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Getting to Know Latin America
John Haberin New York City
Tarsila do Amaral, Adriana Varejão, and Zilia Sánchez
It did not take contemporary awareness of race and culture to discover the dignity of native people. Still, at a time when Europe valued other cultures for their "primitivism," would it surprise you to know that it took a woman?
In 1922, São Paulo celebrated (I kid you not) Modern Art Week. Born to the life of plantation owners and educated in Paris, Tarsila do Amaral took more than a week. She also had a learning curve of her own when it came to Brazil, and she made good use of it. She found in it not only a subject for Cubism, but a language for her titles and her art. And where Tarsila found her way into the new century through a trip to her nation's heartlands, Latin American women today make it look easy, without so much as leaving home. 
Also in Brazil, Adriana Varejão invokes Native American tradition for her images of women, but here tradition and feminism alike begin and end with her. Zilia Sánchez calls ink drawings from 1972 her Furies, but her decades of shaped canvas, in Cuba and then Puerto Rico, have an enduring calm. Much of it alludes to heroines and warriors, but for her the most heroic struggle is persistence.
Fine young cannibals
Tarsila do Amaral and a poet, her future husband, caught the train to Rio and then the colonial hinterlands to get to know the natives and to modernize Brazil. They delighted in what they saw. The next year, she had her first major painting with A Negra, or "the black woman" (not just "a black woman," of course)—a nude with large lips and a single hanging breast, set against staggered bands of local colors. "I feel," she wrote home, "increasingly Brazilian." Oswalde de Andrade, in turn, was to give their movement a name with his "Manifesto of Anthropophagy," or cannibalism, after the customs of the country. Its cover has touches of the Bauhaus and Art Nouveau, and the painter contributed the frontispiece, Abaporu. She also made it fun.
It must sound like a parable of everything that could go wrong with modern art. It reduces others to stereotypes, in the name of celebrating them—with "traditional cities," she wrote, as "mirrors of Brazil's primitive soul." She painted the black woman not from life, but from a photograph, fully clothed. She also painted medicinal plants and grinning animals, like A Cuca (or "critter"), in a fanciful frame. The movement's very name reeks of anthropology rather than solidarity. But then who is cannibalizing whom?
Never mind, because she never stops asking just that. She is celebrating at MoMA, but also sending up stereotypes every step of the way, in order to become "the painter of my country." She freely mixes Cubism and observation, as Pablo Picasso faced with African art never could. She combines sophistication and idealism, much as the manifesto sought "the one and only world principle" that "unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically." Landscapes hold steel towers and factories along with nearby slums and shantytowns, or favelas, with wash on the line—and they are no less welcoming for that. One calls the artist by her first name because so today does Brazil.
Early paintings are closer to Fernand Léger, with whom she studied, than to Picasso. One sets a rounded nude in front of a landscape painting, because Tarsila is already drawn more to the country than to the urban scene. Abaporu, from the vernacular for cannibal, centers on a nude as well, with its elbow on its knee as in any number of western paintings. It nestles beneath a cactus in the glow of a yellow-orange sun, with slices like a lemon's to boot. Its long arm and preposterously large foot dwarf a small head, and the elbow could well be its nose. Is she resting or posing, melancholy or asleep?
Much else, too, can seem simultaneously comic and languid. Tarsila's colors run to green plants and purple earth beneath graded yellow, orange, and blue skies. Either nudes or plants can set the foreground. MoMA compares Calmaria II (or "calmness") to the work of Giorgio de Chirico, but her dreams never become nightmares. Her rhythms derive from the towers, but also comic-strip repetition. Their energy and humor have a parallel in another who brought Paris to the Americas, Stuart Davis in New York.
She died in her late eighties, in 1973, after a long turn to socialist realism—but the curators, Luis Pérez-Oramas and Stephanie D'Alessandro with Karen Grimson, stick almost entirely to six years after the train trip, with drawings and memorabilia outnumbering the paintings. Not much happens in those years, and whimsy can wear quickly, especially in the drawings. It seems to have worn for Tarsila as well, with the market failure in 1928 followed by a military coup. One last painting, from 1933, piles on the faces of workers as portraits of anxiety. Their skin comes in every color, because she still wants to be the painter of native peoples and her country. Others to come would bridge Europe and South America with the same aim, from Horacio Coppola in 1936 to Lygia Clark and Grupo Frente half a century later, but it may take a long time to recover the idealism and the fun.
Inbreeding
Adriana Varejão has every right to call her paintings Kindred Spirits. Each presents none other than herself. A clan of twenty-nine cannot get more inbred than that. Yet they serve as no more than a ground for a freer application of paint—decorating her, exalting her, obliterating her, and obscuring her. They show her in the same three-quarter view, at once banal and defiant. Adding Native American tribal practices to portraiture, like Jimmie Durham, they give a double meaning to face painting.
Not that they begin or end with either vision of her native Brazil, no more than shadows for Regina Silveira. Like Remy Jungerman, they also draw on contemporary American art more than cultural anthropology or art history. She mentions Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Paul Thek, and Llyn Foulkes, and at times I could almost convince myself that I had seen them here. Maybe it matters that no one withdraws from his art as much as LeWitt or exposes his sexuality and abjection as much as Thek. Maybe it matters that no one brings the touch of a woman's hand as much as Martin or the Disneyfication of Surrealism as much as Foulkes. Maybe it matters, too, that Cindy Sherman has riffed on cultural models and a woman's body, disguise and self-presentation, while working in series.
