Тарсила ду Амара́л: Жизнь и творчество бразильской модернистки

Brazilian painter, draftswoman and translator

Tarsila de Aguiar do Amaral (taʁˈsilɐ du ɐmaˈɾaw; 1 September 1886 – 17 January 1973) was a Brazilian painter, draftswoman, and translator. She is considered one of the leading Latin American modernist artists, and is regarded as the painter who best achieved Brazilian aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style. As a member of the Grupo dos Cinco, Tarsila is also considered a major influence in the modern art movement in Brazil, alongside Anita Malfatti, Menotti Del Picchia, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade. She was instrumental in the formation of the aesthetic movement, Antropofagia (1928–1929); in fact, Tarsila was the one with her celebrated painting, Abaporu, who inspired Oswald de Andrade's famous Manifesto Antropófago.

Tarsila do Amaral was born in Capivari, a small town in the countryside of the state of São Paulo. She was born to a wealthy family of farmers and landowners who grew coffee, two years before the end of slavery in Brazil. At that time in Brazil women were not encouraged to seek higher education, especially if they came from affluent families. Despite coming from a well to do family, Tarsila had her family's support in obtaining higher education. As a teenager, Tarsila and her parents traveled to Spain, where Tarsila caught people's eyes by drawing and painting copies of the artwork she saw at her school's archives. Tarsila attended school in Barcelona, and later trained privately in her hometown under painter Pedro Alexandrino Borges (1864 1942). She also attended the Académie Julian in Paris and studied with other prominent artists (1920 1923).

Beginning in 1916, Tarsila do Amaral studied painting in São Paulo. Later she studied drawing and painting with the academic painter Pedro Alexandrino. These were all respected but conservative teachers.

While in Paris in the mid 1920s, Tarsila encountered surrealism. After returning to Brazil, Tarsila began a new period of painting where she departed from urban landscapes and scenery, and began incorporating surrealist style into her nationalistic art. This shift also coincided with a larger artistic movement in São Paulo and other parts of Brazil which focused on celebrating Brazil as the country of the big snake, as part of a broader rediscovery of Amerindian mythology and history. Tarsila's first painting during this period was Abaporu (1928), which had been given as an untitled painting to Andrade for his birthday. The subject is a large stylized human figure with enormous feet sitting on the ground next to a cactus with a lemon slice sun in the background. Andrade selected the eventual title, Abaporu, which is an Indian term for "man eats", in collaboration with the poet Raul Bopp. Upon her return to Brazil in 1932, she became involved in the São Paulo Constitutional Revolt against the dictatorship in Brazil, led by Getúlio Vargas. Along with others who were seen as leftist, she was imprisoned for a month because her travels made her appear to be a communist sympathizer. The remainder of her career she focused on social themes. Representative of this period is the painting Segunda Classe (1931), which has impoverished Russian men, women and children as the subject matter. She also began writing a weekly arts and culture column for the Diario de São Paulo, which continued until 1952. In 1938, Tarsila finally settled permanently in São Paulo, where she spent the remainder of her career painting Brazilian people and landscapes. In 1950, she had an exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, where a reviewer called her "the most Brazilian of painters here, who represents the sun, birds, and youthful spirits of our developing country, as simple as the elements of our land and nature ". She died in São Paulo in 1973.

Besides the 230 paintings, hundreds of drawings, illustrations, prints, murals, and five sculptures, Tarsila's legacy is her effect on the direction of Latin American art. Tarsila moved modernism forward in Latin America, and developed a style unique to Brazil. Following her example, other Latin American artists were influenced to begin utilizing indigenous Brazilian subject matter, and developing their own style. The Amaral Crater on Mercury is named after her. In 2018 MoMA opened a solo exhibition of her work, the eighth retrospective on Latin America artists following exhibitions on Diego Rivera, Cândido Portinari, Roberto Matta, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Armando Reverón, José Clemente Orozco and Joaquín Torres García. In August 2022 several of her paintings were recovered in Brazil from criminals who had gained them from an art dealer and collector's widow by deception and force. This included Sol poente, O sono and Pont neuf.

Congdon, K. G., & Hallmark, K. K. (2002). Artists from Latin American cultures: a biographical dictionary. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press. Lucie Smith, Edward. Latin American Art of the 20th Century. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2004. Damian, Carol. Tarsila do Amaral: Art and Environmental Concerns of a Brazilian Modernist. Woman's Art Journal 20.1 (1999): 3 7. Barnitz, Jaqueline. Twentieth Century Art of Latin America. China: University of Texas Press, 2006: 57. Gotlib, Nadia Batella. Tarsila do Amaral: a Modernista. São Paulo: Editora SENAC, 2000. Pontual, Roberto. Tarsila. Groves Dictionary of Art. Ed. Jane Turner. New York: Macmillan, 1996. Amaral, Aracy and Kim Mrazek Hastings. Stages in the Formation of Brazil's Cultural Profile. The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts. 21 (1995): 8 25. Fundación Juan March. Tarsila do Amaral (Catalogue: published in English and Spanish) Madrid: Fundación Juan March (2009), 295 pp. English
D'Alessandro, Stephanie and Luis Pérez Oramas. Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Scott, Andrea. Introducing New York to the First Brazilian Modernist. The New Yorker, 2018. Cardoso, Rafael. The Problem of Race in Brazilian Painting, c. 1850 1920. Art History, 2015: 18–20. Ebony, David. Brazil's First Art Cannibal: Tarsila Do Amaral. Yale University Press Blog, 2017. Jackson, Kenneth David. Three Glad Races: Primitivism and Ethnicity in Brazilian Modernist Literature. Modernism/modernity 1, (1994): 89–112. Latin American Women Artists 1915–1995. Films Media Group, 2003.