© Michele Greet, 2015 Devouring Surrealism: Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu Michele Greet Various scholars have suggested a contiguity or affinity between Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral’s iconic painting Abaporu (1928) and surrealism; none have engaged in an in-depth analysis of her actual relationship with surrealism, however. This close reading of Abaporu will demonstrate that Amaral deliberately and systematically engaged with the tenets and formal languages of surrealism. Her engagement was not one of pure emulation; instead she turned the surrealists’ penchant for satire and desire to disrupt hierarchical schema back on itself, parodying the images and ideas put forth by the movement to create a counter modernism. Amaral’s sardonic appropriation of surrealism’s formal languages and subversive strategies was the very factor that made Abaporu the catalyst of the anthropophagite Movement. On 11 January 1928 the Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral presented a painting to her husband, the writer and intellectual Oswald de Andrade, for his birthday. Amaral described the painting, which Andrade would later entitle Abaporu (Fig. 1), or ‘person who eats,’ as: ‘a monstrous figure, with enormous feet planted on the Brazilian earth next to a cactus.’1 Scholars have long acknowledged Abaporu as a crucial work in Amaral’s career as well as an icon of early twentieth-century Latin American art. The painting marked the beginning of her anthropophagite phase, a period from about 1928 until 1930 during which Amaral departed from the densely packed compositions of urban São Paulo and the Brazilian countryside that characterized her Pau-Brazil period to paint scenes of one or two isolated figures in lush tropical dreamscapes.2 Despite the dream-like quality of these pictures, Amaral’s engagement with surrealism in Abaporu (and the other paintings of the period), while occasionally acknowledged, has not been fully interrogated. Various scholars have suggested a contiguity or affinity with surrealism during this period; I argue, however, that Amaral’s sardonic appropriation of surrealism’s formal languages and subversive strategies was the very factor that made Abaporu the catalyst of the anthropophagite movement.3 My discussion goes beyond an examination of visual affinity to examine precisely how Amaral engaged with surrealism to move her art in a new direction and the significant impact her new vision had on the formulation of the anthropophagite movement. While I am not arguing that Amaral’s paintings held sway over European artists closely associated with surrealist poet André Breton, her sophisticated engagement with surrealism’s precepts indicates the fluidity, transmutability and relevance of surrealist intellectual and aesthetic practices for artists across disciplines, geographies, and time periods. Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 1 © Michele Greet, 2015 Fig. 1. Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu (originally exhibited as Nu), 1928, oil on canvas, 83 x 73 cm, Museo de Arte Latinoamericana de Buenos Aires, Fundación Costanini. Surrealism was the one movement that Amaral chose to deny in constructing her artistic trajectory and has therefore been downplayed in the scholarship on the artist. This deliberate disavowal suggests that there was a great deal at stake in admitting knowledge of and engagement with surrealism. As the 1920s and Amaral’s career progressed, creating nationalist modernisms became a marker of artistic independence and avant-garde status. To admit to European influence was to admit to a lack of cultural authenticity. Thus, in describing their sources, it became increasingly likely that artists would deny the transnational and transhemispheric circulation of ideas and proclaim national or regional sources of their inspiration. They deployed European constructs of primitivism strategically as a marker of cultural difference, while maintaining or simply allowing critics to assert that this primitivism was inherent. The importance of declaring aesthetic independence become the cultural equivalent of disavowing colonialism and influenced the critical assessment of modern artists for generations, obfuscating discussions of their actual participation in circuits of intellectual exchange. My hope here is to shift the discussion back toward an examination of cross-cultural interaction by examining Amaral’s selective appropriation and sardonic Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 2 © Michele Greet, 2015 contestation of surrealism as a strategy for creating a hybrid modernism that challenged traditional aesthetic and cultural hierarchies. In 1967 the Brazilian art historian Aracy Amaral (a distant family relation to the artist) wrote an article entitled ‘The Surreal in Tarsila’ [O Surreal em Tarsila] — but more aptly titled ‘The Lack of Surreal in Tarsila’— in which she argues: ‘Contrary to what it seems, never was there any intentionality or surrealist research on the part of the artist throughout her entire career.’4 Aracy Amaral claims the fantastic or bizarre