Brazilian painter who spent the 1920s moving between São Paulo and Paris, studied Cubism under André Lhote, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger, and used what she learned to paint Brazilian towns, railways, plants and bodies. Her 1928 painting Abaporu prompted the manifesto that gave the Anthropophagic movement its name.
Tarsila do Amaral (September 1, 1886 – January 17, 1973) was a Brazilian painter, draftswoman and illustrator, and one of the central figures of Brazilian modernism. She spent the 1920s moving between Brazil and France. What she learned from the European avant-garde she put to work on Brazilian subjects: landscapes, popular traditions, the growth of cities, and memories of plantation life. Her paintings simplify their forms, arrange them carefully, and use strong color. In the most experimental of them, the bodies are radically altered and the plants are invented. She wanted a modern Brazilian art that could meet international movements on its own terms rather than copy them.[1]
Her career is tied above all to two movements, Pau-Brasil and Anthropophagy. In the Pau-Brasil years she built a recognizable vocabulary of tropical plants, provincial towns, railways and industrial structures. Her painting Abaporu, of 1928, then prompted Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago, which used cultural “cannibalism” as its metaphor: foreign influences could be eaten and turned into a Brazilian culture of its own. Those years made her reputation. They are not the whole of her work, which also takes in academic studies, portraits, religious subjects, socially engaged pictures, and late reconsiderations of her own earlier landscapes.[2]
Tarsila was born in the Capivari region of São Paulo into a prosperous coffee-growing family. Her parents, José Estanislau do Amaral and Lydia Dias de Aguiar do Amaral, provided an education that included music, languages, and schooling abroad. She attended the Colégio Sion in São Paulo and later studied in Barcelona, where she painted an early religious picture, Sagrado Coração de Jesus (Sacred Heart of Jesus), in 1904. She married André Teixeira Pinto, a distant cousin of her mother, at eighteen; their daughter Dulce, her only child, was born in 1906, and the couple separated in 1913. After the marriage ended, she increasingly devoted herself to artistic study. One detail of that upbringing is told two ways. The Guggenheim chronology says a young Belgian governess taught her French. Tarsila told the critic Leo Gilson Ribeiro in 1972 that the reverse was true: her mother taught the Belgian woman Portuguese, and her own French came from her European schooling.[3]
Her childhood on the family's fazendas, or agricultural estates, provided a lasting source of imagery. Rural buildings, tropical vegetation, domestic religious objects, animals, and stories associated with the people who lived and worked on the estates later appeared in transformed forms throughout her paintings. This environment also belonged to the historical world of Brazilian plantation society: Tarsila was born two years before the abolition of slavery in 1888, and her childhood memories included formerly enslaved people. She recalled that her grandfather had used enslaved labour while building the family's wealth. Her eventual representations of Brazilian life therefore emerged from a privileged social position within a country still profoundly shaped by slavery and its aftermath.[4]
Tarsila's sustained professional training began in adulthood. She initially studied sculpture with William Zadig before concentrating on drawing and painting. Her teachers in São Paulo included Pedro Alexandrino, known for his naturalistic still lifes, and Georg Fischer Elpons. These early studies established a conventional foundation in observation, proportion, modeling, and the organization of objects in pictorial space. Her later simplification of bodies and landscapes developed from this training rather than from an absence of technical preparation.[3]
In 1920, she moved to Paris and attended the Académie Julian, subsequently studying with Émile Renard. Her work at this stage remained largely academic, although Renard encouraged a lighter palette and freer handling of paint. The nude studies she produced under his guidance demonstrate her growing interest in light, atmosphere, and visible brushwork, contrasting with the darker earth colors associated with her earlier instruction. These paintings belong to a transitional period before the more sharply defined forms and stronger color contrasts of her mature work.[5]
While Tarsila was abroad, the Semana de Arte Moderna, or Modern Art Week, took place in São Paulo in February 1922. She did not participate in the event, although she later became closely associated with the generation it helped bring together. Returning to Brazil in June, she was introduced to the modernist circle by the painter Anita Malfatti. The two of them joined the writers Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, and Menotti del Picchia in the informal group known as the Grupo dos Cinco, or Group of Five. Their discussions encouraged her to consider how modern artistic methods could be applied to Brazilian subjects. Her relationship with Oswald also became romantic, beginning an important personal and intellectual partnership.[6]
