Maria Martins: Tropical Fictions

Maria Martins: Tropical Fictions PDF

Author: Isabella Rjeille

Publisher: Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo / Kmec Books

Published: 2022-03

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9786557770108

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Eroticism and Amazonian mythologies in the sculpture of an overlooked Brazilian Surrealist A leading figure in New York's Surrealist circles and in Latin American modernism, the Brazilian artist Maria Martins (1894-1973) was known for her bronze sculptures of hybrid and mythological figures. Through her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, Martins built a large part of her career outside Brazil, having lived in New York in the 1940s, when she was part of the city's expat Surrealist community. This survey examines Martins' central and active role in Surrealism (in a counterpart to the narratives about her romantic involvement with Duchamp), her interpretation of Amazonian mythologies and iconography from the outset of her career, and her female perspective on themes of desire and eroticism.

Gertrudes Altschul: Filigree

Gertrudes Altschul: Filigree PDF

Author: Adriano Pedrosa

Publisher: Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo / Kmec Books

Published: 2022-03

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9786557770122

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The debut monograph on the Brazilian fotoclubismo photographer This is the first monograph dedicated to the work of the trailblazing German Brazilian photographer Gertrudes Altschul (1904-62). Featuring an elegant uncoated paper cover with stamped lettering, it reproduces all 70 of the artist's known vintage prints, exploring her main themes: modern Brazilian architecture, botanical motifs and still lifes. The volume includes a selection of the artist's archival material, such as contact sheets. Of Jewish origin, Altschul migrated in 1939 from her hometown, Berlin, to Brazil with her husband, fleeing the Nazi regime. She settled in São Paulo, where she divided her time between photography and the production of flowers for hats in a factory run by the couple. Altschul was one of the few women to be part of the well-known Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) in São Paulo, an important group that brought together photographers aligned with modernist photography in Brazil.

Maria Auxiliadora

Maria Auxiliadora PDF

Author: Vários Autores

Publisher:

Published:

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9788531000430

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A exposição Maria Auxiliadora: vida cotidiana, pintura e resistência – parte do eixo temático dedicado às histórias afro-atlânticas – resgata 82 obras da artista autodidata que pintou cenas do cotidiano e da cultura afro-brasileira, todas reproduzidas no catálogo que também traz outros 60 trabalhos raros localizados durante o processo de pesquisa – compondo o mais completo livro sobre a artista já lançado. A exposição pretende renovar o interesse na original produção da artista, ampliando as leituras sobre sua vida e obra para além dos rótulos. O catálogo traz doze ensaios inéditos, três republicações de textos históricos e uma nota biográfica.

A Tropical Belle Epoque

A Tropical Belle Epoque PDF

Author: Jeffrey D. Needell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0521333741

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This book, originally published in 1987, is a socio-cultural analysis of a tropical belle epoque: Rio de Janeiro between 1898 and 1914. It relates how the city's elite evolved from the semi-rural, slave-owning patriarchy of the coffee-port seat of a monarchy into an urbane, professional, rentier upper crust dominating the centre of a 'modernising' oligarchical republic. It explores such varied topics as architecture, literature, prostitution, urban reform, the family, secondary schools, and the salon. It evokes a milieu increasingly marked by Europe, demonstrating how French and English culture permeated the lives of elite members who adapted it to their needs and perspectives as a dominant stratum of relatively recent and varied origin. This exploration of cultural 'dependency' in a unique, cosmopolitan, fin-de-siecle urban culture will also interest those concerned with the broader questions of culture and colonialism during the high tide of European imperialism.

Erika Verzutti

Erika Verzutti PDF

Author: André Mesquita

Publisher: Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo / Kmec Books

Published: 2022-03

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9786557770092

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Erika Verzutti (São Paulo, 1971) is a key artist for understanding sculpture practice today, both in the Brazilian panorama and internationally. Her thought- provoking forms explore new routes for the medium, with renewed attention to the origin and materiality of sculpture, its varied references, and its formal intelligence. Using different materials, such as bronze, concrete, stone, and papier-maché, Verzuttiœs works are sensual and tactile, both rough and refined, evoking animals and plants, landscapes and minerals, everyday objects and objects of artfrom Tarsila do Amaral to Constantin Brancusi, from René Magritte to Piero Manzoni. Often with an uncanny character, Verzuttiœs sculptures give themselves up to unpredictability, sometimes with a certain degree of humor, refusing to accept pre-established definitions or traditionshence the catalogueœs subtitle: The Indiscipline of Sculpture. This is the most thorough publication dedicated to Verzuttiœs oeuvre, which accompanies her first exhibition in a Brazilian museumthe Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. The book is divided into seven chapters organizing the artistœs practice, spanning her entire career since 2003: Becoming-Animalʺ, Tropical Pathwayʺ, World Metaphorʺ, Totemize the Tabooʺ, Wild Modernismʺ, Under Tarsilaœs Sun (and Other Stories),ʺ and Strangely Familiar.ʺ With texts written by curators, art critics, and historians, this is a fundamental book for understanding Erika Verzuttiœs work as one of the most singular contributions to the field of sculpture today.

Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire

Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire PDF

Author: Felix Driver

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0226164705

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The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire explores images of the tropical world—maps, paintings, botanical drawings, photographs, diagrams, and texts—produced by European and American travelers over the past three centuries. Bringing together a group of distinguished contributors from disciplines across the arts and humanities, this volume contains eleven beautifully illustrated essays—arranged in three sections devoted to voyages, mappings, and sites—that consider the ways that tropical places were encountered, experienced, and represented in visual form. Covering a wide range of tropical sites in the Pacific, South Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the book will appeal to a broad readership: scholars of postcolonial studies, art history, literature, imperial history, history of science, geography, and anthropology.

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics PDF

Author: Lesley Wylie

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1835535224

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Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.

Lina Bo Bardi

Lina Bo Bardi PDF

Author: José Esparza Chong Cuy

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2020-03-13

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 3791359649

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From furniture and exhibition design to monumental domestic and public architectural projects, the breadth of Lina Bo Bardi's multidisciplinary work is showcased in this richly illustrated book. Lina Bo Bardi is regarded as one of the most important architects in Brazil's history. Beginning her career as a Modernist architect in Rome, Bo Bardi and her husband emigrated to Brazil following the end of WWII. Bo Bardi quickly resumed her practice in her adopted homeland with architecture that was both modern and firmly rooted in the culture of Brazil. In 1951 she designed "Casa de Vidro" ("Glass House"), her first built work, where she and her husband would live for the rest of their lives. She also designed the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo Art Museum), a landmark of Latin American modernist architecture which opened in 1968. It was for this museum she created the iconic glass easel display system, which remains radical to date. This book presents a comprehensive record of Bo Bardi's overarching approach to art and architecture and shows how her exhibition designs, curatorial projects, and writing informed her spatial designs. Essays on Bo Bardi's life and work accompany archival material such as design sketches and writings by the artist, giving new insight into the conceptual and material processes behind this radical thinker and creator's projects. Published with MASP, Museo Jumex, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Cannibalizing Modernism

Cannibalizing Modernism PDF

Author: Adriano Pedrosa

Publisher: Masp

Published: 2019-10-22

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9788531000706

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The most comprehensive exhibition catalog dedicated to the work of Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), a pioneering figure in Latin American modernism. The focus of the exhibition is the popular, or the vernacular, a notion as complex in Brazil as it is contested, and which Tarsila explored in different ways throughout her career. The popular is associated with debates on national art or identity and the invention or construction of brasilidade, Brazilianness. In Tarsila, the popular is manifested in landscapes of the countryside or the suburbs, the farm or the favela, populated by people of indigenous or African descent, characters from Brazilian folklore, full of animals and plants, both real and fantastic. But Tarsila's palette (which served as inspiration for the colors of the exhibition design) is also popular: "pure blue, violaceous rose, bright yellow, singing green." Much of the art criticism on Tarsila to this day in Brazil has emphasized her French affiliations and genealogies, possibly in search of the artist's international legitimization, but thus marginalizing the themes, characters, and popular narratives that she constructed. Today, after successful shows in the United States and Europe, we can look at Tarsila in other ways. In this sense, the essays and commentaries on her works included in the exhibition and in the catalog are central elements of this project. It is not by chance that the controversial painting A Negra [The Negress] has received special attention from the authors and is a central work in the exhibition. Tarsila do Amaral: Cannibalizing Modernism does not seek to exhaust all these discussions, which take into account questions of race, class and colonialism. But the project does point to the need to study this artist, so fundamental in our art history, from new perspectives and approaches. This exhibition is part of a series that MASP has organized reassessing the notion of the popular in Brazil: from A mão do povo brasileiro, 1969/2016 [The Hand of the Brazilian People, 1969/2016] and Portinari popular [Popular Portinari] in 2016 to Agostinho Batista de Freitas in 2017 and Maria Auxiliadora in 2018. Tarsila do Amaral: Cannibalizing Modernism is contextualized in a full year dedicated to women artists at the museum in 2019 under the heading Women's Histories, Feminist Histories. The exhibition dialogues with two others dedicated to artists who explored the notion of the popular through different approaches: Djanira: Picturing Brazil, on view through May 19th, and Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat, on view through July 28th.

Ways to Disappear

Ways to Disappear PDF

Author: Idra Novey

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2016-02-09

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0316298506

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For fans of Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, an inventive, brilliant debut novel about the disappearance of a famous Brazilian novelist and the young translator who turns her life upside down to follow her author's trail. Beatriz Yagoda was once one of Brazil's most celebrated authors. At the age of sixty, she is mostly forgotten-until one summer afternoon when she enters a park in Rio de Janeiro, climbs into an almond tree, and disappears. When her devoted translator Emma hears the news in wintry Pittsburgh, she flies to the sticky heat of Rio. There she joins the author's son and daughter to solve the mystery of Yagoda's disappearance and satisfy the demands of the colorful characters left in her wake, including a loan shark with a debt to collect and the washed-up editor who launched Yagoda's career. What they discover is how much of her they never knew. Exquisitely imagined and as profound as it is suspenseful, Ways to Disappear is at once a thrilling story of intrigue and a radiant novel of self-reckoning. "An elegant page-turner....Charges forward with the momentum of a bullet."-New York Times Book Review