Photo By Gail

“I want to be the painter of my country,“ artist Tarsila do Amaral (1886 – 1973) declared in 1923, at a moment when Brazilian artists and writers were actively developing a new, homegrown modernism. With his undulating planes, suggesting land, water, and sky, and a human-like cactus, The Moon (1928) offers the artist’s vision of a Brazilian landscape. At the same time, her visual language draws on experimental forms of European art, which she absorbed while studying in Paris. In this way, the painting exemplifies anthropofagia: the idea, introduced in a 1928 manifesto by the Brazilian poet Oswald De Andrade, that Brazil would forge its own art by ingesting – or literally ‘cannibalizing ‘– European influence.

Photographed in The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.