Global Art and Latin America

Reviews: Global Art and Latin America stephanie d’alessandro, and luis pe´rez-oramas, editors. Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil. Yale UP, 2017, 184 pp. Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil sets out to confront “the issues of race, class, and gender in Brazil . as well as larger matters of nationalism and internationalism, primitivism and colonial history and the relationship between high art and low, regional, folk or vernacular art” (23). Such an ambi- tious undertaking is tackled through works by Tarsila do Amaral, affectionately addressed by her first name (though I do not recall many male artists in the twentieth century being addressed by their first names) and described as the originator of Modern Art in Brazil. The volume accompanied an exhibition held first at The Art Institute of Chi- cago (October 2017-January 2018) and later at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (February 2018-June 2018). Curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Luis Pe´rez-Oramas, this was the first solo exhibition dedicated to the artist in North America. In only a few rooms, the exhibition gathered important archival material, drawings, and paintings made between 1923 and 1933. These dates mark the artist’s most transformative stay in Paris and her turn to Socialist Realism. The catalogue also contextualizes her influence on subsequent generations of artists and how her work was indelibly inscribed into the genealogy of modern and contemporary Brazilian art. The fully illustrated catalogue features two scholarly essays by the curators of the exhibition, a chronology, and a concise selection of primary sources— interviews given by Tarsila do Amaral and key texts written by the poet Oswald de Andrade, her second husband and close collaborator. It introduces a widely celebrated artist in Brazil to an American audience with the objective of histori- cizing the formation of modernism outside the Anglo-American world. This book testifies to the mission, shared by multiple American institutions, to pro- mote exhibitions that expand Western art’s historical narrative to include broader geographic areas. This effort is also reflected in the incorporation of works by Latin American artists into institutional collections. MoMA, for example, has benefited from several outstanding donations, most recently in 2018 by the Coleccioń Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. In her contribution, D’Alessandro illustrates the way do Amaral’s practice embodied the process of cultural digestion, assimilation, and reinvention that characterized research into brasilidade (the distinctive form of Brazilian cultural identity). The text examines the genesis of Tarsila do Amaral’s iconic painting A ................. 19364$ REVS 11-15-19 14:19:56 PS PAGE 229 230 Revista Hispańica Moderna 72.2 (2019) negra (1923). This canvas is credited for linking many of the lessons on modernist painting the artist learned in Paris with the colors of vernacular Brazil to depict an archetypal, motherly, and voluptuous black woman. A negra, D’Ales- sandro argues, paved the way for the formulation of the Anthropophagous Move- ment, defined by the Manifesto of Antropofago written by Oswald de Andrade in 1928 and reprinted at the end of the catalogue.1 The text also focuses on two subsequent paintings Abaporu (1928) and Antropofagıá (1929). The first painting depicts a monstrous distorted figure named by Oswald with a neologism that literally means “the one who eats,” in Tupi. Antropofagıá, on the other hand, presents stylized versions of the figures in Abaporu and A negra intertwined within the same composition. The progression across these three works speaks to the very process of cognitive digestion that do Amaral underwent in her research. D’Alessandro’s argument sets the stage for Pe´rez-Oramas’s claim that do Amaral ultimately invented Modernism in Brazil. Pe´rez-Oramas argues that the full effects of do Amaral’s research were only appreciated later in the 1960s. The curator relies on Freud’s concept of Nachtra¨glichkeit (literally “afterwardness”) to cast do Amaral’s work as the cathartic event that inspired artists such as Lygia Clark and He´lio Oiticica (both of whom have been given retrospective exhibitions in the US). According to Freud, when a true moment of trauma occurs, one acquires consciousness of certain prior traumas that are responsible for one’s current state of mind. The transformative effects on Brazilian culture of works such as A negra or Abaporu, manifest themselves with a forty-year delay in works such as Lygia Clark’s Baba antropofa´gica (1973). Clark’s work consisted in a collective action. A group of people holding colored spools of thread in their mouths, kneel around another person lying supine. Participants then begin to pull thread out of their mouths, inevitably covered in saliva, and lay them on the person on the ground. In Clark’s words, “[the participants] soon become aware that they are drawing