From São Paulo to Paris and Back Again

At the closure of Tarsila do Amaral’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) at the end of July 2019, a total of 402,850 visitors had viewed the exhibition (fig. 1). Tarsila Popular thus fittingly became the most visited show in the museum’s history, displacing a 1997 Monet blockbuster. The show had followed shortly upon the well-received Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, the first monographic exhibition of the painter in the United States, which was coorganized by the Chicago Art Institute (October 8, 2017– January 7, 2018) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (February 11–June 3, 2018). This recent spotlight on the Brazilian artist joins a series of institutional efforts to make modernism more global by emphasizing previously overlooked geographies and artists’ mobility between different parts of the globe.

. This recent spotlight on the Brazilian artist joins a series of institutional efforts to make modernism more global by emphasizing previously overlooked geographies and artists' mobility between different parts of the globe. 2 As part of this expansion of modernism, scholars from both hemispheres have often cited Tarsila do Amaral (1886Amaral ( -1973 as the quintessential example of a transatlantic Latin American artist. 3 As histories of her career inevitably point out, she would study in Paris in 1923 with such masters of cubism as Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Albert Gleizes , and André Lhote (1885-1962)-influences that both she and her critics have identified as fundamental to what would become her modernist style. 4 The painter herself further singled out the year 1923, when she produced the cubist work A Negra in Paris, as the most important of her career. 5 What most accounts fail to note, however, is that do Amaral, or Tarsila, as she is often referred to, 6 had been first exposed to modernism in São Paulo a year earlier, in 1922, when her peer and friend Anita Malfatti  introduced her to the modernist crowd in the most populous city in South America. 7 It was also during this time in São Paulo that the artist met the writer

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Oswald de Andrade , who would become her husband. In Brazil, she and Oswald would start the Anthropophagic movement in 1928, which has since been widely recognized as inaugurating a postcolonial approach toward culture in the country.
Anthropophagy, whose origins can be arguably traced to one of Tarsila's canvases, Abapuru (1928), was inspired by the country's colonial history. Just as the indigenous natives had allegedly cannibalized European colonizers, its proponents claimed, so should Brazilian intellectuals "devour" Europe, taking what was most culturally nutritious from the old continent. By purposely self-representing local intellectuals as cannibals, anthropophagy granted greater agency to South American artists and thus inverted power relations between center and periphery. Tarsila's production of the 1920s, which comprises her celebrated Pau-Brasil (1924)(1925)(1926)(1927)(1928) and Antropofagia phases (1928)(1929)(1930), and was inspired by native topics and childhood memories, was extremely successful in her home country and abroad. It clearly pleased an audience eager to consume images of "Brazilianity" on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit for different purposes. While European modernists appreciated depictions of locality that could fit into the broader umbrella of primitivism, Brazilians were interested in creating a national modernity that could be viewed as authentic and freestanding.
This article's analysis of Tarsila's 1920s transatlantic travels is intended to redirect our understanding of modernism, which is normally presented as radiating from Europe to America. To do so, it will first focus on the close collaboration between Tarsila and Oswald in the shaping of anthropophagy as a national and international cultural insertion strategy. As the first two sections argue, a careful look at the influence of the couple's transatlantic mobility on their vision of "Brazil" forces us to reconsider predominant understandings of primitivism and persistent concerns about the derivativeness of Latin American art. Finally, the last section examines how the subsequent international promotion of cultural cannibalism in the late 1990s has also made it a contemporaneous tool for the global insertion of southern perspectives into canonical art history. As Tarsila noted, a particular vision of Brazil, one more akin to a rural heaven than to the urban São Paulo extolled in Klaxon, was at the time highly valued in Paris, a city that had fallen in love with primitivism in the late nineteenth century. Therefore, to be accepted as a modern artist in Europe required a reconfiguration of her ideas of modernism first acquired in São Paulo. The adoption of primitivism meant that, once in Paris, Tarsila would embrace aspects of Brazilian culture associated with the countryside and the mixed-race population that were not representative of either the culture of the urban elite or the rural aristocracy. 14 Primitivism became an essential cultural strategy for many cosmopolitan members of the Latin American diaspora, because it did not represent something from their local cultures that had to be rejected from their work to be valorized by the Parisian avant-garde. 15 While European artists interested in primitivism had to resort to foreign appropriations filtered through colonialism, Tarsila could draw inspiration from her native country, as her memories of a rural childhood had the potential to be avidly consumed in Paris, and to make cultural interchanges among vanguard artists more symmetrical. 16 As Tarsila and Oswald would soon realize, the same images of Brazil were also likely to be welcomed in their homeland by an urban elite who associated folklore with a more accurate and authentic 5/16 representation of Brazil than urban depictions of the country. 17 In the painting A Negra, produced in what, as noted, she later identified as the watershed year of 1923, Tarsila combined modernist aesthetics with a Brazilian theme legible to the European avant-garde ( fig. 2). 18 The simplified but still easily recognizable figure of a black woman dominates the canvas, resembling an African mask. 19 The avant-gardism of the work can also be seen in its background, which is flattened into horizontal colored stripes, and in the geometrizing of the banana leaf that appears in the preparatory drawings of the work into a green diagonal in the painting ( fig. 3). 