incongruities in Tarsila do Amaral’s work stemmed from the experience of such things in her childhood.5 Even though the European surrealists were interested in the innocence of the child’s mind, Aracy Amaral declares Tarsila do Amaral’s use of childhood memories a unique occurrence unrelated to developments in Europe. For her Brazilian artists were actually ‘immune to surrealism as a philosophy of artistic expression and all its implications as a “school.”’6 While Aracy Amaral would later revise her opinion of Tarsila do Amaral’s relationship to surrealism, she would still insist that ‘magical or unconscious elements are minor characteristics of Tarsila do Amaral’s pictorial work, and are linked more to antropofagismo than to the surreal.’7 The issue here, however, is that the anthropophagite movement itself, with Abaporu as its harbinger, engaged in a sophisticated re-appropriation and critique of surrealist ideas and methods.8 Indeed, Oswald de Andrade made explicit the connection in 1929 stating: Let us not forget that surrealism is one of the best pre-Anthropophagist movements. The liberation of man as such through the discourse of the unconscious and through turbulent personal manifestations was without a doubt one of the most thrilling spectacles for the heart of any Anthropophagist who in these last few years has accompanied the despair of civilized man… After Surrealism, only Anthropophagy.9 The subsequent denial of a connection to surrealism, both by the artists themselves and the scholars who wrote about them, therefore seems strategic. While surrealism was certainly not Amaral’s only source during this period, its blatant absence from serious consideration deserves further investigation. Because of André Breton’s tendency to designate certain Latin American artists as surrealists (i.e. Frida Kahlo or Rufino Tamayo), a proclamation which denied these artists agency, many Latin American artists (and some European artists) and the critics who promoted them downplayed or rejected outright any debt to or engagement with surrealism.10 Writers such as the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier declared ‘the marvellous’ an innate Latin American characteristic, present long before the surrealists’ ‘discovery’ of the region.11 Such a claim served to assert Latin America’s cultural autonomy in the face of foreign influences. While resisting Breton’s imperious declarations was certainly warranted, the literature on Latin American artists, especially in the post-war period, has characteristically avoided determining the particularities of an artist’s actual connection to surrealism. Tarsila do Amaral’s personal motives for disavowing surrealism seem to stem from a desire to construct an artistic trajectory that demonstrates her progression from dependence on foreign ideas to independence. In the 1930s she wrote extensively about the arts, penning articles on cubism, Ferdinand Léger, André Lhote, Constantin Brancusi, Robert Delaunay and Henri Rousseau, all of which were important influences early in her career. But she never wrote about surrealism despite her clear Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 3 © Michele Greet, 2015 involvement with the movement’s precepts. Rather, she positioned cubism as a launching pad from which sprung the impetus for a more specifically ‘Brazilian’ art: ‘cubism, or rather modern art, gave artists a creative conscience and spirit of freedom.’12 Acknowledging a debt to surrealism in 1928 would have meant conceding that she had not fully disengaged from European sources, and that she had not succeeded in creating a purely Brazilian art, when her Brazilian supporters and many French critics claimed she had. Additionally, because there were significantly more negative responses to her 1928 exhibition, where her exploration of surrealism was most evident, than her 1926 show with its exploration of cubism and Léger’s machine aesthetic, she may have decided to promote through her writings an interpretation of her work that negated surrealist influence. Because of Aracy Amaral’s declaration and Tarsila do Amaral’s own disavowal of the movement, few scholars writing after the 1960s have engaged in an in-depth analysis of her actual relationship to surrealism. Icleia Maria Borsa Cattani argues, for example, that Amaral painted dream-like worlds in works such as Venice (1923) and A Cuca (The Bogeyman, 1924) (Fig. 2) before the advent of surrealism, and therefore could not have been significantly influenced by the movement.13 Fig. 2. Tarsila do Amaral, A Cuca (The Bogeyman), 1924, oil on canvas, 73 x 100 cm, Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France. But one could argue, on the contrary, that because her work echoed certain aspects of the movement’s aesthetic, she began to explore further its theoretical framework as it gained prominence in the Parisian art world. Additionally, Sônia Salztein insists that because of the presence of ‘irony and constructive Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 4 © Michele Greet, 2015 intelligence’ in her paintings, they could not possibly stem from a surrealist exploration