Page 91 - ARTE!Brasileiros #42

Paris, bringing together more than 100 works, including paintings, a woman who worked on the family farm of the artist and that was
drawings and documents, gathering iconic and interlocking works probably born in the slavery period: represented with stereotypical
as A Negra (1924), Abaporu (1928) and Antropofagia (1929). traces and a typical Brazilian color palette. The work points at the
Right at the entrance of the show hall, outside the exhibition space same time to issues that would be developed in the course of the
itself, inside a niche, is the screen A Cuca, which represents a typical career of the artist, but at the same time refers to the past of Tarsila,
character of the Brazilian folklore, immortalized by Monteiro Lobato who despite being the daughter of an abolitionist, was born into a
in his stories of Sítio do Pica-Pau Amarelo. But before that, the family of agrarian elite of São Paulo, which like many other, developed
origin of this figure is in native Portuguese legends, tradition that financially from the cost of slave labor. It is worth remembering that
was brought to Brazil during the colonization. Tarsila produced Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888.
this canvas in early 1924 and wrote to her daughter saying she was The absence of texts about A Negra by the main modernist critics
painting something “very Brazilian”, already announcing her interest as Sérgio Milliet and Oswald de Andrade, reinforces the analysis of
in national identity and in the Brazilian culture said genuine, not curator Paulo Herkenhoff, who drew attention to the fact that this
ruled by European customs and values, which would be unfolded in painting is a more primitivism oriented in French context than a
her Anthropophagic phase. In this sense, A Cuca can be regarded reference to a “national” figure, in the context of a modernism that
as the harbinger of her Anthropophagic phase, it is the “outside was still crawling in Brazil.
look “ staring at the A Negra that is hanging on the wall facing the These perceptions, opinions and findings about A Negra throw an
entrance into the exhibition space. issue about the narratives that are built around the work of Tarsila
Tarsila do Amaral and Antropophagy are two themes completely do Amaral, almost always linked to a formal thinking of Modernism,
interwoven in each other, given that this intellectual movement interested in an artist’s stylistic development and not necessarily
emerged formally in 1928 with the Manifesto Antropófago, written in facets more politicized or that can escape the modern canon.
by Oswald de Andrade, then Tarsila’s husband, just after he contact However, the shows at MoMA joins the first approach, formalist,
Abaporu canvas. Tarsila in an interview for the magazine Veja, leaving gaps in the artistic career of Tarsila, rightfully on put the
February 23 1972, comments this curious episode of first contact highlights on these stylistic aspects, ignoring her late production,
with Abapuru that intertwined her own history with the emergence usually ignored by critics and by historians, what denyes the
of the Anthropophagic Movement: “(...) Oswald said: ‘ this is how possibility to compare what the artist produced before and after in
a thing like a wild, something from the woods ‘ (...). So I wanted to your trajectory. Curious to remember that at the end of 60’s, already
give a name to the canvas, something also wild, because I had a living alone and far from the artistic milieu, Tarsila re-examined A
dictionary of Montoia, a Jesuit priest , that has everything. To say Negra, leading us to think about where her job was pointing.
man, for example, in indianslanguage, was Abá. I wanted to say Revealing the nonstop theoretical bickering about what is time of
Canibal Man, I skimmed through the whole dictionary and didn’t the beginning of the modern movement in Brazil, the curator of the
found, only in the last few pages had a lot of names and I saw Puru exhibition at MoMA, the Venezuelan Luis Pérez-Oramas, argues in his
and when I read said man that eats human flesh, so I thought, Oh, text for the catalogue that modernism in Brazil didn’t come up nore
how it’s going to be okay, Aba-Puru. And stayed with that name (...). before nore even during the Week of Art of 1922, having appeared
Everyone started saying that Oswald had made the Aba-Puru and years later because modernity, according to him, consists of things
created the Anthropophagic Movement. He accepted that they said that go far beyond a skirmish elitist. And says: “The present essay
it was his own the autorship, he thought it was interesting. “ doesn’t intends to resolve the issue of which modernity was or was
The key concept of the Anthropophagic manifest will just encounter not in Brazil, but to examines an artist, Tarsila – whose work and
with the genesis of the name created by Tarsila, while recovering artistic personality are inextricably linked to the fate of the modern
the indigenous Brazilian mythology who ate their enemies, not as project of Brazil and the image of this modernity “.
a form of barbarism, but rather as an act of intelligence, precisely But the desire for modernism began long before, some historians
because believe be assimilating the qualities of their opponents. point even to the end of the 19th century. Many of these artists
In this sense, Antropophagy is a form of cultural cannibalism in (many women, it’s worth to research) disappeared, not legitimized
which the Brazilians consume other cultures (European, indigenous at this modernist process. Some events leading up to the Brazilian
and Afro-Brazilian and if updated this question could include the Modernism, such as the Lasar Segall’s exposition, in 1913, artist who
NorthAmerican cultures as well) to create an own cultural and artistic has flirted with the German avant-gardes. However, it will be Anita
identity, transforming the imported product in an exportable one. Malfatti, who then was virtually erased by the story, which in 1917,
Antropophagy was a radical proposal for the time and consolidated arrived from Europe, that opened the doors to the artistic avant-
the Brazilian modernism in the international field, but most of his garde in Brazil with an exhibition that is considered a landmark in
supporters and organisers were white people of the urban elite - the the history of Brazilian modern art and the “fuse” for the Week of
one that consumed the European culture of explicit mode, but that Modern Art in 1922, as pointed by the historian Mário da Silva Brito.
became interested in the consumption of Indigenous and Afro- Tarsila didn’t invent the modern art in Brazil, but was, according
Brazilian culture, which leads us to think about the existence of a fine to Aracy Amaral, the “pioneer of Brazilian modernist style”. The
line that could separate Antropophagy from cultural appropriation. title of this exhibition “Tarsila do Amaral: inventing modern art in
A controversy work from Tarsila do Amaral, who stumbles on the Brazil”, says a lot about how MoMA appropriates narratives of Latin
questions here raised about cultural appropriation is, with no doubt America by recreating historical narratives and defining the canons
,
A Negra, made in1923. The canvas, made eight years before the artist throughout the 20th century until the present day, as advocates
traveling to the Soviet Union and declare herself communist, portrays historian Ana Avelar in her 2014 book A Raiz Emociona, Emotional

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