Tarsila do Amaral's First French Retrospective at Musée du Luxembourg

The Musée du Luxembourg in Paris presents 'Tarsila do Amaral. Dipingere il Brasile moderno', the first comprehensive retrospective in France dedicated to the Brazilian modernist painter (Capivari, 1886 – São Paulo, 1973). Curated by Cecilia Braschi, the exhibition spans Tarsila's entire career from her early training in Paris to the 1960s, including late works often overlooked by international critics. A co-founder of the Grupo dos Cinco alongside Anita Malfatti, Menotti del Picchia, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila was a key figure in the Movimento Antropofágico, whose 1928 painting 'Abaporu' exemplifies the movement's concept of cultural cannibalism. The show highlights her stylistic evolution in parallel with Brazil's cultural history, emphasizing her dual identity as a high-society woman and an avant-garde artist. Her formative years in French culture and her 1922 return to Brazil after the Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo—a pivotal event for Brazilian modernism—shaped her unique visual language. Tarsila blended European abstract techniques with Brazilian motifs such as houses, churches, exotic nature, and vibrant colors, creating a distinctive national aesthetic. The exhibition also contextualizes her work within the intellectual ferment of São Paulo's modernist revolution, fueled by the Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928), which advocated for the assimilation and 'digestion' of foreign cultures to forge an independent Brazilian art.