Artists

Tarsila do Amaral

Press release

A central figure of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) is one of Brazil’s best-known and best-loved artists. She created an original, evocative body of work, drawing on indigenous imagery and the modernising elements of a rapidly-transforming country.

Starting in the 1920s, moving between São Paulo and Paris, Tarsila do Amaral navigated between the avant-gardes of these two cultural capitals. Having constructed a “Brazilian” iconographic world in Paris, put to the test by the Cubism and Primitivism so in vogue in the French capital, her painting was the root of the “anthropophagic” movement advocating the "devouring" by Brazilians of foreign and colonial cultures as a form of both assimilation and resistance.

Brightly coloured landscapes, dreamlike compositions and abstract geometry confirm the power of a body of work firmly rooted in its time and always ready to renew itself. Her work also raises social, identity and racial issues and invites us to reconsider the divides between tradition and avant-garde, centres and outskirts, high culture and popular culture.

Widely exhibited in her native country, very few exhibitions have so far been dedicated to her work abroad. This first retrospective in France which gathers together more than 150 works aims to bridge this gap and takes us to the heart of modern Brazil and its cleavages.