The Art of Tarsila do Amaral at the Musée du Luxembourg

The international art world is beginning to pay more attention to women artists. Some of today’s exhibits focus on rarely shown artists like Tamara de Lempicka at the San Francisco de Young and Harriet Backer at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Add Tarsila do Amaral to the list. The Musée de Luxembourg is featuring the first retrospective of her work in France. She was a Brazilian artist who trained in Paris in the 1920s, then returned to Brazil to paint some of her most beloved paintings that inspired South American art. 

Amaral was a central figure of Brazilian modernism and is one of Brazil’s best known and loved artists. Her work drew upon indigenous imagery presented in a modern style that reflected the rapid changes in the country at the time. She moved between São Paulo and Paris starting in the 1920s where she attended Académie Julian from 1920 – 1923 with other prominent Parisian artists and studied one-on-one with Brazilian painters. Brazilian art at that time was conservative and Amaral was inspired by the Cubism, Futurism and Primitivism that was vogue in Paris and blended that with Brazilian influences.

The result was her style that both drove and illustrated Brazil’s anthropophagic movement. This movement’s objective was to “swallow” external American and European cultures which resulted in not denying foreign cultures but not imitating them either. It was a form of both assimilation and resistance.

Her art features brightly colored landscapes and compositions using abstract geometry and dreamlike forms. While it raises social, identity and racial issues, it also entertains with a colorful and creative blend of traditional and popular culture told as only Amaral could do. Palm trees become tall straight sticks with a puff of curved leaves at the top. Abnormal character shapes make political statements. A lively carnival scene in Rio de Janeiro features a wooden Tour Eiffel in homage to a Brazilian aviator who flew a plane over Paris in 1906. Dancing around it are all sizes of native women and children in colorful hats and clothes with a background of creative tropical images. Can you find the dog?

Several of Amaral’s famous works are among the 150 shown in the exhibit. Negra is a stylized figure of a Black woman with a single prominent breast and background of geometric forms. Using surrealistic style, Abaporu is a human figure with large feet and a hand, but the head and second arm are quite small. The figure sits next to a cactus and a yellow sun. Or is that a cactus blossom? The playful A Cuca is a collection of creative styled bugs smiling as if enjoying a joke in a colorful tropical forest. Look deeper and all make a social statement about people and culture.

The exhibit moves through her life’s work starting with the influence of Cubism and then the development of her style and social statements using bright colors, shapes and characters. She often places people or animals in her stylized Brazilian countryside that speak to the cultural and social cleavages in the Brazilian population. Amaral’s art also reflects her political support for movements in South American including the Pau Brazil, Anthropophagic and leftist support in the 1930s.

In her final years, she focused on the culture of the times regarding Brazilian social themes, people and landscapes. She died in 1973 and her legacy is the influence driving modernism forward in Latin American art and influencing a unique Brazilian style. The Amaral crater on the planet Mercury is named after her, along with craters named for other artists including Matisse, Monet and Picasso. What color would Amaral paint her crater on Mercury and would it include a palm tree?

DETAILS

Tarsila do Amaral. Painting Modern Brazil 
Luxembourg Museum 
19 Rue de Vaugirard, 6th arrondissement
October 9, 2024 – February 2, 2025
Open every day from 10:30 am to 7 pm. Late night opening on Mondays until 10pm.
Regular ticket price is 14 €. Free for under 16s