Anita Malfatti - Marcelo Guimarães Lima
oil on canvas, 1915-1916
The role of Anica Malfatti as the absolute pioneer of Brazilian modern art marked both her career and her work. The artist was 28 years old when her solo show of modern paintings in São Paulo in 1917 provoked the furore of the press and the public in the cosmopolitan, and yet in many ways provincial, state capital.
In the early decades of the 20th century São Paulo was a rapidly developing industrial city and the most important business centre of Brazil. In one sense, Malfatti's early works reflected the spiritual energies of the place. She was the daughter of immigrants in a city marked by large-scale immigration - her father was Italian, an engineer by profession, her mother, a North American of German descent, was an amateur painter. Of a relatively stable, middle-class family, Malfatti followed the traditional educational path of aspiring artists in Brazil that included a period of study in Europe, whether funded by public grants through annual competitions or by private patronage. The specific difference in her case was not only her young age at the time of her departure to Europe but the fact that the trip, a personal and familial enterprise, combined an educational and professional goal with the private aspect of a visit to the continent of her ancestors.
In 1910 she went to Germany, the country of her maternal forebears, to study painting at the Berlin Academy, and at the end of 1914, after a brief period back in São Paulo, she departed for New York. Her formative years as a young artist, therefore, were spent outside Brazil, and nothing, apart from her own personal sensibility and initiative, and especially nothing in her previous educational experience, prepared her for the artistic choices she made while in Germany, which determined the path of development of her art.
In Berlin she felt dissatisfied with the rigidity of the traditional instruction at the Academy and gravitated towards the experimental and innovative works of the German Avant-garde. She studied under Lovis Corinth and something of the influence of the German painter, a search for immediacy of form and colour, could be seen in her first (and rather inconspicuous) solo exhibition in São Paulo in 1914, aspects of which were identified by contemporary critics as a lack of mastery and technical crudeness.
Uncompromisingly, she reaffirmed her avant-garde leanings in New York, where she studied for a brief period at the Art Students League and with. more concentration at the Independent School of Art under the American painter Homer Boss. During her period in New York she met, among other American and European avant-garde artists, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, and produced the greater part of her works for her exhibition of 1917 in São Paulo. Her New York period was indeed a confirmation of the expressionist disposition she had defined in direct contact with the works of the German avant-garde artists in Europe.
The most effective works of Malfatti's New York period concentrated on the isolated human figure painted directly, emotionally, emphatically, with a firm, vigorous delineation of form and a use of colour that reverberated the subjective tones, the emotional energies of the encounter of artist and sitter in the space of the canvas.
oil on canvas, 1917
In Yellow Man and The Japanese painted in 1915-16, and in The Idiot of 1917, the half-figure confronts the viewer against a background of broken diagonals or of raw surfaces of colour created with rapid, energetic brush strokes. These concentrated and self-absorbed individuals are the masks of the artist's subjectivity.
Anita Malfatti - O Homem Amarelo / The Yellow Man,
oil on canvas, 1915-1916
These were the very works that at first met with incomprehension in São Paulo and then with universal condemnation and ridicule after the show was harshly criticized by the writer Monteiro Lobato in a newspaper article whose title, "Paranoia or hoax?", intended to define not only Malfatti's works but modern art in general as the natural product of a deranged mind or, in the absence of a mental condition, the fruit of a malicious intent to deceive the credulous. The immediate result of Lobato's attack was an atmosphere of public scandal surrounding the exhibition and the sudden notoriety of the young painter.
To others, however, the initial feelings of discomfort in front of those "distorted" images and unusual colour harmonies gave way to interest and soon to the positive evaluation of the quality and the importance of the paintings. Such was the case of the writer and poet Mario de Andrade, later one of the leading figures of modern Brazilian literature, for whom the works of Malfatti had the effect of a sudden revelation of a new artistic universe in the making.
Mario de Andrade was part of a group of (mostly young) artists and writers that congregated informally in defence of Malfatti's works and of modern art - a group that was to give impulse to the celebrations of the Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo in 1922. The Semana repeated in a larger dimension the scandals associated with modern art in the mind of the Brazilian public since Malfatti's show, but this time as a collective and organised effort of the artists with the deliberate aim of "upsetting the bourgeois". The Semana consolidated Modernismo (modernism) as a growing and vital movement in Brazilian art, in a sense bringing to realisation what Malfatti started on a purely individual basis in 1917.
To Malfatti, however, the immediate results of her exhibition were isolation, the loss of sales and the loss of students, a solitary struggle for professional and artistic survival in which the confident experimental character and subjective emotional dimension of her expressionist paintings gave way gradually to an eclecticism of pure aesthetic experimentation on the one hand and the search for stylistic "syntheses" between modern and traditional concepts on the other. Her contact with modern French art in Paris from 1923 to 1928. also contributed to this synthesis.
After 1922 the consolidation of Brazilian modernism occurred in the creation of a modern and national art thanks to the efforts of painters such as Tarsila do Amaral, Rego Monteiro and Di. Cavalcanti, and writers such as Mario de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. The writers developed the ideological basis and theoretical foundations of the Movimento Modernista in manifestoes and. critical works as well as fiction and poetry.
The contributions of Anita Malfatti to modern Brazilian art never attained the intensity of the heroic years. At times her later paintings alluded to the achievements of the early years. In a general way, however, Malfatti tended towards an individualized thematic elaboration of, or a response to, some of the nationalist and popular preoccupations of the modernists and their successors in the 1930s and 1940s. Without achieving either the formal or the ideological impact of the avantgarde artists, her works tended more and more towards a somewhat idiosyncratic "return to innocence", a sort of artistic quietism, exemplified in some of the paintings of landscapes of rural Brazil and the depictions of peasant life of her later years.
Anita Malfatti - Marcelo Guimarães Lima
in Dictionary of Women Artists, D. Gaze editor, 1997
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