indicate a problem at
once cultural and organic, relating not only to ideas but to bodies,
to coitions, swallowings, and digestions, all as much physical
as symbolic.
Such is the metaphor, or the parable, that leads me down a
strange trajectory: the idea that A Negra was devoured by Abaporu,
and that from that swallowing, that (symbolic) digestion, arose
Anthropophagy. Just as the anthropophagic project could not
come to fruition at the time of its first articulation, but only later—
delayed, appropriated, devoured, gulped down for other uses
and other fates (just as Oswald’s manifesto was itself a delayed
effect, an après-coup, of Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Des
88 Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal
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Cannibales,” published in 1580), Tarsila’s work, too, came to fruition
later, becoming central in that history only when its trauma, or
the effect of its trauma, had been made digestible.34
An acerbic critic of the Semana de Arte Moderna, Monteiro Lobato,
sarcastically commented that in the salons of the elitist and
Eurocentric café society of São Paulo, and in the rich halls of the
Villa Kyrial, mansion of the illustrious senator José de Freitas
Valle, they ate “foie gras de Nantes.”35 This nemesis of Brazilian
Modernism was certainly aware that not only did foie gras come
from Nantes, but much of what was imported from France passed
through that port, from the essays of Montaigne to—notoriously,
and not that far back in time—African slaves. The anecdotal
reference to Nantes in relation to a senator who had earlier, with
arrogant cruelty, attacked Malfatti’s work—proof of the elites’
myopia, an obstruction to the early development of Modernism—
makes me think of the Africans who were sold in markets in the
French West Indies and then in Brazil, the last American nation to
abolish slavery. The fascinating woman in A Negra, whom some
may find disturbing but who rivets our eyes—and who can be
linked to a photograph (fig. 6) that Tarsila kept from the early 1920s
on, showing a black woman sitting outdoors, a woman Tarsila
spoke of when remembering her childhood in 1972—would certainly
in 1923 have summoned a memory of slavery, which had ended
less than forty years before.36
The figure in A Negra is iconographically a matriarch at the
same time that she is historically a slave: simultaneously a primal
subject—a figure embodying a collective engenderment, the
troubled infancy of a nation—and a subject for emancipation. Nunes
writes of Oswald’s anthropophagic texts,
The maternalistic nature of Pau-Brasil’s poetic vision is reflected
in matriarchy as a schema of primitive life, having served as
a core for the crystallization of technological barbarism in the
form of an ideal society. And because the break with matriar-
chal society took place when man had ceased eating his fellow
man in order to enslave him, the lack of catharsis provided
by ritual cannibalism allows us to see the cause that fixed the
power of the father as Superego onto the trauma of guilt
feelings and, therefore, as an exterior reality principle, coercing
and inhibiting the interior pleasure principle.37
Matriarch and slave, A Negra is the beginning of everything in
Tarsila’s art. Anthropophagy does not operate among these
works—they do not devour each other—but it does not precede
2017-08-14 9:31 AM
 Fig. 6 Undated photograph of an
unknown woman from Tarsila
do Amaral’s travel album, (1922–
at least 1926). Thaís do Amaral
Perroy Collection, São Paulo.
the tension that links them either: her painting Abaporu is the
cannibal, and her painting Anthropophagy is what results from
the digestion of A Negra. Anthropophagy digests—condenses,
metabolizes—both the matriarch and the slave.
These three paintings cut through the marrow of Tarsila’s art of the
1920s. If we can sustain this hypothesis, this reading of the trio as
a cannibal parable in which Abaporu might have digested A Negra
to produce Anthropophagy, then what Anthropophagy traces is
simultaneously a neutral zone and a sphere—an interval—of defer-
ment. The neutrality is that between two (perhaps imaginary)
poles of tension: on the one hand, filiation, the maternal phantasm,
perhaps also Mother Europe, and on the other, submission to
(and emancipation of) a messianic phantasm. In other words, the
myth or ideology of Anthropophagy is that it establishes a neutrality
between the blame-inducing constitutive tensions of Brazilian (and,
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I would add, Latin American) culture, between dependence and
submission on the one hand and emancipation and messianic
promise on the other. The deferment comes because it could only
achieve its effects—still incomplete—quite a bit later, when it
would become possible to locate in an entire social body—not just
an illuminated elite—the field of a true public space, a popular
culture whose forms and sites Tarsila was able to prefigure ahead
of (her) time.
001-192 CC.indd 89
Yet Anthropophagy, this belatedly realized operating myth of
the Brazilian modern project, is at root a European construct, and
as such is not cannibalistic at all. Its constructors were white
Europeans, from Montaigne to Georges Bataille, without forgetting
Francis Picabia.38 “We can already make out,” writes Nunes,
“in the ideas that Oswald de Andrade stole from Montaigne, Freud,
Nietzsche, and Keyserling . . . the general philosophical outline
of Anthropophagy that passed unharmed onto the author’s
doctrinaire works.”39
The cannibal, simply, feeds on another human being in a totally
normal way. The idea that this behavior is extraordinary is a
European invention, a construct of the cannibal’s victims. The
cannibal, however, is a weak metaphor for symbolic assimilation
because it is too general: should we conclude that every attempt
to assimilate modernity in Latin America was a sort of symbolic
cannibalism? “The world’s one law,” Oswald called anthropophagy
in the manifesto, only to limit it to a term for the absorption of
some cultures by others, a word describing the banal truth that
cultures—all cultures—have always constituted themselves by
symbolically metabolizing elements from outside them. The chal-
lenge lies in finding the codes specific to Brazilian anthropophagy,
beyond the obvious and necessary kinds of assimilation inherent
in cultural migration since time began. And perhaps it is precisely
in an image that preceded Anthropophagy, shaping it even before
it had a name—that is, in the work of Tarsila, that artist absent from
the self-styled birth of Modernism in Brazil—that we can glimpse
a path away from such generalizations. Setting aside the verbal
texts of Anthropophagy, we must interrogate its image, and above
all, as Quignard would say, the image that is absent in its images.
What makes Tarsila’s work modern? How did it come to be
modern, through what skirmishes, appropriations, and delays?
And if, like Oswald’s writing, it had to wait for decades before
a collective response to it became possible, we have to wonder:
what of Tarsila is there in Oiticica, in Clark, in Lygia Pape? What
of her is there in Eichbauer, set designer for Celso’s production
of O rei da vela (The Candle King ), the play Oswald wrote in 1933
but whose debut came only in 1967, when the entire Tropicália
generation discovered Anthropophagy, four decades after the writing
of its manifesto (see fig. 7)? What of Tarsila is there in Gil, Veloso,
Artur Barrio, Waltercio Caldas, Tunga, and Anna Maria Maiolino?
Such questions arise easily, given that Tarsila’s connection to
Anthropophagy seems not only authorized by her work but affected
by it. Abaporu was printed as the frontispiece in Oswald’s
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 Fig. 7 Hélio Eichbauer (Brazilian, born
1941). Set design for O rei da vela
(The Candle King ), c. 1967. Coleção
Teatro Oficina, São Paulo.

manifesto, although it predated it, and the cactus from Abaporu,

or from Distance (1928; pl. 59) appeared in the backdrop for
Celso’s production of O rei da vela. Veloso, who attended that
production, saw it as the foundational event in the Tropicália
movement’s embrace of Anthropophagy: “The idea of cultural
cannibalism fit tropicalistas like a glove. We were ‘eating’ the
Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. Our arguments against the nationalists’
defensive attitude found in this stance its most succinct and
exhaustive enunciation.”40

Less obvious, but more important, is an understanding of

the heterogenous temporality of modernity, especially the
Brazilian modernity that adopted the motto and visual imaginary
of Anthropophagy. To understand this we must understand
Tarsila’s “delays.”

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In his brilliant analysis of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit—
the deferred action, the après-coup—Jean Laplanche emphasizes
the alogical, anachronic order of its manifestation: the operative
scene always happens later, and the originary, primal scene (which
actually comes to light second, although it falls earlier in time) is
always and forever lost. We were not in it; its trauma is such that
we have no memory of having suffered it, until it emerges later,
through and as an effect of a second event.41 In effect, it never
happened. And if by some chance it did happen—as the Semana
de Arte Moderna happened in 1922 or as the painting of Abaporu
preceded the writing of the “Manifesto antropófago”—it is as if it
had not happened, until another scene awakens the meaning of
its traumatic effect.

It is well known that any après-coup, any Nachträglichkeit, is built

on a backward-looking fantasy: to have seen that lost Urszene, to
have observed parental coitus. The Tropicália movement, and Brazil’s
Concrete poetry and Neo-Concrete art of the late 1960s, were
the standpoints for just such a backward view, toward Oswald’s
and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy of the 1920s. That retrospective gaze
would bring out the repressed meaning of a message that had
been waiting to emerge since Tarsila conceived her melancholic
monster, her melancholic cannibal.

III
Among the voices involved in revealing, materializing that delay,
the voices that formulated the effects of Tarsila’s work, was that
of the poet Haroldo de Campos. In a famous essay of 1969, this
Concrete poet defined Tarsila’s painting as structural.42 To tie the
work to one of the motivating impulses of literary formalism

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 Fig. 8 Fernand Léger (French, 1881–
1955). Still Life, 1922. Oil on canvas;
65.4 × 48.3 cm (25 3/4 × 19 3/4 in.).
Hermann und Margrit Rupf-Stiftung,
Kunstmuseum Bern.

was a brilliant strategy: for de Campos, Tarsila revealed pictoriality

in Brazilian painting, that is, the pictorial equivalent of what
literaturnost, or “literariness,” was for literature, according to the
Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century. De Campos’s
argument that Tarsila read Brazil’s environmental and human
landscape “along Cubist lines,” however, fails to take hold. Tarsila
was not a Cubist—at least the Tarsila who interests us here,
the artist working in the wake of brief studies with Léger, André
Lhote, and Albert Gleizes in the early 1920s, was not a Cubist. Her
work shows not the least sign of Cubism. It may be that during
her apprenticeship in those Paris ateliers she absorbed the lesson
that painting should account for relations, not things—an ancient
lesson that in no way originates with Cubism—but as Paulo
Herkenhoff clearly states,

Tarsila’s work is far from being Cubist. . . . Her so-called

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“postcubism” merely reflects, by contrast, a period of devel-
opment in Léger’s work [see fig. 8]. All of Tarsila’s work
was devoid of the complex Cubist logic, which she never fully
understood. This does not detract from Tarsila, nor from
her founding role in the Brazilian “constructive project.”43

Contrasts of shape, and relationships whether synthetic or analytic,

do not come into play in Tarsila’s art of the Pau-Brasil period
(1923–25), and as Herkenhoff writes, she never reduced “space
into its planar dimension or to the notion of surface.”44 What is
interesting to observe instead is how she constructed her work out
of a limited repertoire of iconographic elements that repeat and
permute: tall palm trees, foliage à la Léger, semicircular hills, accu-
mulations of spheres, conjoined ovals, horizontal colored rectangles,
crisscrossing diagonal lines, forests of cones. In fact the work
operates so heavily through variations of related forms—“[a] return
albeit from something that differs from itself in [the process of]
returning,” to the point that it prefigures “an ornamental geometry.”45
Hence the diagrammatic quality that is a prominent feature of
Tarsila’s drawings, which are stripped of extraneous detail, like
haikus of the Brazilian landscape. De Campos describes “Tarsila’s
iconic world: synthetic, rigorously demarcated, and lucid places
and figures that occasionally—and without contradiction—aspire
to a stage of monumental abbreviation, of lush proliferation”46
In these “monumental abbreviations” of the Brazilian landscape,
animals and topographic features present there since time imme-
morial take on new life and new color through Tarsila’s eyes (see
fig. 9): certain oval gray stones in the bluffs; the riverine capybaras
that Frans Post described in the first Brazilian landscape painting
in history, made in 1639 (fig. 10).

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 Fig. 9 Detail of Setting Sun (1929;
pl. 69) showing the capybara figures
that were inspired by the stones
photographed in Landscape Indaiatuba
(1928; pl. 103).
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92 Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal
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Fig. 10 Frans Post (Dutch, 1612–
1680). The Rio São Francisco and
Fort Morits, with a Capybara in
the Foreground, 1639. Oil on canvas;
62 × 95 cm (24 7/16 × 37 3/8 in.).
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
None of this has anything to do with Cubism. I would dare say,
in fact, that none of it has anything directly to do with any of the
canonical avant-garde languages (despite the link some have
proposed with Surrealism).47 Following the traces of the work’s
ornamental geometry, and the function of repetition and variation
in the paintings of the late 1920s, I instead suggest that her
iconography responds, in part, to a certain vocabulary—also
ornamental—present in Art Deco.48
As Aracy Amaral has described, when Tarsila had her first solo
show in Paris, at the Galerie Percier in 1926, she commis-
sioned the paintings’ frames from the famous Art Deco designer
Pierre Legrain (see fig. 11). Amaral establishes the bases—or
throws out the clues—for a future investigation of the relation-
ship between Tarsila’s work and Art Deco, and her position is
decidedly critical: “Commissioning Legrain to construct frames
that emphasized the exotic-magical nature of her works—in lizard
skin, in corrugated cardboard, in polished wood, with mirrors
cut at angles, etc.—always seems to us to have been a sign of
insecurity in light of the public before whom she was presenting.
In addition, these frames became works themselves, parallel
with her paintings, no doubt interfering with them and causing
some French critics to consider them tableaux-objets.”49 Legrain’s
frames, however, don’t seem to have undermined the paintings at
the time. The critic Paul Fierens, while mentioning “Pierre Legrain’s
strange frames” in the Journal des débats, described the balance
between the paintings’ freshness, freedom from artifice, and
an “adequate dose of organizational intelligence.”50 Gaston de
Pawlowski, in Le Journal, saw in the “Cubist frames” a desire to
surprise—”There is something with which to shock the establish-
ment”—but praised the “originality, the firm will of [Tarsila’s]
compositions.”51 More interesting still, given the author’s conceptu-
al reach, is Maurice Raynal’s remark in L’Intransigeant: “For Tarsila’s
work, Pierre Legrain made special, very specifically designed
frames, the formal and material combinations of which accompany
the canvases no longer in a conventional way, but in order to isolate
the picture less crudely and to enhance its qualities by harmonizing
it with the objects that surround them.”52
Legrain’s assignment was elaborate: he designed a different frame
for each work. Only one of these frames now survives, that for
A Cuca (1924; pl. 44), but even so, it is surprising that this gesture
of Tarsila’s has not been examined with greater care. A frame is
no small thing—a parergon, an exhibition device, a Beiwerk—the
“bit of cornice,” Nicolas Poussin called it in 1639, that differen-
tiates between the work and the world.53 The decision to hire
2017-08-14 9:31 AM
 Fig. 11 Mário da Silva Brito and
Tarsila do Amaral with Abaporu in
a frame by Pierre Legrain, c. 1950s.
Biblioteca Mário de Andrade.
Legrain could not have been made without the artist’s consent,
and she repeated it two years later, for her second show in Paris.54
In fact, the catalogues for both exhibitions explicitly mention
Legrain’s frames. Their disappearance—not just their physical
disappearance, their removal over time from all of the works
except one, but their neglect when the work is discussed—may
be attributable to a repression typical of Modernism, with its
taboo against the ornamental or anecdotal in art. This taboo is an
accomplice to the ideology of the absolute artwork, a fiction that
art historians from Ernst Gombrich to Hans Belting have wisely
dismantled.55 That fiction contradicts the understanding of meaning
in art as the product of an expressive or linguistic system. Indeed,
Legrain’s frames, and Tarsila’s tactical recourse to these ornamental
accessories, should be interpreted as a symptom of something
deeper. Such accessories, Spyros Papapetros writes, are “less, but
also something more than a normative object. Biewerk is literally
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a side-work, or parergon in Greek (yet not a paralipomenon, or
leftover). Such an intermediary object transcends distinctions
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between the accessory and the necessary, the organic body and
the inorganic thing imposed in early philosophical discourses.”56
There is quite a bit we might say about the parergon, but first
we must emphasize that logocentric approaches generally tend
to disregard both ornament and supplement: “Philosophical
discourse,” Jacques Derrida writes, “will always have been against
the parergon.” We must also observe that the parergon—like
any frame, including Legrain’s for Tarsila—is structurally called
upon to position itself precisely against the material it contains
or highlights:
A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the
ergon, the work done [fait], the fact [le fait], the work, but it
does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within
the operation, from a certain outside. Neither simply outside
nor simply inside. Like an accessory that one is obliged to
welcome on the border, on board [au bord, à bord]. It is first
of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er) [Il est d’abord l’à-bord].57
The frames Tarsila commissioned for her first Paris show, and
then again for her second, cannot be considered simply ancillary
nor their function purely technical. The charge of making these
frames, of transforming these paintings into objects, was not a
banal or anodyne gesture that can be disposed of as reflecting
“a certain insecurity.”58 Tarsila’s sensibility, after all, had been
formed in the context of a symbolic universe marked by extraor-
dinary supplements to the art object: the ornamental profusion
of the Brazilian Baroque, the marvelous gilt reliefs that Aleijadinho
made in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, not to
mention the exuberant decoration omnipresent in the country’s
countless popular celebrations, beginning with Carnival, a collective
delirium on the part of the Brazilian people. Tarsila would have
to have sustained some sort of determining interaction with
Legrain. The fact that we know of no documentary traces of this
dialogue does not invalidate the hypothesis: the commissioning
of frames from Legrain was—is—an authorial decision, a stamp.59
That these accessories must be considered operators of historical
inscription becomes even clearer when we remember that the
gesture was repeated in 1928. In Paris, then, Tarsila presented her
works within, or through, a considerable ornamental apparatus.
This gesture was consequential and effective. The work “gobbled
up” the avant-garde languages that were normalized—generalized
and made familiar—through Art Deco during that period, but did
so in a convertible, symmetrical manner: camouflaging itself in Art
Deco strategies, the work let itself be digested by them.
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IV
Beyond Tarsila’s decision to inscribe her painting within the widely
popular stylistic context of Art Deco, something in the excess of
those frames should be read as standing in an oppositional relation-
ship to the work they bordered. “Any parergon is only added
on by virtue of an internal lack in the system to which it is added,”
Derrida declares. “What constitutes . . . parerga is not simply their
exteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets
them to the lack in the interior of the ergon. And this lack would
be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon.”60
If the one Legrain frame that has survived the harshness of time
can be taken as representative, these objects supplemented the
paintings with the exotic materials shown in the works’ interiors,
setting dead materials, such as lizard- or snakeskin, alongside
the depiction of animate ones. In the process, these accessory
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objects aligned with an ancient tradition in the visual arts: the life
that is absent inside the frame, though vividly represented in shapes
and colors, is supplemented by the (dead) organic matter of the
frame.61 With this in mind, perhaps we can understand Raynal’s
astute observation more fully: despite their excess and their strange-
ness, Legrain’s frames would have served to not to accentuate
but attenuate the difference between Tarsila’s works and everything
around them, to make it less “abrupt,” more fluid.
In Paris in 1926, then, Tarsila’s paintings appeared not just as
singular and admirably different paintings but as decorative objects
inscribed into a style that was very à la mode in that city during
those years. Aracy Amaral, despite her reservations in the face of
this evidence, sees elements in the artist’s work from the late
1920s that respond to that stylistic alignment: “Certainly these
works contain a stylization exploited by ‘art déco’ in stained glass
windows, tapestry and milk glass, the absorption of which [the
Brazilian artists [Antônio] Gomide, [Vicente do] Rego Monteiro,
[Victor] Brecheret, and Ismael Nery also reflected.”62
Perhaps the vague assignment of Tarsila to a supposed “post-
Cubism,” an idea that cuts across the reception of her work from
Mário de Andrade to Zilio, is just a critical euphemism, the result
of a reluctance to name Art Deco—as if that term, precisely because
of its broad dissemination across the applied arts, were spurious
and ill-begotten. But once the myths and historical fictions of the
modern avant-gardes are transcended, once the truth of Oiticica’s
remark “Purity is a myth,” inscribed in his Tropicália, Penetrables
PN 2 (1966–67), is accepted, the setting of Tarsila’s work in the
massive international constellation of ornamental artistic languages
94 Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal
001-192 CC.indd 94
Fig. 12 Anita Malfatti). Group of Five,
1922. Ink and colored pencil on paper;
26.5 × 36.5 cm (10 7/16 × 14 3/8 in.).
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros,
Universidade de São Paulo. Left to
right: Tarsila do Amaral (on sofa), Mário
de Andrade and Anita Malfatti (at the
piano), Oswald de Andrade (center),
and Menotti del Picchia (bottom).
of the 1920s gains a fascinating dimension. And now the commis-
sioning of frames from Legrain makes total (and another) sense, to
the point of arousing the suspicion that Tarsila might have had the
idea that some of these works would become significant ornamental
objects through their frames. One might even speculate that for
her second Paris exhibition in 1928, she could have painted some
of the works—Abaporu, for example, which she produced that
same year—with Legrain’s frames in mind.63
A second delay: Tarsila came to modernity late. All indications show
that in 1917, like so many others, she had failed to fully under-
stand the message of Malfatti; nor does she seem to have found
herself attracted—although she was certainly intrigued—by modern
art during her first stay in Paris, between 1920 and 1922.64 In truth,
and paradoxically, Tarsila came to modernity in São Paulo: having
missed the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922, and in the wake of
the excitement it had generated, she found herself part of what
came to be called the Grupo dos Cinco (Group of Five), which also
included Malfatti, Oswald, Mário, and Menotti del Picchia (see
fig. 12). I say paradoxically because when the artist returned to
Paris in 1923, she arrived with a commitment to modernity—
a will to be modern—only to find Brazil.65 Its exoticism was repre-
sented tonally as flat, even paintings, and its vibrant colors lay
off in the distance. There was also its black population, widely
represented and embraced.66 Not for nothing is A Negra a Paris
painting, not a Brazilian one: “It was in Paris,” writes Herkenhoff,
“that Tarsila discovered Brazil. . . . It was in Paris that [Tarsila and
Oswald] discovered the negro in a different light. African culture
until then had been a disenfranchised culture in Brazil, a remainder
2017-08-14 9:31 AM
 of the Brazilian tradition of slavery. It was also notoriously absent
from Brazilian academic painting.”67
Tarsila, then, came to modernity when modernity was preparing
to be absorbed into daily life in innumerable industrial, ornamental,
and utilitarian products, achieving the goal at which the supposedly
pure historical avant-gardes had failed: to change the world, to
invade reality, even at the sometimes-programmatic price of diluting
art with industry, the artist with the worker. The fact that one
of the ways this came to pass was through impure, even bastard
means—the neutralizing assimilation of modern aesthetic languages
by the bourgeois fashion of Art Deco—matters least.68 Art Deco
made a good part of modernity transparent, dissolving it into accept-
ability, denying it differentiation. And this transparency, without
excluding either modernity’s oddity or its invention of new forms,
seems to have served as the vehicle for a formative inscription
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in Tarsila’s work, in Tarsila’s creative mind, in 1926.
What were they like, those paintings in Legrain’s extravagant
frames? What quality in them, what internal deflation, would struc-
turally explain the supplementary exteriority that framed them—
up to a point— as monumentally ornamental objects? Perhaps no
one has better described Tarsila’s painting of the years following
Oswald’s “Pau-Brasil” manifesto of 1924, the work that made up
most of the 1926 show, than the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa:
Tarsila do Amaral is the first Pau-Brasil transcription to
painting. Her mission is to restore the naïve iconography
of the provincial interior, transplanting it to the canvas.
And, for the first time, modernism finds in Brazil the perfect
correspondence between newly learned techniques and the
artist’s inspirational subject matter. Tarsila flirts with naïve,
caboclo taste as well as the art of the native santeiros [makers
or vendors of images of saints]. It is her distinction to have
realized the most technically modern paintings produced in
the country until then. In order to bring new life to the saints
of domestic altars and the golden stars of its blue skies, the
languid purple of the manacá [an ornamental and medicinal
shrub] and the white of the jasmine, the scarlet of peasant
dresses, the tinplate chests with their laughing decorations, the
outlines of the banana trees, the crisscrossing lines of little
paper flags underneath the gentle roofs of useless tiles, and of
the stocks of elements of the everyday life of people, in poetry
and in festivity, preserving the qualities of purity and lyricism,
Tarsila found herself obliged to keep to the irreducible two-
dimensionalism of the rectangle. And, casting aside the
001-192 CC.indd 95
procedures and tricks of traditional painting, all destined
for the fictitious representation of volumes in space, the artist
draws the contours of the icons with clear, limpid lines, in a
simple graphic procedure that attempts to evoke the whimsical
arabesque of popular ornamentation, while the background
of the canvas is divided into flat color zones in which pure blue
encounters pink, and a dense, banana-tree green is contrasted
against the dark chestnut brown of black skin.69
There is a painting of this period, however, that Pedrosa’s detailed
and colorful description doesn’t fit: A Negra. In this work alone
might the ampleness of Legrain’s frame as an object be more
complementary than supplemental, combining with the arresting
amplitude of the body that interrogates us frontally to produce a
material redundance. Perhaps this is what Legrain’s frames heralded,
and perhaps Tarsila’s decision to commission them prefigured an
intuition that would determine her work later in that decade, after
the publication of Oswald’s “Manifesto antropófago”: the strategy
of creating figures of an amplitude and size in tension with the field
in which the artist has inscribed them, signaling in some now
explicitly modern way a will toward overflow, a generative opposi-
tion, a matrix, a deforming force between imagination and repre-
sentation. That this tension was announced in a painting from early
in that decade, and, further, in a work representing the problem
figure of Brazilian national culture as a matricentric and racially
mixed society—the black woman, as mother and slave—should
take on particular significance. Legrain’s monumental frames for
Tarsila’s paintings—frames that turned them into ornament, that
integrated them into a decorative strategy—won them a space of
indifference, a neutral space where they could echo without facing
resistance. Yet through this ingenious ornamental strategy, her
work also announced that the modern message required another
field in order to be able to emerge: a field yet to come, broader,
more social, more shared. It so happens that A Negra, spreading
out from its excessive frame among avant-gardes that were
already seeing their power of friction fade, was a traumatic image;
but it was also, as the embodiment of a historical tragedy and an
emancipatory promise, the ground on which the utopian anthro-
pophagic project could feed. A Negra was an implacable gift.
The other paintings in the trio—Abaporu, a message and visual
manifesto, and Anthropophagy, a synthesis potentially generating
a new kind of humanity—were a speculative wager, a bet on a
possible world that history, with its delayed skirmishes, would only
confirm quite some time later. This explains the delay in the
reception of Tarsila’s work and its late assimilation at the end of the
1960s, when it finally came to fulfill its function as the emblem of
Pérez-Oramas 95
2017-08-14 9:31 AM
 Fig. 13 Albert Eckhout (Dutch,
c. 1610–1665). Tapuya Woman,
1641. Oil on canvas, 272 × 165 cm
(107 1/16 × 64 15/16 in.). National
Museum Denmark.

hungry for human flesh, offered Montaigne an inverted metaphor

for his own location in a bloody time and place, a place of religious
wars, murders, massacres, regicides. For him, cannibals (see fig. 13)
offered promise, being representatives of another possible culture.
“We may call these people barbarous insofar as the rules of
reason are concerned,” he writes, “but not in respect to ourselves,
who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them.”70 The key to this essay,
as to the modernity Tarsila embodied, is what has no place and
remains pending. Montaigne, in sibylline fashion, uses a rhetorical
device to articulate the inconclusiveness of history, which in its
multiple delays repeats incessantly. Having led his readers to
expect to hear from three Brazilian cannibals visiting the court of
the French king Charles IX, he leaves us in suspense, producing
a willful omission: the cannibals, he tells us, had come to transmit
three messages, “of which I have forgotten the third—which
distresses me—but I can still remember two.”

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Montaigne was surely aware of the abrupt interruption in another
essential text announcing a possible world different from our
own: Plato’s dialogue Critias (360 B.C.), which describes the land
of Atlantis, and which, in the form in which history has passed
it down to us, is cut short just as the “god of gods” Zeus is about to
explain that utopia’s fate. Another masterful example is Giordano
Bruno’s De Vinculis in Genere (A General Account of Bonding )
of 1588, which also leaves us in suspense just when the bonds
are about to be resolved in the union of bodies.71 In any case,
“Des Cannibales” does pass on the two messages of Charles IX’s
exotic visitors that Montaigne remembers: their surprise, first,
that a people has submitted itself to the rule of a king—and a child
king no less—instead of choosing its sovereign themselves, and
second, that half the kingdom lives comfortably and the other half in
poverty. This is the real, perfectable, precarious world, summarized
in two metonyms. And their third comment, their final message,
is lost, consigned to enigma and permanent imminence.

Montaigne also speaks of a mediocre interpreter, of a failure of

Brazil’s anthropophagic project. Only then could those paintings
be digested in their sophisticated simplicity, like a song by Veloso
or by Maria Bethânia. Until then, even as they appeared before
admiring eyes in Paris, São Paulo, and Rio, their message only partly
filtered into the culture.
In this regard, Tarsila was no different from the cannibals described
in Montaigne’s famous essay (which refers to Brazil without using
that name, calling it “the place in which Villegaignon landed”):
a people with a message only partly decipherable. These others,
communication and meaning. Perhaps that lacuna resembles the
primal scene, something that happened in the past but only makes
its way back to us through the labyrinths of the future. This is an
apt image for Tarsila, and perhaps also for the modernity that she
sought, a modernity always pending, always to come, its presence
always hoped for in the appropriation of some symbols by others,
in the neutralizing digestion of the tensions that constitute us, in
endless anthropophagy.

