From São Paulo to Paris and Back Again: Tarsila do Amaral

Abstract

At the closure of Tarsila do Amaral’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) at the end of July 2019, a total of 402,850 visitors had viewed the exhibition (fig. 1). Tarsila Popular thus fittingly became the most visited show in the museum’s history, displacing a 1997 Monet blockbuster.[1] The show had followed shortly upon the well-received Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, the first monographic exhibition of the painter in the United States, which was co-organized by the Chicago Art Institute (October 8, 2017–January 7, 2018) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (February 11–June 3, 2018). This recent spotlight on the Brazilian artist joins a series of institutional efforts to make modernism more global by emphasizing previously overlooked geographies and artists’ mobility between different parts of the globe.