“A woman ahead of her time and very brave. It took a lot of courage to do a work like this”, says Tarsilinha, great-niece of the artist Tarsila do Amaral, while pointing to the painting “Antropofagia” (1929) during this interview for the CNNwhich this week brings a series of special reports about the 1922 Modern Art Week.
For the last 20 years, Tarsilinha has dedicated herself exclusively to her aunt’s legacy inside and outside Brazil. No wonder, the most recent events were great: in 2019, for example, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Masp), received a record audience during an exhibition dedicated to the artist and, in the following year, the painting “Caipirinha” was bought for R$57.5 million at auction, making Tarsila the most valued Brazilian artist in the world.
In this interview, Tarsilinha reveals some curiosities about the relationship between Tarsila and Oswald de Andrade, with whom she had a relationship, as well as how the name of one of the artist’s best-known paintings, “Araporu” (1928) came about.
“Tarsila gives the work to Oswald as a gift. She wanted to give him something that would impress him and I imagine it shouldn’t be too easy. Oswald was a person with a lot of personality, funny, cultured, intelligent. She surpasses herself: today Abaporu is one of the most important paintings in Brazilian art”, she says.
“And when Oswald sees the painting, he is very moved – he soon writes the Anthropophagous Manifesto, and later founds the Anthropophagic Movement. And he interprets it as saying that he looks like a man who eats people. Tarsila then remembers a Tupi-Guarani dictionary that her father had. There, she finds the words ‘aba’, which means man, and ‘poru’, which means to eat. They thought that putting these two words together would be cool and created Abaporu.”
Watch the full video of the interview with Tarsilinha do Amaral.
Take the opportunity to listen to the episode “Modernism: For Whom and By Whom?”, from the CNN podcast series on the Week of Modern Art of 1922:
What is modern? What is art? What is Brazilian? The fourth episode of the podcast tells that, in the first phase of modernism, the discussions were carried out by white people, heirs of the coffee barons. Brazil in the 1920s was still a rural, mestizo country that had abolished slavery less than 40 years ago. Through today’s lenses, the search for the “Brazilian soul” raised by artists who had little contact with the peripheral population can be interpreted, according to researchers, as folkloric and even as a cultural appropriation.
Source: CNN Brasil
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