Tarsila do Amaral

Tarsila do Amaral was one of the foremost visual artists of Brazil’s modernist movement during the first half of the twentieth century. With her partner, the poet Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila, as she is popularly known in her home country, was actively engaged in the 1920s in the development of a new visual language of Brazilian modernism. Together, they founded the Antropofagia movement, following the publication of the the Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto, 1928) by De Andrade. The manifesto employed the concept of anthropophagy as a metaphor and argued for artists to “cannibalize” the diverse cultural traditions that surrounded them in modern Brazil; after a process of “digestion,” or synthesis, this would yield original and authentic cultural products. During the 1920s, Tarsila’s most prolific decade, the artist traveled regularly between her native São Paulo and Paris. Each time, she returned from Europe bearing not only her own innovative paintings but also important examples of modernism, particularly Cubism, from abroad. Tarsila’s personal collection, one of the first in Brazil to feature European modernism, included works by many of the artists she met and befriended, such as Constantin Brancusi, Robert Delaunay, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Picasso. Tarsila also purchased artworks for the collections of Brazilian writer Mário de Andrade and patron Olivia Guedes Penteado.

Tarsila’s personal collection was informed by the cross-cultural relationships that she cultivated throughout her career. In 1923 she settled in Paris for a time in order to learn the techniques necessary to advance her practice as a modernist. From June to November of that year, Tarsila attended classes for short periods in the studios of Albert Gleizes and Lhote. Although she was never a student in Léger’s school, she took classes with him for a few weeks and the two developed a close friendship. It was during this year that Tarsila also purchased a number of his works for Brazilian collections: The Cup of Tea (1921; private collection, Los Angeles) for her personal collection and Le compotier aux poires (The Pear Dish, 1923, Museu de Arte de São Paulo) for Penteado. Her acquisitions led Léger and dealer Léonce Rosenberg to view Tarsila as an important link to potential new markets after World War I.

Even as she absorbed the forms and tenets of Cubism, Tarsila remained committed to an ongoing Brazilian national modern art project. When she returned to São Paulo in 1924, it was still a culturally provincial city. Young modernist artists working there were up-to-date on the activities of the Paris avant-garde, but many had never seen their work in person. Tarsila’s studio, in which she displayed her personal collection, became a gathering place for São Paulo-based artists and offered them a critical opportunity to experience European modernism, particularly Cubism, for the first time.

While Tarsila played a pioneering role in bringing modern European art to Brazil, only a very small portion of her important personal collection still remains in the country today. In the years following the market crash of 1929, Tarsila faced financial troubles and was forced to sell most of the works she had purchased in Paris. A handwritten inventory from 1930, housed in the Mário de Andrade Archives at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros of the Universidade de São Paulo, and possibly made for the purpose of the sale, shows that Tarsila’s collection not only contained the work of Léger, but also one painting and three drawings by Lhote, a painting by Marie Laurencin, four works by Picasso, one by Gris, one by Gleizes, and a drawing by Modigliani, among many others. Today, these works are scattered across museums in Europe and the United States. The centerpiece of her collection, Delaunay’s Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911/23), originally purchased from Léonce Rosenberg in 1923, is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.