Tarsila Do Amaral's Abaporu

© Michele Greet, 2015 Devouring Surrealism: Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu Michele Greet Various scholars have suggested a contiguity or affinity between Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral’s iconic painting Abaporu (1928) and surrealism; none have engaged in an in-depth analysis of her actual relationship with surrealism, however. This close reading of Abaporu will demonstrate that Amaral deliberately and systematically engaged with the tenets and formal languages of surrealism. Her engagement was not one of pure emulation; instead she turned the surrealists’ penchant for satire and desire to disrupt hierarchical schema back on itself, parodying the images and ideas put forth by the movement to create a counter modernism. Amaral’s sardonic appropriation of surrealism’s formal languages and subversive strategies was the very factor that made Abaporu the catalyst of the anthropophagite Movement. On 11 January 1928 the Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral presented a painting to her husband, the writer and intellectual Oswald de Andrade, for his birthday. Amaral described the painting, which Andrade would later entitle Abaporu (Fig. 1), or ‘person who eats,’ as: ‘a monstrous figure, with enormous feet planted on the Brazilian earth next to a cactus.’1 Scholars have long acknowledged Abaporu as a crucial work in Amaral’s career as well as an icon of early twentieth-century Latin American art. The painting marked the beginning of her anthropophagite phase, a period from about 1928 until 1930 during which Amaral departed from the densely packed compositions of urban São Paulo and the Brazilian countryside that characterized her Pau-Brazil period to paint scenes of one or two isolated figures in lush tropical dreamscapes.2 Despite the dream-like quality of these pictures, Amaral’s engagement with surrealism in Abaporu (and the other paintings of the period), while occasionally acknowledged, has not been fully interrogated. Various scholars have suggested a contiguity or affinity with surrealism during this period; I argue, however, that Amaral’s sardonic appropriation of surrealism’s formal languages and subversive strategies was the very factor that made Abaporu the catalyst of the anthropophagite movement.3 My discussion goes beyond an examination of visual affinity to examine precisely how Amaral engaged with surrealism to move her art in a new direction and the significant impact her new vision had on the formulation of the anthropophagite movement. While I am not arguing that Amaral’s paintings held sway over European artists closely associated with surrealist poet André Breton, her sophisticated engagement with surrealism’s precepts indicates the fluidity, transmutability and relevance of surrealist intellectual and aesthetic practices for artists across disciplines, geographies, and time periods. Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 1 © Michele Greet, 2015 Fig. 1. Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu (originally exhibited as Nu), 1928, oil on canvas, 83 x 73 cm, Museo de Arte Latinoamericana de Buenos Aires, Fundación Costanini. Surrealism was the one movement that Amaral chose to deny in constructing her artistic trajectory and has therefore been downplayed in the scholarship on the artist. This deliberate disavowal suggests that there was a great deal at stake in admitting knowledge of and engagement with surrealism. As the 1920s and Amaral’s career progressed, creating nationalist modernisms became a marker of artistic independence and avant-garde status. To admit to European influence was to admit to a lack of cultural authenticity. Thus, in describing their sources, it became increasingly likely that artists would deny the transnational and transhemispheric circulation of ideas and proclaim national or regional sources of their inspiration. They deployed European constructs of primitivism strategically as a marker of cultural difference, while maintaining or simply allowing critics to assert that this primitivism was inherent. The importance of declaring aesthetic independence become the cultural equivalent of disavowing colonialism and influenced the critical assessment of modern artists for generations, obfuscating discussions of their actual participation in circuits of intellectual exchange. My hope here is to shift the discussion back toward an examination of cross-cultural interaction by examining Amaral’s selective appropriation and sardonic Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 2 © Michele Greet, 2015 contestation of surrealism as a strategy for creating a hybrid modernism that challenged traditional aesthetic and cultural hierarchies. In 1967 the Brazilian art historian Aracy Amaral (a distant family relation to the artist) wrote an article entitled ‘The