When Tarsila returned to Paris at the end of 1922, her artistic priorities had changed. Rather than continuing exclusively within academic painting, she sought direct contact with the avant-garde. During 1923 she studied for short periods with André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Fernand Léger. Cubism offered her a means of reorganizing the visible world through geometric construction, selective simplification, and departures from conventional perspective. She later described this training as her “military service in Cubism,” suggesting both its disciplinary importance and its status as a stage through which she passed rather than a permanent artistic allegiance. Her ambition was already national rather than Parisian: writing home from Paris on 19 April 1923, she declared that she wanted to be “the painter of my country.”[7]
Léger's influence is especially apparent in Estudo (Academia nº 2), or Study (Academy No. 2) (1923). The painting constructs the body from rounded, separately articulated masses and places it among simplified forms and vegetation. Rather than dissolving the figure into the fragmented planes associated with some earlier Cubist painting, Tarsila retained its weight and physical presence. This combination of geometric organization, bodily fullness, and vivid color became an important foundation of her independent style. As MoMA's curatorial account emphasizes, she absorbed Cubist methods without becoming a straightforward follower of her teachers.[8]
The Franco-Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars helped introduce Tarsila and Oswald to the Parisian artistic community. Her acquaintances included Constantin Brancusi, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Erik Satie, as well as Brazilian figures working in Paris, including Heitor Villa-Lobos and Di Cavalcanti. These relationships placed her within an international exchange involving painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and design.[3]
Tarsila also became an important collector and intermediary. Her collection included works by Léger, Lhote, Gleizes, Juan Gris, Picasso, Marie Laurencin, Modigliani, and Robert Delaunay. She purchased works for other Brazilian collectors, including Mário de Andrade and the patron Olívia Guedes Penteado. When displayed in her São Paulo studio, these acquisitions gave local artists opportunities to study European modernism firsthand. Her role in the movement therefore extended beyond her own paintings to the circulation of artworks and ideas between France and Brazil.[7]
In Autorretrato (Manteau Rouge), Tarsila presented herself as a fashionable, self-possessed modern woman wearing a voluminous red coat. The controlled arrangement of the figure and the prominence of the garment turn personal appearance into an element of artistic self-definition. The painting belongs to the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. Her self-presentation had particular significance in a European art world that frequently interpreted women and Latin American artists through restrictive expectations. Critics sometimes described her work in terms of femininity or exoticism rather than treating it solely as an intellectual and formal achievement. Tarsila's cultivated appearance allowed her to work within those expectations while asserting a distinctive identity as a Brazilian participant in the avant-garde. Her self-portraits consequently concern not only individual likeness but also the public identity of the modern artist.[9]
Painted in Paris in 1923, A Negra (The Black Woman) was a decisive development in Tarsila's work. The monumental seated figure occupies most of the canvas, with exaggerated limbs, lips, and breast set against horizontal bands of color and an abstracted banana leaf. The painting combines the simplified construction she encountered in European modernism with a subject connected to Afro-Brazilian life. Its emphatic physical scale and unconventional proportions anticipate the bodily distortions of her later Anthropophagic paintings. The work is held by the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. Fernand Léger, in whose studio she was then working, responded to it with enthusiasm and called his other students over to look.[10][3]
In a 1972 interview with the critic Leo Gilson Ribeiro, Tarsila associated the picture with memories of a formerly enslaved woman she had known as a child. She also connected its exaggerated breast to a story she had been told about nursing under slavery: that enslaved women's breasts were altered so a child carried on the mother's back could be fed over her shoulder. Tarsila reported this as something she had been told, and it stands as her recollection rather than as an established account of the practice. That account survives as her recollection, rather than as an independently verified history of the woman represented. In the same interview, Tarsila explained that experiences and remembered images became material for invention and stylization in her paintings.[11]
