Tarsila do Amaral
Tarsila do Amaral is associated with pivotal modern art projects of the 1920s, and her paintings and drawings contributed to avant-garde’s larger goal of establishing a national Brazilian identity, or Brasilidade.
She painted Morro da Favela (1924) during her Pau-Brasil period, in a style that developed in dialogue with ideas put forth by Oswald de Andrade in his 1924 Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil. It aimed to integrate the “primitive” and folkloric with the modern. In Morro da Favela, do Amaral depicts an idealized view of Afro-Brazilians in a favela located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The bright, tropical colors and the serenity of the subjects belie the grueling reality of life in a shantytown. Tarsila later acknowledged that she represented Afro-Brazilian subjects and used tropical colors to engage a then-popular understanding of exoticism.
It cannot simply be said, however, that Tarsila’s work represents an exploitative or dehumanizing exoticization of Afro-Brazilian bodies, and nothing more. It is important to remember that do Amaral’s representation of Brasilidade with a non-white body was deeply radical at the time, despite the fact that Brazil is an ethnically diverse country. The complexity of do Amaral’s representation of race is one of the most interesting aspects of her work.
Madeline Murphy Turner. Tarsila do Amaral: inventing modern art in Brazil. Internet:https://brooklynrail.org (adapted).
Considering the ideas stated in the previous text and the words used in it, judge the following item.
The text indicates that the Brasilidade represented in Morro da Favela is closely connected to an idealized reality as to the lives of Afro-Brazilians.