of the unconscious.14 While clearly not manifestations of automatism, as I will demonstrate, Amaral’s paintings do appropriate and subtly challenge the branch of surrealism that engaged in carefully constructed ironic inversions of bourgeois social norms by presenting an imagined ‘primitive’ world as an archetypal model of unrestrained creative expression. One of the few authors who acknowledges the connection between Amaral’s work and surrealism is Maria José Justino.15 While recognizing a parallel, Justino does not examine the intricacies of Amaral’s exploration of surrealism. The following close reading of Abaporu will demonstrate that Amaral deliberately and systematically engaged with the tenets and formal languages of surrealism, not to the exclusion of other sources, but much more seriously than has previously been acknowledged. Amaral never joined the surrealist group; rather she engaged with the group’s ideas from a critical distance, selectively appropriating certain surrealist images and strategies. Her engagement was not one of pure emulation, however; instead she turned the surrealists’ penchant for satire and desire to disrupt hierarchical schema back on itself, parodying the images and ideas put forth by the movement to create a counter modernism that turned European forms into the servants of the Brazilian vanguard.16 Amaral’s Parisian Exhibitions Amaral had lived in Paris at various intervals during the 1920s, studying first at the Académie Julian and later with Lhote and Léger. For several years she maintained a studio in Montmartre that became a gathering place for the Brazilian intelligentsia and European avant-garde alike.17 She held her first individual exhibition in Paris in June of 1926 at the Galerie Percier on the famous Rue de la Boëtie, which included paintings such as The Railway Station of 1925 (Fig. 3).18 In 1927 she returned to São Paulo to focus all her efforts on preparing for her second individual exhibition that would take place in Paris in the summer of 1928, also at the Galerie Percier. While her 1926 exhibition had been well received, critics identified her work closely with that of her teacher, Léger.19 Georges Rémon stated for example: ‘Without detracting from her native grace, she aims for a powerful expression in her works that is meditated by the simple and vigorous quality that Léger has employed in his recent paintings and drawings.’20 And Raymond Cogniat asserted: ‘It is true that right now Mademoiselle Tarsila is very influenced by Léger. But she knows how to bring to her compositions a very strong personal note that stems from sensitivity and finesse, however.’21 For her 1928 show she realized that she needed to do something different to distinguish her work from that of her mentor. As a means to deviate from her obvious affiliation with Léger, Amaral began a selective exploration of surrealism, the most prominent avant-garde movement in Paris at the time, in preparation for her solo exhibition the following year. Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 5 © Michele Greet, 2015 Fig. 3. Tarsila do Amaral, The Railway Station, 1925, oil on canvas, 84.5 x 65 cm, Rubens Taufic Schahin Collection, São Paulo. Amaral spent little time in Paris before her second show opened on 18 June 1928. She arrived in March after having spent the previous eighteen months in Brazil preparing, and left soon after the exhibition closed on 2 July. This was a moment in Brazil when an emerging bourgeois class began challenging the prerogative of the agrarian aristocracy, to which Amaral belonged. In the face of this shifting class structure, rather than continuing to depict urban vitality and rural charm, by co-opting aspects of surrealism’s visual lexicon she began to create timeless myths that in their strangeness and indecipherability belie the uncertainly of the moment and question the rigidity of traditional hierarchies of social and cultural value.22 The exhibition included only twelve paintings, all of which Amaral completed in 1927 and early 1928, and demonstrated a definitive shift in style.23 Whereas Amaral composed many of the works in her 1926 exhibition, whether urban scenes or the Brazilian countryside, with densely packed geometric shapes and a smattering of figures, by 1927 she had begun to simplify her compositions. With the exception of Pastoral and Nu (Abaporu was exhibited as Nu in Paris; the implications of this will be discussed below), there are no figures present in her paintings and plants seem to take on an anthropomorphic quality in paintings such as Manacá (Fig. 4, Princess Flower), Paysage (Landscape), and Lac (Lake) to make up for the absence of people.24 She eschewed the urban scene entirely, creating instead otherworldly landscapes like Marine (Fig. 5), in lush contrasting colours, and in most of the paintings she focused on a single element, isolated in the centre of the composition as in L’Oeuf (The Egg), Sommeil (Sleep), Les Colonnes (The Columns) and La Voûte (Fig. 6, The Archway). La Voûte, in particular, seems to be a direct reference to similar archways in early paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, whose metaphysical paintings were highly admired by the surrealists and featured in La Révolution surréaliste, to which Amaral almost certainly had access as will be discussed below. Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 6 © Michele Greet, 2015 Fig. 4. Tarsila do Amaral, Manacá (Princess Flower), 1927, oil on canvas, 76 x 63.5 cm, Simão Mendel Guss Collection, São Paulo. Fig. 5. Tarsila do Amaral, Calmness I (originally exhibited as Marine), 1928, oil on canvas, current location unknown. Reproduced in Tarsila do Amaral Catalogue Raisonné http://www.base7.com.br/tarsila Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 7 © Michele Greet, 2015 Fig. 6. Tarsila do Amaral, The Toad (originally exhibited as La Voûte), 1928, oil on canvas, 50.5 x 60.5 cm, Museu de Arte Brasileira – Faap, São Paulo. While none of the critics who reviewed the 1928 exhibition specifically mentioned surrealism, they did comment on her deliberate avoidance of the real, which can be understood as figures or scenes that could potentially exist as opposed to the invented, incongruous, or fantastic images Amaral painted. Charensol called Amaral an ‘extremely gifted colourist who would benefit from not avoiding the domain of the real so much.’25 And according to G. J. Gros: ‘Mme Tarsila had strange visions in her country that stem from, I dare say, an impressive unrealism.’26 Raymond Cogniat, the art critic for La Revue de l’Amérique Latine, goes further in his assessment of Amaral’s work: She offered us, in the decorative way an artist does, a very picturesque place for her fantasy to take place. The evolution of the artist proceeded in this way: promises became certitudes and as her conception became more assured, the author felt more freedom, escaping without hesitation from reality. In this exhibition, most of the paintings are pure imagination; even if a detail is borrowed from reality (a tree, a plant, an animal), it is so stylized, reduced to its most basic shape, that it evokes a creation. All these elements are regrouped in a new order often evocative of a theatrical set and constituting a peculiar world with new connections, and unexpected perspectives.27 Cogniat’s conclusion that Amaral’s paintings, through a regrouping or rearrangement of familiar forms, create new unexpected worlds, describes one aspect of the surrealists’ project. Rather than specifically delineating her European sources as they did for her 1926 exhibition, other critics rooted their assessment of the artist’s work in how they perceived it to relate to her national identity. This critical shift in the interpretation of Amaral’s work may have contributed to her decision not to acknowledge surrealism as an influence. For example, the critic for the Cahiers d’art wrote: Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 8 © Michele Greet, 2015 Mme Tarsilla [sic] is a young Brazilian. That fact is important. Indeed, ordinarily we maintain that modern art is universal, and that it follows one sole rule, that its forms and expressions should be identical. This assertion is far too absolute. If modern art, whether it be painting, sculpture or architecture, is a phenomenon with universally accepted characteristics, it is no less true that it is characterized by influences specific to each country as well as by the personality of the artist. Therefore Tarsilla brings to modern painting her sensibility as well as the experiences of her country. Her painting is impregnated with the Indian spirit…. Tarsilla, after having been intoxicated by the Impressionist movement, came to Europe to study painting with Léger and Lhote. We wanted to see in her manner of painting what was innate in her and what Impressionism threatened to destroy. Thanks to her estrangement from Brazil, Tarsilla was able to better realize the considerable importance that the indigenous element played in her country and that she has introduced in her painting with her own unique sensibility. We hope that western influences will no longer hinder an effort that seems to us to be fortuitously oriented.28 Similarly, in ‘Tarsila et l’Antropophagie,’ printed in La Presse, Waldemar George credits Amaral’s paintings with revealing aspects of Brazilian thought: America, that ethnic entity, still holds surprises for us. If Madame Tarsila’s exhibition revealed to us an authentic artist, who combined her acute sense of colour with a taste for a fine technique, this crafted and precise technique of which Léger is the father, she also made known to us certain tendencies in contemporary Brazilian thought. Brazil, following Mexico’s example, rebels against the domination of the West in the spiritual realm. After having driven out the invader, they wish to liberate themselves from the spiritual tutelage of Europe.29 By lauding her ‘Brazilianness’ and ‘authenticity,’ this estimation of her work establishes a trajectory from artistic dependence to independence. While she had certainly developed a unique personal style by 1928, the primacy of this reading has precluded a more nuanced discussion of the sources she did engage and the manner in which she transformed