Interpretations of A Negra have emphasized different aspects of this relationship between modernism and Brazilian identity. MoMA's curatorial interpretation stresses the significance of placing a Black subject at the center of an ambitious modern painting. More critical accounts of Tarsila's broader practice examine the idealization and racial stereotypes that could accompany a white, elite artist's representation of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous life. The painting's importance lies partly in this unresolved tension: its formal innovation does not remove the social inequalities within the world from which its imagery emerged.[10]
From 1924, Tarsila developed the body of work associated with Pau-Brasil. The name is the Portuguese for brazilwood, the dyewood whose export gave the country its name and which colonial Brazil shipped to Europe as raw material. Oswald de Andrade's Pau-Brasil manifesto of 1924 took that history and turned it around. Brazilian culture was to be something the country exported on its own terms, not something assembled out of imports. It is a separate and earlier text from the Anthropophagic manifesto of 1928. A journey to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival and through the historic towns of Minas Gerais, undertaken with Oswald and Cendrars, was particularly important. She studied colonial architecture, religious traditions, ordinary buildings, vegetation, and the relationship between towns and surrounding landscapes. These experiences encouraged her to represent Brazilian subjects through the modern methods she had acquired abroad.[12]
Color became a defining feature of this development. Tarsila later recalled encountering in Minas Gerais the vivid colors she had loved as a child but had been discouraged from using because they were considered provincial. She deliberately reclaimed them, integrating bright pinks, blues, yellows, and greens into rigorously organized compositions. Rural settlements and industrial infrastructure could coexist within the same picture, allowing her to represent Brazil as a country in which older cultural forms and technological modernization remained visibly intertwined.[12]
Carnaval em Madureira (Carnival in Madureira) records a striking encounter between European imagery and Brazilian popular culture. For Carnival, residents of Madureira, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, had constructed a replica of the Eiffel Tower. Tarsila placed this structure within a landscape of houses, figures, rounded hills, and unusual rock formations. The painting's simplified forms and carefully balanced arrangement transform the observed scene without removing its recognizable local character. The imported monument is significant because it has become part of a Brazilian celebration rather than remaining an emblem of distant European authority. The painting can therefore be read as an early visual expression of the cultural transformation that later became central to Anthropophagy.[13]
In Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil, often abbreviated as E.F.C.B., Tarsila organized railway infrastructure, buildings, and vegetation into a densely constructed composition. Tracks, signals, structural beams, and architectural forms create an interlocking arrangement of verticals, horizontals, and diagonals. The railway is not treated simply as an isolated machine but as part of a changing environment in which industrial development and inherited forms of settlement occupy the same space. Now in the collection of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, it received an acquisition prize at the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951.[14]
A Cuca introduces a more fantastic dimension into Tarsila's Brazilian imagery. The painting depicts a strange creature within an exuberant landscape populated by animals and plants. In a letter to Dulce, Tarsila described the scene as including a frog, an armadillo, and an invented animal, demonstrating that observation and imagination were already closely connected in her work. Rather than constructing a naturalistic account of a forest, she converted its inhabitants into simplified, decorative, and sometimes unclassifiable forms. The painting anticipates the later Anthropophagic period through its unstable boundary between recognizable nature and invention.[15]
Tarsila held her first solo exhibition at Galerie Percier in Paris in 1926, following travels through Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and Egypt. She married Oswald in São Paulo in October of that year. For the Paris exhibition, she commissioned frames from the Art Deco designer Pierre Legrain, linking the presentation of her paintings to contemporary decorative design. A second solo exhibition at Galerie Percier followed in 1928.[16]