96 Tarsila, Melancholic Cannibal

001-192 CC.indd 96 2017-08-14 9:31 AM

 NOTES
Many thanks to Jen Hofer for her sensitive translation
of this essay. Unless otherwise specified, all Portuguese
translations are by Stephen Berg.
1 Pierre Fédida, “Le Cannibale mélancolique,” Nouvelle
revue de psychanalyse 6 (Autumn 1972), pp. 123–28.
2 Lygia Clark called her psychoanalysis with Fédida “one
of the most creative and mythological things I have ever
experienced.” See Clark, letter to Hélio Oiticica, July 6,
1974, in Lygia Clark–Hélio Oiticica: Cartas, 1964–1974,
ed. Luciano Figueiredo, with a preface by Silviano Santiago
(Editora UFRJ, 1996), p. 221.
3 Tarsila do Amaral wrote of Fernand Léger, “Two years
later [in 1923], this much-discussed artist opened an
academy in Paris on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs,
and I was happy to be among his students. . . . All
of us there were sub-Légers. We admired the master:
of necessity we bowed to his influence. From that large
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group of workers, the true artists would one day
find their own personalities while the others would keep
copying.” Tarsila, “Fernand Léger,” Diário de São Paulo,
April 2, 1936; translated in Aracy A. Amaral et al.,
Tarsila do Amaral, exh. cat. (Fundación Juan March,
2009), pp. 204–205.
4 See Paulo Herkenhoff, “General Introduction,” in
Paulo Herkenhoff and Adriano Pedrosa, XXIV Bienal
de São Paulo: Núcleo histórico; Antropofagia e histórias
de canibalismos, exh. cat. (Fundação Bienal de São
Paulo, 1998), pp. 45–46.
5 On this foot, and its links with the work of Joan
Miró, see Michele Greet, “Devouring Surrealism: Tarsila’s
Abaporu,” Papers of Surrealism 11 (Spring 2015),
pp. 1–39.
6 See Aracy A. Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo,
3rd ed. (Editora 34/Editora da Universidade de São
Paulo, 2003), p. 279.
7 Lygia Clark, letter to Hélio Oiticica, July 6, 1974, in
Lygia Clark–Hélio Oiticica: Cartas, p. 223.
8 I refer here to categories that I have used elsewhere
to explicate South America’s various local forms of
Modernism, grouping them by qualities they share while
respecting their differences. In “utopic messianism,”
modernity is seen as promise (in the Argentine artist
Joaquín Torres-García’s view of the South as a North,
for example); “archaeological utopia” refers to the
recuperation of pre-Columbian cultures in Mexico, Peru,
Chile, and Uruguay; and “involuntary residuality” and
“deforming indifference” refer to works that are modern
yet were not intentionally created as modernizing
projects—to modernities lacking in will to power and
therefore indifferent, residual, or distortive in relation to
their metropolitan parallels. See my essays “Armando
Reverón: La gruta de los objetos y la escena satírica,”
in Armando Reverón: El lugar de los objetos, exh. cat.
001-192 CC.indd 97
(Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, 2001), pp. 14–17;
“Armando Reverón and Modern Art in Latin America,”
in Armando Reverón, exh. cat. (Museum of Modern Art,
2007), p. 90; “Reverón, el torpedo y la arcadia marina,”
unpublished lecture, New York University, 2008;
“Is There a Modernity of the South?,” in Omnibus/
Documenta X (October 1997), pp. 14–15; “Gego, Residual
Reticuláreas, and Involuntary Modernism: Shadow,
Traces and Site,” in Questioning the Line: Gego in
Context, exh. cat. (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
2003), pp. 83–115; and “Traumatic Modernity: Policies
of the Unfathomable,” lecture, Fundació Tàpies,
Barcelona, October 19, 2013, www.macba.cat/en/
audio-luis-perez-oramas-tapies.
9 See Benedito Nunes, “Antropofagia ao alcance de
todos,” in Obras completas de Oswald de Andrade,
vol. 6, A utopia antropofágica (Globo y Secretaria
de Estado da Cultura, 1990), pp. 5–39. For an English-
language summary of this long and important essay,
see Nunes, “Anthropophagic Utopia, Barbarian Meta-
physics,” in Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea,
Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, exh.
cat. (Yale University Press/Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston, 2004), p. 57.
10 Claude Lévi-Strauss coined this classic distinction in
modern ethnology and structural anthropology between
societies at a low anthropic historical “temperature”
(those grounded in myth) and societies at a high anthropic
historical temperature (those grounded in history).
See Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Claude Lévi-
Strauss (Les Belles Lettres, 2010), p. 38.
11 Nunes, “Antropofagia ao alcance de todos,” p. 28.
12 On April 19, 1923, Tarsila wrote to her parents
from Paris: “I want to be the painter of my country.
I am so thankful to have spent my whole childhood on
the fazenda. . . . I want to be the country girl from
São Bernardo.” Quoted in Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e
seu tempo, p. 101. The celebrated first line of Oswald’s
poem “Atelier” (1925; pl. 94), meanwhile, dedicated to
Tarsila without naming her directly, reads “Caipirinha
enfeitada por Poiret.”
13 “Of all the modernist contributions, [anthropophagy
was] the one to meet with the greatest resistance,
in fact total rejection, having been repressed from the
1920s until the end of the ’60s.” Caetano Veloso,
Verdade tropical (Companhia das letras, 2012), p. 246;
translated in Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and
Revolution in Brazil, ed. Barbara Einzig, trans. Isabel de
Sena (Knopf, 2002), p. 158.
14 The monograph is Amaral’s Tarsila: Sua obra e seu
tempo, the first edition of which dates to 1975.
15 See Veloso, Verdade tropical, pp. 236–56; translated
in Veloso, Tropical Truth, pp. 153–69.
16 See Carlos Zilio, A querela do Brasil: A questão
da identidade da arte brasileira; O obra de Tarsila,
Di Cavalcanti e Portinari, 1922–1945 (Relume-
Dumará, 1997). First published as an article in the journal
Malasartes in 1976, Zilio’s text was developed into
a book during his exile in Paris in the late 1970s.
17 Oswald’s return to Anthropophagy is manifest in
the essays “Mensagem ao antropófago desconhecido
(Da França Antártica),” Revista Acadêmica 67 (Nov.
1946); and “Um aspecto antropofágico da cultura
brasileira—O homem cordial,” 1950, printed in Oswald
de Andrade, Estética e política, ed. Maria Eugênia
Boaventura (Globo, 1991), p. 447; and Obras Completas,
p. 157.
18 “Oswald de Andrade, as a great Constructivist
writer, was also a prophet of the new left and of pop
art,” writes Veloso. “He was endlessly interesting
to the artists who were in their youth during the 60s.
This ‘indigestible cannibal,’ rejected by Brazilian culture
for decades, who had created a Brazilian utopia that
consisted of overcoming patriarchal messianism in
favor of a primal and modern matriarchy, became for
us the great father.” Veloso, Verdade tropical, p. 251.
This passage, included here in my translation, is absent
from the English edition of Veloso’s book.
19 See Hélio Oiticica, letter to Lygia Clark, November 8,
1968, in Lygia Clark–Hélio Oiticica: Cartas, p. 73.
20 Oswald, “Manifesto antropófago,” Revista de
Antropofagia 1, 1 (May 1928), pp. 7, translated by Hélio
Oiticica in Carlos Basualdo, Tropicália: A Revolution in
Brazilian Culture (Cosac Naify, 2005), pp. 207, and in this
publication, p. 177.
21 “Her painting, in the end, discerned anthropophagy—
even before it was named.” Sônia Salzstein, “A audácia
de Tarsila,” in Herkenhoff and Pedrosa, XXIV Bienal de
São Paulo, p. 365.
22 Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto antropófago,” p. 47.
23 As Gonzaga Duque had mournfully observed in
a review of the Exposição Nacional of 1908, in Rio de
Janeiro: “But, sirs, a people’s art is not the result of the
will of one group, nor of the attempts of one school.”
Quoted in Zilio, A querela do Brasil, p. 47.
24 Following the arguments of Fredric Jameson,
I distinguish here between modernity, understood as a
system of collective advances in which the arts were
just one element (“the classic moderns,” in Jameson’s
words), and Modernism (“the full blown ideology of
modernism”). Modernity unfolds as an artistic style, one
that does not identify “models” to follow, where-
as Modernism, as the artistic ideology of modernity,
unfolds as a second moment, always referring to earlier
predecessors in the history of modern art. See Jameson,
A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the
Present (Verso, 2002), pp. 197–200. Neither term is to
be confused with the current use in Brazil of the term
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2017-08-14 9:31 AM
 Modernismo to classify the work of modern artists
linked to the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922.
25 On the parallel between the modern scenes in
Russia and Brazil, see Zilio, A querela do Brasil, p. 75.
26 Salzstein, “A audácia de Tarsila,” p. 370.
27 The fact that Brazilian modernity was not initially
a matter of literature has been extensively discussed,
beginning with Mário Pedrosa’s crystal-clear analysis
of the Semana de Arte Moderna: “The starting point is
not literary. The holy fire did not come from readings,
but from a direct experience between the naïve young
barbarian Brazilian and the magical powers of expression
and aggression of hitherto ignored pictorial forms.”
Pedrosa, “Modern Art Week,” in Mário Pedrosa:
Primary Documents, ed. Glória Ferreira and Paulo
Herkenhoff (Museum of Modern Art, 2015), p. 178.
28 For an exhaustive analysis—a genetic microreading
— of the authorized discourses of Anthropophagy
(Oswald’s “Manifesto antropófago” and “Manifesto da
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Poesia Pau-Brasil”)—see Beatriz Azevedo, Antropofagia:
Palimpsesto selvagem (Cosac Naify, 2016).
29 See Pascal Quignard, Sur l’image qui manque à
nos jours (Arléa, 2014).
30 It is telling, and significant, that a work that is a
foundational modern painting for Brazil should depict a
black woman. This fact reflects both the racial issues
embedded in all societies in the Americas and a
singular difference between racial issues in Brazil and
in North America. It is commonly understood that
Brazilian culture structurally institutes the primacy of
the mother figure, to the point where it has been called
a “matricentric society.” It is additionally significant,
then—even revelatory—that Tarsila should represent
the central maternal figure in Brazil through the figure
of a black woman.
31 Mário de Andrade, “Tarsiwaldo,” 1925. The
manuscript is reproduced in Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra
e seu tempo, p. 213.
32 “In the same way that Oswald’s two manifestos . . .
must be analyzed together and diachronically, Tarsila’s
three most important paintings—A Negra (1923),
Abaporu (1928), and Antropofagia (1929)—are best
approached as a triptych or unified group.” Jorge
Schwartz, “Tarsila and Oswald in the Wise Laziness of
the Sun,” in Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, p. 101.
The link between these three paintings is obvious and
a commonplace in interpretations of Tarsila’s work,
an issue addressed by Stephanie D’Alessandro at the
end of her essay “A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s
Anthropophagy” in this publication, pp. 38–55. On the
idea of the series of transformations, see Hubert
Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman
(MIT Press, 1994), pp. 284–85: “And with regard to
structure, as [Jacques] Lacan liked to point out (and
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Lévi-Strauss said the same thing), one must learn to
count higher than two, and at least to three: for works
of art, like myths, like man itself, can ‘converse’ among
themselves only insofar as they conform to the
regimen conditioning all discourse, that of a polar
opposition and regulated exchange of positions
of enunciation, in which reference to a third party is
obligatory (I, You, He).” See also Lévi-Strauss, La
Voie des masques (Plon, 1979), p. 144.
33 Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, p. 286.
34 I refer here generally to the psychoanalytical theory
of Nachträglichkeit—“afterwardness”—developed
by the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche out of a
series of letters between Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm
Fliess, and taking as his point of departure Lacan’s
use of the term après-coup, meaning the realization of
an event after a period of time needed for “under-
standing.” This theory has been widely applied to art
history and anthropological arguments in recent years,
from Damisch to Daniel Arasse, Carlo Ginzburg, Salva-
tore Settis, and others. The classic understanding of
Nachträglichkeit involves the repression of a traumatic
memory that then becomes the object of a belated
return, caused by a different experience at a different
time. As applied in this argument, and following authors
such as Herkenhoff, Salzstein, and Zilio, the definitive
significance of Tarsila’s work for modern Brazilian society
was only realized when its potential for friction—its
traumatic dimension—eventually became “digestible”
for the Brazilian social body.
35 See Marcos Augusto Gonçalves, 1922: A semana
que não terminou (Companhia das Letras, 2012),
p. 79.
36 For a thorough analysis of A Negra, see D’Alessan-
dro, “A Negra, Abaporu, and Tarsila’s Anthropophagy.”
The essay discusses issues of dating related to this
photograph and includes a quotation in which Tarsila
remembers a woman, formerly enslaved, whom she
had known as a child on her family’s rural estate;
see p. 49.
37 Nunes, “Antropofagia ao alcance de todos,”
pp. 44–45.
38 Francis Picabia, “Manifeste Cannibale Dada,”
Dada 7 (March 1920); and Cannibale 1 and 2 (Au Sans
Pareil, 1920).
39 Nunes, “Antropofagia ao alcance de todos,” p. 29.
40 Veloso, Verdade tropical, pp. 240–42; translated
in Veloso, Tropical Truth, p. 156.
41 See Jean Laplanche, Problématiques VI: L’Après-
coup (Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), p. 53.
42 Haroldo de Campos, “Tarsila: uma pintura
estrutural,” in Tarsila: 50 anos de pintura, exh. cat.
(Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 1969),
pp. 35–37.
43 Herkenhoff, “Color in Brazilian Modernism—
Navigating with Many Compasses,” in Herkenhoff
and Pedrosa, XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, p. 350.
44 Ibid.
45 Jean-Claude Bonne, “L’Ornement—la différence
dans la répétition,” in La Variation (Association des
Conférences, I.A.V., 1998), p. 81.
46 De Campos, “Tarsila: uma pintura estrutural,”
p. 36.
47 On Tarsila and Surrealism, see Flávio de Carvalho,
“Uma análise da exposição de Tarsila,” Diário da
Noite, Sept. 16, 1929; Maria José Justino, O Banquete
canibal: A modernidade em Tarsila do Amaral (1886–
1973), Série Pesquisa 62 (Editora UFPR, 2002), p. 160;
Greet, “Devouring Surrealism”; and Aracy A. Amaral,
“O Surreal em Tarsila,” Mirante das artes 3 (May–
June 1967), pp. 23–25.
48 Aracy A. Amaral, “O modernismo à luz do ‘art
déco,’” in Arte e meio artístico: Entre a feijoada e o
x-burguer (Editora Nobel, 1983), p. 59. For a discussion
of four Latin American women artists in Paris during
these years, including Tarsila and Anita Malfatti, see
Greet, “‘Exhilarating Exile’: Four Latin American
Women Exhibit in Paris,” Artelogie 5 (October 2013),
http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article262.
49 See Aracy A. Amaral, “Tarsila Revisited,” in Arte
e meio artístico, p. 63.
50 Paul Fierens, “Les Petites expositions,” Journal
des débats politiques et littéraires, June 20, 1926,
p. 3.
51 Gaston de Pawlowski, “Tarsila,” Le Journal,
June 22, 1926, p. 3.
52 Maurice Raynal, “Les Arts,” L’Intransigeant,
June 13, 1926, p. 2.
53 See Nicolas Poussin, letter to Paul Fréart de
Chantelou, April 28, 1639, in Nicolas Poussin: Lettres
et propos sur l’art, ed. Anthony Blunt (Hermann,
1989), p. 45.
54 The issue of the frame as a formal supplement—
whether through its transformation or its absence—has
been a determining factor in the history of the Brazilian
(and Argentinian) constructive project. See Aleca
Le Blanc, “The Material of Form: How Concrete Artists
responded to the Second Industrial Revolution in
Latin America,” in Making Art Concrete: Works from
Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps
de Cisneros, exh. cat. (Getty Publications, 2017).
55 See Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study
in the Psychology of Decorative Arts (Cornell University
Press, 1979); and Hans Belting, The Invisible Master-
piece (Reaktion, 2001).
56 Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the
Inorganic: Art, Architecture and the Extension of Life
(University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 64.
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 57 Jacques Derrida, “Parergon,” in La Vérité en
peinture (Flammarion, 1986), p. 63; for an English
translation, see The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Ian McLeod (University of Chicago
Press, 1987), p. 54.
58 Such is the hypothesis, evidently speculative,
proposed by Amaral in Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo,
p. 231, and in “Tarsila Revisited,” p. 63. But the
artist’s acceptance of Blaise Cendrars’s catalogue essay
and Pierre Legrain’s frames is the equivalent of an
authorial decision.
59 What does exist is the check, in Tarsila’s hand,
with the relevant sum paid to Legrain; repr. in Amaral,
Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo, p. 294.
60 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, pp. 57, 59.
61 On this large issue, see Papapetros, On the
Animation of the Inorganic.
62 Aracy A. Amaral, “Novas reflexões sobre Tarsila:
68 Maria Gough, for example, has discussed the
aestheticization of Russian Constructivism in Paris
in the mid-1920s, visible in the use of materials
without patinas, such as Plexiglas and aluminum, in
the work of such artists as Antoine Pevsner. Gough,
presentation at the symposium “Joaquín Torres-García:
The Arcadian Modern,” Museum of Modern Art,
New York, January 28, 2016, www.youtube.com/
watch?v=wWeYsb8i7qo&t=9536s.
69 Pedrosa, “Modern Art Week,” p. 184.
70 Michel de Montaigne, “Essais, Livre I, Chap. 32,”
in Oeuvres complètes (Seuil, 1967), p. 101; for an
English translation, see “Chapter XXX—Of Cannibals,”
Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. William Carew
Hazlitt, trans. Charles Cotton, Project Gutenberg EBook
#3600, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-
h/3600-h.htm.
71 See Plato, The Critias, Or Atlanticus (Pantheon,
1944), 121 b, c; and Giordano Bruno, Des Liens

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1. A fórmula e o mágico intuitivo,” in Arte e meio
artístico, p. 88. (Allia, 2001), p. 86.
63 The nonneutral framing of major works of modern
art was not uncommon during these years, as is
illustrated by Jacques Doucet’s commission of a Legrain
frame for Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907;
The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Legrain also
designed elaborate frames for a series of works
by Francis Picabia. See George Baker, “Leather and
Lace,” October 131 (Winter 2010), pp. 116–49.
64 See Zilio, A querela do Brasil, p. 45: “After studying
in São Paulo with Pedro Alexandrino and George
Elpons, Tarsila completed the second phase of that
traditional recorrido, moving into an encounter with
French academicism in Émile Renard’s atelier and at
the Académie Julian. Her experiences with modern art
until 1922 were limited to seeing and disliking Anita’s
exhibition in 1917, and visiting the 1920 Salon
d’Automne in Paris, which left her somewhere be-
tween perplexed and confused.” On Tarsila’s reaction
to the 1922 Salon d’Automne in Paris, documented in
a letter to Anita Malfatti from October 19 of that year,
see Juan Manuel Bonet, “A Quest for Tarsila,” in Amaral
et al., Tarsila do Amaral, p. 70.
65 On the rich panorama of Latin American artists
in Paris in the 1920s, see José Antonio Navarrete,
“Respondiendo a una encuesta imaginada: la vanguardia
artística latinoamericana en París,” in Maria Clara Bernal,
ed., Redes intelectuales: Arte y política en América
Latina (Universidad de los Andes, 2015), p. 307.
66 See Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde
Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (Thames &
Hudson, 2000).
67 Paulo Herkenhoff, “Color in Brazilian Modernism,”
p. 338.

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 55 The Bull, 1928 (cat. 57)

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101

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 56 The Lake, 1928 (cat. 59)

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102

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 57 Sleep, c. 1928 (cat. 62)

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103

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 58 Urutu Viper, 1928 (cat. 60)

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104

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 59 Distance, 1928 (cat. 58)

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105

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 60 Landscape with Five Palm 61 Forest, 1929 (cat. 68)
Trees I, c. 1928 (cat. 61)

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106

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 62 Anthropophagic Landscape I,
c. 1929 (cat. 74)

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108

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 63 Anthropophagic Landscape II,
c. 1929 (cat. 75)

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109

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 64 Anthropophagic Landscape III, 66 Anthropophagic Landscape V,
c. 1929 (cat. 76) c. 1929 (cat. 78)

65 Anthropophagic Landscape IV,

c. 1929 (cat. 77)

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111

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 67 Landscape with Creature and
Palm Trees, 1929 (cat. 70)

68 Hanging Palm Tree II, 1929

(cat. 69)

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112

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 69 Setting Sun, 1929 (cat. 72)

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113

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 70 City (The Street ), 1929 (cat. 67) 71 Landscape with Anthropophagic
Animal III, c. 1930 (cat. 83)

72 Anthropophagic Drawing of
Saci-Pererê I, 1929 (cat. 65)

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115

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 73 Animal with Triangle, 1930
(cat. 79)

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116

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 74 Calmness II, 1929 (cat. 66)

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117

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 75 Anthropophagy I, 1929 (cat. 64)

76 Anthropophagic Figure in the

Landscape, c. 1929 (cat. 73)

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118

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 77 Anthropophagy, 1929 (cat. 63)

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119

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 78 Study for Composition
(Lonely Figure) II, 1930 (cat. 81)

79 Study for Composition

(Lonely Figure) III, 1930 (cat. 82)

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120

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 80 Composition (Lonely Figure),
1930 (cat. 80)

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121

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 81 Postcard, 1929 (cat. 71)

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 82 Workers, 1933 (cat. 84)

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 CHRONOLOGY

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 1886
September 1
Tarsila do Amaral is born in Capivari, São
Paulo, to Lydia Dias de Aguiar and José
Estanislau do Amaral Filho, the owner of a
large coffee plantation. As a girl, she will
spend much of her time at the fazendas
São Bernardo, in the municipality of Rafard,
and Santa Teresa do Alto, in Itupeva.
1888
The Golden Law abolishes slavery in Brazil.
1889
Proclamation of the Republic of Brazil.
1891
The first constitution of the Republic of Brazil
is ratified, combining elements of presidential,
federal, democratic, and republican forms
of government.
1898
Studies at the Colégio Santana, São Paulo.
1901
February
Begins boarding school at the Colégio Sion,
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São Paulo.
1902
Travels to Europe for the first time with
her parents and sister, Cecília.
1904
Returns to Brazil and marries André Teixeira
Pinto, a physician. On their honeymoon, the
couple travels through Argentina and Chile.
1906
Tarsila’s daughter, Dulce, is born. The family
moves to Fazenda Sertão, which is owned
by Tarsila’s parents.
1913
Separates from Pinto and moves to
São Paulo.
1916
Begins to work in the studio of William Zadig,
a Swedish sculptor based in São Paulo. She
also studies with the Italian-Brazilian sculptor
Oreste Mantovani.
1917
Studies drawing and painting under the
instruction of Pedro Alexandrino, who
recommends that she carry a notebook to,
as she later recalled him saying, “preserve
the lines of certain drawings by means of
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copying. ‘It is always good to keep things.
You might need them someday.’”1 The
artist builds her own studio—one of the
first in São Paulo—on Rua Vitório, where
Alexandrino gives her lessons.
1919
Studies painting with George Elpons,
a German artist based in São Paulo.
1920
June 3
Embarks for Europe with Dulce, whom
she enrolls at a boarding school in London.
She will settle in Paris and study at the
Académie Julian and later with the painter
and engraver Émile Renard.
October 26
From Paris, writes to her friend and fellow
artist Anita Malfatti, “Look, Anita, almost
all of it runs to Cubism or Futurism. Lots of
impressionist and Dadaist landscapes.”2
Confides that she does “not approve of
exaggerated Cubism and Futurism.”
1922
February 11
The Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art
Week) is held at the Municipal Theater in
São Paulo; it runs through February 18. This
series of events, concerts, poetry readings,
and exhibitions constitutes one in a series
of steps toward Modernism and a rejection
of Brazil’s prevailing national tradition and
culture. Key participants include Malfatti;
the painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti; sculptor
Victor Brecheret; writers and poets Mário de
Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Graça Aranha,
Sérgio Milliet, and Menotti del Picchia; and
composers Guiomar Novaes and Heitor
Villa-Lobos.
April 30
The 135th Salon of the Société des Artistes
Français opens at the Grand Palais des
Champs-Élysées, Paris; it runs through June
30. Tarsila exhibits Portrait of a Woman
(p. 39, fig. 1), which she later calls Passport,
since it gained her entry to the Salon.
June
Returns to São Paulo and forms the Grupo
dos Cinco (Group of Five) with Mário,
Oswald, Malfatti, and del Picchia.
Paints portraits of Oswald and Mário; her
work shows Malfatti’s influence in its
expressive brushwork and a newly vibrant
palette. She also creates a portrait of
Aranha, which is reproduced as a supple-
ment for Klaxon, the first publication of
the Brazilian vanguard (see pl. 89).
September 7
Exhibits The Spanish Woman (1922; private
collection, Brasilia) in the 1a Exposição
geral de belas artes (General Exhibition of
Fine Arts), which opens at the Palácio das
Indústrias in São Paulo; the exhibition runs
through July 2, 1923.
December
Returns to Europe.
1923
January
Oswald joins Tarsila in Paris; together they
travel to Spain and Portugal.
February
Tarsila rents an apartment at 9, rue Hégésippe
Moreau, which she believes is the former
studio of painter Paul Cézanne; this serves
as her Paris home until January 1925.
March
Works in the studio of painter André Lhote,
where she will stay for three months.
In her 1952 essay “Recordações de Paris”
(Recollections of Paris), she describes
Lhote as “the bridge between classicism
and Modernism.”3
April 19
Writes to her parents, “I feel increasingly
Brazilian: I want to be the painter of
my country.”4
May (?)
Meets Pablo Picasso and visits his studio,
where she sees works by Henri Rousseau,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and other artists.
Years later, publishes the article “Um mestre
da pintura moderna” (A Master of Modern
Painting) in Diário de São Paulo, in which
she recounts her first visit.
May 3
Tarsila and Oswald attend a dinner organized
by the Brazilian ambassador, Luis Martins
de Souza Dantas, in honor of the aviator
Alberto Santos-Dumont. They also spend
time with Brazilian modernists, including Di
Cavalcanti, Malfatti, and Milliet, as well as
writer Paulo Prado, poet Ronald de Carvalho,
painter Vicente do Rego Monteiro, and
patron Olívia Guedes Penteado. The pair
accompanies Penteado to exhibitions of
modern art and the studios of modern artists.
125
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 May 11
In a lecture at the Sorbonne, Oswald identifies
Tarsila and other Brazilian artists as “laying
the foundations of a style of painting that is
genuinely Brazilian and up-to-date.”5
May 28
Tarsila and Oswald meet the Swiss poet
Blaise Cendrars, who gives her a small
painting of the Eiffel Tower (1913; Pinacoteca
São Paulo) and dedicates it to her. Cendrars
will introduce the couple to his circle of
friends, including artists Constantin Brancusi,
Albert Gleizes, and Fernand Léger; writer
Jean Cocteau; composer Erik Satie; and art
dealer Ambroise Vollard.
May 29
Exhibition for the inauguration of the Maison
de l’Amérique Latine opens in Paris at 9,
rue de Presbourg. Tarsila’s Portrait of Mário
de Andrade (p. 39, fig. 2) is included.
After May
Makes Vollard’s acquaintance and sees his
collection, including paintings by Renoir and
Cézanne. In 1936 the artist will share mem-
ories of the visit in the Diário de São Paulo.
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June
Studies with Gleizes for about a month and a
half. She will later describe the artist as “the
Cubist pontiff” and his school as “based on
spiritualist concepts of aesthetic theories.”6
July 3
Meets Brancusi in his studio; in 1936 Tarsila
writes about the encounter for the Diário
de São Paulo.
August 5
Writes to her family that when she returns
to Brazil at the end of the year, she would
like to stay in the northeastern state of Bahia,
where she could find “precious documents
of the [type of] Brazilian art that is my
present direction.”7 She also mentions a
possible exhibition of her work.
August 12
Tarsila and Oswald travel to Italy and visit
Santa Margherita, Siena, Pisa, Rome, Capri,
Naples, Milan, Verona, and Venice. They
return to Paris in early September.
October 6
Visits Léger’s studio with some of her most
recent work. He especially likes A Negra
(pl. 13) and hopes that his students will have
a chance to see the canvas, too.
12 6 Tarsila do Amaral
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October 8
Starts lessons with Léger, which will
continue for some weeks.
Week of October 21
The dealer Léonce Rosenberg visits Tarsila’s
studio and offers her an exhibition when
she is ready, which she excitedly reports to
her family.8
November 1
The Salon d’Automne opens; it will close
on December 16. There, Penteado will
purchase a sculpture by Victor Brecheret,
which she orders for her family tomb in São
Paulo. Through Rosenberg, she buys works
by Brancusi, Léger, Lhote, Picasso, and
Tsuguharu Foujita; these, along with those
acquired by Tarsila and Prado, will become
the first examples of international modern
art to be brought to Brazil. Around this time,
Tarsila also acquires Robert Delaunay’s
Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911/23;
Art Institute of Chicago).
November 15
Mário, writing from São Paulo, implores the
artist,“Tarsila, Tarsila, return back into your-
self. Abandon Gris and Lhote, impresarios of
decrepit criticism and decadent aesthesias!
Abandon Paris! Tarsila! Tarsila! Come to
the virgin forest, where there is no black art,
where there are no gentle streams either.
There is VIRGIN FOREST. I have created
virgin-forestism. I am a virgin-forester. That
is what the world, art, Brazil, and my dearest
Tarsila need.”9
December 23 or 24
Returns to Brazil, arriving in Rio de Janeiro.
December 25
The Rio de Janeiro newspaper Correio da
Manhã features an interview with Tarsila on
the current state of the arts in Europe. She
talks about the freedom and inventiveness of
Cubism while also affirming her intentions:
“I am profoundly Brazilian and will study
the taste and the art of our caipiras. In the
hinterlands, I hope to learn from those who
have not been corrupted by the academies.”10
1924
Oswald’s Memorias sentimentais de João
Miramar (Sentimental Memoirs of John
Seaborne) is published with a cover by Tarsila.
February 6
Cendrars travels to São Paulo, invited
by Prado.
After February 6
Together with Oswald and Penteado, Tarsila
travels to Rio de Janeiro to experience
Carnival with Cendrars. She will make many
quick drawings and notes that she will later
use for paintings such as Hills of the Favela
(pl. 24) and Carnival in Madureira (pl. 21).
February 23
Writes to her daughter, Dulce, about a new
painting: “I am painting some truly Brazilian
pictures that have been very well received.
Now I’ve done one called A Cuca [pl. 44].
It is a strange animal, in the forest with
a frog, an armadillo and another invented
animal.”11
March 14
Exposition d’Art Américain-Latin (Exhibition
of Latin American Art ) opens at the Musée
Galliera under the auspices of the Maison
de l’Amérique Latin and the Académie
Internationale des Beaux-Arts; it will close
on April 15. Tarsila’s work is not included.
This undertaking is the first to classify “Latin
American art” as a distinct category.
March 18
Oswald publishes “Manifesto Pau-Brasil”
in the Correio da Manhã .
Week of April 13
Tarsila, Oswald and his son Nonê, Cendrars,
and Penteado undertake a twenty-day trip to
historic cities in the southeastern Brazilian
state of Minas Gerais. Joining them are Mário,
politician Gofredo da Silva Telles, and
lawyer and writer René Thiollier. The group
is impressed by the work of the colonial
architect and sculptor Aleijadinho. Tarsila
will later recall, “In Minas I found the
colors I loved as a child. Later, I was taught
that they were ugly and caipira [countrified].
I followed the hum of refined taste . . . But
later, I took my revenge on that oppression,
transferring them to my canvases: purest blue,
violet pink, vivid yellow, strident green.”12
During her visits, Tarsila will make over one
hundred drawings, including Ouro Preto
and Padre Faria (Front of Sabará) (pl. 26),
Study of Mountains (Front of Study of
Landscape) (pl. 25), and Train Station (pl.
16), as well as studies, sketches, and notes.
Some will lead to such canvases as Lagoa
Santa (pl. 48) as well as the illustrations for
books of poems inspired by the trip written
by both Oswald and Cendrars.
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 July 5–27
The Paulista Rebellion challenges the
existing political order in Brazil. Together
with Oswald, Tarsila escapes with her
family to Fazenda Sertão and visits Penteado
at Fazenda Santo Antônio in Araras.
September
Returns to Paris.
November
Oswald joins Tarsila in Paris.
December
Cendrars publishes Feuilles de route (Road
Maps), illustrated by Tarsila and featuring
a drawing of A Negra on its cover (pl. 93).
Mid-December
Oswald asks Tarsila to marry him.
1925
March
Following Oswald’s advice, Tarsila leaves
Paris for Brazil with the goal of making
paintings in São Paulo for a future exhibition.
August 22
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Oswald returns to Brazil and brings copies
of his recently published book Pau Brasil
(pl. 92), which features a cover and illustrations
by Tarsila.
December 7
Mário writes the poem “Tarsiwaldo” in
honor of the couple.
1926
January
From Brazil, Cendrars sends poems that will
constitute the preface of Tarsila’s catalogue
for her eventual Galerie Percier exhibition.
January 13
Tarsila, Oswald, Nonê, Dulce, writer Cláudio
de Sousa, and the former president of the
state of São Paulo, Altino Arantes, travel to
the Middle East. They depart from Marseilles
and visit southern Italy, Greece, Lebanon,
Cyprus, Israel, and Egypt. Tarsila will make
about one hundred sketches and studies.
Mid-February
Tarsila commissions the Art Deco designer
and bookbinder Pierre Legrain to make
frames for the paintings she will show at
her exhibition.
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April 10
Rosenberg writes to Oswald about
organizing an exhibition at Galerie Percier.
May
Tarsila, Oswald, and Penteado travel
to Rome.
June 7
Tarsila, the artist’s first solo exhibition,
opens at Galerie Percier; it closes on June 23.
In addition to drawings and watercolors,
she shows seventeen paintings, all framed by
Legrain, including A Cuca (pl. 44), A Negra
(pl. 13) as Négresse, Hills of the Favela
(pl. 24), Lagoa Santa (pl. 48), and The Railway
Station (pl. 14). She donates A Cuca to
the Grenoble Museum with the assistance
of art critic Maximilien Gauthier.
August 15
Returns to Brazil with Oswald, arriving in
Rio de Janeiro.
August 17
The Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Jornal
publishes an interview with Tarsila along
with a self-portrait.
August 21
The magazine Para Todos publishes a photo
of the artist (see pl. 98) at the opening of
her Galerie Percier exhibition.
September 1
Vogue Paris features an illustrated article
on Tarsila.
October 22
Tarsila’s work is included in the Salon du
Franc; the exhibition closes on October 31.
October 30
Tarsila and Oswald marry; they will divide
their time between the city of São Paulo
and the Fazenda Santa Teresa do Alto.
November 17
Brancusi’s work is shown at the Brummer
Gallery, New York, until December 15. The
artist sends a catalogue to Tarsila and Oswald,
annotating a drawing of The Kiss (1916;
Philadelphia Museum of Art) with a dedication
to the “newlyweds” (pl. 100).
1927
Tarsila and Oswald host many friends at
Santa Teresa do Alto, including Mário, Prado,
journalist Antônio de Alcântara Machado,
and poet Manuel Bandeira.
The government approves a law permitting
repression of communist activities and
trade unions.
August
Tarsila and Oswald travel to Salvador, Bahia,
to meet Mário, Dulce, and Penteado and
her niece Margarida.
Oswald publishes his second book of poems,
O Primeiro caderno do alumno de poesia
Oswald de Andrade (First Notebook of the
Poetry Student Oswald de Andrade) (pl. 101).
It is a collection of work from his Pau-Brasil
period illustrated with his own drawings;
the book’s cover bears an illustration
by Tarsila.
1928
January 11
Tarsila gives Oswald the painting Abaporu
(pl. 54) as a birthday present; Oswald and a
friend, poet Raul Bopp, are “shaken” and
conclude “that an important intellectual
movement could come of this.”13 Together
they consult a Tupi-Guarani dictionary to find
a title, settling on the combination of aba,
meaning “person,” and poru, signifying
“who eats.”
February 16
Tarsila announces her 1928 exhibition in
an interview in the São Paulo newspaper
Diário da Noite.
March
Tarsila travels to Europe with Oswald.
April
Bopp writes Cobra Norato (Black Snake),
which he dedicates to Tarsila; the poem
will be published in 1931 (pl. 105).
May
Inspired by Tarsila’s painting Abaporu, the
periodical Revista de Antropofagia (Journal
of Anthropophagy ) is launched. Oswald’s
“Manifesto antropófago” (Manifesto of
Anthropophagy) appears in its first issue,
illustrated with a drawing of Abaporu by
Tarsila (pl. 104).
June 18
The artist’s second solo exhibition, again titled
Tarsila, opens at Galerie Percier; it closes
on July 2. The show features twelve works
with frames by Legrain. Abaporu is listed as
Nu (Nude). Other paintings include The Bull
(pl. 55), The Lake (pl. 56), Manacá (pl. 50),
Sleep (pl. 57), and Urutu Viper (pl. 58).
Chronology 127
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 October 8
The first exhibition of the Association
Artistique des Vrais Indépendants opens;
it runs through November 26 at Versailles;
Tarsila shows four works, including
A Negra (pl. 13) and Manacá (pl. 50).
December 9
The newspaper O Jornal interviews Tarsila.
1929
March
The magazine Movimento brasileiro
announces Tarsila’s upcoming solo exhibitions
in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
July 10
Tarsila, the artist’s first-ever solo exhibition
in Brazil, opens at the Palace Hotel, Rio de
Janeiro; it closes on July 30 and then travels
to the Prédio Glória in São Paulo, where it
runs from September 17 to 24. The works
exhibited at both venues are the same
(thirty-six paintings and an unstated number
of drawings), except City (The Street) (pl. 70),
which was added to the São Paulo presen-
tation. For the catalogue, Geraldo Ferraz
collects previous reviews of Tarsila’s Paris
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exhibitions in 1926 and 1928, as well as
texts written about Tarsila in Brazil. The
last two days of the São Paulo exhibition
include work from her private collection
acquired in Paris.
July 27
The Rio de Janeiro newspaper Crítica
publishes an interview with Tarsila.
Fall
Tarsila and Oswald separate.
October 26
The Salon des Surindépendants opens
at the Parc des Expositions, Porte
de Versailles.
October 29
The United States stock market crashes,
causing a drop in coffee prices, on which
the Brazilian economy (and Tarsila’s family)
rely heavily.
1930
Facing financial difficulties, Tarsila takes a
position at the Pinacoteca do Estado de
São Paulo. She will organize a catalogue of
the collection but lose her post when the
government is overthrown in the Revolution
of 1930.
12 8 Tarsila do Amaral
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March 26
The exhibition of the Casa Modernista, São
Paulo, designed by Gregori Warchavchik,
opens. Five of Tarsila’s paintings, including
Postcard (pl. 81) and Hills of the Favela
(pl. 24), decorate the house’s interior rooms,
along with works by Malfatti, Di Cavalcanti,
Victor Brecheret, and Cícero Dias. The
show closes in April.
June 6
Tarsila is included in the group show
Exposition d’art moderne: l’École de Paris
(Exhibiton of Modern Art: The School of
Paris) at the Palacete Glória, organized by
the poet Géo-Charles and the artist Vicente
do Rego Monteiro. She shows works from
the 1920s, including Hills of the Favela
(pl. 24); the exhibition closes on June 20.
October 11
The First Representative Collection of
Paintings by Contemporary Brazilian Artists
opens at the International Art Center of the
Roerich Museum, New York; it closes on
October 30. This is the first time that Tarsila’s
work is exhibited in the Unites States;
three paintings, including Hills of the Favela
(pl. 24), are shown.
October 24
Getúlio Vargas, who lost Brazil’s 1930
presidential election, organizes a bloodless
coup known as the Revolution of 1930.
Vargas will hold sole power until July 17,
1934, when he is elected president by the
constituent assembly.
1931
Tarsila meets Osório César, a young doctor
dedicated to the artistic expression of
patients in psychiatric hospitals. A leftist
intellectual, César dreams of visiting the
Soviet Union. Tarsila will finance their trip
by selling some of the paintings from her
private collection.
March
Travels to Paris and, through the introduction
of Russian critic Serge Romoff, journeys
to Moscow.
June 10
The solo exhibition Tarsila do Amaral opens
at the Museum of Western Art, Moscow.
June 27
Tarsila writes from Moscow to her mother,
“Now I am seeing what Russia is. How many
fantasies I’ve had about it.”14 Impressed
by the “great collective effort,” she wrote,
“When I get to Paris I’m going to provide
myself with a good Marxist library, and do
a lot of studying.”
July 1
In Paris, Tarsila participates in the
Fortifications project, in which Sonia and
Robert Delaunay and their friends build
houses for artists.
October 23
Tarsila participates in the Salon des
Surindépendants; the exhibition closes
on November 22.
December
Tarsila returns to Brazil.
1932
July
The Constitutional Revolution takes place
against the Vargas government.
As a consequence of her trip to the USSR
and participation in leftist group meetings,
Tarsila is arrested and held for almost
one month at the Presídio do Paraíso in
São Paulo.
1933
March
Tarsila presents the lecture “A Mulher na
luta contra a guerra” (Woman in the Fight
against the War) at the Continental Anti-
War Committee in Montevideo, Uruguay.
While there, she holds a conference on
Soviet poster art at the Clube dos Artistas
Modernos (Modern Artists Club), presenting
posters she brought back from her trip.
She meets the Mexican social realist painter
David Alfaro Siqueiros and the writer Blanca
Luz Brum. Paints two of her greatest socialist
paintings, Workers (pl. 82) and Second
Class (p. 21, fig.10).
October
Holds her first retrospective exhibition
at the Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro.
She presents sixty-seven paintings and
106 drawings.
1934
Tarsila’s granddaughter, Beatriz, is born.
Vargas is elected president. A new
constitution grants the central govern-
ment greater authority and provides
for universal suffrage.
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 1936
Begins to write articles for the Diário de
São Paulo, especially about her experiences
in Paris.
1937
Exhibits in the Salão de Maio in São Paulo.
November 10
Vargas, responding to a perceived communist
threat, declares a state of emergency,
enacts a new constitution, and dissolves
congress. The new administration, known as
the Estado Novo (New State), abolishes
political parties and centralizes power; it also
diversifies the agricultural sector, introduces
extensive educational reforms, and enacts
a minimum wage for workers.
1938
Exhibits in the Salão de Maio.
1939
Exhibits in the Salão de Maio and shows
two paintings, including A Negra (pl. 13).
Publishes “Pintura Pau-Brasil e Antropofagia”
in the journal RASM—Revista anual do
Salão de Maio.
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1940
November
A special issue of the journal Revista
Acadêmica is dedicated to Tarsila.
1941
Illustrates Milliet’s Duas cartas no meu
destino (Two Letters in My Destiny).
1944
Takes part in the Exposição de arte moderna
in the city of Belo Horizonte and in a group
exhibition of Brazilian artists at the Royal
Academy of Arts, London, in order to raise
funds for the Royal Air Force. Later that
year, she also exhibits work in the Exposição
de pintores norte-americanos e brasileiros
in São Paulo; the exhibition travels to
the Museu Nacional de Belas-Artes in Rio
de Janeiro.
1945
October 29
Vargas is overthrown by a military-led
coup d’etat; he continues to retain popular
support. A new democratic constitution
is passed.
1949
Beatriz, Tarsila’s granddaughter, drowns
at the age of fifteen.
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1950
December
The Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo,
holds the large-scale retrospective Tarsila:
50 anos de pintura. Organized by Milliet,
the exhibition closes in January 1951. Tarsila
contributes the essay “Confissão geral”
(Full Confession) to the catalogue.
1951
January 1
Vargas returns to politics as the candidate
of the Brazilian Labor Party and wins
the presidential election; he will serve
until 1954.
October 20
Tarsila is chosen to take part in the first
São Paulo Biennial at the Museu de Arte
Moderna; the exhibition closes on
December 23. She submits three paintings,
including The Lake (pl. 56).
1952
Participates in an exhibition to commemo-
rate the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922
at the Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo.
Writes the essay “Recordações de Paris”
(Recollections of Paris) for Habitat—Revista
das artes no Brasil.
1954
Finishes the mural Procession of the
Blessed Sacrament for the History Pavilion
in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo.
1956
Juscelino Kubitschek is elected president of
Brazil. He will encourage a nationalistic
spirit and undertake ambitious programs to
construct highways and expand iron, steel,
petroleum, and coal production; he serves
until 1961.
1960
April 21
Kubitscheck inaugurates Brasilia, the new
federal capital.
1961
Sells her farm and moves permanently to
São Paulo. Invited by the artist Pola
Rezende, she holds a retrospective in the
Casa do Artista Plástico.
1963
September 28
Tarsila is honored with a special gallery
at the seventh São Paulo Biennial;
the exhibition closes on December 22.
1964
April 1
A military revolt deposes the democratically
elected president João Goulart and instates
an authoritarian dictatorship that will rule
Brazil until 1985. This period is marked by
great political repression.
June 20
The twenty-second Venice Biennial
includes a special gallery of Tarsila’s work;
the exhibition closes on October 18.
1966
Tarsila’s daughter, Dulce, dies.
1969
April
A major retrospective exhibition, Tarsila:
50 anos de pintura (Tarsila: Fifty Years of
Painting), is organized by Aracy Amaral at
the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro;
the exhibition closes in May. It later travels
to the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da
Universidade de São Paulo.
1970
May
A retrospective of Tarsila’s drawings is held
at the Museu de Arte da Prefeitura de Belo
Horizonte; the exhibition closes in June.
1973
January 17
Tarsila dies in São Paulo.
NOTES
Special thanks to Katja Rivera for her work on this
section of the catalogue. Unless otherwise noted,
all translations are by Stephen Berg.
1 Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo, p. 44n7.
2 Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, p. 236.
3 Tarsila, “Recollections of Paris,” p. 171 in this
publication.
4 Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, p. 238.
5 Oswald de Andrade “L’Effort intellectuel du Brésil
contemporain,” Revue del’Amérique latine 20
(July 1, 1923), p. 206.
6 Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, pp. 208–209.
7 Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo, pp. 115–16.
8 Ibid., p. 130.
9 Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, p. 23.
10 Tarsila, “O estado actual das artes na Europa,”
p. 155 in this publication.
11 Amaral et al., Tarsila do Amaral, p. 98.
12 Ibid., p. 31, and p. 167 in this publication.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 247.
Chronology 129
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 PHOTOGRAPHS AND DOCUMENTS