them. Amaral, now a mature artist with previous experience exhibiting in Paris, was skilled at positioning her own reception and most likely advocated this revised interpretation of her work. Moreover, her Parisian reviewers were not alone in impelling her to renounce foreign influence. Ever since 1923 Mario de Andrade, a Brazilian writer and friend of Amaral’s, had been inciting her to abandon Paris for the virgin forests of Brazil: ‘Tarsila, Tarsila, turn to your true self. Abandon Gris and Lhote, agents of decrepit criticisms and decadent aesthesis? Abandon Paris! Tarsila! Tarsila! Come to the virgin woods, where there is no Negro art, nor gentle brooks. There is Virgin Woods.’30 The Negress (1923), which I will discuss below, was her first such effort, leading to an intensified exploration of ‘Brazilianness’ in the years that followed. As a foreigner living abroad, Amaral would have been exposed to the European avant-garde’s fascination with the exotic and the ‘primitive,’ which combined with Andrade’s appeal, awakened in her an acute interest in Brazilian culture. In 1924, she and a group of colleagues embarked on a trip to Brazil’s historic colonial towns in the state of Minas Gerais in search of artistic inspiration. For Amaral, this experience opened her eyes to the creative potential of Brazil’s African and indigenous heritage; consequently she focused on painted works that engaged the Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 9 © Michele Greet, 2015 European discourse on the ‘primitive,’ many of which were included in her individual exhibition in Paris in 1926. Whereas Parisian artists and intellectuals appropriated the notion of primitivism from foreign cultures with which they were not familiar, Amaral—despite her upper-class background—claimed (and critics willingly conceded) a certain privileged access to indigenous or Afro-Brazilian cultures because of her national identity, positioning herself as an authority on the subject. As Herkenhoff argues, primitivism is what gave her legitimacy in Paris.31 But hers was a strategic primitivism that stemmed primarily from an exploration of how these forms were deployed as a cultural inversion by the European avant-garde, such as Léger, Brancusi, Picasso and Rousseau, rather than some sort of lived or even intellectual connection to native cultures indigenous to Brazil.32 By 1928, she began deliberately avoiding acknowledgment of European influence, despite her explicit exploration of surrealism, in a conscious effort to reinforce her ‘authenticity’ in the eyes of the Parisian public. Because she transformed and redeployed her surrealist sources in a more subtle and sophisticated way than her appropriation of Léger’s style, however, many Parisian critics also tended to ignore those aspects of her work that referenced Parisian avant-garde forms because for them conceding influence or artistic dialogue sullied their quest to identify cultural authenticity. While some reviewers were satisfied with constructing the artist as a cultural ‘primitive,’ her choice of frames seemed to simultaneously draw attention to and disrupt this classification, and therefore undermine an interpretation of her work as merely pandering to a European fascination with the ‘primitive.’ Amaral had commissioned Pierre-Emile Legrain (1889-1929), a cutting-edge designer working in an Art Deco style, to make the frames for her 1926 exhibition and used him again for her exhibition in 1928. Legrain, who was known for his innovative work as a bookbinder and furniture designer, designed for two wealthy Parisian patrons, Jacques Ducet, a couturier, and Jeanne Tachard, a milliner, who both owned extensive collections of African objects that inspired Legrain’s creations.33 The frames he made for Amaral’s paintings, most of which are now lost, incorporated an eclectic range of unconventional materials including lizard skin, parchment paper, shards of mirrored glass, corrugated cardboard, and leather, enhancing the unusual themes in the paintings they enclosed.34 As Amaral asserted, Legrain used ‘anything that, by its material or form, was a complement, an extension of the painting.’35 Legrain’s Art Deco frames seemed to mock Parisian audiences’ desire to comprehend Amaral’s work in terms of her national identity, however, because while they occasionally hinted at the ‘exotic’ in their use of materials like lizard skin, their whimsy and materiality made the viewer acutely aware of the constructed nature of the paintings. Whereas critics such as Raymond Cogniat appreciated the wit and playfulness in her choice of frames (Fig. 7) - ‘Madame Tarsila presents us with a fantasy that is not lacking in humour. The very amusing frames by Pierre Legrain, with their unexpected construction, add to the canvases by Madame Tarsila,’36 - others found them confusing, and referred to these constructions as ‘tableaux-objets’ [painting-objects].37 This label was not meant as a compliment. This sense of confusion suggests that Amaral had transgressed a pictorial convention, a convention that the surrealists would also challenge in Papers of Surrealism, Issue 11, Spring 2015 10