In January 1928, Tarsila painted Abaporu as a birthday present for Oswald. The composition shows a solitary figure seated beside a cactus beneath a bright sun. Its anatomy is radically altered: a large foot dominates the foreground, while the head is small and the limbs extend in unexpected proportions. Tarsila later recalled that she had intended to produce something extraordinary enough to surprise him. The painting measures 85 by 73 centimetres and belongs to MALBA, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.[17]
The title, derived from Tupi terms and generally translated as “person who eats human flesh,” connected the image with the idea of anthropophagy. Oswald's Manifesto Antropófago, published in May 1928, developed cultural cannibalism as a metaphor for the active transformation of external influences. Rather than treating European art as a model to be copied, the movement proposed that imported forms could be appropriated, changed, and incorporated into an independent cultural practice.[17]
The paintings that followed pushed out the recognizable towns and railways of Pau-Brasil. In their place came imaginary landscapes, oversized plants, and creatures hard to name. These pictures describe less and suggest more. Their imagery came from remembered stories, from dreams, and from turning familiar things into unfamiliar ones. That carried the idea of creative assimilation out of cultural theory and into the making of the paintings themselves.[18]
In A Lua (The Moon), a cactus resembling a human figure stands within a landscape of undulating land, water, and sky. The limited number of elements gives the composition an unusual concentration, while the resemblance between plant and body makes the scene difficult to classify as either ordinary landscape or figurative painting. Its clearly defined forms contrast with the uncertainty of what they represent. The work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[19]
Antropofagia (Anthropophagy) brings together the monumental figure of A Negra and the elongated anatomy of Abaporu. The two figures occupy an environment of transformed cactus and banana-tree forms, creating a close relationship between bodies and vegetation. By combining images from her own earlier paintings, Tarsila made the process of assimilation visible within her artistic development. The work is therefore more than an illustration of Oswald's manifesto. It demonstrates how an artist could revise and recombine an established visual vocabulary to produce something new. The painting is in the Fundação José e Paulina Nemirovsky collection, on loan to the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.[20]
Tarsila's mature style depended on the selective reduction of forms rather than the elimination of recognizable subject matter. Buildings could be organized into rectangular masses, hills into repeated curves, and vegetation into a limited vocabulary of cones, ovals, and rounded volumes. These elements remained identifiable while also serving the internal structure of the composition. Her drawings in pencil and ink were important to this process, allowing her to extract the features of a landscape that could be translated into a coherent pictorial arrangement.[21]
The resulting space was not uniformly flat. Some paintings preserve a strong sense of weight, distance, or bodily volume, while others compress their subjects into shallow arrangements of overlapping shapes. Her relationship to Cubism is therefore best understood as selective rather than doctrinal. She used geometric construction and freedom from conventional perspective while retaining the sensuous presence of figures, plants, and objects.[8]
Color in Tarsila's work functions as both subject matter and structure. Her adoption of bright colors associated with provincial buildings, popular decoration, and remembered rural environments challenged the assumption that such combinations were unsuitable for serious painting. Within the pictures, contrasting areas of color separate forms, establish visual relationships, and guide attention. Their purpose is not always to reproduce the effects of natural illumination.[12]
Clear contours reinforce this organization. In many of her mature paintings, forms are sharply bounded and their surfaces relatively controlled, although this handling differs from the looser brushwork of her early studies. The combination of distinct outlines, broad color areas, and modeled volumes gives her work an unusual balance between decorative clarity and physical solidity. These characteristics help explain why even her most unfamiliar creatures and distorted bodies appear deliberate rather than improvised.[5]