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 83 Portrait of Tarsila do Amaral,
c. 1921 (cat. 87)

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131

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 84 Sketchbook I, 1919–20 (cat. 1)

85 Sketchbook II, 1921 (cat. 2)

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132

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 86 Exhibition catalogue for Semana
de Arte Moderna, São Paulo,
with cover illustrated by Emiliano Di
Cavalcanti (Brazilian, 1897–1976),
1922 (cat. 88)

87 Program for Semana de Arte

Moderna, São Paulo, 1922 (cat. 94)

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133

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 88 Mário de Andrade (Brazilian, 89 Klaxon: Mensario de Arte
1893–1945), Paulicea desvairada, Moderna, no. 4, 1922 (cat. 92)
1922 (cat. 93)

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134

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 90 Scene from Minas Gerais trip with
drawing by Tarsila do Amaral, 1924
(cat. 98)

91 Tarsila do Amaral at Fazenda Santo

Antônio, 1924 (cat. 99)

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135

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 92 Oswald de Andrade with cover
and illustrations by Tarsila do Amaral,
Pau Brasil, 1925 (cats. 101–102)

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136

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 93 Blaise Cendrars (Swiss,
1887–1961) with cover and
illustrations by Tarsila do Amaral,
Feuilles de route (Road Maps),
1924 (cats. 96– 97)

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 94 Oswald de Andrade, letter with
draft of the poem “Atelier,” c. 1925
(cat. 103); the text reads, “Caipirinha
dressed by Poiret / Your eyes saw
neither / Paris nor Piccadilly nor Toledo /
Nor the exclamations of men / At
your passage / Between earrings /
[Doope berepra?] / [Doña Mapcuuna?] /
Betita, allied queen daughter of iron, /
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001-192 CC.indd 141
of fire / Tarsila / the great Futurist
paulista (pauliste) poet Oswald de
Andrade known as the Kid / 15 grams
of wire [illegible]”
95 Portrait of Tarsila do Amaral in
profile, mid-1920s (cat. 86)
96 Benedito Duarte (Brazilian,
1910–1995), Portrait of Tarsila do
Amaral, 1926 (cat. 107)
97 Exhibition catalogue for Tarsila,
Galerie Percier, Paris, 1926
(cats. 105–106)
98 Tarsila do Amaral at Galerie Percier,
Paris, July 1926 (cat. 108)
141
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 99 Tarsila do Amaral, Travel Album,
1922–at least 1926 (cat. 95)

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 100 Constantin Brancusi (French,
born Romania, 1876–1957),
annotated exhibition catalogue for
Brancusi, Brummer Gallery, New York,
with an inscription to Tarsila do
Amaral and Oswald de Andrade, 1926
(cat. 104); the text reads, “To the
newlyweds who came up from Paris
[like seducers]”
101 Oswald de Andrade with cover
by Tarsila do Amaral, Primeiro caderno
do alumno de poesia Oswald de
Andrade (First Notebook of the Poetry
Student Oswald de Andrade), 1927
(cat. 109)

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146

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 102 Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de
Andrade, “Minha terra tem palmares”
(My Land Has Palm Trees), 1928 (cat.
114); the text reads, “My land has
palm trees / Where the sea trills / The
little birds here / Do not sing like the
ones over there / Oswald (Pau Brasil)”

103 Indaiatuba Landscape, 1928

(cat. 112)

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147

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 104 Oswald de Andrade with a 105 Raul Bopp (Brazilian, 1898–1984)
drawing by Tarsila do Amaral, with cover by Flávio de Carvalho
“Manifesto antropófago” (Manifesto (Brazilian, 1899–1973), Cobra Norato,
of Anthropophagy), 1928 (cat. 113) 1931 (cat. 121)

106 Carolina Silva Telles, Clóvis

Camargo, Tarsila do Amaral,
Olívia Guedes Penteado, Oswald
de Andrade, and Maria Penteado
Camargo in São Paulo, 1928 (cat. 110)

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 107 Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald
de Andrade, letter to Guilherme de
Almeida, May 19, 1928 (cat. 116); the
text reads, “Guy / The ship (actually
a motor vessel) misses you both
enormously. Promise me immediately
we’ll all be together on the next trip!
If not, we will bring back the oriental
carpet. / The greatest of all embraces
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001-192 CC.indd 149
from Oswald, who sends his regards
to Marco Aurélio / Baby / Not even
you yourself could know how much
you are missed on a trip / Tarsila”
108 Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald
de Andrade, letter to Olívia Guedes
Penteado, May 19, 1928 (cat. 115);
the text reads, “Aboard the Alcântara
May 19 ‘28 / Long live our beautiful
Our Lady of Brasil! / With Tarsila‘s
most beautiful longings / A Tupy
nostalgia / from Tupana’s devotee /
Oswald the great [in Tupy]”
149
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 109 Exhibition catalogue for Tarsila,
Galerie Percier, Paris, 1928 (cat. 111)

110 Note from Oswald de Andrade

with drawing by Tarsila do Amaral,
1920s (cat. 85); the text reads,
“Where are you, / Dona Santa? /
Where have you been? / Who have
you been with? / On what paths? /
The inspector of holiness, / Oswald”

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 111 Exhibition catalogue for Tarsila,
Palace Hotel, Rio de Janeiro, 1929
(cat. 117)

112 Exhibition catalogue for Tarsila,

Prédio Glória, São Paulo, 1929
(cat. 118)

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 113 Tarsila do Amaral in her home,
c. 1930 (cat. 120)

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152

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 114 Tarsila do Amaral with
Anthropophagy, 1940s (cat. 122)

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153

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 HISTORICAL TEXTS

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 “THE CURRENT STATE OF THE ARTS
IN EUROPE: THE FASCINATING
BRAZILIAN ARTIST TARSILA DO AMARAL
GIVES US HER IMPRESSIONS”
Correio da Manhã, December 25, 1923, p. 2
Translated by Stephen Berg
A curious figure from any perspective, the fascinating, brilliant
Brazilian artist Tarsila Amaral passed through here yesterday on
her way back from Europe to Santos. Sensible and modern in
temperament, she could not help being what she has become—
an important part of the great movement that has revolutionized
art in general (from painting to poetry) throughout these last few
years, designating a wondrous new period in the mental activity
of all educated peoples. This is why she proclaims herself to us
as frankly and positively Cubist and why she expounds her ideas
on the modernizing movement to us with such ease and clarity.
She began her studies in São Paulo and later frequented the French
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art scene, where she studied under the curious André Lhote,
who quite recently scandalized the bourgeois critics of the Salon
d’Automne with his Cubist football match. Tarsila belongs to
the group descended from the illustrious Cézanne, one that the
contemporary art world has agreed to call “the extreme left,”
consisting of Lhote, Goerg, Olga Sacharoff, and, to a [lesser] degree,
Kvapil, Genelvée, Marny, Llerow, Brabo, and Harboc.1
We found her aboard the Orânia, thrilled to be under the sun of
beautiful Guanabara, all of it as green as a large emerald.
And we chatted:
— What is the current state of the arts in Europe?
— I will refer primarily to France, which is where I am coming
from. It is the best possible. In this great time we are witnessing
a formidable rebirth of writing and art. The twentieth century
searches the arts for a form of expression that corresponds to the
scientific discoveries and tumult of our large modern cities.
— Do you think contemporary artists have already discovered
anything in that sense?
— I do. Paris in 1908 was the setting for a strong, ever expanding
reaction against the imitative decadence of the visual arts. This
reaction was called Cubism just as among us we call everything
that reacts against past formulas Futurism. The Expressionism
of the north of Europe and Futurism in Italy correspond to it.
— And who was the first Cubist?
— Hard to say. “It was in the air.” The path cleared by Cézanne
had its followers in Picasso and Braque who, in turn, formed
a chain later to be linked with Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger,
Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, and a large number of practitioners.
001-192 CC.indd 155
— And has Cubism created interesting things?
— Yes. It has had a triumphant trajectory and been accepted by
great, already established, celebrated artists. I refer particularly to
this recognition as a defense against those who say that Cubism
is only a path for those who never got anywhere with so-called
serious art, that is, realism. I ask them: have you seen the realist
portraits of Picasso, of Léger, of Gleizes?
— Cubism is a movement based on past arts. It doesn’t destroy
the old schools; instead, it rejects the continuation of those very
schools in a century in which they no longer have any reason
for being. It was born with the fragmentation of form and was,
therefore, the continuation of Impressionism—the fragmentation
of color. The early Cubists were destroyers. Hence, the age of
destruction. This was followed by a search for pure materials,
integral Cubism, geometric reaction, and volume. Now it focuses
openly and frankly on construction and on form.
— But that’s a step backward.
— Never. It is a new classicism. We are the primitives of a great
century who have nothing to do with past classicisms.
— Are you a Cubist?
— Completely so. I am associated with this movement that has
produced an effect on industry; in furniture, in fashion, in toys,
in the four thousand exhibitors at the Salon d’Automne and the
Indépendents.
— But why is there such a strong reaction against Cubism?
— The reaction is largely that of minor artists who are perplexed
at the victory of the new spirit and do not take the time to find out
what is really going on. Ill will reinforced by artistic prejudice enters
into this. Like all modern movements, Cubism is a movement that
invents rather than one that copies. Only an elite could afford
the responsibilities it brings with it. Minds shaped by the ancient
formulas rebel, unable to see the more or less realistic repre-
sentation of objects in a painting; recognizing something they have
become accustomed to. For them, painting must be forcibly
objective; it must represent something. They do not remember
that the artist has the right to create his painting, to bestow upon
it an organism of its own, a life of its own.
— Is it the intention of Cubists or Futurists to make art for
the future?
— Cubists are laying the foundations for an art of the future.
Although they are merely artists of their time, they seem futuristic
to the ordinary gaze.
— What about Brazilian artists in Paris?
— We have a group that follows a fine modern orientation.
The sculptor Brecheret (whose name the papers drew attention
to this year) has just had a triumph at the Salon d’Automne.2 The
composer Villa-Lobos is a huge success. After being invited to
compete with one hundred and some important pianists, Sousa
Lima was unanimously elected first soloist of the Concerts Colonne
a short while ago.3 In painting, beyond Anita Malfatti, who
brought us the first elements of modern art in 1916, we have Di
Cavalcanti and Rego Monteiro.4 Paulo Prado, Oswald de Andrade
(with his lecture at the Sorbonne) and Sérgio Milliet are the
equivalent of a veritable Brazilian propaganda mission.5 Out of their
almost daily contact with the great French poet Blaise Cendrars,
with Jean Cocteau, Jules Romain, Jules Supervielle, Paul Morand,
and others an interest in Brazilian art is being born in Paris.
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 Our country is already spoken of in the way that Russia was talked
about fifteen years ago. It is common knowledge that Russian art
is imposing itself more and more each day.
— Do you intend to show your work?
— Above all, I intend to work. I am profoundly Brazilian and will
study the taste and art of our caipiras. In the hinterlands, I hope to
learn from those who have not yet been corrupted by the academies.
Painting Brazilian landscapes and caboclos doesn’t make one a
Brazilian artist, just as one who paints machines realistically and
distorts the human figure is not necessarily a modern artist.6
— Who are the great artists of today?
— In the visual arts, Léger, Gleizes, Picasso, Brancusi, Gris, Lhote,
Lipchitz, and others.
— But is it convenient for Brazil to investigate what is going on
outside [the country]?
— Certainly. Why ignore what is going on in the field of art when
daily telegrams put us in contact with the most distant nations?
— But that would mean falling once again into an imitation
of Europe.
— No. Cubism is liberating because it has the advantage of being
a school of invention.
— But if it is a school, it must enslave.
— No. There are general laws from which we cannot escape. These
persist. As an example of Cubist freedom, I would draw attention
to two names: Fernand Léger and Albert Gleizes. While submitting
themselves to general laws, these artists nonetheless follow
utterly different paths. Cubism is military exercise. All artists must
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experience it to become strong. And she said goodbye to us with
a handshake.
1 Among the artists mentioned here are Olga Nicolaevna Sacharoff (Spanish, born
Georgia, 1889–1967); Édouard-Joseph Goerg (French, 1893–1969); Charles Kvapil
(Belgian, 1884–1957); and Albert Brabo (French, 1894–1964).
2 Victor Brecheret (1894–1955) was a Brazilian sculptor who was born in Italy, studied
in Paris, and made his career in São Paulo. He exhibited at the Semana de Arte
Moderna and is best known for his large-scale Monument to the Banderas at the
entrance of São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park.
3 João de Sousa Lima (1898–1982) was a Brazilian pianist, composer, conductor,
and teacher.
4 Emiliano Augusto Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Melo (Brazilian, 1897–1976), known
as Di Cavalcanti, was a painter engaged in a form of Brasilidade; he was involved
in the Semana de Arte Moderna and produced the cover for its well-known exhibition
program. Vicente do Rego Monteiro (Brazilian, 1899–1970) was a painter born in
Recife, who, like Tarsila, studied in Paris. His work was greatly inspired by the indige-
nous cultures of the Amazon.
5 Paulo Prado (Brazilian, 1869–1943) was a businessman, writer, and patron of the
arts. Sérgio Milliet (Brazilian, 1898–1966) was a writer, painter, and critic.
6 Caipiras translates to “country bumpkins.” In Brazilian Portuguese, the term
caboclo technically refers to a person of mixed indigenous and Caucasian descent
but is also used as a generic label for the rural poor.
156 Tarsila do Amaral
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“MODERN PAINTING AS SEEN
BY AN EXTREMELY MODERN ARTIST:
TARSILA DO AMARAL SPEAKS TO
O JORNAL ON HER WAY THROUGH RIO”
O Jornal, August 17, 1926, p. 2
Translated by Stephen Berg
Fresh from the extraordinary success of a Paris exhibition
of her canvases—news of which made it all the way here by way
of French newspapers—Tarsila do Amaral passed through Rio
Sunday en route to Santos. A passenger on the Lutetia, she
disembarked on Saturday afternoon but, because her voyage was
to be continued in the early evening of the following day, she did
not have time for anything much beyond seeing friends and taking
a quick tour of the city. We spoke to her in Mr. Geraldo Rocha’s
mansion in the hills of Santa Alexandrina.1 At O Jornal’s request,
the fetching artist had scheduled our interview for Sunday at 11.
Punctually, there we were. Informed of our presence, Tarsila do
Amaral quickly emerged to greet us with a friendly smile, and,
after introducing her fiancé, the writer Oswald de Andrade, sat
down to give us her travel impressions of Paris and her favorite
artists and told us she had been to the Teatro Rialto on Saturday
evening to attend a performance by the black theater ensemble.
— I really enjoyed the show and, in particular, the cunning work
of the black female performers—Tarsila adds—the only thing I found
to be deplorable was the interference, in such a typically Brazilian
company, of an artist of color with the abominable name of De
Chocolat.2 Wouldn’t it be much more interesting if they didn’t strike
such a foreign note? It compromises the troupe’s authenticity.
The subject changed. Mr. Oswald de Andrade referred to Tarsila’s
success in Paris and, apropos of that, showed us a printed repro-
duction of a painting of hers in a Carioca newspaper.
The lecture then moved on to her exquisitely original art, filled with
bold and daring color compositions. Intentionally, we reminded the
artist that such was not the original style of her paintbrush.
— And yet it isn’t hard for me to explain—she replied promptly
and brightly—the transition my art has undergone over these last
few years, after my exposure to the French masters and the
triumph of modern painting. On the contrary, this transition may
be most easily explained. My restless temperament was never
satisfied by my early academic paintings; rather, my most spon-
taneous impulses were suppressed by a series of petty rules and
truly humiliating aesthetic prejudices. So I allowed myself to be
seduced by the modern school. However, I must confess that,
initially, painting in accordance with the new methods seemed
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 extremely easy. Ignorant as I was with regard to the technique of
the new school, I also believed [mistakenly] that Cubist painting
consisted of randomly arranged color tones.
I made a few such paintings before showing them to a few
connoisseurs, at which point I realized the works were of no
consequence. I learned that Cubism was not, as I had judged
it, some mad, disoriented school in which color and line had
no real, discernible meaning. Later, in Paris, as I visited the art
galleries, I was able to more carefully (and in a more fortuitous
state of mind) admire paintings by the French masters of the
moment. It was then I began to feel that Cubism best suited my
temperament and that, in it, my restless mind would have greater
freedom. Having finally penetrated the secret behind the beauty
of those original forms, I soon allowed myself to become excited
and devote myself to the study of the new school. I diligently
attended Prof. Loti’s course. Loti is a great artist, a painter whose
process wavers between classical academicism and contempo-
rary Cubism.3 It is, so to speak, a spirit of conciliation between
past and modern trends, set in that perfect middle ground that
comprises the mystery of the harmonious French gesture.
Later, I had other teachers.
Yet my spirit did not rest even after I had finally identified with
Cubism. I began to want to create a more personal art and,
thus, perfect the methods I had learned, accommodating them
my way and in keeping with my temperament. This is why
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my Cubist masters may not see me as one who is very faithful
to the school . . .
— Tarsila is not, as has been said and repeated insistently—
Mr. Oswald de Andrade intervenes—a Futurist artist. Futurism
is an Italian school that has passed, even though its chief is
still around—that would be Marinetti. In Brazil anything that strays
from the classical models is labeled Futurism. Therefore, it is
an incorrect designation.
Tarsila do Amaral continues: Futurism is actually a regional
Italian school that has ended. For the rest, the Italian modernist
movement strikes me as artificial and false. And she explains:
Italians are ultimately influenced by an extremely heavy tradition
that does not allow them to free themselves for a single minute
to think and imagine freely. Futurism does not consist only of
free, original form. One may be futuristic in a sonnet, just as one
may be loathsomely passéiste [old-fashioned] in free verse without
meter or rhyme. This is the reason why I feel that the global
hub of the modern spirit lies in Paris. The spiritual guidance of the
world always came from Paris. France continues to retain
its hegemony. It preserves it still, and brilliantly so. The success of
the moment unquestionably belongs to the moderns, and the prices
fetched by their works are quite significant. Some canvases
sell for two or even three hundred thousand francs, which proves
beyond doubt that they are no longer purchased solely by collectors
of extravagances and curiosities. Only those who are truly able to
understand and appreciate it pay three hundred thousand francs
for a single painting. Anyone who believes Cubist canvases to be
worthless is mistaken by virtue of an inability to understand. I, too,
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have been that incapable, and it is for this very reason that I may
speak as forthrightly and perhaps as crudely as I do. [Such work]
represents everything that the artist feels and wishes to convey.
Let me give you an example. Prior to beginning a work, I meditate
at length, imagining its thousands of details. No one has an inkling
of what my paintings cost me in terms of effort. Oswald just
showed you a photograph of a painting I made in one of Rio’s
morning papers. In this regard, I conceived the figures you see
in it as having innocent features, the depiction of which were the
result of a mighty struggle and very hard work in order that they
might have been reproduced on canvas. The untrained gaze sees
in it only figures that do not resemble men they are used to see-
ing; upon [closer] examination, however, [the viewer] will feel the
aesthetic emotion that it suggests or understand the difficulty that
the artist overcame. Therefore, the modern school is not some-
thing disorganized or devoid of method. It has its own procedures.
It’s just that these procedures are much broader, allowing artists
a greater freedom of action.
Tarsila do Amaral made a pause. Mr. Oswald de Andrade remarked
upon some of the paintings in the Salon that were also reproduced
in the previously mentioned newspaper, finding them lacking and
unexpressive. She accuses the Bernardelli brothers—two “artistic
monsters,” to use her expression—of being fatal to Brazilian art
and of having interfered with the spontaneity and originality of
several generations of Brazilian artists.4
Bringing our interview to a close, we asked Tarsila do Amaral
whether she intends to show her work in Brazil.
— I don’t know yet. Perhaps. In any event, I didn’t bring back the
pictures I painted in Paris. The ones I didn’t sell at the exhibition
were entrusted to an Englishman for consignment to a number
of galleries.
1 This reference is to the journalist Antônio Geraldo Rocha (Brazilian, 1881–1959).
2 In the early 1920s, João Cândido Ferreira, a Brazilian of African descent, was in
Paris performing at various variety shows. Initially called “Jocanfer,” he soon
established the Companhia Negra, which premiered in Rio de Janeiro on July 31,
1926. For more on Ferreira, see Jeferson Bacelar, “Corações de Chocolat: A história
da Companhia Negra de Revistas (1926–1927),” Revista de Antropologia 50, 1
(Jan. –June 2007), pp. 437–43.
3 This reference is to André Lhote, one of Tarsila’s teachers in 1923, whom she
would often identify for his blend of classicism and Modernism (Cubism).
4 Henrique, Félix, and Rodolfo Bernardelli were all painters; Henrique was also
a sculptor and Félix an art teacher. Although all were noted for their artistic
conservatism, the most well known of the three was Rodolfo (1852–1931).
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 “TARSILA DO AMARAL SPEAKS
OF HER ART AND OF HER TRIUMPHS
AND HOPES: A SUCCESS THAT
REVERBERATED THROUGHOUT THE
WORLD, EXCEPT FOR BLESSED BRAZIL”
Diário da Noite, February 10, 1928, p. 1
Translated by Stephen Berg
It is almost noon. Tarsila do Amaral welcomes the journalist from
the Diário da Noite to her great, manor-like home. The atelier is
filled with beautiful things, dozens of paintings and art objects, a
large table covered with books, magazines, and newspapers. Off
to a corner, an impossible bronze of a head of a child, suggesting
any number of things, sits on a sideboard-table. It is a fine environ-
ment for a conversation.
D[ona]. Tarsila sits on the couch, Oswald de Andrade sinks into
a comfortable armchair, and we begin to talk about the painter’s
upcoming Paris exhibition at the Galerie Percier on the rue
la Boétie . . .
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Tarsila do Amaral explains to us that, in Paris, the rue la Boétie is
something more than a spot on a map. It currently congregates
a series of the great city’s art galleries to which only the most
important artists have access—its great modern artists, to be clear.
It concentrates shows by painters who carry credentials that
document their value. Formerly, artists could be found on many
other streets throughout the Quartier Latin, in all of its galleries.
The rue la Boétie began to form the tradition it represents today
some years ago.
The newly rich who visit the city for the first time get lost on the
boulevards, where they pay exorbitant prices for as many paintings
as they can carry, all foisted upon them by the organizers of the
galleries established there. They are convinced they are taking with
them the most rare masterpieces of Paris. And in vain would they
visit galleries of modern art, for they would understand nothing of
it and end up discovering the obtuseness of their own brains . . .
The Exhibition of 1926
Tarsila tells us about the show she held in 1926, in the same gallery
that will exhibit her paintings this time around.
So the director of the Galerie Percier wanted to see my paintings.
He did not know me and did not know if I was worthy of inclusion
among the rue la Boétie exhibitors. He was immediately pleased
by my seventeen paintings, drawings, and watercolors, and I
was enthusiastically received. For the current exhibition, I doubted
whether there would be room for me at the Galerie Percier, so I
inquired . . . The result could not have been any better than it was.
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001-192 CC.indd 158
I just received a telegram from them in which they tell me the
gallery is at my disposal. I’ve already set a date for the opening of
my new show of paintings—May 19.
— And, D. Tarsila, was your 1926 exhibition the great success
we were told it was?
— Absolutely. But only in Europe. In Brazil there wasn’t so much
as an echo of my triumph . . .
Documentation
Important magazines and important newspapers now published
articles about my paintings. These included the Contemporânea
review—the leading magazine of the modern Portuguese intel-
lectuals . . . In the same issue, the cover of the Contemporânea
carried a reproduction of one of the paintings I showed. In Paris,
the magazines L’Art vivant and Vogue—the important international
publication that is also published in London and New York—printed
reviews and reproduced my work in their pages as well. My most
prized trophies include articles by G[aston]. de Pawlowski in
Le Journal and Severiano de Rezende in La Gazette du Brésil. La
Renaissance, Paris Sud-Amerique, [and] Plus Ultra of Paris also
published references to my exhibition.
The pictures I sold in Paris hang in the private collections of the
French writer Jules Supervielle; of Mme. Errázuriz, a lady of
great standing in Parisian art circles; of Mme. Tachard, and of
M. Vilonghby.1 The Salon du Franc and the Galerie Percier also
acquired my paintings. The museums of Moscow and Grenoble
also have two canvases. The importance of the Museum of
Grenoble as a storeroom for contemporary painting need not
be emphasized.
The Exhibition of May 1928
D. Tarsila do Amaral intends to put twelve canvases on view in
her upcoming May exhibition. She showed us a few of them.
Compared to her paintings of days past, Tarsila do Amaral’s current
works reveal a new stage in the development of her artistic nature.
In fact, all modern painters are moving on to the next manner . . .
In his latest works, Braque is almost Cézanne again, albeit with
his own free personality.
Cubism’s realist, objective period has passed; it is over. D. Tarsila
do Amaral has also moved on to subjectivism. Model: a mysterious
canvas, redolent of macumba 2 . . .
D. Tarsila do Amaral sails to Europe accompanied by her husband
(the writer Oswald de Andrade) before the end of the month.
1 The individuals mentioned here include Jules Supervielle (French, 1884–1960) and
Eugenia Errázuriz (Chilean, 1860–1951); the latter purchased Tarsila’s Lagoa Santa
(1925; pl. 48) in 1926.
2 Macumba is a generic denomination for Afro-Brazilian religions that mix traditional
African elements with those from Europe, Brazil, and Roman Catholicism; in general,
the term refers to the two main forms of African spirit worship in Brazil, Candomblé
and Umbanda, but it can also be used as a pejorative term to mean “witchcraft.”
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 “A PAULISTA PAINTER IN PARIS:
TARSILA DO AMARAL’S
VEHEMENT DEFENSE OF MODERNISM” 1
O Jornal, December 9, 1928, p. 3
Translated by Stephen Berg
Modernism is not the result of a state of insanity—Cubism is
the artist’s military service: it should be mandatory. something else, based on nature, if we like, but let it be frankly
We have begun to lose interest in exposing reasons for which
artists may have allowed themselves to be led down the path
of art that has abandoned all tradition in order to inaugurate the
“new” in the visual arts, in writing, or in music. Once these have been
sufficiently understood, the artists find themselves oppressed by
the historical inevitability that leads the styles of an age to emerge,
at the place in which civilization ended a cycle of its evolution in
keeping with the impositions of preceding circumstances.   Even as the Cubists were holding their first public exhibitions,
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Thus, our interview now departs from the why of its unflinching
guideline. It grapples with the facts, analyzes our interviewees’
words in order to find out what they want to be as they create
their current works and what they see in the groups to which
they belong. These groups now cling to precious little of what we
might call a limitation of boundaries. The art of today reflects a
most brotherly desire to invade foreign lands. And it is just such a
desire that moves across continents and oceans to penetrate
nations and unsettle the entire mesh of the immense task of
establishing twentieth century art with its effects; the cardinal
points of such art are most vigorously defined.
The above is by way of an interview with São Paulo’s Tarsila do
Amaral, who has just recently held an exhibition in Paris.
Although it is of interest because the many things she discusses
in it stem from direct observation, the interview mentions neither
her exhibition nor the art show she will soon hold in São Paulo
(in 1929).
Tarsila do Amaral speaks:
Dawn of a Century
— “We are witnessing a new renaissance in which all artists
work together for the glory of this affirmatismo [assertion].
The arts seek an expression that is equivalent to the progress
of science, to the inner life of factories or the machinery of large
modern cities. The first Cubists emerged in the visual arts in
1908, continuing the evolution of the offensive begun by Cézanne.
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They broke with molds that were then in vogue; they destroyed,
they were hygienists: they availed themselves of nothing from
the stagnation that preceded them. And now they are using new
materials to build a healthy art, one that is in keeping with the
life of action that currently commands educated peoples [and]
therefore, in accordance with the modern artist’s very life, which
is that of his own century, free from all romantic morbidity. Modern
artists are the primitives of a new age that has not yet reached
its apex.
They understand that man cannot compete with nature by imitating
it. Those who contradict us say: “Nature is our mistress: the more
the artist approaches it, the more perfect he will be.”
But wouldn’t it be madness to attempt to compete with nature,
knowing beforehand that we would lose the match? Let us do
our creation, without the pretense of imitation. Let us create
humbly, at the boundaries of our intellectual ability. In doing so,
we continue only the work of nature. Even Pirandello said: “La
natura si serve da strumento della fantasia umana per proseguire,
più alta, la sua opera di creazione.”2 And whenever we want
a fine naturalistic picture, we must buy the most perfect photo-
graph cameras.
Apollinaire was discovering the forms of the new poetry. As
Cézanne had previously done for painting, Debussy paved the
musical path for Stravinsky, Satie, Honegger, and other contem-
porary composers and, to the glory of Brazil, our own Villa-Lobos,
who is well known in Paris.
Dominant Trends in the Visual Arts
— “The most advanced modern trends in the visual arts are over-
coming the copiers, although Impressionist currents and other
survivors of past schools still have their practitioners. These, in a
truly distressed state of mind, insist upon saving their idols. The
minds of their followers are dominated by the sickly Romanticism
of the last century, powerless to destroy inherited perversions.
The modern artist loves life, practices sports, hates whining, and
is optimistic. New art is healthy, logical, balanced, and highly
intelligent. It is only because they are uninformed that laypeople
deem it to be the product of a state of insanity. Clearly, a layperson
will find it hard to distinguish so-called modern art from real modern
art. Like anything else, this is a matter of education. I know plenty
of people who cannot tell the difference between old Bordeaux
and mulberry wine. In transposing the case to art, how are we
to classify two modern paintings, one good and one bad? Or two
dissonant songs? Or two poems written in free verse?
Rather, the most powerful opposition to modern art comes from
conservatives who will not resign themselves to their own
defeat or to half-cultures enslaved by artistic prejudice. They are
unaware that the modern artist respects the past but does not
continue it.
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2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 Júlio Dantas3 (who declares himself to be above suspicion because The Paris-Midi speaks: “In the gallery of bold efforts, Mme.
he belongs to the school of the past) recognizes Modernism’s full Tarsila exhibits the violent colors framed by Legrain6 with an
victory. This is what he said about Menotti del Picchia’s latest book.4 entirely personal whimsy.”

