Tarsila do Amaral

Tarsila do Amaral’s (1886–1973) painting The Moon (1928), a highly stylized, desolate nocturne, grew from the artist’s desire to create a new national form of expression for Brazil. In The Moon and other paintings of the late 1920s, do Amaral successfully “cannibalized” modern European painting and Brazilian popular culture and Indigenous lore to transform them into something new. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Beverly Adams investigates do Amaral’s unique negotiation of her Brazilian identity and the contemporary innovations of Europe, a balancing act on which she built a modern art for her country.

A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2019

Featuring a tip-on cover images and paper changes throughout, Cannibalizing Modernism is the first comprehensive English-language catalog on the Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), a key figure in Latin American modernism.

After studying with Fernand Léger and André Lhote in Paris, Tarsila—as she is widely known in Brazil—cannibalized modern European references to create a unique style, with the use of caipira (rural Brazilian) colors and representations of local characters and scenes. Much of her work was made in dialogue with two leading modernist thinkers of her time, Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. Her work also parallels the development of Oswald de Andrade's antropofagia, a key concept in 20th-century Latin American thought, through which intellectuals of the tropics would cannibalize European cultural references, while also bringing indigenous, Afro-Atlantic and local elements into their work.

Cannibalizing Modernism reproduces 233 paintings alongside documents and photographs.