Tarsila used changes in proportion to alter the relationship between the human body and its surroundings. Enlarged feet, reduced heads, elongated limbs, and swelling organic forms undermine ordinary expectations of anatomy and scale. In Abaporu, the foreground foot carries much of the composition's visual weight, while the small head and adjacent cactus create a different balance from that of a conventional seated portrait. In other works, the resemblance between bodies and plants makes the distinction between figure and landscape increasingly uncertain.[17]
The dreamlike character of these paintings has encouraged comparisons with Surrealism, but their sources also include childhood memories, Brazilian stories, and Tarsila's own methods of stylization. Her work should not be reduced to the application of a European movement to tropical subjects. Its imaginative forms developed through an interaction between international artistic experiments and experiences that she repeatedly revisited and transformed.[22]
The financial crisis beginning in 1929 severely affected the coffee-growing economy and Tarsila's family resources. At approximately the same time, her relationship with Oswald broke down as he became involved with the writer Patrícia Galvão, known as Pagu. These events disrupted the material and personal circumstances in which her celebrated paintings of the 1920s had been produced. In November 1929 she mortgaged her property, and she subsequently had to sell much of the European art collection she had assembled.[23]
Composição (Figura só), or Composition (Lonely Figure) (1930), has been interpreted in relation to this period of loss. It depicts a solitary woman with her back to the viewer, standing in a dark landscape as her long hair is swept sideways by the wind. MASP's interpretation treats it as a possible indirect self-portrait, contrasting its isolation and subdued atmosphere with the more expansive imagery of preceding years. In 1930, Tarsila also briefly worked as conservator at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, losing the position amid the political changes that brought Getúlio Vargas to power.[23]
In 1931, she traveled to the Soviet Union with her partner Osório César, a psychiatrist and left-wing intellectual, and exhibited at the State Museum of Modern Western Art in Moscow. Her encounters with Soviet society and politically engaged art contributed to a growing interest in labor and social inequality. In 1932, she was imprisoned for approximately a month in Brazil in connection with suspicions surrounding her political associations and Soviet journey. These experiences accompanied a marked change in both the subjects and atmosphere of her painting. She left Paris for the last time in 1932; the years of moving between the two cities were over.[24][16]
Operários (Workers) is the best-known painting of Tarsila's social period. Rows of closely grouped faces rise before an industrial background of buildings and smokestacks, presenting the workforce as both a collective presence and a gathering of individuals. Differences in age, appearance, and complexion evoke the diverse population of industrial São Paulo. At 150 by 205 centimetres it is among her largest canvases. Tarsila explained that she drew on photographs and visual memories of people she knew when constructing the composition, and the faces gathered there carry both the internal migration that filled industrial São Paulo and the arrival of immigrants from abroad.[25]
The state collection's account names several faces from her own circle. Among them are the architect Gregori Warchavchik, the singer Elsie Houston-Péret, the writer Eneida de Moraes, and Benedito Sampaio, an administrator on her father's estate. That changes how the crowd reads. The mass is built out of particular lives rather than a generalized image of labor. The pyramid of heads and the repeated faces also show that compositional order still mattered to her in this more openly political work.[26]
Painted in the same year, Segunda Classe (Second Class) represents impoverished adults and children in a railway setting. It is in a private collection, and no holding institution publishes its measurements. Its emphasis on vulnerable travelers differs substantially from the more affirmative treatment of transport and infrastructure in the Pau-Brasil paintings. The railway remains a sign of modern society, but attention has shifted toward the people whose circumstances are shaped by economic inequality. Read alongside Operários, the painting demonstrates that Tarsila's social turn involved more than replacing fantastic subjects with realistic ones.[24]
During the mid-1930s, Tarsila began a long relationship with the writer Luís Martins. Portrait commissions and cultural journalism became important parts of her working life, and she wrote for the Diário de S. Paulo for roughly two decades. She continued exhibiting while returning to subjects and methods from earlier stages of her career. These years also brought personal loss: her granddaughter Beatriz drowned in 1949 while attempting to save a friend.[16]