The Principal Names of the Moment
— “The principal names of the modern Parisian moment are:
in sculpture, the great Brancusi, Martell and Lipchitz. In painting,
Picasso, Fernand Léger, Chirico, Albert Gleizes, Survage, André
Lhote, and Juan Gris, whose paintings are better appreciated after
his death; Miró and Max Ernst, these two being Surrealists.
There are others still. In architecture, Le Corbusier; in literature,
Giraudoux, whose recent “Siegfried” revealed a remarkable
playwright; Blaise Cendrars, who was misunderstood ten years
ago, is now unanimously respected; Jean Cocteau, always
at odds with the intransigence of the Surrealists, the bosses of
which are Aragon and Breton.”
The Issue of Cubism in Brazil
— “The modern movement is global and cannot be otherwise,
in an age of omnipresent life. To introduce Cubism in Brazil is
to restore freedom [to it] because it is a school of invention
and not of copy. Cubism is the artist’s military service. It should
be mandatory.
Our very own nature comes to its aid: intense colors, anti-
Impressionist landscapes devoid of delicate colors. Our green is
bárbaro.5 A true Brazilian enjoys contrasting colors. As a proper
And from Portugal, from the Portugal of today, from contemporary
Portugal, Fernanda de Castro, the wife of António Ferro, wrote
the following to Tarsila7:
“Tarsila, many congratulations for the great and well-earned
success of your exhibition. António arrived from Paris quite taken
with your paintings, with the ever more vivid and impressive
colors of your canvases, with the difficult choice of subject matter
and the simplicity of execution—the most difficult and rare of
qualities. I read a review in Comoedia and, through it, I was able
to see how you are understood and appreciated there. It is highly
significant that a Frenchman would say [such things] to a foreigner.
There is no need to tell you how sorry I am not to have seen
your exhibition.” 
1 A paulista is someone who is born in the state of São Paulo (which is different
than a paulistano/a, which means a native of the metropolitan area of the city
of São Paulo).
2 From Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921): “Nature
makes use of the instrument of human fantasy to pursue her work of creation on
a higher level.” Translation from Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans.
Frederick May (Heinemann Educational Books), 1954.
3 Júlio Dantas (Portuguese, 1876–1962) was a prominent writer, doctor, politician,

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caipira, I declare that I find certain bright color combinations to
be beautiful, although I was taught to consider them in bad taste.
Nowadays I spread blue and pink—my favorite colors—across
my paintings.
To those who say Cubism is a matter of fashion and, therefore,
fleeting, I ask: if fashion is the externalization of the taste of a
given age, which artistic movement can escape it?   and 1928 solo exhibitions at the Galerie Percier, Paris.
I defend Cubism ardently because I left it a long time ago. But
the bad result of our painters is such that they refuse to receive
its saving influence, and I deem it my duty to insist upon this.
In order to be strong, the artist must experience it.
and diplomat.
4 The writer Menotti del Picchia (Brazilian, 1892–1988) was a member of the
Grupo dos Cinco. Tarsila is likely referring to his Juca Mulato, a book of poetry
published in 1917.
5 “Barbarous” or “uncivilized”; the word choice is critical. In his “Manifesto of
Pau-Brasil Poetry,” Oswald includes the phrase “bárbaro e nosso” (barbarous and
ours). See p. 174 in this publication.
6 The reference is to the French designer Pierre Legrain (1889–1929), whom
Tarsila commissioned to create frames for the paintings displayed in her 1926
7 Maria Fernanda Teles de Castro e Quadros Ferro (Portuguese, 1900–1994) was
a writer; António Joaquim Tavares Ferro (Portuguese, 1895–1956) was a writer,
journalist, and politician.

The Tarsila Exhibition of 1928

— “This time around, I placed better than I did in Paris in 1926,”
Tarsila tells us, in great fear of talking about herself. And that
is all we were able to find out. There can be no doubt that the
interview ended badly.

Le Temps speaks of Tarsila do Amaral: “Tarsila, who has

a refined view of color, makes use of it in preposterous Cubist
compositions.”

At the Salon des Indépendents the split produced the “Vrais

Indépendents,” of which Tarsila is part. Among the most repre-
sentative names, such as Vines and others, the name of the
painter from São Paulo is mentioned as one of the group’s most
daring artists in Avenir, Liberté, Paris-Soir, Comoedia, etc.

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 “AN INTERVIEW IN THREE QUESTIONS:
THE CURRENT MOMENT IN
BRAZILIAN ART AND TARSILA DO
AMARAL’S POSITION”
Crítica, July 27, 1929, p. 11
Translated by Stephen Berg
The success that has crowned Tarsila do Amaral’s exhibition
is both impressive and significant.
A large, enormously elegant public has been flocking to the
Palace Hotel, curious to view the great artist’s unsettling,
paradoxical art.
Ever since last Saturday’s vernissage—an event of large-scale
secular repercussion—took place, this show of paintings has been
attracting the most educated and select attendance. This fact
evinces the degree of interest and curiosity with which the distin-
guished lady’s initiative to open an exhibition of clearly modern
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art has been welcomed by Rio de Janeiro’s intellectual circles.
CRÍTICA sought out Tarsila do Amaral. Her words about the
current moment of Brazilian art and its possibilities as well as about
the Anthropophagic movement undoubtedly have a heightened
importance that stems from the situation of expressive artistic
prominence in which the brilliant painter finds herself.
We came up with three questions on this subject, to all of which
Tarsila kindly provided extremely interesting answers composed
with flair and sharp intuition and not lacking in an amiably playful
sense of irony.
— Do you believe in the definitive victory of the moderns
against cold, conventional academicism?
— The victory is definitive. Its manifestations are already being
considered late to the game. When I came to Rio, I thought my
exhibition evoked something new, and now I see it is the Escola
de Bellas [Belas] Artes that is Futurist, and that it finds my art
to be “already old,” to use the words of Mr. Fléxa Ribeiro.1 Yet
such was not the opinion of an enlightened Paris. If my exhibitions
of ‘26 and ‘28 were review-worthy, it was precisely because
they brought a new tropical art to Europe—one that did not
exclude Brazilianism.
I am what I am, effortlessly. Even the technique in my clean,
sharply outlined painting comes from my childhood; from a time
in which I did not know teachers existed. Some of my 1923
canvases bear the strict characteristics of the Cubist school that
provided my military service, as I called it.
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However, I soon freed myself from that discipline, a Swedish
movement cure of sorts of no interest beyond creating musculature.
Of me, the authoritative voice of Maurice Reynal has said: “Mme.
Tarsila brings with her from Brazil the signs of a truly national
artistic renewal, early symptoms of the decadence of international
academic influence in that great nation that have hitherto obscured
its personality.”
Speaking last year about possible early influences on my art,
Raymond Cogniat declared:
“Such influences are already far enough away to require an
occasional effort of memory or observation should one want to
locate them in these latest works.”
As we can see, what we have here is a lack of knowledge
about what is happening in the world of painting.
If there is anything good in my art, [it is] that it has retained
a spontaneous Brasilidade from 1924 until now, from the period
I call Pau Brasil to the most recent Antropophagic period. In
terms of an indisputable Brasilidade, I’d be curious to know which
painters are currently considered avant-garde . . . the
Bernardelli and Visconti, perhaps?2
— Do you think “Antropophagy” will endure as a Brazilian
aesthetic, or will it pass amid the tumult of literary currents?
— Antropophagy is a representative movement of the age. It
will have a cycle of its own. I believe it to be an indicator of great
Brazilian renewal, one that is bound to lead Brazil to the loftiest
destinies since it is not a merely literary or colonial movement.
— Is the present moment an auspicious one for painting
[in Brazil]?
— The most auspicious one possible. You can feel a fighting
spirit everywhere. This is just the aperitif. The heralded artistic-
social renewal must awaken those who sleep the sleep of
conventional purity.
1 José Fléxa Pinto Ribeiro (1884–1971) was a teacher, critic for many newspapers
and journals, and historian of Brazilian art.
2 Eliseu d’Angelo Visconti (Brazilian, born Italy, 1866–1944) was a painter and
decorative artist.
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 “INTERVIEW:
TARSILA DO AMARAL”
Leo Gilson Ribeiro, Veja 181 (February 23, 1972), pp. 3–6
Translated by Stephen Berg
“What Could That Thing Be?” This is what she wanted to
know, in Europe, when she read the letter that Anita Malfatti
wrote to her about the Semana de Arte Moderna
Propped up against a stack of pillows, her restless hands caressing
tiny canvases that she is painting on commission, Tarsila do
Amaral, age 75, smiles ironically in talking about her pastimes
now that she is confined to bed after a fall that affected her
spine. She lifts the flowered blue sheet that covers two thick books
upon which she rests her elbows: “I like to read dictionaries.
Imagine! Today I learned the exact pronunciation of exegete.”
A coquette, she prefers not to be photographed in her bedridden
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state (“Why don’t you print pictures of when I was young?”).
She is unfamiliar with the music of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil,
and Chico Buarque:1 she recognizes their names on the radio but
changes the station, “because I’ve always found popular music
so banal, sometimes I like to listen to Debussy—so poetic and
coloristic! Serving Brazilian broths to Cocteau in Paris and wines
from the Tour d’Argent’s cellar to Mário de Andrade in São Paulo,
the (absent) “muse” of the Semana of 22 found herself divided
on the occasion of the “lobster war” between France (a country
she adores and whose tongue she speaks with the accent of an
aristocratic mademoiselle of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie) and
Brazil, but the nationalist vein prevailed: “The lobsters are ours,
after all!”
She is not interested in modern art; Calder’s mobiles are not art
to her: “Do you think that balancing those colored things is art?!”
She refused to see the plays of her ex-husband Oswald de Andrade
because she heard they “were very indecent.” Accused of being
a woman of many lovers, she disavows this reputation with
miffed distress: “Why, I’m a puritan, by Our Lady!”
She gave up reading Guimarães Rosa2: “A writer who used such
strange language!” She is undisturbed by the noise of the electric
saws in construction work that filters through the closed windows
of São Paulo’s Higienópolis quarter. “The world they are building
is so unlike mine! They tell me even Europe is different today; Paris
has changed for the worse, it’s no longer worth visiting. Paris
was the city I knew in my youth.”
Tarsila do Amaral is lucid, although her mind wanders when
answering questions. Many of the sentences she intersperses
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between one subject and another refer to isolated recollections
that occur to her on the spur of the moment. Assisted by Dona
Anette, her secretary and nurse, who also prepares her canvases,
the painter retains a vivacious, ironic, and aristocratic wit that doesn’t
sound very modern in today’s world. A grande dame in her day,
she is currently an outstanding, charming conversationalist, subtly
irreverent toward the Semana’s great figures and the electrifying
Paris she once knew.
Beginnings in the Studio of a Passéiste
Veja: You were in Europe, during the Semana. In spite of this,
you are considered one of its most important personalities. Why?
Tarsila: In spite of the fact that I was in Europe, I like to think
I took part in the Semana of 22 because Anita Malfatti told me all
about it, in a highly detailed letter. I have no idea where it is now.
I was surprised at what she told me and at how very rude Monteiro
Lobato had been when he wrote about her.3 He didn’t understand
anything, [he was] very reactionary. Imagine it: Monteiro Lobato
judging himself a painter! I was very surprised: what could that
thing be? Anita was hurt and rightfully so, Monteiro Lobato talked
about her paintings as if they had been made by a donkey with
a brush tied to its tail and, as the flies tormented the donkey he
would produce those brushstrokes on the canvas, right?
Veja: But the Semana . . .
Tarsila: Shortly before I left for Europe, I rented my studio to a
German teacher, Professor Elpons, the only Impressionist in Brazil.
He was the only one who gave me a taste of Impressionist painting
because none of it ever made it to Brazil, except if it was through
professor Pedro Alexandrino, who spent twenty years in Paris and
often visited the great painters—all of whom he knew. Plenty of
people told me it was a waste of time to work in Pedro Alexandrino’s
studio, because he is a passéiste; but he was knowledgeable, so
if you stop to think about it, it wasn’t a waste of time at all.
Oswald’s Quarrel with Paulo Prado
Veja: How did you discover your talent?
Tarsila: I began to work (in São Paulo) under the direction of Pedro
Alexandrino, and it did me no harm to see it was old-fashioned
and academic, he practiced that old fashioned method of copying
à fusain to exercise the hand. I even made a black man’s head.
He wanted me to have a very firm hand, so he gave me very large
sheets of paper upon which to work, didn’t he? He would explain
everything, drawing lines without a ruler, without anything. I
started with drawing, I wasn’t a colorist in the beginning, I made
plaster copies, too. And [I learned] shading and [there were]
anatomical things I had to copy, to know well. He used to work
at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios, and he would bring his models
along, and it was very good because you learned anatomy and the
proportions, isn’t that so?
Veja: Was São Paulo very provincial as far as the arts
were concerned?
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 Tarsila: Oh, yes, taste ran to landscapes that were as close to
lifelike as possible. This was the reign of the still life. The gleam of
metal copied on canvas . . . so real! It wasn’t prejudicial to me—
it was a preparatory stage. As soon as I arrived in Europe I went
straight to the Académie Julian, an academy in which the painting
of nudes was taught in a large hall. I took my work: the head of an
old man rendered in pastels, and a Dutch woman done in oils and
the black man, in charcoal. There were many studios, and nudes
were all the rage; the model stood before the artist for five minutes,
and that was it, so he could sketch rapidly. I rather enjoyed the
fact that I’d had some practice. Later I went to study with a great—
an hors concours teacher, he held exhibitions of his work, and
he liked my painting very much. I’ve forgotten his name now. He
drew the students’ attention to my work, you know? There were
plenty of them, and he liked me because I worked quickly, and
he would remark out loud in the large studio: “Voyez ce qu’elle
fait, comme c’est puissant!” 4 I returned to Brazil shortly after the
Semana, but I didn’t like what Anita Malfatti was doing—it was
all sort of deformed. But of course I was completely shocked at
and against Monteiro Lobato. Later on, at the end of the year,
Anita also went to work with Pedro Alexandrino, because Anita’s
mother was very old fashioned, and she was always against her
daughter and against her innovations in painting, she kept saying
none of it was any good. Anita was very discouraged because
her mother was angry with her for not making recognizable things.
Her mother didn’t understand anything—[she] was just dreadful!
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Veja: Did you find a hostile environment upon your return?
Tarsila: I arrived in very early June, on a ship, there were no
planes then, Gago Coutinho5 later made the Atlantic crossing. But
the ocean crossing was so peaceful! . . . The liners of the British
Royal Mail were the best. Soon, France also had the Lutèce and
the Marsília sailing.6 No, I didn’t return to a hostile environment
when I got back. I received many people, poets, in my studio on
the rua Vitória. The house belonged to my family.
Veja: You were a very beautiful woman . . .
Tarsila: Who? Me? Well, naturally, in those days I was better
than I am today. Then I met Oswald de Andrade, who was very
extravagant: he derided everyone. Whenever he found something
amusing, he just had to say it out loud even if it meant offending
his friends; he would sacrifice anything for a bon mot. Paulo Prado
once had a fight with him and never spoke to him again, you
know? I didn’t even know why, yet Paulo Prado had written a very
good preface to Oswald’s book Pau Brasil, which was published
in Paris. Whenever Oswald had something to say, he couldn’t
hold back . . . he really couldn’t, and then he talked about Dona
Veridiana Prado and how it was said she wasn’t, well . . . Aryan,
that there was a little mixture there, and Oswald had spoken of
the “glorious mulatto woman that is Dona Veridiana Prado.” Why,
Paulo Prado was very closely related to her, so he never spoke
to Oswald again.
“Aba-Puru”7 at the Origin of Anthropophagy
Veja: Did he also fight with Mário de Andrade?
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Tarsila: Yes, he fought with him, too. Later on he missed him
and asked me to write a letter to Mário. Oswald was very temper-
amental. I was already married to him and so I wrote, but Mário
replied that it would be impossible, that Oswald had offended him
too much, that he felt deeply resentful, that it wasn’t possible,
that things were different with me; he was always my very good
friend, Mário was. Then, when Oswald realized he really wasn’t
going to forgive him, he began to disparage Mário. A pity, that
character trait of Oswald’s . . . And with such a serious body of
work, no? I did the illustrations for his books. All of them.
Veja: So that was the starting point for the famous “Aba-Puru”?
Tarsila: No. I wanted to make a picture that would startle Oswald,
you know? Something really out of the ordinary. That’s how we
get to the “Aba-Puru.” I myself did not know why I wanted to do
this . . . I didn’t find out until later. The “Aba-Puru” was that
monstrous figure you know, isn’t that so? The little head, the skinny
little arm supported by an elbow, those enormous long legs and,
next to it, a cactus that looked like a sun, as if it were a flower and
the sun at the same time, so when he saw the picture Oswald
was extremely startled and asked: “But what is this? What an
extraordinary thing!” And immediately called Raul Bopp, who was
here, and said: “Come on over right away. You need to see some-
thing!” So Bopp went over to my studio, on rua Barão de Piracicaba,
a very fine mansion that my father had recently bought. Bopp
was equally startled and Oswald said: “This is like a thing, like a
savage, a forest thing,” and Bopp felt the same way. So I wanted
to give the painting a wild name, too, because I had one of the
Jesuit priest Montoya’s dictionaries.8 There were definitions
for everything in it. For example, in the language of the Indians
“person” was “Abá.” I wanted to say “anthropophagous person,”
I searched the whole dictionary and couldn’t find it, but there was
a list of names in the last pages, and I saw “Puru,” and then I
read it and it said “one who eats human flesh,” so I thought, ah,
that sounds good, Aba-Puru. And the name stuck.
Veja: So you were the source of the Anthropophagous
movement?
Tarsila: Raul Bopp thought we should build a movement around
the picture. He found it extremely strange; he liked it a lot and
later wrote an extremely interesting book about the indigenous
language of the Amazon. Everybody started saying that Oswald had
made the “Aba-Puru” and created the Anthropophagous move-
ment. He accepted people saying that he had authored it—he
found that interesting.
Veja: Was that the point at which he began to date documents
from the year that bishop— Bishop Sardinha—was eaten by
Indians in Bahia?
Tarsila: That’s right, and they made the Anthropophagous move-
ment, and then every Wednesday Chateaubriand (pronounced
in the French style) offered a page of his newspaper to [the]
movement. Then Geraldo Ferraz, who was known as “the Butcher,”
came along to talk about art, right?9 Yes, a butcher, because
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 Antropophagy was meat eating, so he talked about it and distributed
it among the readers. But then, because there was much irrev-
erence toward the families who subscribed to the Diário de São
Paulo, Chateaubriand found himself forced into asking them to
stop because he was losing his readership.
Friendship with Léger and the Energy of the Earth
Veja: With that deformed, monstrous figure, the “Aba-Puru”
seems to be the stuff of nightmares.
Tarsila: It’s funny you should mention it, I enjoy inventing forms
such as things I’ve never seen in life, but I didn’t know why I had
made the “Aba-Puru” in that form. I kept asking myself: “But how
did I make this?” Then a friend who was married to the mayor
said to me: “Every time I see ‘Aba-Puru’ I recall some nightmare
I’ve had,” and so I associated one thing to the other, a psychic
recollection or some such thing and remembered when we were
children on the fazenda. There were maids aplenty in those days,
black women who worked for us on the fazenda.10 After dinner
they would gather the children and tell [us] ghost stories. They told
us about a ghost in the wainscoting, I was terrified. We listened,
and they said: in a minute an arm will fall from the opening, then
a leg . . . But we never waited for the head to fall, we just opened
the door and ran out before the entire ghost came crashing down.
Who knows? Perhaps the “Aba-Puru” is a reflection of that.
Veja: Just as the Anthropophagous movement had a relation
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to so-called primitive cultures, of the Indians, of Africa, etc.,
did Fernand Léger and his subject matter of machines, factories,
and modern society influence your painting as well?
Tarsila: I was enormously fond of his work. He was a very good
friend, but I didn’t frequent Léger’s studio. I was a friend of his
wife; even after “they” invented that he had designed earrings
for me, etc. Imagine! I drew my inspiration from São Paulo itself,
from industrial society. What I did was a novelty then, in Brazil.
And I was so well received that the state government bought
my work, you know—a large painting [Workers, pl. 82], it is in
Campos do Jordão. The upper portion of it imitates a factory. At
the time of my exhibition in Rio, I had a friend from [the state of]
Pernambuco who sent me all the clippings of the reviews of the
“Aba-Puru” there, inclusive, there were astonishing fabrications,
they said my studio was like the studio of Renoir, filled with nudes
and I don’t know what all else and that I’d ordered divans to be
spread around the entire studio covered in purple velvets. Would
you believe it? And they mistook me for Anita Malfatti. At the
time (can you imagine?) a journalist from Rio actually wrote that
Oswald de Andrade had never even married me! He talked about
me as if I were a São Paulo monument: you must see Tarsila in
São Paulo. Why, I became a tourist attraction! And my wedding to
Oswald was a luxury wedding—Washington Luís attended!11 They
talked about me, about my many loves! They even called me a
fashion plate. And rightly so, because whenever I came back from
Europe I brought the latest things with me, didn’t I? I once wore
an extremely lovely gown, a sort of checkered silk with bouffant
sleeves and two very large blue bows (Dona Anette shows us a
copy of Ilustração Brasileira and says it is from 1924), you know?
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That was the dress I chose to wear at the vernissage of my work
in a vast suite of rooms on rua Barão de Itapetininga, I was standing
there waiting for the visitors. Then I saw a really large group
of young men coming toward me. I was standing at the door, I
asked: “Would you gentlemen like to come in?” It seemed that was
what they really wanted, and I welcomed them very cordially, I
invited them in, little did I know what they wanted to do: they all
had razors in their pockets to slash everything I had made! But I
think they found it very odd that I was wearing this beautiful dress
and didn’t manage to follow through with their plan.
Veja: During your childhood, did you live in São Paulo or
in the interior?
Tarsila: When I was small, I lived on a fazenda, my father adored
everything that had to do with fazendas, he bought lots of land, he
was a very rich man because his father was also known in paulista
genealogy as José Estanislau do Amaral, the Millionaire. He started
out with nothing, making castor oil, he had one or two slaves
who helped him to make it and later continued to sell, continued
to improve, bought fazendas, lots of them, he sold coffee in
Santos, too, where he made a lot of money with that. I was raised
in the countryside. I think that’s why I’m as strong as I am at my
age. Even men have a hard time beating me at arm wrestling
[shows her arm], you know?
The Cubist Portinari, a Disappointment
Veja: And your painting also contains some of this energy
of the earth, of the countryside?
Tarsila: Exactly. You know? I was a little girl on the fazenda and
would see my mother at church with many prayer cards, I already
liked painting, so much so that I [was] already making the first
poorly made copies of the saints. I made a Saint Francis Xavier
when I was about four years old. I adored drawing and being
surrounded by chickens and little chicks, and I made little drawings
of every animal I saw. Then they gave me a little white kitten, I
loved cats, she was called Falena, and she had many husbands,
and I ended up with forty cats that surrounded me, meowing, in
the Capivari fazenda. But I also spent time at the fazenda in São
Bernardo, which Daddy had already bought at that time. It was a
very large and beautiful house, and I learned to read by seeing the
letters at the entrance to the fazenda. You know, the letters were
nearly the size of this closet here. My mother used to teach me:
“Look, this here is a B, this letter is called B. This letter here is
an A,” and right away I’d memorize something about the shape
of each letter. I didn’t even feel I was being taught to read before
entering school. And I used to make grass dolls: out of a kind of
grass that had square stems and flowers, I would weight it and
make little sculptures of sorts, with arms and legs and play with
them. I grew up on that farm, and because my father had heard that
a Belgian family had established itself nearby, they were nobility:
Van Harenberg Valmont, they had an eighteen-year-old daughter
and, because I had younger brothers, Daddy sent someone over
to ask whether the young lady could come and teach us French,
and she came but she didn’t teach us anything—Mama taught her
Portuguese. I learned French because Daddy wanted his children
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 to be very well educated, so we went to Europe, and no one in
France ever knew I was not French: they always told me I spoke
without an accent étranger, you know?
Veja: In Paris you met Picasso, Apollinaire, and Breton?
Tarsila: Oh, I did. Cocteau was a great friend of ours, too. I
prepared many a Brazilian lunch at my studio in Paris, which Paulo
Prado discovered to have been the studio of Cézanne, on the rue
[Hégésippe] Moreau, in a not quite desirable neighborhood, but it
was so hard to get a studio in Paris! There were many American
artists, many foreigners, and it was hard to find. Mine was on the
fifth floor, you had to walk up, there was no bathroom, it was
kind of primitive, and if you really wanted a bath you had to go to
the bains publiques. Villa-Lobos was always there and Cocteau
frequented it, too, it was even said that he was a very good
musician. Villa-Lobos improvised on a concert grand piano in my
studio, he would play something and Cocteau would respond with
a grimace of boredom: “Non. Ce n’est pas quelque chose de
neuf!”12 Then Villa-Lobos played something else, and Cocteau
would shake his head: “No, that’s not new,” even sitting under
the piano claiming it was pour mieux entendre [to hear better],
but never approving of the music of Villa-Lobos, to him, Brazilian
folklore was déjà entendu [already heard]. You can imagine the
ensuing quarrels, with the very loud, very exuberant Villa-Lobos . . .
As a matter of fact, there was an ongoing climate of debate
because they belonged to different literary, political, and aesthetic
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parties and, thus, eternally at odds with one another . . .
Veja: Where do you get so much strength to live? A fall has
left you bedridden for most of the day. Recently, you lost
your only daughter. Soon after that, your only granddaughter
drowned to death. Are you religious?
Tarsila: Oh, I am, indeed. I am deeply devoted to the Infant Jesus
of Prague, because I received many graces through prayer to him.
It’s a miraculous novena. I know the whole thing by heart: “Oh
Jesus, who said: Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find,
knock and the door shall be opened,” when I read that it gave
me goose bumps, you know? Just imagine that door opening and
opening . . . That inspired me to paint the Infant Jesus with a little
black boy, who symbolizes the meek; there were Japanese and
Indians in it, too, I gave it to a priest who runs an orphanage for
children. I used to copy religious oleographs . . .
Veja: Portinari also began by copying saints.
Tarsila: Oh, I was very disappointed in Portinari when I met an
exegete of Cubism in Paris, and I frequented that great teacher
for more than six months. And I don’t think Portinari made Cubist
paintings. For instance: he was going to paint Tiradentes.13 He
used a brush and China ink to draw him, and then he got pieces of
paper and glued them onto the drawing. That was never Cubism!
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Painting of a Happy Childhood
Veja: Beyond their religious sentiment, there is a tone of
remembrance in your paintings . . .
Tarsila: One of the most successful paintings I exhibited in Europe
is called A Negra [pl. 13]. Because I have recurring memories of
having seen one of those old female slaves, when I was five or
six years old, you know? A female slave who lived on our fazenda,
and she had droopy lips and enormous breasts because (I was
later told) in those days black women used to tie rocks to their
breasts in order to lengthen them, and then they would sling them
back over their shoulders to breastfeed the children they were
carrying on their backs. In a picture I painted for the city of São
Paulo’s fourth centennial, I painted a procession with a black
woman in the foreground and a Baroque church, it was a memory
of that woman from my childhood, I think. I invent everything in
my painting. And I stylize whatever it was that I saw or felt, like a
beautiful sunset or that woman.14
Veja: So your very poetic painting is a tender evocation
of a happy childhood?
Tarsila: I believe you aren’t far from the truth.
1 The musicians Caetano Veloso (Brazilian, born 1942), Gilberto Gil (Brazilian, born
1942), and Chico Buarque (Brazilian, born 1944), were all active in the Tropicália
movement of the 1960s.
2 João Guimarães Rosa (Brazilian, 1908–1967) was a novelist, short-story writer,
and diplomat.
3 The artist’s memory is confused here, as Monteiro Lobato’s criticism of Malfatti
occurred at the time of her first exhibition in 1917.
4 “Look at what she is doing, how powerful it is!”
5 Carlos Viegas Gago Coutinho (Portuguese, 1869–1959) was a naval officer and
aviation pioneer.
6 The ship’s correct name was Lutetia.
7 Abaporu (pl. 54).
8 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (Peruvian, 1585–1652) was a Jesuit priest, missionary,
and scholar of the Tupi-Guarani languages.
9 Benedito Geraldo Ferraz Gonçalves (Brazilian, 1905–1979) was a writer, journalist,
and critic.
10 Fazenda is the Brazilian Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish hacienda in the
sense that it defines a large estate that is also very likely an agricultural property.
11 Washington Luís Pereira de Sousa (Brazilian, 1869–1957) was a politician who
served as the thirteenth President of Brazil, the last of the First Brazilian Republic.
12 “No, there’s nothing new about it!”
13 Tiradentes (Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, 1746–1792) was a Brazilian leader of
the revolutionary movement aimed at independence from Portugal and the creation
of a Brazilian republic. Tiradentes, who was arrested and put to death for his goals,
became a national hero in the nineteenth century.
14 It is noteworthy that Tarsila’s recollections of childhood were of an idyllic, perfect
moment of beauty and “purity” that took place amid actual slaves or at least very
newly freed slaves.
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 MÁRIO DE ANDRADE
LETTER TO TARSILA
November 15, 1924
Translated by Graham Howells, reprinted from Aracy A. Amaral
et al.,Tarsila do Amaral, exh. cat. (Fundación Juan March,
2009), pp. 23–24.
November 15 – Long live the Republic!
Tarsila, my dear friend:
(Now the current letter of the conversation:)
Be careful! Fortify yourselves well with theories and excuses and
things seen in Paris. When you arrive here, there will surely be
arguments. Right now, I challenge you all, Tarsila, Oswald, Sérgio,1
to a formidable debate. You went to Paris as bourgeois. Ready
to épaté. And you became Futurists! Ha! Ha! Ha! I weep with
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envy. It is true, though, that I think of you all as caipiras in Paris.
Your Parisianness is skin-deep. That’s horrible! Tarsila, Tarsila,
return back into yourself. Abandon Gris and Lhote, impresarios
of decrepit criticism and decadent aesthesias! Abandon Paris!
Tarsila! Tarsila! Come to the virgin forest, where there is no black
art, where there are no gentle streams either. There is VIRGIN
FOREST.2 I have created virgin-forestism. I am a virgin-forester.
That is what the world, art, Brazil, and my dearest Tarsila need.
If you are brave, come here, accept my challenge.
And how beautiful it would be to see the beautiful resurgent
figure of Tarsila Amaral in the green frame of the forest. I would
arrive silently, confidently, and would kiss your divine hands.
A hug from your friend Mário.
1 Sérgio Milliet, who was then in Paris.
2 MATA VIRGEM in the original Portuguese.
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TARSILA
MÁRIO DE ANDRADE
Dated December 21, 1927, published in Tarsila, exh. cat.
(Typographia Bancaria, 1929)
Translated by Graham Howells, reprinted from Aracy A. Amaral
et al.,Tarsila do Amaral, exh. cat. (Fundación Juan March,
2009), pp. 223–24.
In the Brazilian modern art movement, one person who from the
beginning adopted an exceptional stance was Mrs. Amaral de
Andrade. A name almost no one knows. . . . Well, the illustrious
painter is only known as Tarsila, and that is how she signs
her paintings.
Tarsila has one of the strongest personalities that the modern
artists have revealed to Brazil. It affects the most up-to-date currents
of universal painting, she has reached an absolutely personal
solution that has drawn the attention of the big shots of modern
Parisian painting. From a traditional family, feeling much at ease
within Brazilian reality, one can say that in the history of our
painting, she was the first who managed to create a work of national
reality. What distinguishes her from an Almeida Júnior, for ex-
ample, is that her paintings are not inspired by national themes.
Ultimately, in artworks like O Grito do Ipiranga and Carioca, only
the subject is Brazilian. Her technique, expression, emotion,
art, all of them lead us to far-off places beyond the sea. In Tarsila,
as in all true painters, the theme is only another circumstance
of the enchantment. What truly produces that Brazilian quality
immanent in her painting is artistic reality itself; a certain and
very advantageously used rustic quality of shapes and color; an
intelligent systematization of bad taste that is in exceptionally
good taste; an intimate sentimentality, somewhat tinged with sin,
full of tenderness and strong flavor.
I do not clearly know which French painter or critic noted that this
exoticism should be criticized in her. However, nobody censures
the douanier Rousseau for his small monkeys and African jungles.
It is not only the subject that makes a painting exotic but the
same essential values of that work as art. This French observation,
which, by the way, does not have the slightest critical value,
clearly proves that Tarsila was able to obtain a visual realization
so intimately national that foreigners find it has an exotic flavor.
I believe this is the principal merit of Tarsila’s painting. What is
most surprising in her, however, is that pursuing that national
psychology in her technique did not impair in the least the artistic
essence that a painting, to be a painting, requires. This is
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 extraordinary. With an admirable balance between expression and
formal realization, she plainly proves what a creative imagination TARSILA DO AMARAL
can do at the service of a critical and intelligent culture.
PAU-BRASIL AND ANTHROPOPHAGOUS
I believe that, after the Paris exhibition, the great painter felt
tired. She abandoned the brushes and entered the teatime of her
PAINTING
TARSILA DO AMARAL
existence. She traveled, amused herself, studied, but painting,
she did not paint anything else. This restlessness brought a dark
twilight to the modern festivals here. 8 p.m., 10 p.m., 11 p.m.,
12 a.m., 1 a.m., 2 a.m. . . . It is five o’clock and arriving at the
Santa Teresa do Alto farm finds a dining room recently decorated
by the painter. Tarsila has resumed her work and plans to hold an
exhibition here next year. This will be very good because, ultimately,
in Brazil, except for the small group of admirers who frequent RASM—Revista anual do Salão de Maio 1 (1939), n.p.
the painter’s studio, the rest only have knowledge of her paintings Translated by Graham Howells, reprinted from Aracy A. Amaral
through highly imperfect reproductions. et al., Tarsila do Amaral, exh. cat. (Fundación Juan March,
2009), pp. 31–33.
Actually, in that dining room the painter restricted herself to
improving the naïve paintings that were already there, giving them
an artistic value. But those still lifes, which were formerly On the occasion of Blaise Cendrars’ visit to Brazil in 1924,
of an applied vulgarity, with unworthy colors, now became joyful, without premeditation, with no desire to form a school, I painted
a delight to the eyes. Bananas, oranges, fat pineapples converted the picture they called Pau-Brasil.
into fruit from the north, just-picked, in the orchard . . . of imagination.
They do not make us want to eat them but rather gently encourage Impregnated with the theory and practice of Cubism, I only had
conversation. There is sun out there. It smells strongly of soil eyes for Léger, Gleizes, and Lhote, my teachers in Paris. Having
and flowers. Better to stay right here, chatting aimlessly. The recently returned from Europe, and after giving various interviews
delightful indolence of the farm, where every hour we return to the to several Brazilian newspapers about the Cubist movement, I felt

