Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This flier, which announces the seventh edition of the Salão Paulista de Arte Moderna, has an excellent minimalist design on the cover. The (ordinal) “ o ” becomes one of the squares in the black and yellow composition, which uses [...]

Aracy Amaral scrutinizes Tarsila do Amaral’s body of work in search of traces of Surrealism; she also explains that the artist’s thematic and formal universe was conditioned by spending her childhood at her family’s coffee plantation in the [...]

The art historian Ana Maria Belluzzo begins her essay by considering factors that suggest links between modern art and primitive art processes, such as the idea of “rupture” in modern times. She discusses certain key paintings by Tarsila do [...]

This essay is about reaching a dead end in the nationalist project as well as the aesthetic requirements inherent in the avant-garde when modern art began to develop in Brazil. That development was launched with the 1917 exhibition by the painter [...]

In this essay, the well-known Argentinean critic Jorge Romero Brest attempts to assess national problems as they were understood by the most famous Brazilian artists, touching on a raw nerve concerning the differences between the art produced in [...]

According to the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar, the essential problem concerning the “national” nature of art is directly related to the cultural dependence of the country. By way of explanation, he suggests that this question would not arise [...]

In this text, painter Tarsila do Amaral provides an overview of her artistic career, specifically in relation to the Pau-Brasil movement and to cultural “anthropophagy.” She emphasizes the importance of the trip she took to Minas Gerais in 1924 [...]

This article is about the Salão Nacional de Belas Artes that was organized by the architect Lúcio Costa; it explains that the organizing committee decided that no submission would be rejected. This prompted the “old guard” artists to boycott [...]

In this letter to the painter Tarsila do Amaral, the writer Mário de Andrade urges her, Sérgio Milliet, and Oswald de Andrade—the “country folk” who have become futurists during their stay in Paris—to return to the “virgin jungle,” to [...]

In this article, Oswald de Andrade claims there is an urgent need to create a modern art museum in the city of São Paulo, underscoring the fragile nature of and almost nonexistent institutional support for the Brazilian art system. De Andrade [...]

Oswald de Andrade was invited by the American Contemporary Arts to give this lecture in São Paulo in 1944, in which he discusses the two characters he created for a series of novels (that was never completed) entitled Marco Zero. He used these [...]

SPAM (Sociedade Pró-Arte Moderna) was founded in December 1932 in São Paulo. Its stated goals were to create closer artistic ties, and relationships between artists and the public. The catalogue for the SPAM 1ª Exposição de Arte Moderna includes [...]

This text is a report, possibly written in 1929, based on an exhibition of paintings by Tarsila do Amaral in São Paulo. The text establishes two distinctive periods in the artist’s work. One “with the universal, moving colors of the shantytowns [...]

The Brazilian art critic Mário de Andrade reviews São Paulo and Morro da Favela [Shanty Town Hill], two of the paintings that were presented at the first solo exhibition of work by Tarsila do Amaral (in São Paulo, 1929). In de Andrade’s opinion [...]

Mário de Andrade, the writer and member of the Brazilian “modernist” movement—[this version of “modernism” had nothing to do with the literary movement headed by Rubén Darío that followed European avant-garde ideas]—described Tarsila [...]

In this interview the painter Tarsila do Amaral talks about Cubism and delivers a spirited defense of this modern movement. She sees it as an innovation that will lay the foundations for the art of the future. Just returned from Paris, she calls “ [...]

In April 1942, in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Semana de Arte Moderna [Modern Art Week] at the Teatro Municipal in São Paulo in 1922, Mário de Andrade gave a talk at the library of the Ministério das Relações [...]

The writer Mário de Andrade reviews Feuilles de route [Leaves of the Road], the book by the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, illustrated by Tarsila do Amaral. The reviewer refers to the Brazilian countryside, which he compares with Cendrars’ writing [...]

The catalogue for the Exposição de uma casa modernista was written by the architect Gregori Warchavchik, creator of this radical project. Although it was controversial in the conservative milieu of the period, the project was fairly significant in [...]

After criticizing the selection made in the United States to represent Brazil at the Latin American Exhibition of Visual Arts that was held in New York during the 1939 World’s Fair, the great Brazilian polymath, Mário de Andrade continues by [...]

The erudite music composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote a letter to a couple also staying in Paris, Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral. He comments on the difficulties involved in presenting different types of art produced in Brazil as [what is] “ [...]

In this letter, written in 1926 to the multifaceted Oswald de Andrade, the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars makes certain suggestions regarding the forthcoming Paris exhibition of work by Tarsila do Amaral, the leading woman artist in the Brazilian [...]