Tarsila do Amaral

Tarsila do Amaral played a central role in the formation of Brazilian modernism. Born in Capivari, she spent the 1920s moving between São Paulo and Paris, where she studied with André Lhote, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger. She transformed Cubist experimentation into paintings informed by Brazilian landscapes, everyday scenes and popular imagery. Clear colours, simplified volumes and unexpected proportions structure her pictorial world.

Painted in 1928, Abaporu depicts an isolated figure beside a cactus. It inspired the Anthropophagy movement and its proposal to assimilate outside influences into an original culture. With the poet Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila helped redefine what modernity could mean in Brazil. Her later works also address social and urban transformations, extending an inquiry into the images through which a country represents itself.