20 Although the nakedness, passivity, and exhausted expression of the figure signal the violence of slavery, until recently most interpretations of the work examined it simply as an abstraction, resulting in historically and culturally decontextualized readings. 21 By de-emphasizing the representational aspects in A Negra that Tarsila herself suggested by saying that the work was inspired by her recollections of ex-slaves, such readings were consistent with the then-dominant interpretation of the African art that inspired it as an embodiment of primeval forces, 22 or with the theory promoted by members of Tarsila and Oswald's circle in the 1940s, that Brazil was becoming a racial democracy through the process of mestiçagem, or racial mixing. 23 Filtered through these theories, A Negra could be praised as modern in Paris while representing a new vision of Brazilianity at home-a vision that was consistent with ongoing efforts to fabricate a myth of a racially inclusive country, erase the experience of slavery, and assign a mostly symbolic cultural role to Afro-Brazilians. Read through a formalist vein that overlooks the representational aspects of the work, the painting epitomizes a modernist Brazil and anticipates the style that Tarsila would develop in close collaboration with Oswald as part of the anthropophagic movement later in the decade, and can be seen as the start of their mutual influence. Indeed, uncritically viewed through the lenses of primitivism and mestiçagem, the canvas appears to complement Oswald's "L'Effort Intellectual du Brésil Contemporain," a talk he delivered on May 11, 1923, at Sorbonne University, shortly after he followed Tarsila to Paris. 24 Oswald's presentation addressed the origins of modern art in Brazil and emphasized the influence of African and indigenous elements in Brazilian culture. By underscoring these features, the writer simultaneously endorsed the Parisian valorization of so-called primitive cultures and of national specificities. What is more, he also participated in the ongoing Brazilian attempt to assign a positive value to miscegenation. The two Brazilian artists who Oswald explicitly identified as representatives of primitivism in the visual arts were Tarsila and the sculptor Victor Brecheret (1894-1955), who had taken part in the Semana and was also in Paris at the time. Oswald's assertion that these  32 This poem, written in a telegraphic, modern style, called for a new poetry that would be naïve like a child, which he termed "Pau-Brasil Poetry, for exportation." In this attempt to recruit local artists to participate in this movement, Oswald argued that the intelligentsia should invert the traditional route in which excolonies supply natural resources and import industrialized goods by not merely providing "raw material" to be appropriated by Europe-as in Picasso's use of African art, for example-but by actively contributing to a transatlantic dialogue by producing form as well as content. Tarsila's new paintings that rendered Brazilian landscapes in sophisticated cubist style clearly fit this bill.
The "Manifesto de Poesia Pau-Brasil" and Tarsila's new work can both be seen as attempts to concretize the cosmopolitan Brazilianity that Oswald had first preached when he called Brazilian primitivism an "intellectual effort" at the Sorbonne. Just as Tarsila's Morro da Favela presented an idyllic scenario in which black bodies and cactus represented Brazilianity, Oswald's poetic call to action idealized shantytowns and tropical nature using the avantgarde literary genre of the manifesto. Therefore, both Tarsila's and Oswald's Brazilwood production resulted from a synthesis between local themes and avant-garde techniques-a hybrid style already demonstrated in A Negra that the couple would further develop during their anthropophagic period. The outcome of this fusion of vernacular theme and international style was a national and modern art that could be exported as a refined cosmopolitan and yet indigenous production.
The assimilation of local motifs and avant-garde forms advocated in the couple's work suggested a method for the construction of a cosmopolitan mode of national production that Oswald would more radically theorize in his 1928 "Manifesto Antropófago." This manifesto ensured his position as one of the country's major intellectuals and created an indelible image of Brazil represented by Tarsila's Antropofagia phase. Indeed, the painter later described the anthropophagic movement as deriving from one of her canvases, Abaporu, which she had created for Oswald's birthday ( fig. 5). In Tarsila's telling of this event, she explains that "abaporu" means cannibal in the Tupi indigenous language (ABA: man, PORU: eater), a term created by Artfully constructing the concept of "native primitivism" to represent Brazil's original contribution to modern culture, the anthropophagic movement appropriated the figure of the cannibal to portray Brazilians as passionate, creative, spontaneous, and vital-thereby stressing their possession of characteristics already associated with the European avant-garde trope of the primitive. 36 Simultaneously, however, the figure of the cannibal also represented resistance to Europe's civilizing mission and a critique of the violence inseparable from the colonial process. For Oswald and Tarsila, cannibalism became a sign of agency, autonomy from Europe, and an intentionally adopted primitive identity. Concerned primarily with matters of legitimation of their art at home and abroad during this period, the couple attempted to dismantle the implicit cultural hierarchy contained in such binary tropes as savage/civilized that were commonly used to justify colonial enterprises, but without implying a blind rejection of Europe. Here Oswald describes anthropophagy not as a derivative but superior version of a European movement, one better able to solve the problems of an over-civilized world from its subaltern vantage position in the Global South. By choosing the manifesto as a form to promote his ideas, Oswald also allied the Brazilian avant-garde with their foreign peers on equal terms. Tarsila, by using cubist and surrealist vocabularies to compose her work, similarly guaranteed that she would be viewed as a modern representative of Brazil, nationally and internationally. Indeed, she exhibited Abaporu in Paris in 1928, under the name of Nu (Nude), during her second solo exhibition at Galerie Percier, and later in Brazil under its original indigenous name. 38 In 1929, shortly after the creation of anthropophagy, the painter and Oswald separated, ending their artistic and amorous partnership but not the lasting influence of their work on Latin American thought and art.
