Location

Musée du Luxembourg du 9 octobre 2024 au 2 février 2025

Conception

Grande Palais RMN

Description

A central figure in Brazilian modernism, Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) created original and evocative works, drawing on the indigenous, popular, and modern imagery of a country undergoing rapid transformation.

In Paris in the 1920s, she put her iconographic universe to the test of Cubism and Primitivism, before initiating the “anthropophagic” movement in São Paulo, advocating the “devouring” by Brazilians of foreign and colonizing cultures as a form of both assimilation and resistance.

Her brightly colored landscapes gave way to unusual and fascinating visions, before a more overtly political dimension appeared in her paintings of the 1930s. The dreamlike gigantism and almost abstract geometry of her later compositions only confirm the power of a body of work rooted in its time and always ready to renew itself.

Filling a gap in the artist’s recognition in Europe and presenting some previously unseen aspects of his work, this retrospective invites us into the heart of modern Brazil and its divisions between tradition and avant-garde, centers and peripheries, highbrow and popular cultures.