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table to eat a little something. That is the environment created dazzled by the folk decorations in the homes of São João del Rei,
by the bananas, oranges, and pineapples that Tarsila has harvested Tiradentes, Congonhas do Campos, Sabará, Ouro Preto, and
from her imagination. other small towns in Minas, full of folk poetry. Return to tradition,
to simplicity.

We went as a group to discover Brazil, led by Dona Olívia Guedes

Penteado with her sensitivity, charm, social prestige, and her
support of modern artists. Blaise Cendrars, Oswald de Andrade,
Mário de Andrade, Gofredo da Silva Telles, René Thiollier, Oswald
de Andrade Jr., then a boy, and me.

The mural decorations in the modest corridor of a hotel; the

room ceilings, made of colored and braided bamboo; the church
paintings, simple and moving, made with love and devotion by
anonymous artists; Aleijadinho, with his statues and the brilliant
lines of his religious architecture. Everything caused us to cry out
in admiration. In Minas, I found the colors I loved as a child. Later,
I was taught that they were ugly and caipira. I followed the hum
of refined taste. . . . But, later, I took my revenge on that oppression,
transferring them to my canvases: purest blue, violet pink, vivid
yellow, and strident green, all in various grades of strength
according to how much white was mixed in. Clean painting above
all, without fear of conventional canons. Freedom and sincerity,
a certain stylization that adapted it to the modern age. Clean
contours that gave a perfect impression of the distance separating
one object from another. This led to the success I had at the
Galerie Percier on the rue la Boétie in Paris, where I had my first
exhibition in 1926. I first had to take an exam. In spite of Cendrars’
introduction, M. Level, the director of the gallery, could not commit
himself to showing the work of an unknown artist. The excuse

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 was that he had no space. He would, however, go to my studio
to see my work. When I showed him Hills of the Favela—black
people, black children, animals, clothes drying in the sun, among
tropical colors, a painting that today belongs to Francisco da Silva
Teles—he asked me: “When would you like to exhibit?” I had
passed. I was going to be shown on Paris’s street of avant-garde
art. I rejoiced. The Parisian critics, spontaneously (without my
having to spend a single franc on advertisements, despite what
certain less than benevolent colleagues said), liked me. At the
vernissage, the collector Madame Tachard bought Adoration, that
painting of the thick-lipped black man with his hands clasped,
praying in front of the image of the Divine One, surrounded by blue,
pink, and white flowers, with a frame by Pierre Legrain. The little
colored wax dove, purchased here in a little provincial town and given
to me as a gift by Cendrars, was the model. The rustic angels, with
their wings of different colors like devotional flags, which belong
today to Júlio Prestes, also had their fans among the critics.
Maurice Raynal wrote: “Sra. Tarsila brings from Brazil the first
fruits of artistic renewal, the first signs in that great nation of the
decay of those international academic influences that until now
have stifled its personality. Here we have indigenous or imaginary
scenes that are totally Brazilian: landscapes from around São
Paulo, families of black people, children in the sanctuary and those
angels with their purely animal mysticism.” Etc.
André Warnod commented: “Blue, green, pink, everything raw,
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beautiful colors, like New Year’s Eve parties and images of
first communions. Pleasant to look at, full of exuberant content,
radiant happiness and smiling cheerfulness.” Etc.
The well-known art critics Christian Zervos, Maximilien Gauthier,
Louis Vauxcelles, Serge Romoff, Gaston de Pawlowski, and
Raymond Cogniat spoke kindly about Pau-Brasil painting, as did
António Ferro, Mário de Andrade, Assis Chateaubriand, Plínio
Salgado, António de Alcântara Machado, Menotti del Picchia,
Manuel Bandeira, Álvaro Moreira, Renato Almeida, Paulo Silveira,
Luís Aníbal Falcão, Ascenso Ferreira, and others. Naturally, there
were adversaries.
Cendrars sent enthusiastic letters to me in Paris: “ Vive votre belle
peinture,” 1 and Paulo Prado said it all when he stated that he felt
a piece of our homeland upon glimpsing, from a distance, a very
Pau-Brasil painting of mine in the window of the Galerie Percier.
The reviews I’ve transcribed have one aim: to clarify and confirm
with documents that this movement had repercussion in Brazilian
painting, just as Oswald de Andrade’s Pau-­Brasil poetry had
in literature.
—
The Anthropophagy movement of 1928 had its origins in my canvas
Abaporu, cannibal: a solitary, monstrous figure with immense
feet sitting on a green plain, one bent arm resting on its knee, the
hand supporting the tiny feather­weight head. In the foreground,
a cactus bursting into an absurd flower. That canvas was sketched
on January 11, 1928. Oswald de Andrade and Raul Bopp—who
16 8 Tarsila do Amaral
001-192 CC.indd 168
wrote the famous poem Cobra Norato —were both shaken when
they saw Abaporu and spent a long time looking at it. Both very
imaginative, they felt that an important intellectual movement
could come of this.
Now, a pause: some years later, Sofía Caversassi Villalva, who had
an artist’s temperament and radiated beauty and sensitivity, said
that my Anthropophagite canvases resembled her dreams. Only
then did I understand that I myself had given expression to
subconscious images suggested by stories I had heard as a child:
the haunted house, the voice that shouted from on high: “I’m
falling” and let fall a foot (which seemed enormous to me). “I’m
falling,” and another foot fell and then a hand, another hand and
the whole body, terrifying the children.
The Anthropophagy movement had its pre-Anthropophagy phase
before Pau-Brasil painting, in 1923, when I painted in Paris a very
controversial picture, A Negra, a seated figure with two robust
tree-trunk legs crossed; a heavy breast hanging over her arm; huge,
pendulous lips; a proportionally small head. A Negra announced
the birth of Anthropophagy. The drawing of that painting served
as the cover of the poems of Feuilles de route, which Blaise
Cendrars wrote about his trip to Brazil in 1924.
As I was saying, Abaporu made a great impression. It suggested
a doomed creature tied to the earth by its enormous, heavy
feet. A symbol. A movement should be formed around it. It was
Brazil concentrated, the “green hell.” The Anthropophagy Club
was formed, with a magazine under the direction of Antônio de
Alcântara Machado and Raul Bopp. Oswald de Andrade launched
his manifesto, and membership grew rapidly. On February 14, 1928,
quite some time before the appearance of the first issue of the
magazine, which came out in May, Plínio Salgado was already
writing in the Correio Paulistano: “Tarsila do Amaral, whom Blaise
Cendrars said would be capable of bringing about a literary
movement . . . in Russia. No. Tarsila is capable of bringing about
a literary movement in Brazil. . . . She reveals significant traces of
those great and elemental forces to which I’m referring. Two of
her paintings, in particular, have a deep sense of ‘cosmic center’
and ‘racial truth.’ She has painted them without feeling because
the artist never aims to do anything other than fix a thought. And
that thought is often a prophetic revelation.”
In the first stage (or the “baby-teeth stage”) of the Revista
de Antropofagia, contributors, apart from the founders Oswald de
Andrade, Raul Bopp, and Antônio de Alcântara Machado, included
Mário de Andrade, Osvaldo Costa, Augusto Meyer, Abigoar Bastos,
Guilherme de Almeida, Plínio Salgado, Álvaro Moreira, Jorge
Fernandes, Rosario Fusco, Yan de Almeida Prado, Marques Rebelo,
Manuel Bandeira, Brasil Pinheiro Machado, José Américo de
Almeida, Rui Cirne Lima, Maria Clemencia (Buenos Aires), Menotti
del Picchia, Abgar Renault, Murilo Mendes, Nicolas Fusco
Sansone (Montevideo), Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Pedro Nava,
Ascenso Ferreira, Achilles Vivacqua, Mario Gra­ciotti, Ascânio
Lopes, Jaime Griz, Luís da Camara Cascudo, Antonio Gomide,
Henrique de Rezende, Guilhermino Cesar, Alberto Dezon, Peryllo
Doliveira, Franklin Nascimento, Azevedo Correa Filho, Sebastião
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 Dias, A. de Almeida Camargo, A. de Limeira Tejo, Mateus
Cavalcante, Josué de Castro, Júlio Paternostro, Ubaldino de Senra,
Silvestre Machado, L. Souza Costa, Camilo Soares, Charles Lucifer,
F. de San Tiago Dantas, Rubens de Moraes, Nelson Tabajara,
Walter Benevides, Emilio Moura, João Domas Filho, Pedro Dantas,
and Augusto Schmidt.
In Europe, the art critic Waldemar-George, referring to a 1928
paintings exhibition of mine, wrote the essay, “Tarsila et l’Anthro-
pophagie,” commenting on the Brazilian movement’s return to its
Indian roots, the lord of the land, where “happiness is the casting
out of nines,” as the Manifesto of Anthropophagy stated.
Krishnamurti sent a greeting from Paris, reproduced in facsimile
in issue number 8 of the magazine. Distinguished writers offered
their collaboration. Published, also in facsimile, in issue number
6, was the following thought from Max Jacob: “À la Revista de
Antropofagia—Les grands hommes sont modestes, c’est la
famille qui porte leur orgueil comme des reliques.”2
The review appeared from May 1928 until February 1929.
From March to July of that same year, its official organ was a
weekly page in the Diário de São Paulo. In this “permanent teeth”
stage, support and contributions came from Oswald de Andrade,
Osvaldo Costa, Geraldo Ferraz, Jorge de Lima, Júlio Paternostro,
Péret (of the French Surrealist group), Raul Bopp, Barboza Rodrigues,
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Clovis de Guarniio, Pagu, Álvaro Moreira, Di Cavalcanti, Mário
de Andrade, Galeão Coutinho, Jayme Adour da Camara, Augusto
Meyer, José Isaac Peres, Heitor Marçal, Achilles Vivaequa, Nelson
Foot, Hermes Lima, Edmundo Lys, Junrandyr Manfredini, Cícero
Dias, Felippe de Oliveira, Dante Milano, Osvaldo Goeldi, Bruno
de Menezes, Eneida, Ernani Vieira, Paulo de Oliveira, Hannibal
Machado, Sant’Ana Marques, Campos Ribeiro, Muniz Barreto,
Orlando Morais, Garcia de Rezende, João Domas Filho, Ascenco
Ferreira, Limeira Tejo, Dolour, Luiz de Castro, Genuino de Castro,
Murilo Mendes, and me.
The movement excited, scandalized, irritated, enthused, infuriated,
and grew in members from northern to southern Brazil, in addition
to attracting the sympathy of intellectuals from our neighboring
countries. It also had reverberations in Paris, with indignant protests
aroused by my painting Anthropophagy. One afternoon, Geraldo
Ferraz—the butcher—ran excitedly into the house of Osvaldo
Costa to say that the magazine had been suspended by the general
manager of the Diário de São Paulo because of the pile of letters
written by the newspaper’s readers protesting against that page that
was doing away with the whole bourgeois canon. Poor magazine!
The Anthropophagy movement died with it. . . .
1 “Long live your beautiful painting.”
2 “In the Revista de Antropofagia—Great men are modest, it is the family that
carries their pride as relics.”
001-192 CC.indd 169
“FULL CONFESSION”
TARSILA DO AMARAL
Tarsila 1918–1950, exh. cat. (Museu de Arte Moderna,
São Paulo, 1950)
Translated by Stephen Berg
My artistic career . . . When did it begin? When I was a child, on
the day I sketched a basket of flowers and a chicken surrounded
by a clutch of chicks. I believe the fairly synthetic basket and its
large handle may have been influenced by adult advice or a recol-
lection of some painting from this genre; but the chicken and the
little chicks came from my soul, from the affection with which
I observed the domestic animals around the house, on the farm
in which I grew up like some small, free animal myself, playing
with my forty cats.
Then came boarding school. The Catholic nuns of my school in
Barcelona always praised my copies of saints. I began to draw
from life in 1917, with Pedro Alexandrino: plaster models, flowers,
fruit, and timid landscapes. The following year I made a small oil
painting in which a backyard may be seen along with the entrance
to my studio, bathed in the light of—Hélas!—a most un-sunlike
sun.1 Three months after the Semana de Arte Moderna, the entire
modernist group (including Graça Aranha)2 later converged on
this studio in the Rua Vitória, in 1922. The Grupo dos Cinco was
formed there, made up of Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade,
Menotti del Picchia, Anita Malfatti, and myself—kooks tearing
deliriously and joyfully around in Oswald’s Cadillac, conquering the
world in order to renew it. It was Paulicéia desvairada (Hallucinated
City ) in action.
After a two-year stay in Europe, I returned with a paint box
full of beautiful colors, many beautiful dresses, and little
artistic information.
In Paris, at the advice of Pedro Alexandrino, I sought out the
Académie Julian and, later, the studio of Émile Renard, whose work
had been deemed hors-concours at the Salon des Artistes Français.
In São Paulo, prior to that trip to Europe, I attended the painting
course of Professor Elpons for about two months in 1920; he was
the importer of Impressionism to Brazil and he did me a great favor:
it was according to his advice that I abolished Pedro Alexandrino’s
earthy colors from my palette. I became more assured in the
technique of broad, paint-laden brushstrokes. At the Académie
Julian my studies were identified as advanced, a status that is
visible in some of the canvases in my retrospective exhibition.
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 It sounds mendacious . . . but it was in Brazil that I first came
into contact with modern art (the same thing happened, actually, to
Graça Aranha); encouraged by my friends, I enthusiastically painted
some pictures that reflected a delighted use of violent color. After
six months in Sao Paulo, I returned to Paris, and the year 1923
was the most important of my artistic career. Still linked to Impres-
sionism, I sought out André Lhote. A new world unfolded to my
restless soul before the Cubist pictures of the rue la Boétie that I
began to frequent. As I have written, Lhote was the bridge between
classicism and Modernism. His vigorous, highly contemporary
painting was based on Rembrandt, on Michelangelo, on the past
masters. That was all I needed for my transition. An amiable joker,
Lhote nonetheless exercised great influence over his students.
Once, for health reasons, when he failed to appear at the studio,
he was substituted by María Blanchard, a very congenial, very
intelligent little hunchbacked painter, the author of figurative canvas-
es rich with enchantment and simplicity. Upon seeing a head I had
sketched nervously, María Blanchard said to me with the airs and
graces of a master seeking effect: “Vous savez trop!”3 She wanted
painting to be more unpretentious, naïve, sprung from the heart.
That same year of 1923, I also took lessons from Fernand Léger.
I admired the strong, red-haired Breton artist, with his imposing,
almost coarse, big, stout physique and his uncompromising
points of view, true to himself from the very beginning of a career
dedicated to the new art. Aligning himself with the Cubists,
Léger soon diverged from them to create his own unmistakably
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personal paintings.
Albert Gleizes, the Cubist pontiff whose paintings may then have
been called abstract through the total absence of subject matter,
was also my teacher. From him I received the key to the Cubism I
cultivated with love. When I returned to Brazil, in December of ‘23,
on the night before Christmas, I gave an enthusiastic interview
about Cubism to Rio’s Correio da Manhã. In it, I said something
that has often been repeated by others: “Cubism is the artist’s
military service. In order to be strong, every artist must be con-
scripted.” In 1924, during a gathering at the home of Dona Olívia
Guedes Penteado, Assis Chateaubriand4 asked me for some ex-
planations about the Cubism I had just imported. In a conversation,
he learned the new theories with his prodigious intelligence and,
in a full page of O Jornal, several photographs of my canvases
launched the new school.
The painting they named “Pau-Brasil” had its origins during a trip
to the state of Minas Gerais in 1924, with Dona Olívia Guedes
Penteado, Blaise Cendrars, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade,
Gofredo da Silva Telles, René Thiollier, Oswald de Andrade, Jr.
(who just a boy then), and myself.
My contact with that region, imbued as it is with tradition, religious
art, and painted houses in the small, essentially Brazilian cities of
Minas—Ouro Preto, Sabará, São João del Rey, Tiradentes, Mariana,
and others—awakened a sense of Brasilidade in me. My canvases
Hills of the Favela [pl. 24], Brazilian Religion date back to this period,
along with many others that fit in with the Pau-Brasil movement
created by Oswald de Andrade.5
170 Tarsila do Amaral
001-192 CC.indd 170
Another movement—the Anthropofagous one—developed from
a picture I painted as a gift for Oswald de Andrade on January 11,
1928. When he saw that monstrous figure with its colossal feet
planted heavily in the soil, Oswald called in Raul Bopp to share his
astonishment. It was in the presence of this painting, which they
named Abaporu—Anthropophagy—that they decided to create
a literary and artistic movement rooted in Brazilian soil. Antônio
de Alcântara Machado was the first to join.6 The three of them
founded the Revista de Antropofagia, the repercussion of which
extended beyond our boundaries. In Paris, the art critic Waldemar-
Georges wrote about Anthropophagy, Max Jacob and Krishnamurti,
with their greeting, sent autographed facsimiles that were repro-
duced in the magazine, in which great names from north to south
of Brazil collaborated. There were countless allegiances and
demonstrations of sympathy.
Previously on view in Paris, my paintings of the Pau-Brasil and
Anthropophagy periods were shown in Rio and in São Paulo in
1929. In 1931 I exhibited in Moscow at the Museum of Western
Modern Art, which acquired O pescador (The Fisherman).7 In Rio,
two years later, I presented a retrospective of all the canvases
of my artistic career and now, after seventeen years without a solo
exhibition, I am showing my work in São Paulo, a “full confession”
of sorts, my work from 1918 until today. In the meantime, I carry
on my pictorial research.
1 The painting is My Studio (Vitória Street), 1918. Its current location is unknown;
see Maria Eugênia Saturni and Regina Teixeira de Barros, eds., Tarsila: Catálogo
raisonné (Base 7 Projetos Culturais/Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2008), P004.
2 José Pereira da Graça Aranha (Brazilian, 1868–1931) was a writer and diplomat
who was involved in the Semana and whose portrait was made by Tarsila and
illustrated in Klaxon (pl. 89).
3 “You know too much!”
4 Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand Bandeira de Melo (Brazilian, 1892–1968),
nicknamed Chatô, was an attorney, journalist, politician, and diplomat who also
acquired a number of works by Tarsila, including Urutu Viper (1928; pl. 58) and
Two Studies (Academy I and The Model) (1923; pl. 3).
5 For an illustration of Brazilian Religion I, see p. 17, fig. 4 in this publication.
6 Antônio de Alcântara Machado (Brazilian, 1901–1935) was a journalist, politician,
and writer.
7 The Fisherman, c. 1925, is in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum,
Saint Petersburg; for an illustration of the painting, see Saturni and
Teixeira de Barros, Tarsila: Catálogo raisonné, P091.
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 “RECOLLECTIONS OF PARIS”
TARSILA DO AMARAL
Habitat—Revista das artes no Brasil 6 (1952), pp. 17–25
Translated by Stephen Berg
I was a girl when I saw Paris for the first time. What a disappoint
ment! Could this be the much talked about city of wonders? Where
were the manors surrounded by emerald parks in whose lakes
slow-moving banks of swans glided serenely and majestically?
Where were the Donas Sanchas1 covered in gold and silver, re-
splendent in their diamond-studded carriages? Where were the
streets lined with iridescent palaces inhabited by charming princes
and their handsome pageboys dressed in damasks and velvets?
Little did I know that the seduction of Paris lies precisely in its
intense life, rich in emotion and aesthetic pleasure. Little did I know
its sad, gray buildings housed international celebrities from all
branches of art and science that I would only later come to know.
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Paris—the real Paris, the one that left indelible impressions on
me—was the Paris of 1923. I had been there three years earlier,
had frequented its painting academies, its museums, and its
theaters, but nothing profound had impressed my sensibility. When
I left Brazil in 1920, a credulous pupil of Pedro Alexandrino, I fell
right into the pompier of the Parisian milieu. I had never visited a
modern art gallery. Amid mocking smiles, I heard talk of Picasso,
of the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922, when all was fervent
enthusiasm over the artistic revolution, when Oswald de Andrade,
Mário de Andrade, and Menotti del Picchia—the Three Musketeers
of literature of that time—held frenzied discussions of art that
challenged the whole world. Once again I fell right into a milieu, the
opposite of Paris. With Anita Malfatti, we formed the Grupo dos
Cinco. We were inseparable. Darting madly about in Oswald’s
Cadillac, we flew everywhere with the energy of an Assis Chateau-
briand to vent the inner fire that so needed an escape valve.2 My
studio on the Rua Vitória—it is still there, behind the house, a joinery
now, according to what I saw a few days ago, while rambling
nostalgically through my old street—for six months my studio was
the center toward which the illustrious members of the artistic
revolution converged; they included Graça Aranha, the boss of the
Semana, and António Ferro, recently arrived from Portugal. The
lesson had been a profitable one. In December of that same year
of 1922, I returned to Paris contaminated by revolutionary ideas.
I hurried off to Lhote and found him in the wooden shed in
Montparnasse, where he held his painting class. There he was,
surrounded by students—a large and very congenial family. Every-
thing seemed mysterious. I remember how avidly I would listen
to his lessons. I can still see the reproductions of Michelangelo
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glued to the walls as standards for good draftsmanship: Lhote
became the bridge between classicism and Modernism. Short in
stature, with intelligent eyes, always obliging, he explained in
his southern accent how it was possible to adapt the technique
and the composition methods of past masters to the demands
of contemporary art.
Later, in the rue Notre-Dame des Champs, came the academy
of Fernand Léger, a tall, stout man with red hair, incisive in his
assertions, deeply convinced of the victory of his art—although
in that time it did not have many practitioners—the man who had
the courage to say in a lecture that he preferred an egg beater
to the Gioconda’s smile—a statement that exploded in the hetero-
geneous auditorium like an atomic bomb. In his private studio,
a vast hall in which canvases and frames were scattered about
amid tremendous clutter, the master showed me the photograph
of a classic nude woman alongside the gears of a machine cata-
logue and said to me: “I will only be satisfied when I succeed in
fusing these two things.” Even today, his art continues to radiate
unwaveringly from its starting point. Léger is always the same:
the great Léger.
Not content with the new directions, he tried to recruit me to
the Cubist school: I sought out Albert Gleizes, its exegete, author
of a History of Art and short essays on Cubism, heavy, obscure
books, leaning toward a philosophical mysticism. Back then he
had a group of students to whom he gave individual lessons in
his own apartment, in which Juliette Roche, his wife, the author
of eccentric poems with a Dadaist flavor, welcomed her friends
in the oriental style, seated on the carpet, her fine Angora in her
lap, surrounded by the richest antique objects. Gleizes told me
how Cubism had been born by chance, from a game of integrated
lines and volumes, and how its creators discovered that they
could take advantage of it. Gleizes’ paintings, classified in that time
as Integral Cubism, would fit in today’s abstractionist current.
Paris in 1923! Recollections of it bubble up, pile up, and run over
one another. . . . My studio in the rue Hégésippe Moreau, which
Paulo Prado discovered had been inhabited by Cézanne, was
frequented by important characters. Cocteau occasionally attended
my typically Brazilian lunches; a causeur [chatterbox], he charmed
everyone with his boutades [quips] and expressive gestures; Erik
Satie, with his sexagenarian youthfulness, believed only in youths
under the age of twenty, entertaining us with his picturesque way
of speaking and not wanting to talk about Cocteau because the
latter, in his admiration for the composer, had decided to pay him
public homage. Cocteau did not appear at one of the luncheons
especially arranged for their reconciliation. On the appointed day
he sent me one of his books to which he added to the dedication
an apology for not having showed up, saying that his devoted re-
spect to Satie was so immense that, in spite of not understanding
the master’s attitude, it would be best to continue to admire him
from afar.
Others who frequented my studio included Valery Larbaud, with
his quiet perspective, a friend of Portugal—the place where he
used to spend his vacations; the stocky figure of Jules Romains,
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 with whom we discussed his Knock and Monsieur Le Trouhadec;
Giraudoux and his circumspect conversational asides; John
dos Passos, brimming with youthfulness, externalizing his inner
flame with witty remarks; Jules Supervielle and his contagious
congeniality; Brancusi, with his white-bearded head of Moses;
Ambroise Vollard, the collector of magnificent Cézannes and
Renoirs, which he hid in [such] an instinctive avarice that only to
congenial friends did he show [them] in his apartment, on given
days of good humor. Among the Brazilians, Villa-Lobos improvised
on the concert Erard, submitting himself to Cocteau’s criticism;
once, as a blague [joke], he sat under the piano because he claimed
he could hear better from that spot. Cocteau did not like the
music Villa-Lobos was writing at that time: he felt it was too similar
to the music of Debussy and Ravel. Newly arrived in Paris, our
great maestro improvised another piece [in an attempt change
Cocteau’s opinion], but Cocteau remained adamant, and a quarrel
was narrowly avoided. It was during one of these Brazilian lunches
that Cocteau learned how to roll a straw cigarette. He kept a
fragrant piece of rope tobacco in his pocket and said: “C’est pour
épater Stravinski.”3 At my studio, our assiduous compatriots
included the aristocratic writer Paulo Prado; our unforgettable Dona
Olívia Penteado; Sousa Lima, who was being noticed in Paris
after his first prize at the Conservatory; Oswald de Andrade, who
with his antennae wound up being anywhere there was interest
and refinement; Sérgio Milliet, with his young dreamer poet’s
figure, of which I made a portrait in blue, which seems to resist
criticism to this day; Di Cavalcanti, in his curiosity for the new
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currents, and others.
I remember that Cendrars introduced us to the black prince
Tovalu4—a fetish coveted by all the avant-garde artistic circles.
A highly perfumed black man with the proper features of the
Aryan race, he dressed with Parisian elegance. He told us that, in
Dahomey, where his father reigned, there was a neighborhood
called Blesin—a corruption of Brazil—where the descendants of
the free slave friends lived, who returned there bringing with them
a civilization, retaining the names of their masters, the Almeidas,
Barros, Camargos, and others.
I also recollect a dinner at the Pen Club, offered to Ramón Gómez
de la Serna with the presence of the composer Manuel de Falla.5
Gomez de la Serna spoke poor French. Anticipating the traditional
toast, he hid an empty bottle under his chair and, at the moment
of acknowledging the tribute, he mumbled a few ungrammatical
phrases, stuttered and, in order to get himself out of trouble,
picked up the bottle, stuck a little Spanish flag in it along with a
French one and, his hand held high, shouted: “Vive la France!”
Imagine the surprise and the laughter. After dinner, when coffee
and the uniquely French old Fine were served, Manuel de Falla,
his small figure almost disappearing, went to the modest upright
piano and set to playing his wonderful compositions. [The writers]
Benjamin Crémieux, Valery Larbaud, Supervielle, Jules Romains,
and other personalities of the avant-garde were there on that
unforgettable night.
And the theaters? And the ballets? And the first audition concerts
with [the composers] Paul Dukas, Samazeuils, Honegger, Ferroud,
172 Tarsila do Amaral
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and Ducasse, to name but a few?6 The crowd of new music lov-
ers ran to the Concerts Wiéner and to the Calvet Quartet. In the
theater,7 Cocteau’s Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel caused delirious
enthusiasm and bitter backlash. Under Rolf de Maré’s direction, the
Ballets Suédois gripped the attention of Paris; after the success
of Skating Rink, with sets by Léger, came La Création du monde,
with a libretto by Blaise Cendrars and music by Darius Milhaud.
One can well imagine the effect caused by that avant-garde trio.
Many other ballets were staged for ever more demanding
audiences. Still young and engaging, Rolf de Maré convened the
most visible artists in his apartment, decorated with exceedingly
antique furniture and exceedingly modern paintings. It was there
that Lhote introduced me to Marie Laurencin; he had warned me
that “Marie Laurencin détestait qu’on allait chez elle.”8
I cannot forget the former ambassador of Chile, the beautiful
Eugenia Errázuriz, with her graying head, a great friend to artists,
an intimate of Picasso, the only artist whose works hung in her
extremely beautiful and remarkable home. I had the satisfaction
of seeing a landscape of Minas (from my 1926 exhibition) be
exceptionally admitted to her environment.9 Where will the en-
chanting Chilean lady be today? Who will give news of her?
The year of 1926 was also of great importance in my career. Blaise
Cendrars had introduced me to Mr. Level who, in spite of the
introduction, did not want to commit to an unknown painter. He
protested he had no space but decided to see my paintings
anyway. Before Hills of the Favela [pl. 24], with its little black boys
and its pink, blue, and yellow houses, Mr. Level turned to me
and asked: “When would you like to show your work?” I had been
accepted: imagine my joy. At the vernissage, the collector Madame
Tachard purchased Adoration, a black man with a large lower
lip and hands clasped before a small wax dove (the Holy Spirit),
that had served me as a model, and had been offered to me by
Cendrars in 1924, on a visit to Pirapora.10 The critics were entirely
favorable and spontaneous (without my having had to spend a franc,
as none too benevolent colleagues think). I had the satisfaction of
seeing myself noted by the most conspicuous critics of that time:
Maurice Raynal, André Salmon, Christian Zervos, André Warnod,
Louis Vauxcelles, Raymond Cogniat, Gaston de Pawlowski,
Maximilien Gauthier, Serge Romoff, António Ferro. All of them
spoke favorably about Pau-Brasil painting. Later, in 1928, beyond
those previously mentioned, Waldemar-George also manifested
himself about my Anthropophagous painting.
Many are my recollections of Paris. My thoughts drift to the art
galleries. I see Picasso’s studio in the rue la Boétie, where I first
stood before an extremely fine Rousseau that the master treated
with great care. I see Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore,11 where a
group of avant-garde intellectuals met almost daily. It was there
I met [the essayist] Léon-Paul Fargue. In the literary cafés, I was
introduced to René Maran, who was very close to Cendrars,
Breton, and the followers of Surrealism.12
Robert Delaunay, the painter of the Eiffel Tower, held exhibitions
annually, and his wife, Sonia, renowned in Paris as a great decorator,
were great friends of mine. I cannot forget Giorgio de Chirico, the
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 painter who sparked the Surrealist movement. Intelligent and
erudite, with a playful, highly amusing manner, he made friends
by virtue of his radiant congeniality. He, too, was an admirable
causeur. I met Juan Gris at his first exhibition of Cubist work. Very
young, tall, typically Spanish, pleasant [in] appearance, Juan Gris
already bore in his eyes the stigma of the tuberculosis that later
ravaged him. His drawings are highly personal. And he is consid-
ered the great stylist of Cubism.

