Tarsila do Amaral: Painting Modern Brazil
02.21.2025 - 06.01.2025
The Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao are co-organizing a major exhibition dedicated to Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral (b. 1886; d. 1973), which will first be presented at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris in fall 2024, and subsequently at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in winter 2025.
A central figure of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila do Amaral created an original, evocative body of work, drawing on indigenous imagery and the modernizing forces of a rapidly-transforming country.
In the 1920s, moving between São Paulo and Paris, Tarsila ferried between the avant-gardes of these two cultural capitals. Having forged 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 Pau-Brasil and “Anthropophagic” movements, whose search for an “authentic,” multicultural and multiracial Brazil aimed to refound the country's relationship with the European “centers” of colonization.
The activist dimension of Tarsila's paintings from the 1930s and their ability to accompany the profound transformations of her social and urban environment until the 1960s confirm the strength of an oeuvre attuned to her time, always willing to reinvent itself, despite the unstable conditions of the different times and contexts that an emancipated, independent woman artist must face.
With her invitation to delve into a Brazilian modernity that she contributed to forging even more than she painted it, Tarsila do Amaral reveals in her production all the complexity of this concept always subject to debate, which raises identity and societal questions of great importance even today, both in Brazil and Europe.
Galleries: 201, 202, 203
Curators: Cecilia Braschi and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães
Venues: Musée du Luxembourg, Paris; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Tarsila do Amaral
Postcard (Cartão postal), 1929
Oil on canvas, 127.5 x 142.5 cm
Private collection, Rio de Janeiro
© Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamento e Empreendimentos S.A.
Photo: Jaime Acioli