Surreal in Tarsila’ [O Surreal em Tarsila] — but more aptly titled ‘The Lack of Surreal in Tarsila’— in which she argues: ‘Contrary to what it seems, never was there any intentionality or surrealist research on the part of the artist throughout her entire career.’4 Aracy Amaral claims the fantastic or bizarre incongruities in Tarsila do Amaral’s work stemmed from the experience of such things in her childhood.5 Even though the European surrealists were interested in the innocence of the child’s mind, Aracy Amaral declares Tarsila do Amaral’s use of childhood memories a unique occurrence unrelated to developments in Europe. For her Brazilian artists were actually ‘immune to surrealism as a philosophy of artistic expression and all its implications as a “school.”’6 While Aracy Amaral would later revise her opinion of Tarsila do Amaral’s relationship to surrealism, she would still insist that ‘magical or unconscious elements are minor characteristics of Tarsila do Amaral’s pictorial work, and are linked more to antropofagismo than to the surreal.’7 The issue here, however, is that the anthropophagite movement itself, with Abaporu as its harbinger, engaged in a sophisticated re-appropriation and critique of surrealist ideas and methods.8 Indeed, Oswald de Andrade made explicit the connection in 1929 stating: Let us not forget that surrealism is one of the best pre-Anthropophagist movements. The liberation of man as such through the discourse of the unconscious and through turbulent personal manifestations was without a doubt one of the most thrilling spectacles for the heart of any Anthropophagist who in these last few years has accompanied the despair of civilized man… After Surrealism, only Anthropophagy.9 The subsequent denial of a connection to surrealism, both by the artists themselves and the scholars who wrote about them, therefore seems strategic. While surrealism was certainly not Amaral’s only source during this period, its blatant absence from serious consideration deserves further investigation. Because of André Breton’s tendency to designate certain Latin American artists as surrealists (i.e. Frida Kahlo or Rufino Tamayo), a proclamation which denied these artists agency, many Latin American artists (and some European artists) and the critics who promoted them downplayed or rejected outright any debt to or engagement with surrealism.10 Writers such as the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier declared ‘the marvellous’ an innate Latin American characteristic, present long before the surrealists’ ‘discovery’ of the region.11 Such a claim served to assert Latin America’s cultural autonomy in the face of foreign influences. While resisting Breton’s imperious declarations was certainly warranted, the literature on Latin American artists, especially in the post-war period, has characteristically avoided determining the particularities of an artist’s actual connection to surrealism. Tarsila do Amaral’s personal motives for disavowing surrealism seem to stem from a desire to construct an artistic trajectory that demonstrates her progression from dependence on foreign ideas to independence. In the 1930s she wrote extensively about the arts, penning articles on cubism, Ferdinand Léger, André Lhote, Constantin Brancusi, Robert Delaunay and Henri Rousseau, all of which were important influences early in her career. But she never wrote about surrealism despite her clear Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 3 © Michele Greet, 2015 involvement with the movement’s precepts. Rather, she positioned cubism as a launching pad from which sprung the impetus for a more specifically ‘Brazilian’ art: ‘cubism, or rather modern art, gave artists a creative conscience and spirit of freedom.’12 Acknowledging a debt to surrealism in 1928 would have meant conceding that she had not fully disengaged from European sources, and that she had not succeeded in creating a purely Brazilian art, when her Brazilian supporters and many French critics claimed she had. Additionally, because there were significantly more negative responses to her 1928 exhibition, where her exploration of surrealism was most evident, than her 1926 show with its exploration of cubism and Léger’s machine aesthetic, she may have decided to promote through her writings an interpretation of her work that negated surrealist influence. Because of Aracy Amaral’s declaration and Tarsila do Amaral’s own disavowal of the movement, few scholars writing after the 1960s have engaged in an in-depth analysis of her actual relationship to surrealism. Icleia Maria Borsa Cattani argues, for example, that Amaral painted dream-like worlds in works such as Venice (1923) and A Cuca (The Bogeyman, 1924) (Fig. 2) before the advent of surrealism, and therefore could not have been significantly influenced by the movement.13 Fig. 2. Tarsila

Load more