Among the art galleries, I cannot forget that of my good friend

Léonce Rosenberg. He took me to the apartment of the widow
of Guillaume Apollinaire, where she gave me a gouache she had
painted as an amateur. I still have it. I also remember the trouble
in which Cendrars left me when he arranged a dinner at my studio,
with a congenial couple he would introduce me to, and ended
up bringing seven more people unannounced.

It is impossible, in these hurried notes, to recount all the curious

scenes I witnessed and the potins [gossip] about artists who
were attracting attention. Perhaps one day I will decide to write
my memoirs (a thing very much in fashion) in which I shall have
occasion to tell in detail much that is of interest.

1 “Senhora Dona Sancha” is the name of a Brazilian nursery rhyme that served as
inspiration to Brazilian composers in the 1920s, including Waldemar Henrique (who
set it to song) and Heitor Villa-Lobos (who named one of his Cirandas after it). In the

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lyrics to the traditional ditty, the eponymous lady is said to ride through the street
“covered in gold and silver.”
2 Tarsila’s equation of Assis Chateaubriand, Brazil’s first great media mogul and a
maker of presidents, with energy—or “dynamism,” as she put it—likely stems from
his perceived ubiquity on the Brazilian national scene from the 1920s through 1950s
as journalist, entrepreneur, art patron, and politician.
3 “It is to shock Stravinsky.”
4 Kojo Tovalou Houénou (Marc Tovalou Quénum) (Porto-Novo, present-day Benin,
1887–1936), was a well-known African critic of the French colonial empire and
related to the king of the Kingdom of Dahomey. He was educated in France, trained
as an attorney and doctor, and served in World War I; in the 1920s, he was part
of Parisian society, as witnessed by Tarsila’s recollections. She would also write an
article on him that appeared in the Diário de São Paulo on December 8, 1937.
5 Ramón Gómez de la Serna Puig (Spanish, 1888–1963) was a writer and dramatist
who was influenced by the Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Manuel de Falla (Spanish,
1876–1946) was one of Spain’s most influential musicians in the first half of the
twentieth century.
6 The correct names of the composers are Gustave Samazeuilh and Jean
Roger-Ducasse.
7 The Concerts Wiéner were the work of composer and pianist Jean Wiéner,
one of the most important proponents of new music in the 1920s.
8 “Marie Laurencin detested people going to her house.”
9 Tarsila is referring to her painting Lagoa Santa (1925; pl. 48).
10 Pirapora is a city in southeastern Brazil. Adoration (Négre adorant) of 1925 is
lost; for an illustration of this canvas, see Maria Eugênia Saturni and Regina Teixeira
de Barros, eds., Tarsila: Catálogo raisonné (Base 7 Projetos Culturais/Pinacoteca
do Estado de São Paulo, 2008), P081.
11 The bookstore, located in the Latin Quarter, was called La Maison des Amis
des Livres.
12 René Maran (French Guyanese, 1887–1960) was a poet and novelist, and
in 1921, the first writer of African descent to win the Prix Goncourt.

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 MANIFESTO
OF PAU-BRASIL POETRY
OSWALD DE ANDRADE
Correio da Manhã, March 18, 1924, p. 5
Translated by Stella M. de Sá Rego, reprinted from Latin
American Literary Review 14, 27 (January–June 1986),
pp. 184–87
Poetry exists in the facts. The shacks of saffron and ochre in the
green of the Favela, under cabralin blue, are aesthetic facts.
Carnival in Rio is the religious event of our race. Pau-Brasil. Wagner
is submerged before the carnival lines of Botafogo. Barbarous
and ours. The rich ethnic formation. Vegetal riches. Ore. Cuisine.
Vatapá, gold and dance.
All the pioneering and commercial history of Brazil. The academic
aspect, the side of citations, of well-known authors. Impressive.
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Rui Barbosa: a top hat in Senegambia. Transforming everything into
riches. The richness of balls and of well-turned phrases. Negresses
at the jockey club. Odalisques in Catumbi. Fancy talk.
The academic side. Misfortune of the first white brought over,
politically dominating the wild wilderness. The alumnus. We can’t
help being erudite. Doctors of philosophy. Country of anonymous
ills, of anonymous doctors. The Empire was like that. We made
everything erudite. We forgot ingenuity.
Never the exportation of poetry. Poetry went hidden in the
malicious vines of learning. In the lianas of academic nostalgia.
But there was an explosion in our knowledge. The men who
knew it all inflated like overblown balloons. They burst.
The return to specialization. Philosophers making philosophy,
critics criticism, housewives taking care of the kitchen.
Poetry for poets. The happiness of those who don’t know
and discover.
There was an inversion of everything, an invasion of everything:
the theatre of ideas and the on-stage struggle between the
moral and immoral. The thesis should be decided in a battle of
sociologists, men of law, fat and gilded like Corpus Juris.
Agile theatre, child of the acrobat. Agile and illogical. Agile novel,
born of invention. Agile poetry.
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Pau-Brasil poetry. Agile and candid. Like a child.
A suggestion of Blaise Cendrars: you have the train loaded,
ready to leave. A negro churns the crank of the turn-table
beneath you. The slightest carelessness and you will leave
in the opposite direction to your destination.
Down with officialdom, the cultivated exercise of life.
Engineers instead of legal advisors, lost like the chinese in
the genealogy of ideas.
Language without archaisms, without erudition. Natural and
neologic. The millionaire-contribution of all the errors.
The way we speak. The way we are.
There is no conflict in academic vocations. Only ceremonial robes.
The Futurists and the others.
A single struggle—the struggle for the way. Let’s make the
division: imported Poetry. And Pau-Brasil Poetry, for exportation.
There has been a phenomenon of aesthetic democratization in
the five enlightened parts of the world. Naturalism was instituted.
Copy. A picture of sheep that didn’t really give wool was good
for nothing. Interpretation, in the oral dictionary of the Schools of
Fine Arts, meant reproduce exactly . . . Then came pyrogravure.
Young ladies from every home became artists. The camera appeared.
And with all the prerogatives of unkempt hair and the mysterious
genius of the upturned eye­—the photographic artist.
In music, the piano invaded the bare sitting-rooms, calendars
on the wall. All the young ladies became pianists. Then came the
barrel organ, the pianola. The player-piano. And the Slavic irony
composed for the player-piano. Stravinsky.
Statuary followed behind. The processions issued brand-new
from the factories.
The only thing that wasn’t invented was a machine to make
verses—the Parnassian poet already existed.
So, the revolution only indicated that art returned to the elite.
And the elite began taking it to pieces. Two stages: 1st)
deformation through impressionism, fragmentation, voluntary
chaos. From Cézanne and Mallarmé, Rodin and Debussy until
today. 2nd) lyricism, the presentation in the temple, materials,
constructive innocence.
Brazil profiteur. Brazil doutor. And the coincidence of the first
Brazilian construction in the general movement of reconstruction.
Pau-Brasil poetry.
As the age is miraculous, laws were born from the dynamic
rotation of destructive factors.
Synthesis
Equilibrium
Automotive finish
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 Invention Elevator-projectiles, sky-scraper cubes and solar indolence’s
Surprise wise flush. Prayer. Carnival. Intimate energy. The song-thrush.
A new perspective Hospitality, slightly sensual, affectionate. The yearning for
A new scale shamans, and the military airfields. Pau-Brasil.

Whatever natural force in this direction will be good. The labor of the Futurist generation was cyclopean. To reset
Pau-Brasil poetry. the Imperial watch of national literature.

The reaction against naturalistic detail—through synthesis; against
romantic morbidity—through geometric equilibrium and technical
finish; against copy, through invention and surprise.
A new perspective.
This step realized, the problem is other. To be regional and
pure in our time.
The state of innocence replacing the state of grace that can
be an attitude of the spirit.

The other, Paolo Ucello’s, led to the apogee of naturalism.
It was an optical illusion. The distant objects didn’t diminish.
It was the law of appearance. Now is the moment of reaction
against appearance. Reaction against copy. Replacing visual
and naturalistic perspective with a perspective of another order:
sentimental, intellectual, ironic, ingenuous.
A new scale:
The other, of a world proportioned and catalogued with letters
in books, children in laps. Advertisements producing letters bigger
than towers. And new forms of industry, of transportation, of
aviation. Gas stations. Gas meters. Railways. Laboratories and
The counter-weight of native originality to neutralize
academic conformity.
Reaction against all the indigestions of erudition. The best
of our lyric tradition. The best of our modern demonstration.
Merely Brazilians of our time. The necessary of chemistry,
mechanics, economy and ballistics. Everything assimilated.
Without cultural meetings. Practical. Experimental. Poets.
Without bookish reminiscences. Without supporting comparisons.
Without ontology.
Barbarous, credulous, picturesque and tender. Readers

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technical workshops. Voices and tics of wires and waves and of newspapers. Pau-Brasil. The forest and the school.
flashes. Stars made familiar through photographic negatives. The The National Museum. Cuisine, ore and dance. Vegetation.
correspondent of physical surprise in art. Pau-Brasil.

Reaction against the invader subject, unlike finality. The theatre

of ideas was a monstrous arrangement. The novel of ideas,
a mixture. History painting, an aberration. Eloquent sculpture, a
meaningless horror.

Our age announces the return to pure meaning.

A picture is lines and colors. A statue is volumes under light.

Pau-Brasil Poetry is a Sunday dining room with birds singing in
the condensed forest of cages, a thin fellow composing a waltz
for flute and Mary Lou reading the newspaper. The present
is all there in the newspaper.

No formula for the contemporary expression of the world.

See with open eyes.

We have a dual and actual base–the forest and the school. The
credulous and dualistic race and geometry, algebra and chemistry
soon after the baby-bottle and anise tea. A mixture of “sleep
little baby or the bogey-man will get you” and equations.

A vision to encompass the cylinders of mills, electric turbines,

factories, questions of foreign exchange, without losing sight of
the National Museum. Pau-Brasil.