Her later work did not follow a single direction. Paintings of children, domestic life, religious subjects, and workers coexisted with renewed interest in rural and urban landscapes. Costureiras (Seamstresses), dated 1950 in the Guggenheim exhibition catalogue, demonstrates the continuation of labor-related subjects beyond the concentrated social phase of 1933. Her later production consequently complicates any division of her career into neatly separated and permanently abandoned styles.[27]
In the 1950s, she revisited villages, tropical vegetation, bridges, and other motifs associated with Pau-Brasil, a tendency often called Neo Pau-Brasil. Vilarejo com ponte e mamoeiro (Village with Bridge and Papaya Tree, 1953) exemplifies this return, while A Metrópole (The Metropolis, 1958) reflects her continued attention to the changing city. These paintings reorganize familiar geometric and organic forms while responding to a landscape increasingly dominated by modern buildings and skyscrapers.[28]
Institutional recognition strengthened during this period. A retrospective at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 1950 was followed by participation in the first two São Paulo Biennials. In 1963, the seventh Biennial devoted a gallery to her work, and in 1964 she participated in Brazil's presentation at the Venice Biennale. These exhibitions helped establish her earlier experiments as foundational works of Brazilian modernism.[16]
Tarsila's final years were affected by serious physical disability and bereavement. Following a fall and spinal surgery in the mid-1960s, she was left paraplegic. Her daughter Dulce died in 1966. Despite these losses, interest in her work continued to grow, culminating in the retrospective Tarsila: 50 Anos de Pintura, presented in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1969.[16]
Tarsila died at the Hospital da Beneficência Portuguesa in São Paulo on January 17, 1973, aged eighty-six. She was buried in the city's Cemitério da Consolação. By the time of her death, the paintings that had emerged from her exchanges between São Paulo and Paris had become central to accounts of Brazilian cultural history.[3]
Tarsila's influence extends beyond the appearance of her paintings to the cultural model associated with Anthropophagy. During the 1960s, a younger generation reconsidered the movement's proposal that foreign influences could be transformed rather than passively accepted or entirely rejected. Its importance can be traced in the work and discussions of figures associated with Tropicália and experimental Brazilian art, including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Clark. This legacy is best understood as an inheritance of ideas about cultural production rather than a simple continuation of Tarsila's pictorial style.[29]
Later exhibitions have broadened international understanding of her career. Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, organized by MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago and presented at MoMA in 2018, concentrated on her pivotal work of the 1920s. Tarsila do Amaral: Painting Modern Brazil, presented at the Musée du Luxembourg and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2024–25, extended attention to her social paintings and later production. These reassessments have reinforced her importance while also examining the tensions between national identity, cosmopolitanism, gender, race, and social privilege that run through her work.[2]
She did not find an unchanging or culturally pure Brazil and set it down on canvas. What she built was a pictorial language, one in which the country's landscapes, its people, its inherited traditions and its modern upheavals could all become material for invention. Her work still matters for that invention, and for the questions it raises. Who gets to represent a nation? Whose experience becomes its defining image? How is an influence from abroad made to mean something at home?[1]
Born on 1 September in the Capivari region of São Paulo, into a coffee-growing family.
Paints Sagrado Coração de Jesus while studying in Barcelona.
Her daughter, Dulce, is born during her first marriage, to André Teixeira Pinto, a distant cousin of her mother whom she married at eighteen. The couple separate in 1913.
Moves to Paris and attends the Académie Julian, later studying with Émile Renard.
Returns to Brazil after Modern Art Week and joins the Grupo dos Cinco with Anita Malfatti, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade and Menotti del Picchia.
Studies with André Lhote, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger in Paris, and paints A Negra, Autorretrato (Manteau Rouge) and Study (Academy No. 2).
Travels to Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais with Oswald de Andrade and Blaise Cendrars, and begins the Pau-Brasil paintings, among them A Cuca, Carnaval em Madureira and Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil.
Holds her first solo exhibition at Galerie Percier in Paris and marries Oswald de Andrade in São Paulo in October.
Spends time working on the family property in the interior of São Paulo state.
