An icon of the avant-garde, whose paintings celebrate Brasilidade, and who was responsible for exporting the concept to Paris.

Tarsila do Amaral´s family was upper-class and owned a coffee plantation. After completing classical formal art training in São Paulo, she travelled to Paris in 1920, where she stayed for two years to continue her studies. While there, she familiarised herself with modern art trends, before returning to São Paulo in 1922, shortly after the Semana de Arte Moderna had taken place. She soon became associated with members of the avant-garde circle that surrounded Anita Malfatti and the writers Oswald and Mário de Andrade. Before long, she travelled to Paris with Oswald de Andrade for a year, where she really embraced her “exotic” Brazilian identity. She invited Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, and Fernand Léger over to enjoy Brazilian meals and began to create paintings in which she merged her impressions from Paris and her homeland. In their quest for new ideas and stimulation, the couple returned to São Paulo in 1923. Amaral painted images that employed a visual language inspired by Cubism and Surrealism, in which she depicted the lives of Brazil’s rural communities and formerly enslaved people in the favelas on the outskirts of the cities as an idyllic utopia utterly disconnected from reality.

Like other artists, do Amaral sought new ways to represent Brazilian identity and believed she would be able to do so by turning to the country’s original population. The previously enslaved Afro-Brazilian workers with whom she had grown up on the coffee plantation became a favourite motif, such as in A Negra (1923). Her paintings prompted her partner Oswald de Andrade to compose the Manifesto Antropófago, in which he called for the assimilation and incorporation of European influences in order to allow for the evolution of a distinctly Brazilian style of art, with local cultures merging with a more modern approach. In the 1930s, Amaral’s art underwent a radical shift: she began to paint her working-class themes in a more realistic style, which reflected the prevailing political and social situation in the Estado Novo.