English Biography Tarsila do Amaral, Brazilian painter 1920's

Tarsila do Amaral was born into an affluent family near Capivari in Brazil. She studied in under Pedro Alexandrino and Fischer Elpons in Brazil and then at the Academie Julien in Paris. After her training, she returned to Brazil and joind the art circle, Grupo dos Cinco. On a trip to Paris, she encountered the work of Picasso and de Chirico. As a result, her paintings are mixture of Brazilian, Modern, and Cubist influences.

Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral--or "Tarsiwald," in Mário de Andrade's felicitous expression--constitute today true emblems of the Week of Modern Art. The joining of their names represents the fusion of body and mind united by the productivity of the ideology of Pau-Brasil and Anthropophagy. They met in São Paulo, in the celebrated year of 1922, when Tarsila returned to Brazil after studying in Paris for a two-year period. It' is with this "couple mad with life" that the history of modernism in Brazil, begun with the 1917 Malfatti exhibit, enters its heroic phase. The following year the Tarsila and Oswald duo is in Paris, making contact with the most important artistic trends of the time. In addition to Tarsila's apprenticeship in the studios of Andre' Lhote, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger, the friendship with Blaise Cendrars opened even more for them the doors of the international vanguard whose headquarters were then in Paris: Brancusi, Picasso, Cocteau, Modigliani, Marie Laurencin and others. They also associated with the writers who had always shown an interest in Latin America: Jules Supervielle, Valery Larbaud and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

[3. Tarsila's picture & 4. Oswald's picture] There is a sort of mutual bedazzlement in the couple which, at this moment, looks at itself, at one another and, together, at Europe and Brazil. From this crossing of gazes, that is, from this whole of reciprocal influences, will come the most important part of the production of both, especially the one focused on the period from 1923 to 1925. In Oswald's poetry we perceive Tarsila's visual mark, and click to go to the site with an excellent history of Brazilian art in the roaring 20's >>>

http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/vrp/jschwartz.htm