Paints Abaporu in January as a birthday present for Oswald de Andrade, whose Manifesto Antropófago follows in May; paints A Lua and holds a second Galerie Percier exhibition.
Paints Antropofagia. The financial crisis undermines her family's coffee resources, she mortgages her property in November, and her partnership with Oswald de Andrade ends.
Paints Composição (Figura só) and works briefly as conservator at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.
Travels to the Soviet Union with Osório César and exhibits at the State Museum of Modern Western Art in Moscow.
Imprisoned in Brazil for about a month over her political associations and the Soviet journey. She leaves Paris for the last time this year.
Paints Operários and Segunda Classe, the central works of her social period.
Her granddaughter Beatriz drowns while trying to save a friend.
A retrospective opens at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; she goes on to take part in the first two São Paulo Biennials.
Paints Vilarejo com ponte e mamoeiro, part of the return to Pau-Brasil motifs known as Neo Pau-Brasil.
The seventh São Paulo Biennial devotes a gallery to her work; she takes part in Brazil's Venice Biennale presentation the following year.
Her daughter Dulce dies. A fall and spinal surgery in the mid-1960s had left Tarsila paraplegic.
The retrospective Tarsila: 50 Anos de Pintura is presented in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Dies at the Hospital da Beneficência Portuguesa in São Paulo on 17 January, aged eighty-six, and is buried in the Cemitério da Consolação.
Painting · Modern Art
Tarsila do Amaral painted The Moon, or A Lua, in Brazil in 1928. A green form that could be a cactus or a person stands beside a curving stream, under dark hills, undulating clouds and a small crescent moon. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired it in 2019.
Historical period and art category · circa 1860s–1970s
Tarsila do Amaral studied with André Lhote, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger in Paris in 1923 and used that Cubist training to build a modern art of Brazilian subjects. Her painting Abaporu of 1928 prompted Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago, which argued that Brazilian culture could absorb foreign influences and turn them into something of its own.
Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) was a Brazilian painter, draftswoman and illustrator, and one of the central figures of Brazilian modernism. She trained in São Paulo and then in Paris, where she studied with André Lhote, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger, and used that training to paint Brazilian towns, railways, plants and bodies rather than European subjects.
Abaporu, painted in January 1928 as a birthday present for the writer Oswald de Andrade. It shows a seated figure with an enormous foot, a small head and elongated limbs, beside a cactus under a bright sun. It belongs to MALBA, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. A Negra (1923) and A Lua (1928) are the other works most often reproduced.
Anthropophagy, or antropofagia, is the idea that Brazilian culture could absorb foreign influences and transform them into something of its own, rather than copying them or shutting them out. Oswald de Andrade set it out in the Manifesto Antropófago of May 1928, after Tarsila gave him Abaporu that January. The word means cannibalism, and the metaphor is deliberate: eating what comes from outside and making it part of the body.
The body of work Tarsila developed from 1924, after travelling to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival and through the colonial towns of Minas Gerais with Oswald de Andrade and the poet Blaise Cendrars. She painted provincial towns, tropical plants, railways and industrial structures in bright colours she had been taught to consider provincial. Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil, Carnaval em Madureira and A Cuca all belong to it.
No. She was in Paris when the Semana de Arte Moderna took place in São Paulo in February 1922. She returned to Brazil that June and joined Anita Malfatti, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade and Menotti del Picchia in the circle known as the Grupo dos Cinco, and became closely associated with the generation the event brought together.
They are held across several collections. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds A Lua, acquired in 2019. Abaporu is at MALBA in Buenos Aires. A Negra and Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil belong to the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, and Composição (Figura só) is at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
Associated with · 1923
Tarsila do Amaral studied with André Lhote, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger in Paris in 1923 and used that Cubist training to build a modern art of Brazilian subjects. Her painting Abaporu of 1928 prompted Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago, which argued that Brazilian culture could absorb foreign influences and turn them into something of its own.
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