Capivari, 1886 – São Paulo (Brazil), 1973

By Francisco Alambert

Daughter of a wealthy family from São Paulo, Tarsila do Amaral began her studies at schools in São Paulo and later, in 1902, at Sacré-Coeur in Barcelona, where she started experimenting by copying other artists’ paintings. After returning to Brazil in 1904, she married for the first time. In 1916, she worked as a live model at the studio of Swedish sculptor William Zadig, who was based in São Paulo. The following year, she studied painting with academic painter Pedro Alexandrino and opened her first studio in São Paulo. In 1920, she traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian with Emile Renard, and two years later, she presented her painting Passaporte at the Salon Officiel des Artistes Français in that city.

Through her friend, the painter Anita Malfatti, Tarsila learned about the events of the Week of Modern Art, and upon her return to Brazil, she connected with the participating artists, particularly Oswald de Andrade, with whom she began living the following year when they both returned to Paris. In the French capital, she studied with André Lhote, then with Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger, and maintained a close relationship with the poet Blaise Cendrars and many other artists of the Parisian avant-garde.

During this period, she painted works that would become famous, such as Caipirinha and A Negra. In 1924, she returned to São Paulo and visited several historic cities in Minas Gerais—accompanied by Oswald de Andrade, Blaise Cendrars, and others—an experience that led her to shift from cubism towards a focus on vibrant colors and “vital Brazilianness.” That same year, Tarsila illustrated the Manifesto Pau-Brasil—a landmark of a new phase of Brazilian Modernism—and Blaise Cendrars’s books Feuilles de Route and Le Formose. In 1926, the year she married Oswald, she held her first solo exhibition in Paris. Her most famous painting, Abaporu, from 1928 (currently part of the Constantini Collection in Buenos Aires), inspired Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropofágico. Notable works from Tarsila’s anthropophagic phase include O Sono and Urutu.

In 1929, after separating from Oswald, her works were exhibited in major shows in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and, the following year, in Paris and at the Roerich Museum in New York. Two years later, now engaged with the Brazilian left (a commitment that would lead to her imprisonment in 1932), she exhibited in Moscow at the Museum of Western Modern Art and in Paris at the Salon des Surindépendants. In 1933, she completed two renowned paintings with social themes, Operários and Segunda Classe, which were presented in 1934 at the 1st São Paulo Salon of Fine Arts. She also participated in the 1st Modern Art Exhibition of SPAM (Society for Modern Art) in São Paulo and exhibited at the Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1936, she began writing columns on art and society for several newspapers. Meanwhile, her paintings continued to be part of various exhibitions, such as the Latin American Art Exhibition at the Riverside Museum in New York, the collective exhibition of Brazilian artists hosted in 1939 by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the exhibition of twenty Brazilian artists that toured Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and La Plata in 1944—a milestone event that led to the publication of Contemporary Brazilian Painting by Argentine critic Jorge Romero Brest in 1945. The following year, Tarsila also exhibited in Chile, in the cities of Santiago and Valparaíso.

In 1950, critic Sérgio Milliet organized a retrospective of the artist at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. She also participated in the 1st Biennial (1951), returned in 1953, had a special room at the 7th Biennial in 1963, and exhibited again at the 12th Biennial in 1973, the “National Biennial” in 1974, the 15th in 1979, the 19th in 1987, and the 24th in 1998. Her works were also featured in the 1957 exhibition Modern Art in Brazil at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. In 1963, her works were transported to North America to be exhibited at the Yale University Art Gallery in a show titled Art of Latin America Since Independence, and at the University of Texas Art Museum. In 1964, she participated in the 32nd Venice Biennale, and in 1969, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro inaugurated a major exhibition dedicated to her work, Tarsila: 50 Years of Painting, organized by her biographer, critic Aracy Amaral.