out their own entrails” (qtd. in D’Alessandro and Pe´rez-Oramas 85). Inspired by this work, Pe´rez-Oramas makes a case for a “cannibalistic phantasmagoria, which becomes image in do Amaral’s work then later becomes body in Clark’s” (85). In other words, the artist inaugurated the modernist period in Brazil, whereas Clark ended it by taking the very principles of do Amaral’s modernism and making them relevant to more conceptual artworks. For Pe´rez-Oramas, the lapse of time between Anegraand Baba antropofa´gica was the necessary delay for Anthropophagy to have “real social resonance” in Brazilian culture (87). At first, I was suspicious about marking a beginning and an end to modernism —the span of this timeframe is debatable. The decision to juxtapose two major figures of Brazilian twentieth-century art, based on the fact that both studied with Fernand Le´ger in Paris, and their shared interest in Anthropophagy and in emancipation strategies, seemed reductive. While Clark participated in multiple artist groups and became a figure of reference for young artists from the 1950s, 1 The concept of Anthropophagy has been historicized to condense a distinctive feature of Brazilian culture from the beginning of Modernism in the 1920s. Notably, curator Paulo Herkenhoff named the 24th Saõ Paulo Biennial Um e/entre Outro/s after the key concept of Cultural Anthropophagy. In light of this genealogy, D’Alessandro argues that Tarsila articu- lated the concept of Anthropophagy avant la lettre. ................. 19364$ REVS 11-15-19 14:19:57 PS PAGE 230 Reviews:Global Art and Latin America 231 Tarsila’s work took longer to reach and influence her younger peers. Both artists had ostensibly different impacts on their respective milieus, and their output is vastly dissimilar from a formal perspective. Yet the catalogue forwards the idea of a heterogeneous modernism in conjunction with modernity, and it recognizes the transgenerational concerns regarding the search for a Brazilian identity. Such attributes locate this text within a consistent postcolonial effort to dis- mantle those historical frames that acknowledge cultural advancements only when related to canonical narratives. The compelling history presented by D’Alessandro and Pe´rez-Oramas in many ways addresses the issues of race, class, gender, national identity, and colonial history stated at the beginning of the book. Both essays take into account that do Amaral was born on her family’s estate in rural Brazil and that her experience of her country’s identity was hijacked by a culturally Eurocentric gaze. D’Ales- sandro recounts her efforts to retrieve the lost memory of an “unknown Brazil” through a trip do Amaral embarked upon with Oswald and others across their national territory—a very uncommon journey for members of the upper class at the time (47). D’Alessandro’s account shows how Tarsila was torn between the ideas of a European colonial discovery and of a Brazilian lost memory. “A negra became a kind of talisman, integral to do Amaral’s project of rediscovering Brazil” (48). Further still, an examination of archival material revealed that the subject of A negra might have been a female slave that lived on do Amaral’s estate (she was born in 1886, just two years prior to the abolition of slavery). Her celebratory depiction of a woman of color further highlights a will to rewrite the characteristics of Brazilian national identity. An important tension and ambiguity within the figure of do Amaral is key to understanding the complexity of her role in ushering in modernism. Distin- guished by exoticism in Paris and Parisian-ness in Saõ Paulo, do Amaral strug- gled to forge “her own modernist project” (19). Her dual identity activated a tension between her research into brasilidade and her admiration of European modernism—especially cubism, which she paralleled to “the artist’s military ser- vice [that] should be mandatory” (qtd. in D’Alessandro and Pe´rez-Oramas 159). In fact, the story that led to A negra’s creation is intertwined with do Amaral’s investment in cubism. D’Alessandro describes this work as the artist’s “own ver- sion of a modern bather,” which she made to “find the means to communicate membership in a vanguard . and the path to her own modern art” (41). This description seduces the reader into sharing do Amaral’s perceived admiration for the Cubist (all-boys) club, which she strove to join. Drawing from several published testimonies of her experience of the Parisian scene, D’Alessandro suc- cessfully situates Amaral in a network of artists in the French capital, which included Le´ger (with whom she studied), Brancusi, Picasso, Gris, Delauney, and Ce´zanne (whose former studio she occupied). It thus appears that her passport into modernity in Paris was her brasilidade. As the poet (and her then fiance´) Oswald de Andrade described it: “Never before has the suggestive presence of the Negro drum and of the Indian song been so strongly felt in the ambience of Paris.

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