How Brazil's Female Modernists Shaped a Subversive National Identity
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Brazilian Modernism is currently on display at the Royal Academy of Arts in London from January 28-April 21.
In 2024, Brazil welcomed the most international visitors in its recorded history. Over 6.6 million people travelled to a country where Baile Funk and Passinho meet sultry Bossa Nova and maze-like street markets blend with carnival parties. Brazil’s multi-layered identity is revered the world over—glimpsed in the yellow and green of a flip-flop or the shuffle of a samba step
Yet over a hundred years ago, when Brazil was a fledgling republic, this sense of identity was neither clear nor celebrated. Art and culture struggled against a dominant influence of Europe, and intellectuals sought to imitate the elitism of the old continent. while overlooking the beauty of Brazil’s everyday people and landscapes. Recognising and celebrating a diverse national identity—from Afro-Brazilians to the country's many Indigenous groups—was a radical act.
“I want to be the painter of my country”
Tarsila do Amaral, born in São Paulo in 1886, led a movement to capture Brazil in all its vibrant shades. Writing home in 1923, she declared simply: 'I want to be the painter of my country.'
Tarsila went on to lead the anthropophagite movement, which means to eat human flesh. She evoked the figurative concept of cannibalism as a metaphor to subvert colonial dominance on art and culture, seeking to devour Europe's bustling intellectual scene to nurture her own Brazilian creativity. With its mixture of indigenous people, descendants of African slaves and immigrant workers from Europe and Asia, Brazil was ready for a post-colonial style that deserved to be valued in its own right.
Tarsila, alongside female contemporaries Anita Malfatti and Djanira da Motta e Silva are among the most important artists of Brazil's modernist movement. Painting the landscapes, people and traditions of their homeland was a subversive denial of the traditional European taste for religious, historical realism. In this new artistic style, for a freshly emerging republic, realities were warped under the lens of surrealism and imaginative figuration was enthusiastically embraced.
Anita Malfatti was 27-years old when she showed several works at a Sao Paulo exhibition in 1917. Her art centered the ordinary Brazilian life; of countryside workers gathering fruits, the body of a man camouflage among the huge stems of tropical plants. Her contemporaries ridiculed and criticised her taste in subjects, her style dismissed as caricaturesque. She sold only a few works, and after critics unleashed their torrent of hatred towards the young woman, the buyers returned or destroyed their works.
Today, the exhibition is considered the birth of Brazilian modernism. A few years later, Malfatti teamed up with Tarsila, alongside writers Mario and Oswald de Andrade and Menotti del Picchia to form a collective called Grupo dos Cinco. The work of the members led to the 1922 art fair Semana de Arte Moderna, which cemented their ideas and highlighted Brazil’s place as a frontrunner in modern art that confronted entrenched European conservative tastes prevalent in Brazil’s elite circles.
‘We must look and see what’s really ours. We eat churrasco and eat vatapá, yet insist on painting French still lifes."
Two decades later, an artist called Djanira da Motta e Silva was similarly preoccupied with depicting daily Brazilian life, especially interested in showing the cultural diversity of her country. "We must look and see what’s really ours. We eat churrasco and eat vatapá, yet insist on painting French still life." she wrote in a 1952 article titled, What's the future of art in Brazil?’.
Inspired by the works of Tarsila, Djanira similarly sought to portray local people in traditional activity. She travelled Brazil to showcase its cultural diversity—from the movements of Candomblé (an Afro-Brazilian religion) to the sound of Caboclinhos (indigenous folkloric dance). An artist with Indigenous heritage, she spent time with the Canela people in northern-Brazilian state Maranhão, furthering her artistic commitment to identity.
Depicting the diversity identities of Brazil’s common labourers was radical at a time of military dictatorship in Brazil. Tarsila was briefly imprisoned during the Vargas dictatorship in the 1930s for her leftist ideology, while Djanira was also arrested for inquiry in the 1960s under the military regime.
These three painters played a pivotal role in shaping post-colonial thought that honoured heritage and identity, transforming global perceptions of South American art, While they were criticised and sneered upon during their lifetimes, their work is now revered.
In the 1960s, Brazil's famed Tropicalia cultural movement embraced the works of Tarsila which firmly established her as one of Latin America's most important artist. Her most famous work, Abaporu, is a centrepiece at Buenos Aires' MALBA museum, while a 2019 retrospective on Tarsila at São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) became the most-visited exhibition in the museum’s history.
Through rich textures, contrasting colours, and the surrealism inherent in its layered and singular culture, their paintings have been instrumental in shaping the nation's emerging identity, highlighting the importance and diversity of the everyday people who pulse through Brazil's lifeblood.