Varejão should keep one guessing just what matters. Those parallel marks on her cheeks may make her a cat-woman or a canvas for Minimalism. That ascending red may serve as a tribal headdress, and that black cloud spattering her forehead may belong to Minimalism's nastier explosions. Those two ideas of kindred spirits, at once preposterously narrow and ever so broad, are two sides of the same thing. Whether as self-portraits or as borrowings from all over, they claim Western art as potentially Brazilian and art of the Americas as her own. Apparently the Portuguese for mixed breed, mestizaje, is an insult only for the colonizers.
Not that she is pointing fingers or entirely on an ego-trip. The faces also echo paintings of Native Americans by George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, among others, in nineteenth century America, as well as early photography. She appears to admire both, and she has to be aware of Brazil's contribution to Latin American architecture after Le Corbusier. Still, her embrace of others comes with an edge. She describes her approach to Western art as cannibalizing, after the theories of Oswald de Andrade, a Brazilian poet. This meal may be hard to swallow.
A second series takes her further into North America and beyond. It also takes her further into both ritual and abstraction. Her Mimbres resemble the sliced canvases of Lucio Fontana and Arte Povera in Italy. Up close, though, they seem as much crafted as destroyed. Somehow the thick fragments could still fit nicely together—perhaps another metaphor for the puzzle of cross-cultural traditions. Their wavy outlines serve as composition.
Their blacks, whites, and mute colors also bring them closer to pottery, including Chinese ceramics that sought and valued cracks. European colonizers brought painted ceramics to Brazil as well, but the shattering took on new meaning in the New World. The Mimbres cultures of the American southwest did it, the gallery explains (quoting a curator for Varejão in Dallas, Pedro Alonzo), in order to bury the fragments with the dead. For all the difference between the self-portraits and monochromes, they are kindred spirits after all. Like many global alternatives to Minimalism, these are artier and less industrial, with their own inbreeding. They may yet, though, shatter before your eyes.
Heroines and warriors
Zilia Sánchez is having her first modest museum retrospective at age ninety-three, and she still goes to her studio in Puerto Rico every day. She does, that is, give or take the storm that devastated her studio and the island alike. Only Carmen Herrera, another painter from Cuba, may have found fame and fortune later, but she is not one to complain. In a show called "Soy Isla (I Am an Island)" at El Museo del Barrio, she thinks of herself not as a lonely rock or, as with an upcoming show, "An Emphasis on Resistance," but rather as able "to float and feel free." Not that she ever cared to work entirely apart, as an artist, set designer, and opponent of the regime within a movement in Cuba—or as a magazine contributor and teacher for nearly fifty years now in Puerto Rico. Still, the bulges and nipples are hers as a woman.
She speaks of Erotic Topologies, and the black squiggles that intrude now then are "tattoos." Furies pick up the furious swirls of the show's very first work, a self-portrait in colored ink from 1954. Her Lunar series puns on the Spanish for a beauty mark or mole. Still, the tattoos spell out exactly nothing, and the lunar surfaces unfold around 1969, when all eyes were on the moon. Sánchez is never less than abstract and elegant, and her work plays out against others. It is not even all that sexy.
Nor are her warriors simply winners. She names a painting for Antigone, who persisted in the struggle to bury her brother, but at a cost. She names another for Joan of Arc, who paid her price, too, for reclaiming France for the French. The painting's blue descends in a slim pour to either side in a diptych, like less than heroic legs. Another set of panels depicts the Trojan women, who spend their time on stage for Euripides lamenting what they have lost before yielding themselves to exile, captivity, and death—while cement behind iron bars brings Sánchez closer to political repression in the present. Still, she is not one to look back.
She often works with multiple panels and the gaps between them. They have a parallel Arte Povera in Italy, and one could mistake the shaped canvas for molded plastic. She also plays on the departure from symmetry. The rises in Trojan Women appear at varied heights, like a procession of heads, but then her tits can never sit properly side by side. In more recent work, they may be cut off as well, to become plateaus overlaid in pale colors rather than the earlier shades of black and gray. At her best, they glow.
Like Herrera and Robert Ryman, Sánchez nurtures white space above all. Like them and Ellsworth Kelly, she managed to reconcile painting and Minimalism—and she did have a brief stay in New York, where she may also have admired carved and curved monochrome in sculpture from Louise Nevelson. The stay, in her forties, no doubt completed her paring back from something closer to Abstract Expressionism. Some early canvas has the cryptic, abstract symbolism of still another Cuban artist, Wilfredo Lam, and the simplification helped undo a wrong turn after a trip to Europe. Some work from then has the dark, crusty surfaces of Antoni Tàpies in Spain as its skin. She was not bad at it, but it looks too much like imitation.
When it comes down to it, she was just returning to normal. Just when you think that you have pinned down a chronology, another piece comes earlier or later than you expected. It can feel like a narrowing, and she never quite matches Herrera's bold simplicity. She is content to float free. A work from 2000 even lies flat, like a raft, and a video takes it out onto actual waters. Her body is not backing down.
Tarsila do Amaral ran at The Museum of Modern Art through June 3, 2018, Adriana Varejão at Lehmann Maupin through June 19, 2016, and Zilia Sánchez at El Museo del Barrio through March 22, 2020.