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 MANIFESTO
OF ANTHROPOPHAGY
OSWALD DE ANDRADE
Revista de Antropofagia 1, 1 (May 1928), pp. 3, 7.
Translated by Hélio Oiticica, December 1972, reprinted from
Carlos Basualdo, Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture
(Cosac Naify, 2005), pp. 205–207
Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.
The one and only world principle. Disguised expression of all the
individualisms, of all the collectivisms.
Tupi, or not tupi, that is the question.
Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the “Gracos.”
I am only concerned in that [which] is not mine. Man’s law.
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The law of the anthropophagous.
We are tired of all the dramatized suspicious catholic husbands.
Freud put an end to the “woman” enigma and to other scares
of printed psychology.
Clothing was the obstacle to truth, the impervious between the
internal and the external worlds.
Sun’s sons, mother of the living ones. Ferociously discovered and
loved, with nostalgia’s full hypocrisy, by the immigrated, by the
trafficked, and the “touristes.” In the country of the big snake.
That was because we never had grammars, nor collections of worn
out vegetables. And we never knew the meaning of urban, suburban,
outlandish and continental. Idlers in Brazil’s world map.
A participant consciousness, a religious rythmics [sic].
Against all importers of canned consciousness. Life’s palpable
existence. And the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Levi Bruhl’s study.
We want the [Caraíban] revolution. Greater than the French
Revolution. The unification of all the efficient revolts towards man.
Without us Europe wouldn’t even have its poor declaration of
man’s rights.
The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And
all the girls.
Filiation. The contact with [Caraíban] Brazil. Où Villegaignon print
terre. Montaigne. The natural man. Rousseau. From the French
176 Tarsila do Amaral
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Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the
surrealist Revolution and Keyserling’s barbaric technicality. We go.
We have never been catechized. We live by a somnambulistic right.
We made Christ come into the world in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará.
But we never admitted’s [sic] appearance among us.
Against Father Vieira.
Author of our first loan, for profitable commission. The illiterate
king had told him: Write that out, however, without great cunning.
The loan was settled. The Brazilian sugar became, thus, onerous.
Vieira left the money in Portugal and brought us the cunning.
The spirit refuses to conceive the bodyless [sic] spirit. Anthropo-
morphism. The necessity for the anthropophagous vaccine. For the
balance against the meridian religions. And the external inquisitions.
We can only answer the oracular world.
We had justice, codification of revenge. Science codification
of Magic. Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of Tabu
into totem.
Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Cadaverized.
The “stop” to thinking which is dynamic. The individual victim
of the system. Source of the classic injustices. Of the romantic
injustices. And the oblivion of internal acquisitions.
Itineraries. Itineraries.
Itineraries. Itineraries.
Itineraries. Itineraries.
Itineraries.
The [Caraíban] instinct.
Life and death of hypotheses. From the equation ego part
of the Kosmos to the axiom Kosmos part of ego. Subsistence.
Knowledge. Anthropophagy.
Against the vegetal elites. Communicating with the soil.
We have never been catechized. We really made Carnival. The
Indian dressed as an Imperial Senator. Acting as Pitt. Or performing
Alencar’s operas full of noble Portuguese sentiments.
We already had Communism. We already had the Surrealist
language. The golden age.
Catiti Catiti
Imara Notiá
Notiá Imara
Ipejú.
Magic and life. We had the description and distribution of physical,
moral and condescended virtues. And we knew how to transpose
mystery and death with the help of some grammatical forms.
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 I asked a man what was Law. He answered me it was the
guarantee for the exercise of possibility. This man was called
Galli Matias. I ate him.
Determinism can only be inexistent where there is mystery.
But what have we to do with this?
Against the tales of man, which originate at the Finisterre
Cape. The undated world. Not rubricated. Without Napoleon.
Without Caesar.
The settling of progress by means and catalogues and television
apparatuses. Only machinery. And the blood transufers [sic].
Against antagonistic sublimations. Brought in caravelles.
Against the truth of the missionary peoples, defined by the
sagacity of an anthropophagus, the Viscount of Cairu: It is a lie
many times repeated.
But crusaders were the ones who came. They were fugitives
from a civilization being eaten by us, because we are strong
and vengeful as a Jaboti.
If God is the consciousness of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is
the mother of the living ones. Jaci is the mother of the vegetables.
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We did not have speculation. But we had divination. We had
Politics which is the science of distribution. And a social-
planetary system.
The migrations. The flight from tedious states. Against urban
sclerosis. Against the Conservatories, and speculative tediousness.
From William James to Voronoff.
The transfiguration of Tabu in totem. Anthropophagy.
The family man and the creation of the Moral of the Stork: real
ignorance of facts + lack of imagination + authorianism [sic]
before the pro-curious.
It is necessary to start from a profound atheism to attain at
the idea of God. But the [Caraíban] did not need it. Because
he had Guaraci.
The created objective reacts according to the Fallen Angels.
Afterwards, Moses divagates. What have we got to do
with it? Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had
discovered happiness.
Against the torch holder Indian. The Indian son of Mary,
godson of Catherine de Médicis and son-in-law of D. Antonio
de Mariz.
Joy is the decisive test.
In the matriarchy of Pindorama.
Against Memory as a habit-sources. Personal experience renewed.
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We are concretists. The ideas take over, react, burn people in
public squares. Let us abolish the ideas and other paralisies [sic].
But the itineraries. To trust the signals, to trust the instruments
and the stars.
Against Goethe, the mother of the “Gracos,” and the Court
of D. João VI.
Joy is the decisive test.
The struggle between what could be called the Uncreated and
the learned-Creature by the permanent contradiction of man and
his Tabu. Quotidian love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Anthro-
pophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To be transformed
into totem. Human adventure. Earthly finality. Only the pure elites
though, managed to carry on carnal anthropophagy, which bears
in itself the highest aims of life, and avoids all the evils identified
by Freud, catechistic evils. What happens is not a sublimation of
the sexual instinct. It is the thermo-metrical scale of the anthropo-
phagous instinct. From carnal it becomes elective and creates
friendship. Affective, love. Speculative, science. It deviates from
itself and transfers itself. We end up in abasement. Low anthro-
pophagy assembled in the sins of catechism-envy, usury, slander,
murder. Pest of the so-called cultured and Christianized peoples,
it is against it we are acting. Anthropophagi.
Against Anchieta singing the eleven thousand heavenly virgins
in the land of Iracema – João Ramalho, the patriarch, founder
of São Paulo.
Our independence hasn’t yet been proclaimed. A characteristic
statement by Don João VI: – My son, put this crown on your head,
before some adventurer will do it! We expelled the dynasty. It is
necessary to expel the spirit of Bragança, the ordinances and the
rapp(e)es of Mary of the Fountain.
Against the oppressive and equipped social reality registered by
Freud – reality void of complexes, of insanity, without prostitutions
or penitentiaries of the matriarchy of Pindorama.
At Piratininga
Year 374 of the Deglution of bishop Sardinha.
Historical Texts 177
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 CHECKLIST
Artworks by
Tarsila do Amaral
(Brazilian, 1886–1973)
1 Sketchbook I, 1919–20
11.2 × 16.6 × 0.9 cm
(4 7/16 × 6 9/16 × 3/8 in.)
Tarsilinha do Amaral
Collection, São Paulo
2 Sketchbook II, 1921
16.4 × 10 × 0.7 cm
(6 7/16 × 3 15/16 × 1/4 in.)
Tarsilinha do Amaral
Collection, São Paulo
PRESS USE ONLY
3 Colored Study of Cubist
Composition III, 1923
Graphite and colored pencil
on paper
21 × 13.2 cm (8 1/4 × 5 3/16 in.)
Private collection, São Paulo
4 Cubist Composition
(Hands at the Piano), 1923
Graphite and
watercolor on paper
23 × 25 cm (9 1/16 × 9 13/16 in.)
Max Perlingeiro, Pinakotheke
Cultural, Brazil
5 Cubist Composition II,
1923
Graphite and colored pencil
on paper
21 × 17.5 cm (8 1/4 × 6 7/8 in.)
Private collection
6 A Negra,1923
Oil on canvas
100 × 81.3 cm (39 3/8 × 32 in.)
Museu de Arte Contemporânea
da Universidade de
São Paulo
001-192 CC.indd 178
7 A Negra III, 1923
India ink and graphite on paper
23 × 18.2 cm
(9 1/16 × 7 3/16 in.)
Fulvia Leirner Collection,
São Paulo
8 The First A Negra,1923
Graphite on paper
23 × 18.2 cm (9 1/16 × 7 3/16 in.)
Airton Queiroz Collection,
Fortaleza
9 Sketchbook with a Drawing
of A Negra, undated (c. 1924)
12 × 18 cm (4 3/4 × 14 15/16 in.)
Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel
Collection, Rio de Janeiro
10 Sketchbook with Notes and
Drawing for Caipirinha, 1923
30.5 × 19.5 cm (12 × 11 7/16 in.)
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
11 Sketch of A Negra I,
undated (c. 1923)
Graphite and watercolor
on paper
23.4 × 18 cm (9 3/16 × 7 1/16 in.)
Coleção de Artes Visuais do
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
da Universidade de São Paulo
12 Study (Academy No. 2),
1923
Oil on canvas
61 × 50 cm (24 × 19 11/16 in.)
Private collection, Brasília
13 Study for La Tasse, 1923
Graphite on paper
23.3 × 18 cm ( 9 3/16 × 7 1/16 in.)
Coleção de Arte da Cidade/
DADoC/CCSP / SMC /PMSP
14 Study of a Hand II, 1923
Graphite on paper
18 × 24 cm (7 1/16 × 9 7/16 in.)
Max Perlingeiro, Pinakotheke
Cultural, Brazil
15 Two Studies (Academy
No. 1 and The Model), 1923
Graphite on paper
17.5 × 22 cm (6 7/8 × 8 11/16 in.)
Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand,
Museu de Arte Moderna,
Rio de Janeiro
16 Carnival in Madureira, 1924
Oil on canvas
76 × 63.5 cm (29 15/16 × 25 in.)
Acervo da Fundação José
e Paulina Nemirovsky em
comodato com a Pinacoteca
do Estado de São Paulo
17 A Cuca, 1924
Oil on canvas
60.5 × 72.5 cm
(23 13/16 × 28 9/16 in.)
Centre National des Arts
Plastiques, Paris, France
FNAC 9459
18 Fragment of a Landscape,
1924
Graphite on paper
22 × 14 cm (8 11/16 × 5 1/2 in.)
Michele Behar Collection,
São Paulo
19 Hills of the Favela,
1924
Oil on canvas
64.5 × 76 cm
(25 3/8 × 29 15/16 in.)
Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel
Collection, Rio de Janeiro
20 Ouro Preto and Padre Faria
(Front of Sabará), Journey
to Minas Gerais Series, 1924
Graphite on paper
23.5 × 32.5 cm (9 1/4 × 12 13/16 in.)
Max Perlingeiro, Pinakotheke
Cultural, Brazil
21 Pen with Ox and
Piglets II, 1924
India ink on paper
14 × 13 cm (5 1/2 × 5 1/8 in.)
Fulvia Leirner Collection,
São Paulo
22 Study of Mountains
(Front of Study of Landscape ),
Journey to Minas Gerais
Series, 1924
Graphite on paper
25.4 × 19.3 cm (10 × 7 5/8 in.)
Acervo da Pinacoteca do
Estado de São Paulo, doado
por Família Tarsila do
Amaral, 1973.
23 Train Station, Journey
to Minas Gerais Series, 1924
Graphite on paper
24.2 × 16.7 cm (9 1/2 × 6 9/16 in.)
Breno Krasilchik Collection,
São Paulo
24 Mantiqueira Mountains/
Rio de Janeiro, 1924
Graphite on paper
25 × 19 cm (9 13/16 × 7 1/2 in.)
Daniella Lunardelli Collection,
Goiânia
25–37 Drawings for Feuilles
de route (Road Maps ), c. 1924
Ink on paper
Fonds Blaise Cendrars, Archives
littéraires suisses, Berne
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 25–31 Chicago only
32–37 New York only
25 0.9 × 18 cm (8 1/4 × 7 1/16 in.)
26 20.9 × 18 cm (8 1/4 × 7 1/16 in.)
27 22.7 × 32 cm (8 5/16 × 12 5/8 in.)
28 22.7 × 32 cm (8 5/16 × 12 5/8 in.)
29 23.2 × 31 cm (9 1/8 × 12 3/16 in.)
30 20.3 × 26.6 cm (8 × 10 1/2 in.)
31 26.6 × 20.3 cm (10 1/2 × 8 in.)
32 20.9 × 18 cm (8 1/4 × 7 1/16 in.)
33 20.9 × 18 cm (8 1/4 × 7 1/16 in.)
34 26.6 × 20.3 cm (10 1/2 × 8 in.)
35 22.7 × 32 cm (8 5/16 × 12 5/8 in.)
36 22.7 × 32 cm (8 5/16 × 12 5/8 in.)
PRESS USE ONLY
37 20.3 × 26.6 cm (8 × 10 1/2 in.)
38 Landscape with Railroad
Car, c. 1924
Watercolor and India ink
on paper
16 × 16 cm (6 5/16 × 6 5/16 in.)
Rose and Alfredo Setubal
Collection, São Paulo
39 Sertão Farm III, 1924–30
Graphite on paper
13.5 × 17 cm (5 5/16 × 6 11/16 in.)
Ivoncy and Evelyn Ioschpe
Collection, São Paulo
40 Animal with Fat Stomach,
1925
Graphite and watercolor
on paper
23.2 × 15.5 cm (9 1/8 × 6 1/8 in.)
Private collection, São Paulo
41 Lagoa Santa, 1925
Oil on canvas
50 × 65 cm (19 11/16 × 25 9/16 in.)
Private collection,
Rio de Janeiro
001-192 CC.indd 179
42–45 Original illustrations
for Pau Brasil, 1925
Coleção de Arte da Cidade/
DADoC/CCSP/SMC/PMSP
42 India ink on paper
21.8 × 13.5 cm (8 9/16 × 5 5/16 in.)
43 Graphite and India ink
on paper
11.7 × 18 cm (4 5/8 × 7 1/16 in.)
44 Graphite and India ink
on paper
15.5 × 22.6 cm (6 1/8 × 8 7/8 in.)
45 India ink on paper
23 × 15.5 cm (9 1/16 × 6 1/8 in.)
46 Palm Trees, 1925
Oil on canvas
87 × 74.5 cm (34 1/4 × 29 5/16 in.)
Ivoncy and Evelyn Ioschpe
Collection, São Paulo
47 The Papaya Tree, 1925
Oil on canvas
65 × 70 cm (25 9/16 × 27 9/16 in.)
Coleção de Artes Visuais do
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
da Universidade de São Paulo
48 The Railway Station, 1925
Oil on canvas
84.5 × 65 cm (33 1/4 × 25 9/16 in.)
Private collection
49 Saci-Pererê, 1925
Gouache and India ink on paper
23.1 × 18 cm (9 1/16 × 7 1/16 in.)
Fulvia Leirner Collection,
São Paulo
50 Study for Blue Woman
(Water Spirit) I, 1925
Graphite and watercolor
on paper
22 × 17 cm (8 11/16 × 6 11/16 in.)
Lula Buarque and Leticia
Monte Collection, Rio de Janeiro
51 Town with Tram, c. 1925
India ink on paper
21 × 18 cm (8 1/4 × 7 1/16 in.)
Coleção de Artes Visuais do
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
da Universidade de São Paulo
52 Manacá, 1927
Oil on canvas
76 × 63.5 cm (29 15/16 × 25 in.)
Private collection, São Paulo
53 Abaporu, 1928
Oil on canvas
85 × 73 cm (33 7/16 × 28 3/4 in.)
Colleción MALBA, Museo
de Arte Latinoamericano de
Buenos Aires
54 Abaporu III, 1928
India ink on paper
26 × 20 cm (10 1/4 × 7 7/8 in.)
Claudia and Hélio Ferraz
Collection, Rio de Janeiro
55 Abaporu IV, 1928
India ink on paper
27 × 21.5 cm (10 5/8 × 8 7/16 in.)
Private collection, São Paulo
56 Abaporu V, 1928
India ink on paper
24.5 × 18.5 cm (9 5/8 × 7 1/4 in.)
Private collection,
Rio de Janeiro
57 The Bull, 1928
Oil on canvas
50.4 × 61.2 cm
(19 13/16 × 24 1/16 in.)
Acervo do Museu de Arte
Moderna da Bahia, Salvador
58 Distance, 1928
Oil on canvas
65.5 × 75 cm (25 13/16 × 29 1/2 in.)
Acervo da Fundação José
e Paulina Nemirovsky em
comodato com a Pinacoteca
do Estado de São Paulo
59 The Lake, 1928
Oil on canvas
75.5 × 93 cm
(29 3/4 × 36 5/8 in.)
Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel
Collection, Rio de Janeiro
60 Urutu Viper, 1928
Oil on canvas
60 × 72 cm (23 5/8 × 28 3/8 in.)
Coleção Gilberto
Chateaubriand, Museu de
Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro
61 Landscape with
Five Palm Trees I,
c. 1928
Graphite on paper
22.9 × 16.4 cm (9 × 6 7/16 in.)
Coleção de Artes Visuais do
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
da Universidade de São Paulo
62 Sleep, c. 1928
Oil on canvas, 60.5 × 72.7 cm
(23 13/16 × 28 5/8 in.)
Private collection,
Rio de Janeiro
63 Anthropophagy, 1929
Oil on canvas
126 × 142 cm
(49 5/8 × 55 15/16 in.)
Acervo da Fundação José
e Paulina Nemirovsky em
comodato com a Pinacoteca
do Estado de São Paulo
64 Anthropophagy I, 1929
Iron gall ink on paper
23 × 19.5 cm (9 1/16 × 7 11/16 in.)
Coleção Gilberto
Chateaubriand, Museu de Arte
Moderna, Rio de Janeiro
65 Anthropophagic Drawing
of Saci-Pererê I, 1929
Graphite and India ink
on paper
22.5 × 34.7 cm (8 7/8 × 13 11/16 in.)
Coleção de Arte da Cidade/
DADoC/CCSP/SMC/PMSP
66 Calmness II, 1929
Oil on canvas
75 × 93 cm (29 1/2 × 36 5/8 in.)
Acervo Artístico-Cultural dos
Palácios do Governo do Estado
de São Paulo
67 City (The Street), 1929
Oil on canvas
81 × 54 cm (31 7/8 × 21 1/4 in.)
Collection of Bolsa de Arte
68 Forest, 1929
Oil on canvas
63.9 × 76.2 cm (25 3/16 × 30 in.)
Museu de Arte Contemporânea
da Universidade de São Paulo
Checklist 179
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 69 Hanging Palm Tree II, 1929
Ink on paper
10.6 × 16.3 cm (4 3/16 × 6 7/16 in.)
Patricia and Waltercio Caldas
Collection, Rio de Janeiro
70 Landscape with Creature
and Palm Trees, 1929
Graphite and India ink on paper
20 × 23.5 cm (7 7/8 × 9 1/4 in.)
Private collection
71 Postcard, 1929
Oil on canvas
127.5 × 142.5 cm
(50 3/16 × 56 1/8 in.)
Private collection,
Rio de Janeiro
72 Setting Sun, 1929
Oil on canvas
54 × 65 cm
(21 1/4 × 25 9/16 in.)
Private collection
73 Anthropophagic Figure
in the Landscape, c. 1929
PRESS USE ONLY
India ink on paper
17 × 22 cm
(6 11/16 × 8 11/16 in.)
Private collection
74 Anthropophagic
Landscape I, c. 1929
Graphite on paper
18 × 22.9 cm (7 1/16 × 9 in.)
Coleção de Artes Visuais do
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
da Universidade de São Paulo
75 Anthropophagic
Landscape II , c. 1929
India ink on paper
18 × 22.9 cm (7 1/16 × 9 in.)
Coleção de Artes Visuais do
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
da Universidade de São Paulo
76 Anthropophagic
Landscape III, c. 1929
India ink on paper
18 × 22.9 cm (7 1/16 × 9 in.)
Coleção de Artes Visuais do
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
da Universidade de São Paulo
180 Tarsila do Amaral
001-192 CC.indd 180
77 Anthropophagic
Landscape IV, c. 1929
India ink on paper
18 × 22.9 cm (7 1/16 × 9 in.)
Coleção de Artes Visuais do
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
da Universidade de São Paulo
78 Anthropophagic
Landscape V, c. 1929
India ink on card
14.6 × 11.4 cm (5 3/4 × 4 1/2 in.)
Coleção de Artes Visuais do
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
da Universidade de São Paulo
79 Animal with Triangle,
1930
Graphite on paper
19 × 26 cm (7 1/2 × 10 1/4 in.)
Private collection
80 Composition
(Lonely Figure), 1930
Oil on canvas
83 × 129 cm
(32 11/16 × 50 13/16 in.)
São Fernando Institute
Collection, Rio de Janeiro
81 Study for Composition
(Lonely Figure) II, 1930
Graphite and India ink
on newsprint
15.5 × 23.5 cm (6 1/8 × 9 1/4 in.)
Tuneu Collection, São Paulo
82 Study for Composition
(Lonely Figure) III, 1930
Iron gall ink on paper
22 × 33 cm (8 11/16 × 13 in.)
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Gift of Max
Perlingeiro through the Latin
America and Caribbean Fund
83 Landscape with
Anthropophagic Animal III,
c. 1930
Colored pencil and pastel
on paper
18 × 23 cm (7 1/16 × 9 1/16 in.)
Collection of Marta and
Paulo Kuczynski
84 Workers, 1933
Oil on canvas
150 × 205 cm
(59 1/16 × 80 11/16 in.)
Acervo Artístico-Cultural
dos Palácios do Governo do
Estado de São Paulo
Photographs
and Documents
85 Note from Oswald de
Andrade (Brazilian, 1890–1954)
with a drawing by Tarsila
do Amaral, 1920s
Paulo Kuczynski Escritório
de Arte
86 Portrait of Tarsila do
Amaral in profile, mid-1920s
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
87 Portrait of Tarsila do
Amaral, c. 1921
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
88 Exhibition catalogue
for Semana de Arte Moderna,
São Paulo, with cover illustrated
by Emiliano Di Cavalcanti
(Brazilian, 1897–1976), 1922
Arquivo do Instituto de Estudos
Brasileiros da Universidade
de São Paulo
89–92 Klaxon: Mensario
de Arte Moderna,
nos. 1– 4, 1922
The Museum of Modern
Art Library, New York
93 Mário de Andrade
(Brazilian, 1893–1945)
Paulicea desvairada, 1922
Yale University, General
Collection, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library,
New Haven
Chicago only
94 Program for Semana
de Arte Moderna, São Paulo,
1922
Arquivo do Instituto de Estudos
Brasileiros da Universidade
de São Paulo
95 Tarsila do Amaral
Travel album
1922–at least 1926
Photographs and
pasted papers
4 5/8 × 6 11/16 in. (33.5 × 22 cm)
Private Collection, São Paulo
96–97 Blaise Cendrars
(Swiss, 1887–1961)
with cover and illustrations
by Tarsila do Amaral
Feuilles de route (Road Maps),
1924
96 The Art Institute
of Chicago, Ryerson and
Burnham Libraries
Chicago only
97 The Museum of
Modern Art Library,
New York
98 Scene from Minas Gerais
trip with drawing by Tarsila
do Amaral, 1924
Arquivo do Instituto de Estudos
Brasileiros da Universidade
de São Paulo
99 Tarsila do Amaral at
Fazenda Santo Antônio, 1924
Gelatin silver print
Arquivo do Instituto de Estudos
Brasileiros da Universidade
de São Paulo
100 Tarsila do Amaral
Letter to her family,
October 12, 1924
Tarsilinha do Amaral Collection,
São Paulo
101–102 Oswald de Andrade
with cover and illustrations
by Tarsila do Amaral
Pau Brasil, 1925
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 101 Coleção de Artes Visuais
do Instituto de Estudos
Brasileiros da Universidade
de São Paulo
102 Yale University, General
Collection, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library,
New Haven
Chicago only
103 Oswald de Andrade
Letter with draft of the poem
“Atelier,” c. 1925
Tarsilinha do Amaral Collection,
São Paulo
104 Constantin Brancusi
(French, born Romania,
1876–1957)
Annotated exhibition catalogue
for Brancusi, Brummer Gallery,
New York, with an inscription
to Tarsila do Amaral and
Oswald de Andrade, 1926
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
PRESS USE ONLY
105–106 Exhibition
catalogue for Tarsila,
Galerie Percier, Paris, 1926
105 Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
106 Northwestern University,
Charles Deering McCormick
Library of Special Collections,
Evanston
Chicago only
107 Benedito Duarte
(Brazilian, 1910–1995)
Portrait of Tarsila do Amaral,
1926
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
108 Tarsila do Amaral
at Galerie Percier, Paris,
July 1926
Gelatin silver print
Arquivo do Instituto de Estudos
Brasileiros da Universidade
de São Paulo
001-192 CC.indd 181
109 Oswald de Andrade with
cover by Tarsila do Amaral
Primeiro caderno do
alumno de poesia Oswald de
Andrade (First Notebook
of the Poetry Student Oswald
de Andrade), 1927
University of California,
Berkeley, Bancroft Library
110 Carolina Silva Telles,
Clóvis Camargo, Tarsila do
Amaral, Olívia Guedes
Penteado, Oswald de Andrade,
and Maria Penteado Camargo
in São Paulo, 1928
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
111 Exhibition catalogue
for Tarsila, Galerie Percier,
Paris, 1928
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
112 Indaiatuba Landscape,1928
Gelatin silver print
Tarsilinha do Amaral Collection,
São Paulo
113 Oswald de Andrade with
a drawing by Tarsila do Amaral
“Manifesto antropófago,” 1928
The Museum of Modern Art
Library, New York. Gift of
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
through the Latin American
and Caribbean Fund in honor
of Paulo Herkenhoff
114 Tarsila do Amaral and
Oswald de Andrade
“Minha terra tem palmares”
(My Land Has Palm Trees),
1928
Paulo Kuczynski Escritório
de Arte
115 Tarsila do Amaral
and Oswald de Andrade
Letter to Olívia Guedes
Penteado,
May 19, 1928
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
116 Tarsila do Amaral
and Oswald de Andrade
Letter to Guilherme
de Almeida,
May 19, 1928
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
117 Exhibition catalogue
for Tarsila, Palace Hotel,
Rio de Janeiro, 1929
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
118 Exhibition catalogue
for Tarsila, Prédio Glória,
São Paulo, 1929
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
119 TExhibition catalogue
for The First Representative
Collection of Paintings by
Contemporary Brazillian Artists,
Roerich Museum, New York,
1930
Special Collections, Brooklyn
Museum Library
120 Tarsila do Amaral
in her home, c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Arquivo do Instituto de Estudos
Brasileiros da Universidade
de São Paulo
121 Raul Bopp (Brazilian,
1898–1984) with cover
by Flávio de Carvalho
(Brazilian, 1899–1973)
Cobra Norato, 1931
Archives and Special
Collections Library, Vassar
College, Poughkeepsie, NY
122 Tarsila do Amaral
with Anthropophagy, 1940s
Gelatin silver print
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
Collection, São Paulo
Checklist 181
2017-08-16 8:29 AM
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Catalogue Raisonné
Saturni, Maria Eugênia, and Regina Teixeira
de Barros, eds. Tarsila: Catálogo raisonné.
3 vols. Base 7 Projetos Culturais/Pinacote-
ca do Estado de São Paulo, 2008.
Published Correspondence
Amaral, Aracy A., ed. Correspondência
de Mário de Andrade e Tarsila do Amaral.
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, 2001.
Martins, Ana Luisa, ed. Aí vai meu
coraçao: As Cartas de Tarsila do Amaral
e Anna Maria Martins para Luís Martins.
Planeta do Brasil, 2003.
PRESS USE ONLY
Writings by Tarsila
Amaral, Aracy A., ed. Tarsila Cronista.
Editora da Universidade de São Paulo,
2001.
Brandini, Laura Taddei, ed. Crônicas
e outros escritos de Tarsila do Amaral.
Editora da UNICAMP, 2008.
Interviews with Tarsila
“A pintura moderna vista por uma artista
moderníssima.” O Jornal, August 17,
1926, p. 2.
Mácia Lagoa, Ana. “Um depoimento
inédito de Tarsila do Amaral.” Jornal da
Tarde, January 20, 1973, p. 12.
“Uma entrevista em torno de três
perguntas: O momento da arte brasileira
e a attitude de Tarsila do Amaral.”
Crítica, July 27, 1929, p. 2.
“Uma pintora paulista em Paris: Tarsila
do Amaral faz vehemente defesa do
modernismo.” O Jornal, December 9,
1928, p. 3.
182 Tarsila do Amaral
001-192 CC.indd 182
Ribeiro, Leo Gilson. “O que seria aquela
coisa?” Veja 181 (February 23, 1972),
pp. 3–6.
“Tarsila: A grande dama das artes plásticas
do Brasil.” O Día, October 22, 1972.
“Tarsila do Amaral, a interessante artista
brasileira, dá-nos as suas impressões.”
Correio da Manhã, December 25, 1923,
p. 2.
“Tarsila do Amaral fala da sua arte e dos
seus triunfos e esperanças.” Diário da
Noite, February 10, 1928, p. 1.
“Tarsila, eis novamente a reportagem que
você tanto gostou.” Diário de São Paulo,
January 21, 1973.
Exhibition Catalogues, 1920–30
Association Artistique des Vrais
Indépendants. Première exposition de
l’Association Artistique des Vrais
Indépendants. Exh. cat. Association
Artistique des Vrais Indépendants,
1928.
Association Artistique des Surindépendants.
Première Salon des Surindépendants.
Exh. cat. Association Artistique des
Surindépendants, 1929.
Galerie Percier. Tarsila. With poems
by Blaise Cendrars. Exh. cat. Galerie
Percier, 1926.
———. Tarsila. Exh. cat. Galerie Percier,
1928.
International Art Center of Roerich Museum.
Exhibition of the First Representative
Collection of Paintings by Contemporary
Brazilian Artists. Exh. cat. International Art
Center of Roerich Museum, 1930.
Musée Galliera. Salon du Franc. Exh. cat.
Musée Galliera, 1926.
Palace Hotel. Tarsila: Rio de Janeiro.
Exh. cat. Typographia Bancaria, 1929.
Palacete Glória. Grande exposition d’art
moderne: L’École de Paris. Exh. cat.
Palacete Glória, 1930.
Prédio Glória. Tarsila: São Paulo. Exh. cat.
Typographia Bancaria, 1929.
Société des Artistes Français. Salon de
la Société des Artistes Français. Exh. cat.
Société des Artistes Français, 1922.
Warchavchik, Gregori. Exposição de
uma casa modernista. Exh. cat. Casa
Modernista, Rua Itápolis, 1930.
Exhibition Reviews of the 1920s
“A arte de Tarsila do Amaral.” Diário
Nacional, September 28, 1929,
p. 7.
“A exposição de pintura de Tarsila do
Amaral.” A Noite, July 19, 1929, p. 2.
“A exposição de Tarsila.” Correio da
Manhã, July 21, 1929, p. 3.
“A exposição de Tarsila Amaral.”
A Manhã, July 23, 1929, p. 5.
“A exposição de Tarsila do Amaral.”
Correio Paulistano, September 17, 1929,
p. 7.
“A exposição de Tarsila do Amaral.”
Correio Paulistano, September 18, 1929,
p. 2.
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 “A exposição de Tarsila do Amaral, no
‘Palace-Hotel,’ do Rio de Janeiro, foi a
primeira grande batalha da Antropofagia.”
Diário de São Paulo, August 1, 1929,
p. 10.
“A primeira exposição de Tarsila do
Amaral em São Paulo.” Correio Paulistano,
September 15, 1929, p. 8.
Almeida, Renato. “Num atelier cubista.”
O Jornal, February 6, 1924, p. 5.
Álvarus. “Exposição Tarsila.” A Manhã,
July 25, 1929, p. 6.
Andrade, Mário de. “Tarsila.” Diário
nacional, December 21, 1927, p. 2.
Carnet. “Poète et préfacier.” Comoedia,
June 7, 1926, p. 3.
Charsenol. “Tarsila.” L’Art vivant 2, 50
(June 15, 1926), p. 477.
Chateaubriand, Assis. “Como São Paulo
está cultivando a arte moderna.” O Jornal,
PRESS USE ONLY
May 30, 1925, pp. 1–2.
Cogniat, Raymond. “Deux peintres
brésiliens: Mme Tarsila, M. Monteiro.”
Revue de l’Amérique latine 16, 80
(August 1, 1928), pp. 157–59.
———. “Exposition Tarsila.” Revue de
l’Amérique latine 12, 56 (August 1, 1926),
p. 159.
Corrêa Júnior. “Registo de arte.” Correio
Paulistano, September 29, 1929, p. 4.
“Exposição de pintura da sra. Tarsila do
Amaral.” O Jornal, July 20, 1929.
“Exposição de Tarsila do Amaral.”
Movimento brasileiro 1, 23 (March 1929),
p. 21.
“Exposição Tarsila.” Diário Nacional,
September 18, 1929, p. 7.
“Exposição Tarsila do Amaral.” Correio
Paulistano, September 21, 1929, p. 5.
“Exposição Tarsila do Amaral.” Correio
Paulistano, September 25, 1929, p. 7.
001-192 CC.indd 183
“Exposição Tarsila do Amaral.” Correio
Paulistano, September 28, 1929, p. 6.
“Exposition Tarsila (Galerie Percier).”
Paris-Sud-Amérique 2, 50 (June 20, 1926),
p. 16.
Ferro, António. “Tarsila do Amaral.”
Contemporânea 3, 2 (June, 1926),
pp. 83–85.
Fierens, Paul. “Les Petites expositions.”
Journal des débats politiques et littéraires,
June 20, 1926, p. 3.
Freitas, Bezerra de. “Tarsila,” Crítica,
August 1, 1929, p. 1.
“Homenagem a Tarsila do Amaral.”
Correio Paulistano, August 7, 1929,
p. 1.
“Les Petites expositions.” Journal des
débats politiques et littéraires, July 2,
1928, p. 2.
Machado, Antônio de Alcântara. “Notas
de Arte: Tarsila do Amaral.” Jornal do
Comércio, July 3, 1926, p. 4.
Magellan. “La Maison de l’Amérique
latine.” Revue de l’Amérique latine 20
(July 1, 1923), p. 288.
Memmi. “Les Arts.” L’Humanité,
June 29, 1926, p. 4.
“Na exposição Tarsila.” O Estado de
S. Paulo, September 20, 1929, p. 2.
Pawlowski, Gaston de. “Les Petites
expositions, Tarsila, 38, rue La Boétie.”
Le Journal, June 22, 1926, p. 3.
“Peinture exotique.” Paris-Midi, June 10,
1926, p. 2.
Raynal, Maurice. “Les Arts.”
L’Intransigeant, June 13, 1926, p. 2.
Remon, Georges. “Galerie Percier.”
La Renaissance de l’art français et des
industries de luxe 9, 6 (June 1926),
p. 368.
Rezende, José Severiano de. “A Pintura
brasileira.” Gazette du Brésil, June 17,
1926, pp. 1–2.
Ribeiro, João. “Tarsila,” O Estado de
S. Paulo, August 6, 1929, p. 8.
Romoff, Serge. “Dans les galleries d’art.”
L’Humanité, July 9, 1928, p. 4..
“Tarsila.” Correio Paulistano, September
17, 1929, p. 2.
“Tarsila.” Vogue Paris 7, 9 (September 1,
1926), p. 60.
“Tarsila Amaral.” O Estado de S. Paulo,
October 13, 1929, p. 2.
“Tarsila do Amaral.” O Estado de S. Paulo,
September 27, 1929, p. 5.
“Tarsila do Amaral vai fazer a sua primeira
exposição no Rio.” Correio Paulistano,
July 18, 1929, p. 4.
“Tarsila e o espirito modern.” Correio
Paulistano, September 20, 1929, p. 1.
“Uma arte bem Brasileira uma artista
bem nossa: Tarsila do Amaral e a
sua empolgante exposição de pintura.”
O Paiz, July 19, 1929, p. 1.
“Uma exposição de pintura moderna.”
Jornal do Brasil, July 1929, p. 6.
“Uma exposição de Tarsila do Amaral
em Paris.” O Jornal, June 26, 1926,
p. 3.
“Uma singular expressão de arte moderna:
A pintura antropophágica de Tarsila
de Amaral.” Crítica, July 20, 1929, p. 1.
Waldemar-George. “Tarsila et l’anthro-
pophagie.” La Presse, July 5, 1928,
p. 2.
Warnod, André. “L’Exposition Tarsilla
[sic].” Comoedia, June 8, 1926, p. 2.
———. “Tarsilla [sic]-Sculpture-Louis
Charlot.” Comoedia, June 24, 1928,
p. 2.
Zervos, Christian. “Tarsila (Galerie
Percier).” Cahiers d’art 5–6 (1928),
p. 262.
Selected Bibliography 183
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 Works Illustrated by Tarsila
Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto
antropófago.” Revista de Antropofagia 1,
1 (May 1928), p. 3.
———. Pau Brasil. Au Sans Pareil, 1924.
———. Primeiro caderno do alumno
de poesia Oswald de Andrade. 1927.
Cendrars, Blaise. Feuilles de route.
Au Sans Pareil, 1924.
Primary Sources
Andrade, Mário de. Hallucinated City:
Paulicéia Desvairada. Translated by
Jack E. Tomlins. Vanderbilt University
Press, 1968.
———. Macunaíma. Oficinas graficas
de E. Cupolo, 1928.
Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto
of Anthropophagy.” Translated by Hélio
Oiticica. In Carlos Basualdo, Tropicália:
A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, pp.
PRESS USE ONLY
205–207. Cosac Naify, 2005.
———. “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry.”
Translated by Stella M. de Sá Rego.
Latin American Literary Review 14, 27
(January–June 1986), pp. 184–87.
Bopp, Raul. Cobra Norato.
Irmãos Ferraz, 1931.
Cendrars, Blaise. Anthologie nègre.
Éditions de la Sirène, 1921.
Secondary Sources
Ades, Dawn. “Modernism and the Search
for Roots.” In Art in Latin America:
The Modern Era, 1820–1980, pp. 125–49.
Exh. cat. Yale University Press, 1989.
Amaral, Aracy A. Arte e meio artístico:
Entre a feijoada e o x-burguer. Editora
Nobel, 1983.
———. Arte para quê: A preocupação
social na arte brasileira 1930–1970.
3rd ed. Studio Nobel, 2003.
———. Blaise Cendrars no Brasil e os
modernistas. Martins, 1970.
18 4 Tarsila do Amaral
001-192 CC.indd 184
———. Desenhos de Tarsila. Cultrix, 1971.
———. “Novas reflexões sobre Tarsila:
1. A fórmula e o mágico intuitivo. 2.
Fundo de gaveta.” In Amaral, Arte e
meio artístico, pp. 84–90.
———. “O modernismo à luz do ‘art
déco.’” In Amaral, Arte e meio artístico,
pp. 58–65.
—––. “O modernismo brasileiro e o
contexto cultural dos anos 20.” Revista
USP, São Paulo, 94 (June–August 2012),
pp. 9–18.
———. “O surreal em Tarsila.” Mirante
das artes 3 (May–June 1967), pp. 23–25.
———. Tarsila: 1918–1968. Exh. cat.
Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo,1969.
———. Tarsila do Amaral: Projeto
Cultural Artistas do Meroscul. Fundação
Finambrás, 1998.
———. Tarsila por Tarsila. Celebris, 2004.
———. Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo.
3rd ed. Editora 34/Editora da Universidade
de São Paulo, 2003.
Amaral, Aracy A., Haroldo de Campos,
Juan Manuel Bonet, and Jorge Schwartz.
Tarsila do Amaral. Exh. cat. Fundación
Juan March, 2009.
Amaral, Aracy A., and Regina Teixeira de
Barros. Tarsila: Viajante, viajera. Exh. cat.
Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2008.
Andrade, Carlos Drummond de. “Brasil/
Tarsila.” In As impurezas do branco, 2nd
ed., pp. 95–96. Livraria José Olympio, 1974.
Andrade, Mário de. O movimento
modernista. Casa do Estudante do Brasil,
1942.
Bandeira, Manuel. “O atelier de Tarsiwald.”
In I Encontro de crítica textual:
O manuscrito moderno e as edições,
edited by Philippe Willemart, Roberto de
Oliveira Brandão, and Telê Ancona Lopez,
pp. 27–40. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras
e Ciências Humanas da Universidade
de São Paulo, 1986.
———. “Tarsila antropófaga.” In Crônicas
da província do Brasil, pp. 215–17.
Civilização Brasileira, 1937.
Bercht, Fatima. “Tarsila do Amaral.”
In Latin American Artists of the Twentieth
Century, edited by Waldo Rasmussen,
pp. 52–59. Exh. cat. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, 1993.
Boaventura, Maria Eugênia da Gama
Alves. Movimento brasileiro: Contribuição
ao estudo do modernism. Secretaria da
Cultura, Ciência e Tecnologia, Conselho
Estadual de Artes e Ciências Humanas, 1978.
Brandini, Laura. “Tarsila do Amaral
et Paris.” Le Vieux Montmartre 119, 74
(June 2005), pp. 21–24.
Cardoso, Rafael. “The Problem of Race
in Brazilian Painting, c. 1850–1920.”
Art History 38, 3 (June 2015), pp. 499–511.
Cardoso, Renata Gomes. “A Negra
de Tarsila do Amaral: Criação, recepção e
circulação.” VIS: Revista do Programa
de Pós-graduação em Arte da UnB 15, 2
(July–December 2016), pp. 90–110.
Crippa, Giulia. “O grotesco como
estratégia de afirmação da produção
pictorial feminine.” Estudos feministas
11, 1 (January–June 2003), pp. 113–35.
Damien, Carol. “Tarsila do Amaral: Art
and Environmental Concerns of a Brazilian
Modernist.” Woman’s Art Journal 20,
1 (Spring–Summer 1999), pp. 3–7.
Diniz, Dilma Castelo Branco. “Os artistas
brasileiros em Paris (1922–1932).” O eixo
e a roda: Revista de literatura brasileira 18,
2 (2009), pp. 17–33.
Eulalio, Alexandre. A Aventura Brasileira
de Blaise Cendrars: Ensaio, cronologia,
filme, depoimentos, antologia. Edições
Quíron, 1978.
Fabre, Gladys. La dona, metamorfosi
de la modernitat. Exh. cat. Fundació Juan
Miró, 2004.
Gabara, Esther. Errant Modernism:
The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and
Brazil. Duke University Press, 2008.
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 Giunta, Andrea. “Strategies of Modernity
in Latin America.” In Beyond the Fantastic:
Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin
America, edited by Gerardo Mosquera,
pp. 53–68. MIT Press, 1995.
Gotlib, Nádia Battela. Tarsila do Amaral:
A modernista. Editora SENAC, 2000.
Greet, Michele. “Devouring Surrealism:
Tarsila’s Abaporu.” Papers of Surrealism
11 (Spring 2015), pp. 1–39.
———. “‘Exhilarating Exile’: Four Latin
American Women Exhibit in Paris.”
Artelogie 5 (October 2013), pp. 1–26.
———. “Occupying Paris: The First
Survey Exhibition of Latin American Art.”
Journal of Curatorial Studies 3, 2–3
(June–October 2014), pp. 212–36.
Gullar, Ferreira. “Caráter nacional da arte.”
In Sobre arte, pp. 24–28. Avenir Editora,
1982.
Herkenhoff, Paulo. “Introdução Geral.”
PRESS USE ONLY
In Herkenhoff and Pedrosa, XXIV Bienal
de São Paulo, pp. 22–48.
Herkenhoff, Paulo, and Brigitte Hedel-
Samson. Tarsila do Amaral: Peintre
brésilienne à Paris, 1923–1929. Exh. cat.
Imago Escritório de Arte, 2005.
Herkenhoff, Paulo, and Adriano Pedrosa.
XXIV Bienal de São Paulo: Núcleo
histórico; Antropofagia e histórias de
canibalismos. Exh. cat. Fundação
Bienal de São Paulo, 1998.
Inojosa, Joaquim. “Tarsila do Amaral.”
In O movimento modernista em
Pernambuco, pp. 145–47. Gráfica Tupy,
1968.
Marcondes, Marco Antonio, ed. Tarsila.
Art Editora, 1991.
Meira, Sylvia. “Antropofagia de Tarsila
do Amaral.” Connaissance des arts 625
(March 2005), pp. 108–11.
Milhaud, Darius. Notes without Music:
An Autobiography. Translated by Donald
Evans. Knopf, 1953.
001-192 CC.indd 185
Milliet, Maria Alice. Tarsila do Amaral Zilio, Carlos. A querela do Brasil: A questão
e Di Cavalcanti: Mito e realidade no da identidade da arte brasileira; O obra de
modernismo brasileiro. Exh. cat. Museu Tarsila, Di Cavalcanti e Portinari. Relume
de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, 2002. Dumará, 1997.
———. Tarsila: Os melhores anos. M10
Editora, 2011.
Milliet, Sérgio. Tarsila. Lanzara, 1953.
———.Tarsila: 1918–1950. Exh. cat.
Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo,1950.
Nunes, Benedito. “Antropofagia ao
alcance de todos.” In Obras completas
de Oswald de Andrade. Vol. 6, A utopia
antropofágica, pp. 5–39. Globo e
Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1990.
Pedrosa, Mário. “Modern Art Week.”
In Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents,
edited by Glória Ferreira and Paulo
Herkenhoff, pp. 177–86. The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, 2015.
Ribeiro, Maria Izabel Branco. Tarsila do
Amaral. Folha de São Paulo, 2013.
Sá Rego, Stella M. de. “Pau-Brasil:
Tarsila do Amaral.” Latin American Art 2, 1
(Winter 1990), pp. 18–22.
Salzstein, Sônia. “A audácia de Tarsila.”
In Herkenhoff and Pedrosa, XXIV Bienal
de São Paulo, pp. 356–63.
Salzstein, Sônia, Aracy A. Amaral,
Iole de Freitas, and Haroldo de Campos.
Tarsila: Anos 20. Exh. cat. Galeria de
Arte do Sesi, 1997.
Schwartz, Jorge. Brasil, 1920–1950:
De la antropofagia a Brasília. Exh. cat.
IVAM Centre Julio González, 2000.
———, ed. Las vanguardias
latinoamericanas: Textos programáticos
y críticos. Cátedra, 1991.
Sneed, Gillian. “Anita Malfatti and Tarsila
do Amaral: Gender, ‘Brasilidade’ and the
Modernist Landscape.” Woman’s Art Journal
34 (Spring–Summer 2013), pp. 30–39.
Vidal, Edgard. “Trayectoria de una obra:
‘A negra’ (1923) de Tarsila do Amaral:
Una revolución icónica.” Artelogie 1
(September 2011), pp. 1–19.
Selected Bibliography 185
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 INDEX
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.
academic art, 23, 47, 52n8, 95, 99n64,
156, 157, 161, 162, 168
Académie Internationale des Beaux-Arts,
126
Académie Julian, 38, 99n64, 125, 163,
169
Africa/Africans, 48, 52n2, 173n4, 173n13
Afro-Brazilians, 49, 157n2, 158n2
A Negra and, 44, 45, 49, 52n2
as inspiration, 42, 48, 53n26, 164, 166
slaves from, 46, 88, 95
Aguiar, Lydia Dias de (Tarsila’s mother), 125
Alcântara Machado, Antônio de, 127, 168,
PRESS USE ONLY
170, 170n6
Aleijadinho, 47, 93, 126, 167
Alexandrino, Pedro, 46, 99n64, 125, 162,
169
Amaral, Aracy, 19, 21–22, 24, 42–43,
54n45, 92, 94, 129
Amaral, José Estanislau do (Tarsila’s
father), 54n61, 125, 163, 164–65
Amaral, Tarsila do, 42, 125–29, 128,
131, 140, 141, 153
Anthropophagy period, 161, 170
as the “caipirinha dressed by Poiret,”
38, 44, 52n1, 86, 97n12, 140, 141
group exhibitions, 19, 21, 25n3,
128, 129
Indaiatuba Landscape, 92, 147, 181
“Minha terra tem palmares,” 147, 181
monographic/solo exhibitions, 17, 19,
20, 21, 23, 49, 51, 92, 127, 128,
160n6, 170
Pau-Brasil period, 91, 161, 167–68,
170, 172
private collection of, 50, 53n33, 54n61,
126, 128
travel album, 87, 89, 142, 180
Amaral, Tarsila do, works
illustrations
Feuilles de route, 47, 60, 61, 69, 71,
72, 74, 75, 127, 138, 139, 179, 180
Pau Brasil, 47, 70, 127, 136, 137, 181
18 6 Tarsila do Amaral
001-192 CC.indd 186
paintings
Abaporu (and studies), 17, 25n12,
38–55, 81, 82, 84–85, 87, 88,
89–90, 93, 95, 96, 98n32, 127,
163, 164, 165n7, 168, 170, 179
A Cuca, 76, 92, 126, 127, 178
A Negra (and studies), 22, 34, 35,
36, 37, 38–55, 45, 87, 88–89,
94–95, 98n32, 98n36, 126, 127,
128, 129, 165, 168, 178
Anthropophagy (and study), cover, 23,
38, 43, 51, 54n46, 55n70, 87, 88, 89,
95, 118, 119, 153, 169, 179
Brazilian Religion I, 17, 17, 170
Bull, The, 101, 127, 179
Calmness II, 117, 179
Carnival in Madureira, 63, 126, 178
City (The Street), 22, 53–54n42, 114,
128, 179
Composition (Lonely Figure)
(and studies), 120, 121, 180
Distance, 90, 105, 122, 179
Forest, 10, 107, 180
Fruit Seller, 17
Hills of the Favela, 48, 66, 126, 127,
128, 168, 170, 172, 178
Lagoa Santa, 78, 126, 127, 158n1,
173n1, 179
Lake, The, 8, 98, 102, 127, 129, 179
Manacá, 50, 80, 127, 128, 179
Model, The (and study), 28, 29,
170n4, 178
Palm Trees, 54, 79, 179
Papaya Tree, The, 65, 179
Portrait of a Woman, 38–39, 39, 125
Portrait of Marío de Andrade, 39,
39, 126
Postcard, 122, 128, 152, 180
Railway Station, The, 57, 127, 179
Second Class, 21, 128
Self-Portrait I, 19
Setting Sun, 4–5, 18, 92, 113, 180
Sleep, 103, 127, 179
Street Market I, The, 17
Urutu Viper, 6–7, 104, 127, 170n4, 179
Workers, 23, 123, 128, 164, 180
studies/other drawings
Animal with Fat Stomach, 77, 179
Animal with Triangle, 116, 180
Anthropophagic Drawing of
Saci-Pererê I, 115, 179
Anthropophagic Figure in the
Landscape, 118, 180
Anthropophagic Landscape I, 108, 180
Anthropophagic Landscape II, 109, 180
Anthropophagic Landscape III, 110, 180
Anthropophagic Landscape IV, 110, 180
Anthropophagic Landscape V, 111, 180
Colored Study of Cubist Composition III,
27, 179
Cubist Composition (Hands at the
Piano), 32, 178
Cubist Composition II, 27, 178
Fragment of a Landscape, 68, 178
Hanging Palm Tree II, 112, 180
Mantiqueira Mountains/Rio de Janeiro,
64, 178
Landscape with Anthropophagic
Animal III, 115, 180
Landscape with Creature and Palm
Trees, 112, 180
Landscape with Five Palm Trees I,
106, 179
Landscape with Railroad Car, 58, 179
Ouro Preto and Padre Faria, 67, 126, 178
Pen with Ox and Piglets II, 69, 178
Saci-Pererê, 76, 179
Sertão Farm II, 62, 179
Sketchbook I, 132, 178
Sketchbook II, 132, 178
Sketchbook with a Drawing for
A Negra, 33, 178
Sketchbook with Notes and Drawing
for Caipirinha, 33, 178
Study (Academy No. 2), 31, 178
Study for Blue Woman (Water Spirit) I,
77, 180
Study for La Tasse, 30, 178
Study of a Hand II, 33, 178
Study of Mountains, 67, 126, 178
Town with Tram, 73, 179
Train Station, 59, 126, 178
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 Two Studies (Academy No. 1 and
The Model), 29, 170n4, 178
Amaral Pinto, Dulce do (Tarsila’s daughter),
50, 125, 126, 127, 129, 165
Amazon, 50, 156n4, 163
Andrade, Mário de, 22, 44, 46–47, 50,
52n8, 53n33, 54n47, 54n61, 87, 93,
94, 125, 126, 127, 162, 163, 167,
168, 169, 170, 171
Grupo dos Cinco and, 39, 94, 94, 125,
170, 171
“Homenagem aos homens que agem,”
50–51
Macunaíma, 50, 54n64
“Márioswald” and, 50, 55n70
Paulicéia desvairada, 39, 134
“Tarsila,” 166–67
Tarsila’s portrait of, 39, 39, 125, 126
“Tarsiwaldo,” 21, 53n26, 55n70, 87, 127
Andrade, Nonê de, 47, 126, 127
Andrade, Oswald de, 18–19, 22, 23, 25n4,
39, 40, 42, 42, 46, 47, 50, 52n8, 54n56,
54n65, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94–95, 97n18,
125, 126, 127, 128, 146, 148, 149, 150,
156, 157, 158, 163, 166, 167, 169, 170,
171, 172
“Atelier,” 44, 52n1, 53n36, 97n12, 140, 141
PRESS USE ONLY
Grupo dos Cinco and, 39, 94, 94, 125,
169, 171
“Homenagem aos homens que agem,”
50–51
lecture at the Sorbonne, 42, 51, 53n26,
55n71, 126, 155
“Manifesto antropófago,” 20, 25n4,
25n12, 51, 84, 85–86, 87, 88, 89–90,
91, 95, 98n32, 127, 148, 168, 176–77
“Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil”/and
Pau-Brasil poetry, 47, 88, 95, 126,
160n5, 168, 170, 174–75
“Márioswald” and, 50, 55n70
marriage to Tarsila, 18, 20, 39, 42, 84,
125, 127, 128, 156, 158, 162, 163, 164
“Mensagem ao antropófago
desconhecido,” 84, 97n17, 98n32
“Minha terra tem palmares,” 147, 181
O rei da vela, 21, 22, 89, 90, 90
Pau Brasil, 47, 51, 52n1, 70, 127, 136, 163
titling of, and response to Abaporu, 51,
84, 127, 163, 170
Andrade, Oswald de, Jr., 167, 170
Anthropophagy, 38–55
Abaporu and, 25, 38, 51, 84–85, 127,
163, 168, 170
manifestos of, 20, 25n4, 25n12, 51, 84,
85–86, 87, 88, 89–90, 91, 95, 97n17,
98n32, 127, 148, 168, 176–77
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 159, 165, 173
001-192 CC.indd 187
Arantes, Altino, 127
Arcadia, 23, 41, 43, 49, 51, 53n38
Armory Show, 39
Art Deco, 92, 93, 94, 95, 127
artist-travelers, 47, 50, 51
Association Artistique des Vrai
Indépendants, 49, 128
avant-garde, 18, 20, 21, 23, 86, 92, 94–95,
161, 168, 172
Avenir, 160
Bahia, 16, 46, 126, 163, 176
Salvador, 50, 127
Ballets Suèdois, 42, 172
Bandeira, Manuel, 50, 87, 127, 168
Baroque, 23, 93, 165
Barr, Alfred H.
modern art diagram, 18, 18
Barrio, Artur, 90
Bataille, Georges, 25n4, 89
bathers, 40–42, 43–44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51,
52n15, 53n20, 53n23, 53n38
Beatriz (Tarsila’s granddaughter), 128,
129, 165
Belting, Hans, 93
Bernardelli, Félix, Henrique, and Rodolfo,
157, 157n4, 161
Bethânia, Maria, 96
Blanchard, Maria, 170
Bopp, Raul, 168, 169
Cobra Norato, 127, 148, 168
response to/titling of Abaporu, 51, 84,
127, 163, 168, 170
Boss, Homer, 86
Brabo, Albert, 155, 156n1
Brancusi, Constantin, 42, 42, 43, 50,
53n33, 126, 156, 160, 172
Brummer Gallery exhibition, 127, 146
Kiss, The, 42, 127
White Negress, 42, 42
Braque, Georges, 41, 155, 158
Brasilidade, 16, 20, 23, 50, 156n4,
161, 170
Brazil
independence of, 39, 165n13, 177
modernism in, 39, 51, 85, 86, 88, 89,
95, 97n24, 125
modernity in, 85, 86–87, 88, 90,
98n27
slavery in, 46, 88, 94, 125, 172
Brecheret, Victor, 50–51, 94, 125, 126,
128, 155, 156n2
Brinton, Christian, 16
Brum, Blanca Luz, 128
Bruno, Giordano, 96
Buarque, Chico, 162, 165n1
caboclo, 46, 54n48, 95, 156, 156n6
Cabral, Pedro Álvares, 47
caipira, 46, 47, 54n48, 126, 156, 156n6,
160, 166, 167
caipirinha, 33, 38, 44, 46, 52n1, 97n12,
140, 141
Caldas, Waltercio, 20, 21, 90
Tarsilas, 20
Camargo, Clóvis, 148
Camargo, Maria Penteado, 148
Campos, Haroldo de, 90–91
Cândido Ferreira, João (De Chocolat), 156,
157n2
cannibalism, 17, 25n4, 38, 50, 51, 55n68,
84–99, 168
artistic/cultural, 17, 38, 50, 90
Caraíban, 176, 177
Carnival, 47–48, 51, 54n53, 63, 93, 126,
174, 175, 176
Carvalho, Flávio de, 148
Carvalho, Ronald de, 125
Casa Modernista, 128
Cavalcanti, Emiliano Di, 125, 128, 155,
156n4, 169, 172
Celso Martinez Corrêa, José, 21, 86,
89, 90
Cendrars, Blaise, 40, 41, 42, 47, 49,
53n22, 53n26, 54n65, 99n58, 126, 127,
155, 160, 167, 168, 172, 173, 174
Anthologie nègre, 40, 42, 53n26
Création du monde and, 42, 172
Feuilles de route, 47, 48, 48, 49, 54n56,
60, 61, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 127, 138, 168
trip to Brazil (1924), 47, 48, 126, 167,
168, 170, 172
César, Osório, 128
Cézanne, Paul, 172, 174
Bathers, 40, 40, 52n15
Large Bathers, The, 40, 40
legacy of, 18, 23, 40–41, 46, 51, 52n11,
53n20, 155, 158, 159, 174
Tarsila’s apartment as the former studio
of, 39, 52n11, 125, 165, 171
Vollard as collector of, 40, 52n15, 126, 172
Chateaubriand, Assis, 18, 19, 168, 170,
170n4, 171, 173n2
Chirico, Giorgio de, 160, 173
Clark, Lygia, 20, 21, 84–85, 86, 89
Baba antropofágica, 85, 85, 86
psychoanalysis of, 84, 97n2
Cocteau, Jean, 126, 155, 160, 162, 165,
171, 172
coffee, 16, 86, 125, 128, 164, 172
Cogniat, Raymond, 161, 168, 172
Colombia, 19
colonialism, 23, 25n4, 47, 48, 50, 52n2,
85, 126, 161, 173n4
Other and, 17, 41
Index 187
2017-08-16 8:29 AM
 Corinth, Lovis, 86
Correio da Manhã
interview with Tarsila, 46, 126, 155–56,
170
“Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry,” 126,
174–75
Costa, Gal, 86
Costa, Osvaldo, 168, 169
Courbet, Gustave, 40
Crémieux, Benjamin, 172
Crítica
interview with Tarsila, 128, 161
Cubism, 23, 38–39, 41, 46, 91, 92, 125,
126, 155, 156, 157, 157n3, 158, 160,
165, 167, 170, 171, 173
as “military service,” 40, 52n16, 156,
159, 160, 170
Tarsila’s “post-Cubism,” 94
Dada, 25n4, 38, 125, 171
Tzara’s naming of, 51, 55n68
Damas Filho, João, 169, 170
Damisch, Hubert, 88, 98n34
Dantas, Júlio, 160, 160n3
David, Jacques-Louis, 40
Debret, Jean-Baptiste, 50, 51
Indian Village in Cantagalo, 48
PRESS USE ONLY
Delaunay, Robert, 41, 50, 128, 172
Champs de Mars: The Red Tower,
53n33, 126
Delaunay, Sonia, 128, 172
Derain, André, 41, 42
Derrida, Jacques, 93, 94
Diário da Noite
interview with Tarsila, 127, 158
Diário de São Paulo, 164, 169
Tarsila’s articles in, 40, 41, 53n21, 97n3,
125, 126, 129, 173n4
Dias, Antonio, 20
Dias, Cícero, 128, 169
Duarte, Benedito
Portrait of Tarsila do Amaral, 140
Duchamp, Marcel, 24
Dürer, Albrecht
Melancholy I, 84, 85
Eckhout, Albert
Tapuya Woman, 96
Eichbauer, Hélio, 86
staging of O rei da vela, 21, 22, 89, 90
Elpons, George, 99n64, 125, 162, 169
Errázuriz, Eugenia, 158, 158n1, 172
Europe
Modernism in, 23, 44
Tarsila’s trips to, 125, 127, 158, 165, 169
Exposicão de arte moderna, 129
Exposicão geral de belas artes, 125
188 Tarsila do Amaral
001-192 CC.indd 188
Exposition Colonial, Marseilles, 422
Exposition d’Art Américain-Latin, 126
Falla, Manuel de, 172, 173n5
Farkou, Yvette, 42
fazendas, 19, 46, 48, 49, 97n12, 164, 165,
165n10
Santa Teresa do Alto, 50, 125, 127, 167
Santo Antônio, 127, 135
São Bernardo, 46, 86, 97n12, 125, 164
Sertão, 62, 125, 127
Fédida, Pierre, 84, 85, 97n2
Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, José, 50
The Guitar Player, 50, 54n61
Ferraz Gonçalves, Benedito Geraldo, 128,
163–64, 165n9, 169
Fierens, Paul, 92
Foujita, Tsuguharu, 126
France, 18, 19, 23, 39, 42, 43, 48, 88, 155,
157, 162, 163, 165, 172, 173n4
Futurism, 38–39, 52n8, 125, 141, 155,
157, 161, 166, 174, 175
Gago Coutinho, Carlos Viegas, 163, 165n5
Galerie Dru, 41
Galerie Percier
Tarsila’s first exhibition (1926), 18, 49,
54n65, 92, 127, 140, 141, 158, 160n6,
167–68, 172
Tarsila’s second exhibition (1928), 18,
49, 127, 150, 158
Galerie Pigalle, 52n15
Gauguin, Paul, 41–42, 53n24
Arearea, 41, 53n37
Gauthier, Maximilien, 127, 168, 172
Gazette du Brésil, 49, 158
Géo-Charles, 128
Gil, Gilberto, 86, 89, 162, 165n1
Gleizes, Albert, 53n33, 126, 155, 156,
160, 170, 171
Tarsila’s studies with, 41, 53n22, 91,
126, 167, 170, 171
Goerg, Édouard-Joseph, 155, 156n1
Gombrich, Ernst, 93
Good Neighbor Policy, 16, 25n2
Graça Aranha, José Pereira da, 87, 125,
169, 170, 170n2, 171
Great Depression, 23
Grenoble Museum, 127, 158
Gris, Juan, 126, 156, 160, 166, 173
Grupo dos Cinco (Group of Five), 39, 94,
94, 125, 160n4, 169, 171
Guimarães Rosa, João, 162, 165n2
Herkenhoff, Paulo, 91, 94–95, 98n34
Houénou, Kojo Tovalou (Marc Tovalou
Quénum), 172, 173n4
Impressionism, 23, 38, 125, 155, 159,
160, 162, 169, 170, 174
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 40, 41
Italy, 155, 156n2
Tarsila’s trips to, 54n45, 126, 127
Itupeva, 50, 125
Jacob, Max, 169, 170
Jameson, Fredric, 97n24
Journal des débats, 92
Kahlo, Frida, 19
Klaxon, 125, 134, 170n2
Krishnamurti, 169, 170
Kubitschek, Juscelino, 129
Kvapil, Charles, 155, 156n1
La Création du monde, 42, 43, 172
landscapes
anthropophagic, 108, 109, 110, 111
Brazilian, 46, 91, 156, 168
“Impressionist and Dadaist,” 38, 125
Lane, Eileen, 42
Laplanche, Jean, 90, 98n34
Larbaud, Valery, 171, 172
L’Art vivant, 158
Latin America, 16, 18, 19, 21, 25nn2–3,
47, 50, 54n65, 89, 126
Léger, Fernand, 42–43, 50, 53n28, 53n33,
126, 155, 156, 160, 164, 172
La Création du monde and, 42, 43
Still Life, 91
Tarsila’s studies with, 41, 54n45, 84, 91,
97n3, 126, 167, 170, 171
Legrain, Pierre
frames for Tarsila’s paintings, 18–19,
92–93, 93, 94, 95, 99nn58–59, 99n63,
127, 160, 160n6, 168
Leirner, Nelson, 20
Le Journal, 92, 158
Le Temps, 160
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 85, 88, 97n10,
98n32
Lhote, André, 42, 53n33, 126, 156, 160,
166, 172
Tarsila’s studies with, 40, 91, 125, 155,
157n3, 167, 170, 171
Lobato, Monteiro, 88, 162, 163, 165n3
Lombroso, Cesare
La donna delinquente, 44, 44
Lyotard, Jean-François, 24
macumba, 158, 158n2
Maiolino, Anna Maria, 20, 21, 89
Maison de l’Amérique Latine, 126
Malfatti, Anita, 19, 38, 86, 88, 94, 125,
128, 155, 162, 163, 164, 165n3
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 Grupo dos Cinco and, 94, 94, 125, 169, 171
Stupid Woman, The, 86
Mantovani, Oreste, 125
Maran, René, 172, 173n13
Maré, Rolf de, 42, 172
Marxism, 20, 23, 86, 128
Matisse, Henri, 4
Mendes, Murilo, 168, 169
Mexico, 19, 97n8
Middle East, 48, 127
Milhaud, Darius, 42, 53n27, 172
Milliet, Sérgio, 21, 125, 129, 155, 156n5,
166n1, 172
Minas Gerais, 47, 51, 126, 135, 170
Belo Horizonte, 47, 129
Cataguases, 50, 51
Congonhas do Campo, 47, 167
Lagoa Santa, 47, 78, 126, 127, 158n1,
173n1
Ouro Preto, 47, 67, 126, 167, 170
Sabará, 47, 67, 126, 167, 170
São João del Rei, 47, 167
Tiradentes, 47, 167, 170
Miranda, Carmen, 16, 16, 17
Modernism, 17, 24, 38, 40, 86, 87, 93,
97n8, 125, 157n3, 159, 160, 170, 171
Brazilian, 39, 51, 85, 86, 88, 89, 95,
PRESS USE ONLY
97n24, 125
European, 23, 44
modernity, 23, 42, 84, 85, 86–87, 89,
94–95, 96, 97–98n24, 97n8
Brazilian, 85, 86–87, 88, 90, 98n27
Montaigne, Michel de, 88, 89, 96, 176
Montoya, Antonio Ruiz de, 84, 163, 165n8
Morand, Paul, 155
Moreira, Álvaro, 168, 169
Moscow, 128, 158, 170
Movimento brasileiro, 128
murals, 47, 50, 129, 167
Musée de l’Homme, Paris, 50
Musée Galliera, Paris, 126
Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 129
Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, 21,
52n4, 129
Museum of Western Art, Moscow, 128
Museu Nacional de Belas-Artes, Rio de
Janeiro, 129
New York Times, 17
North America, 16, 83, 98n30
Tarsila’s belated reception in, 16, 17,
19–20, 23
Novaes, Guiomar, 125
Nunes, Benedito, 85, 88, 89
Oiticica, Hélio, 20, 21, 21, 24, 85, 86,
90, 94
001-192 CC.indd 189
O Jornal, 170
article on Tarsila, 19
interviews with/article by Tarsila, 127,
128, 156–57, 159–60
Old Masters, 40
Other, the, 17, 41–42
Palace Hotel
Tarsila’s exhibitions at, 128, 151, 161
Palacete Glória, 128
Palácio das Indústrias, 125
Papapetros, Spyros, 93
Pape, Lygia, 20, 21, 24, 25n19, 89
Pará, 50
Para Todos, 127
Paris, 18, 19–20, 23, 40–41, 42, 42, 43,
46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52n11, 53n22,
53n33, 54n47, 54n56, 54n65, 84, 86, 91,
96, 97n3, 97n12, 97n16, 99n64,
99n68, 126, 127, 128, 129, 141, 146,
155, 156n2, 156n4, 160, 166, 169, 173n4
A Negra’s completion in, 38, 49, 94, 168
Tarsila’s 1922/23 trip to, 23, 38, 39, 41,
88, 94, 125, 168, 170
Tarsila’s descriptions/recollections of,
125, 129, 156–57, 158, 160, 162–65,
166–67, 169, 171–73
Tarsila’s exhibitions in, 51, 92, 93, 94,
126, 128, 140, 141, 150, 156, 158,
159, 160, 160n6, 161, 167–68, 170
Tarsila’s first sojourn in (1920), 19–20, 94
Paris-Midi, 160
Paternostro, Júlio, 169
Patou, Jean, 52n1
paulista, 141, 160n1, 164
Paulista Rebellion, 127
Pawlowski, Gaston de, 49, 92, 158,
168, 172
Pedrosa, Mário, 95, 98n27
Pellerin, Auguste, 40
Penteado, Olívia Guedes, 47, 50, 53n33,
54n53, 125, 148, 149, 167, 170
Pereira de Sousa, Washington Luís, 164,
165n11
Picabia, Francis, 25n4, 55n68, 89, 99n63
Picasso, Pablo, 42, 53n33, 99n63, 126,
155, 156, 160, 171, 172
Seated Nude Drying Off Her Foot, 41,
41, 53n22
Tarsila’s visit with (1923), 41, 53nn22–23,
125, 165, 172
Picchia, Menotti del, 125, 160, 160n4,
168, 171
Grupo dos Cinco and, 39, 94, 94, 125,
160n4, 169
Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 128
Pirapora, 172, 173n10
Plato, 96
poetry
Concrete, 90
Pau-Brasil, 168, 174–75
Poiret, Paul, 52n1
Tarsila as the “caipirinha dressed by
Poiret,” 38, 44, 52n1, 86, 97n12,
140, 141
Portugal, 39, 160, 165n13, 171, 176
Tarsila’s trip to, 39, 53n38, 125
Post, Frans
Rio São Francisco and Fort Morits, The
91, 92
Post-Impressionism, 23
Poussin, Nicolas, 41, 92
Prado, Paulo, 52n11, 87, 125, 126, 127,
155, 156n5, 163, 165, 168, 171, 172
Prédio Glória, Tarsila’s exhibition in, 128,
151
primitivism, 23, 41, 42, 43, 44, 55n68
Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 41
Quignard, Pascal, 87, 89
Raynal, Maurice, 92, 94, 168, 172
Recife, 50, 156n4
Rego Monteiro, Vicente do, 54n63, 94,
125, 128, 155, 156n4
Remon, Georges, 49
Renard, Émile, 99n64, 125, 169
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 52n15, 53n23,
125, 164
Vollard as collector of, 52n15, 126, 172
Reverón, Armando, 19
Revista de Antropofagia, 127, 168, 169,
169n2, 170
“Manifesto of Anthropophagy,” 127,
176–77
Revolution of 1930, 128
Rezende, José Severiano de, 49, 158
Rezende, Pola, 129
Ribeiro, José Fléxa Pinto, 161, 161n1
Ribeiro, Leo Gilson
interview with Tarsila, 162–64
Rio de Janeiro, 46, 47, 64, 126, 127, 128,
129, 157n2, 161
Olympics, 18
Tarsila’s exhibitions in, 20, 21, 49, 128,
129, 151
Rivera, Diego, 19
Rocha, Antônio Geraldo, 156, 157n1
Rodrigues, José Wasth, 50
Roerich Museum, 128
Romain, Jules, 155, 171–72
Romoff, Serge, 128, 168, 172
Roosevelt, Franklin, D., 25n2
Rosenberg, Léonce, 43, 46, 126, 127, 173
Index 189
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 Rosenberg, Paul, 53nn22–23
Rousseau, Henri, 53n23, 125, 166, 172, 176
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 129
Rugendas, Johann Moritz, 50, 54n61
Praia Rodriguez, near Rio de Janeiro, 49
Russian Constructivism, 99n68
Russian Formalism, 91
Russia/Soviet Union, 18, 86, 156
Tarsila’s trip to (1931), 21, 128
Sacharoff, Olga Nicolaevna, 155, 156n1
Salão de Maio, 129
Salgado, Plínio, 168
Salmon, André, 172
Salon d’Automne, 126, 155
Salon de la Société des Artistes Français,
38, 125
Salon des Surindépendants, 128
Salon du Franc, 127, 158
Salzstein, Sônia, 86, 87, 97n21, 98n34
Santa María, Andrés de, 19
Santos-Dumont, Alberto, 125
São Paulo, 18, 21, 23, 39, 46, 48, 49, 50,
84, 86, 88, 94, 96, 125, 126, 127, 128,
129, 155, 156nn2–3, 159, 160, 162–63,
164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 177
Biennial, 21–22, 129
PRESS USE ONLY
Tarsila’s solo exhibition in (1929), 20, 49,
128, 159, 170
Satie, Erik, 126, 159, 171
Segall, Lasar, 86
Semana de Arte Moderna, 23, 43, 48, 86,
87, 87, 88, 90, 98n24, 98n27, 125, 129,
133, 156n2, 156n4, 162, 169, 171
Tarsila’s absence from, 39, 88, 94
Serna Puig, Ramón Gómez de la, 172,
173n5
Silva Brito, Mário da, 93
Silva Teles, Francisco da, 168
Silva Telles, Carolina, 148
Silva Telles, Gofredo Teixeira da, 47, 87,
126, 167, 170
Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 128
slaves/slavery, 88, 164
A Negra and, 49, 54n57, 89, 94, 95,
98n36, 165, 165n14
in Brazil, 46, 88, 94, 125, 172
social realism, 21, 128
Sousa, Cláudio de, 127
Sousa Lima, João de, 155, 156n3, 172
Souza Dantas, Luis Martins de, 125
Spain, 173n5
Tarsila’s trip to (1923), 39, 53n38, 125
Stravinsky, Igor, 159, 172, 173n3, 174
Supervielle, Jules, 155, 158, 158n1, 172
Surrealism, 25n5, 51, 92, 160, 169, 172,
173, 173n5, 176
190 Tarsila do Amaral
001-192 CC.indd 190
Tavares Ferro, António Joaquim, 160,
160n7, 168, 171, 172
Teatro Municipal, 86
Teatro Oficina, 21, 22
Teatro Rialto, 156
Teles de Castro e Quadros Ferro,
Maria Fernanda, 160, 160n7
Thiollier, René, 47, 87, 126, 167, 170
Tiradentes, 165, 165n13
Torres-Garcia, Joaquín, 19, 97n8
tourism, 16, 54n53, 176
Tropicália, 20, 24, 86, 89, 90, 91, 94, 165n1
Tunga, 20, 21, 89
Tupi-Guarani, 51, 84, 127, 165n8
Tzara, Tristan, 25n4, 51, 55n68
United States, 16, 17, 39
stock market crash, 20, 128
Tarsila’s group exhibitions in, 25n3
Uruguay, 19, 97n8, 128
Vargas, Getúlio, 23, 128, 129
Vauxcelles, Louis, 168, 172, 173n11
Veja
Tarsila interview in, 25n12, 162–65
Veloso, Caetano, 21, 24, 86, 89, 90, 96,
97n13, 97n18, 162, 165n1
Venezuela, 19
Venice, 126
Venice Biennial, 129
vernacular art /sources, 16, 23, 46, 50
Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 50–51, 125, 155,
159, 165, 172, 173n1
Virgil, 41
Visconti, Eliseu d’Angelo, 161, 161n2
Vogue Paris, 127, 158
Vollard, Ambroise, 40, 42, 52n15, 53n24,
53n37, 126, 172
Waldemar-George, 169, 170, 172
Warchavchik, Gregori, 128
Warnod, André, 168, 172
Wiéner, Jean, 172, 173n7
World War I, 41, 173n4
World War II, 87
Zadig, William, 125
Zervos, Christian, 168, 172
Zilio, Carlos, 86, 94, 97n16, 98n34
2017-08-14 9:26 AM
 PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

