Discovering a unique Brazilian modernist at Art Institute exhibit

If asked to make a list of the outstanding female artists of Latin America in the 20th century, it is a good bet the single name that might come to mind is Frida Kahlo, along with a couple of photographers (Graciela Iturbide and Lola Alvarez Bravo), all from Mexico.

All that might change in the coming months thanks to the enchanting, eye-opening new exhibit, “Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil,” which runs through Jan. 7, 2018, at the Art Institute of Chicago and will then move to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in February.

A visit to the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, where the show now brightens the walls with more than 120 paintings, drawings, and historical documents (scrapbooks, photographs, letters, book illustrations) from the 1920s — the artist’s most productive, game-changing period — proves to be both a revelation and a pure smile-inducing pleasure. Credited as the painter who most fully “achieved Brazilian aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style,” the artist, who is referred to by her first name, is a brilliant colorist with a wonderfully whimsical turn of mind. And while her work is beloved in her native Brazil, where she is considered a major force in 20th century modernism, it has been all but unknown in North America, at least until now.

Tarsila could lay down a line of paint with the geometric precision and distinctive sense of design of the French Cubist, Fernand Leger. She could playfully distort the shapes of the human body, of real and imaginary creatures, and of the lush cacti and other vegetation of her homeland with a mix of Surrealist distortion, childlike simplicity and ripe sensuality. And she had an imagination that easily mixed folk art charm with great sophistication.

Born in the countryside of Sao Paolo, Tarsila (1886 – 1973), was from a wealthy family of coffee growers, and was one of the rare upper class girls of her time to be encouraged to pursue higher education. She received early training with the conservative academic painters of Sao Paulo, but beginning in 1920 she spent two years in Paris. A return trip to that city in December, 1922 — just five months after she had come home to Brazil — was the pivotal moment in her career as she experienced the work of the Cubists, Futurists and Expressionists, and observed their interest in indigenous cultures of Africa and beyond. Clearly she began to sense that the indigenous cultures of Brazil could infuse her own modernist work. And in 1923 she painted one of her most renowned (and show-stopping) canvases, “A Negra” — the figure of a large black woman with a single prominent breast set against a flat wall of oblong “stripes” that seem to presage Frank Stella’s paintings from many decades later.

Tarsila was a member of the so-called “Grupo dos Cinco” (Group of Five) comprised of other avant-garde Brazilian artists, among whom was the poet and impresario Oswald de Andrade, her frequent traveling companion (later her husband). And in 1928-1929, along with Andrade, she was instrumental in forming Antropophagy, an art movement described in the exhibition as “promoting the idea of devouring, digesting, and transforming European and other artistic influences in order to make something entirely new.” Her painting, “Abaporu” (“The Man That Eats People”) served as an inspiration for its manifesto.

But Tarsila’s glory period was short-lived, for it was also in 1929 that her marriage and artistic partnership with Andrade ended, and the U.S. stock market crashed, resulting in the plummeting of coffee prices and the loss of Tarsila’s family fortune. Her sense of isolation and loss at the time is powerfully suggested in the haunting 1930 painting, “Lonely Figure,” in which she almost appears to become part of a spare but exotic landscape.

In 1930 Tarsila also was briefly imprisoned by the new authoritarian government in Brazil due to her connection with communist activities. That connection is stunningly suggested in “Workers,” a large canvas from 1933 that pictures a cluster of dozens of diverse faces set against factory smokestacks. It was the end of whimsy.