Anita Malfatti

Anita Malfatti was born into a middle-class immigrant family. Her father was Italian and her mother German-American. Thanks to a scholarship from her uncle, Malfatti was able to study arts and crafts in Berlin in the early 1910s, after which she became a student of the expressionist painter Lovis Corinth. Most importantly, she was introduced to European modernism, which was still largely unknown in Brazil. She expressed her enthusiasm as follows:

“When I arrived in Europe, I saw paintings for the first time. When I visited the museums, what I saw made me dizzy.”

When the First World War broke out, Anita Malfatti had to leave Europe. She exhibited her work for the first time in Brazil. The boldness of her painting was met with incomprehension, but her mastery of colour and powerful expression were well received. In 1915 she moved to the United States, where she refined her style. It was during this period that she painted Man of Seven Colors, a male nude striding through a lush garden landscape. His head and feet are cut off, as if his muscular body were expanding and taking up all the space. For the bright colours, Malfatti used pastels supplemented with charcoal. She sculpted the body using only colour: yellow, green and blue – the colours of the Brazilian flag! Behind and beside the figure, Malfatti painted typical Brazilian banana leaves.

In 1917, Malfatti showed the works she had created in the United States at an exhibition in São Paulo. It sparked a fierce debate between conservative academics and modernists. Malfatti was the first to provoke a discussion between these two positions. The exhibition thus marked the birth of Brazilian modernism!