A pioneer of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila was born in a small countryside town in the state of Sao Paulo to a family of coffee plantation owners. Studying painting and sculpture in Brazil, she moved to Paris in 1920 to attend the Académie Julian. At the Academy, she would study under Cubist figures André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Fernand Léger, to undergo what she would call a “military service in Cubism”, a technique that would come to characterise her vibrant and “sensuous” landscapes.

On her return to Brazil in 1922, Tarsila came across a group writers and artists known as the “Grupo Dos Cincos”, who had organised the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art), a festival of modern art, literature, and music that initiated Brazil’s break with academic art. Taking on a prominent role in the group, Tarsila began to delve further into the aspects of Brazilian culture, incorporating the indigenous roots of her country with the Modernist techniques she had studied. One of her most known works A Negra (“The Black Woman”, 1923), shows a flattened and stylized portrait of an Afro-Brazilian woman with a single prominent breast, painted against a geometric background.

Through her fusion of European avant-garde aesthetics, and the iconography native to Brazil, Tarsila played a critical role in the creation of a modern art truly unique to Brazil. The exhibition, the first and largest in the US dedicated to Tarsila’s art, highlights her pieces during the transformation of her first years in Paris and return to Brazil. Her impact in Brazilian modernism is exemplified by arguably her most known piece Abaporú (“Man Who Eats” in the Tupí-Guraraní language), which shows a human figure, seated next to a cactus under the scorching sun, which is inspired by the Manifesto Antropófago, a call for Brazil to break to create its own cultural identity, merged from the symbolic digestion—or artistic “cannibalism”—of outside influences.