From São Paulo to the World: Anthropophagy as a Method By constituting a method that could be systematically applied and then exported, anthropophagy had provided Brazilian cultural production with a new status as modern.
The metaphor of the intellectual as a cannibal allowed artists and critics to understand hybrid artworks as national and original. This affirmation of hybridism as symbolizing a modernist Brazil, while very much a product of its times, also made anthropophagy relevant to several later moments in the country's cultural history. It was cited, for instance, to support Hélio Oiticica's statement against purity in his 1968 Tropicália installation and the use of electric guitars in Brazilian popular music in the movement of the same name, as well as alluded to in the title of Lygia Clark's 1973 performance Baba Antropofágica (Anthropophagic Drool), which blended art and therapy. 39 The notion of anthropophagy was inserted into the larger global art world by Paulo Herkenhoff in 1998, when he chose it as the curatorial theme of the 24th São Paulo Biennial. Anthropophagy, which had by then become widely recognized in Brazil as a means of creating a modern cultural identity, offered a fitting strategy for a biennial whose historical mission had been to modernize the local arts and make transatlantic exchanges more symmetrical. 40 By employing anthropophagy as a curatorial method, Herkenhoff's intention was to present a non-Eurocentric version of art history in the most important exhibition in South America, and thereby end the lingering implication that artists in Brazil and other non-European countries still needed to catch up with the latest artistic trends.
In the original plan for the 24th São Paulo Biennial, the Brazilian curator had intended to employ anthropophagy only in the specific exhibition named Historical Nucleus. 41 In 10/16 order to introduce invited international curators working in adjacent exhibitions at the biennial to the concept of anthropophagy, Herkenhoff distributed Oswald's 1928 manifesto and an institutional release describing anthropophagy as an ongoing "model for cultural practice" as well as an "open and dynamic" concept bearing multiple aspects: "non-Manichean, deconstructive, transcultural, and appropriationist." 42 One of these parallel exhibitions featured fifty contemporary artists coming from seven regions of the world, each of which was intended to be presented independently and thereby provide "areas of dialogue, clash, and friction among the several 'regional' exhibitions, thus integrating the entire segment globally." 43 The team of curators responsible for this collective show decided to also use the notion of anthropophagy to privilege the work of artists from underrepresented areas within their regions and named the show Roteiros (routes) repeated seven times, quoting from Oswald's 1928 manifesto. 44 In the context of the 24th São Paulo Biennial, therefore, anthropophagy came to signify the inclusion of marginal voices and to operate on the political behalf of peripheral geographical zones, including Latin America as a whole. In the context of the 1990s, following the advent of postcolonial and decolonial studies in academia, and after seminal publications like James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994), art professionals thus engaged anthropophagy as a transnational method rather than as a national concept tethered to Brazilianity.
Born as a way to legitimize Tarsila and Oswald's production as both avant-garde and national, and later employed to present an alternative account of the sources and spread of modernism, anthropophagy thus also offers international curators a framework for actively incorporating previously peripheral local histories, political perspectives, and artistic contributions into the predominant art historical discourse. By so doing, anthropophagy proposes a way not only to make curatorial discourses more plural but also to expand current understandings of modernism. An anthropophagous perspective dictates that contributions of creators and thinkers outside traditional art centers not be marginalized or dismissed as "derivative," but digested together with canonical discourses to create a more vital and crossfertilized art history. It also inverts the traditional view of primitivism by giving a dynamic and creative role to "cannibals," who now are responsible for artistic representation rather than merely the objects of it. 45 As an insertion strategy, therefore, anthropophagy reminds us that processes of artistic and intellectual influences are more bilateral than previously thought, and that modernism in the visual arts is a multidirectional, global phenomenon. As Tarsila herself declared in a 1928 interview, "The modern movement is global and cannot be otherwise, in an age of omnipresent life." 46 On the painting, Tarsila commented: "One of the most successful paintings I exhibited in Europe is called A Negra. Because I have recurring memories of having seen one of those old female slaves, when I was five or six years old, you know? A female slave who lived in our fazenda, and she had droopy lips and enormous breasts because (I was later told) in those days black women used to tie tocks to their breasts in order to lengthen them, and then they would sling them back over their shoulders to breastfeed children they were carrying on their backs." Leo Gilson Ribeiro, "Interview Tarsila