Every effort has been made to identify,
contact, and acknowledge copyright
holders for all reproductions; additional
rights holders are encouraged to contact
the Art Institute of Chicago Department
of Publishing. The following credits apply
to all images that appear in this catalogue
for which acknowledgment is due.
All works by Tarsila do Amaral are
© Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos.
© 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York / ADAGP, Paris © CNAC / MNAM /
Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource,
NY: p. 42, fig. 8. © bpk Bildagentur /
Photography by Jaime Acioli: p. 17, fig. 2;
pls. 3, 4, 7, 8, 13, 25, 27, 49, 53, 54, 57,
58, 59, 69, 70, 76, 81, 82. Photography by
Diego Bresani: pl. 6. Photography by
Rômulo and Valentino Fialdini: p. 17, fig. 4;
p. 19, fig. 8; p. 21, fig. 10; p. 39, figs. 1–2;
p. 45, fig. 11; p. 50, fig. 16; p. 87, figs. 4–5;
p. 89, fig. 6; pls. 2, 5, 9, 11–12, 14–17, 21,
22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 31–33, 35, 46–48, 50,
52, 54–56, 60, 62, 72–75, 77–79, 83–88,
91–94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 107–115.
Photography by Robert Gerhardt: pl. 79.
Photography by Sergio Guerini: p. 17,
fig. 3; pls. 1, 51. Photography by Andrew
Kemp: pl. 56. Photography by Robert
Lifson and Jonathan Mathias, Department

PRESS USE ONLY

Museum Berggruen, Nationalgalerie of Imaging, Art Institute of Chicago: pl. 71.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jens Ziehe / Photography by Gustavo Lowry: pl. 55.
Art Resource, NY: p. 41, fig. 5. © Bridge- Photography by Eileen Travell: pl. 68.
man Images: p. 40, fig. 4. Digital Image
© The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed
by SCALA / Art Resource, NY: pls.
89, 93, 104. © Musée de Grenoble: pl.
44. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource,
NY, photography by Hervé Lewandowski:
p. 41, fig. 6. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art
Resource, NY, photography by Georges
Meguerditchian: p. 42, fig. 7. © RMN-Grand
Palais / Art Resource, NY, photography
by Franck Raux: p. 92, fig. 10. Courtesy
Professor Marcia Rizzutto, Professor Paulo
Costa, and Professor Nemitala Added,
Instituto de Física da Universidade de São
Paulo: p. 45, fig. 12.

Photography Credits 191

001-192 CC.indd 191 2017-08-14 9:26 AM

 Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil
is published in conjunction with an exhibition
organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Art Institute of Chicago
October 8, 2017–January 7, 2018
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
February 11–June 3, 2018
At the Art Institute of Chicago, major support
is generously provided by the Diane & Bruce
Halle Foundation.
 
Additional funding is contributed by the Morton
International Exhibition Fund, Robert J. Buford,
Noelle C. Brock, Constance and David Coolidge,
Margot Levin Schiff and the Harold Schiff
Foundation, the Jack and Peggy Crowe Fund,
and Erika Erich.
 
Annual support for Art Institute exhibitions
is provided by the Exhibitions Trust: Neil Bluhm
and the Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation;
Jay Franke and David Herro; Kenneth Griffin; Caryn
and King Harris, The Harris Family Foundation;
Liz and Eric Lefkofsky; Robert M. and Diane v.S.
Levy; Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff; Usha and
Lakshmi N. Mittal; Thomas and Margot Pritzker;
Anne and Chris Reyes; Betsy Bergman Rosenfield
and Andrew M. Rosenfield; Cari and Michael J.
PRESS USE ONLY
Sacks; and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.
Major support for the New York presentation is
made possible by The International Council of
The Museum of Modern Art. Additional support
is provided by the Annual Exhibition Fund.
© 2017 The Art Institute of Chicago
All works by Tarsila do Amaral are © Tarsila
do Amaral Licenciamentos.
Luis Pérez-Oramas’s essay “Tarsila, Melancholic
Cannibal” is © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, digital recording, or any other information
storage or retrieval system (beyond that copying
permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copy-
right Law), without prior written permission from
the Department of Publishing of the Art Institute of
Chicago, except by a reviewer, who may quote
brief passages.
First edition
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-300-22861-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-86559-2896 (softcover)
192 Tarsila do Amaral
001-192 CC.indd 192
Published by
The Art Institute of Chicago
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Distributed by
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Produced by the Department of Publishing,
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Edited by Greg Nosan, David Frankel, and
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Production by Lauren Makholm, Joseph Mohan,
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Photography research by Katie Levi
Proofreading by Theresa Duran and Robyn Roslak
Indexing by Jane Friedman
Unless otherwise noted, photography of works
of art is by Robert Lifson and Jonathan Mathias,
Department of Imaging, the Art Institute of Chicago.
Designed and typeset in Tungsten, Univers,
and Trade Gothic by Jena Sher Graphic Design,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Separations by Professional Graphics,
Rockford, Illinois
Printing and binding by Friesens, Altona, Manitoba
Details: cover: Anthropophagy, 1929 (pl. 77);
pp. 2–3: Setting Sun, 1929 (pl. 69); pp. 4–5: Urutu
Viper, 1928 (pl. 58); p. 10: The Lake, 1928 (pl. 56);
p. 12: Manacá, 1927 (pl. 50); p. 26: Study (Academy
No.2), 1923 (pl. 5); p. 56: Carnival in Madureira,
1924 (pl. 21); p. 100: Forest, 1929 (pl. 61); p. 124:
Distance, 1928 (pl. 59); p. 130: Portrait of Tarsila
do Amaral in profile, mid-1920s (pl. 95); p. 154: The
Railway Station, 1925 (pl. 14).
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: D’Alessandro, Stephanie. | Pérez-Oramas,
Luis, 1960– | Art Institute of Chicago, organizer,
host institution. | Museum of Modern Art (New
York, N.Y.), organizer, host institution.
Title: Tarsila do Amaral : inventing modern art in
Brazil / Stephanie D’Alessandro and Luis
Pérez-Oramas.
Other titles: Tarsila do Amaral (Art Institute of
Chicago)
Description: Chicago : Art Institute of Chicago,
2017. | “Published in conjunction with an exhibition
organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.” | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017030938| ISBN
9780300228618 (hardback)
| ISBN 9780865592896 (softcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Tarsila, 1886–1973–Exhibitions. |
Modernism (Art)–Brazil–Exhibitions. | BISAC:
ART / Individual Artists / Monographs. | ART /
Caribbean & Latin American. | ART / History / Modern
(late 19th Century to 1945). | ART / Collections,
Catalogs, Exhibitions / General.
Classification: LCC ND359.T37 A4 2017 | DDC
759.981–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030938
This book was made using paper and materials
certified by the Forest Stewardship Council,
which ensures responsible forest management.
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