Antropofagia Analysis

Tarsila do Amaral’s “Antropofagia” stands out to me the most as it is the first piece that one sees as they walk in the exhibition. The viewer is taken aback by the vibrant shades of orange that immediately catch their eye. The closer the viewer gets to the painting, the more that they can make out of the simple shapes that are common in Tarsila’s work. These shapes are outlined in darker colors that contrast with the colors of what is behind them. There are two figures sitting side by side in the foreground, the focus of the painting, and behind them is the foliage of Brazil where Tarsila is from and where she bases her work. Her nativeness to Brazil is a significant part of understanding her art as it is a source of her drive to change modern …show more content…
She explores the body in a new way as she represents the face and changes the size of one breast. In doing this, she challenges modern representations of people and race. She painted “A Negra” when she was in Paris as she was beginning to understand her roots. This turning point is similar to what students in Paris had done in the creation of African art at this time. They encountered art that had once been representative of their culture and gave them food for thought on how to create their own take on modern African art (Mercer 43). Overlapping with this figure is the figure from “Abaporu” which is similar to “A Negra” in that it represents a figure in the same style, but in this case, one with no clear face, gender, or race. Despite having from French artists, Tarsila rejects surrealism as defining this piece of work even though the work is similar in its simplicity and nonsensicle scenes. Some scholars consider this to be a result of her rejection of traditional modes of artistry and her belief that everything she had been working on at the time stemmed from her own understanding of the culture in which she was …show more content…
The similarities are that in this painting and many of his others, Leger uses aspects of his culture to create his work. He uses bold colors and machine-like shapes and inanimate objects to form scenes. This skill may remind viewers of Brancusi’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. These two works were both created in relation to World War I and used militarized aspects of art and unrelated shapes to create figures. This also shows how Leger and Tarsila’s work contrast. While he uses cubist strategies to combine many real time objects in creating his works, Tarsila uses the different planes often seen in cubism, the shapes and colors typical of surrealism, and nationalizes them to represent her own culture. Similarly to Tarsila’s, Leger’s goal is to attract a crowd of everyday people as he avoids idyllic representations that would only attract a few groups of people. They are both working towards connecting with big groups of people so that everyone may understand art and their changing country. For Tarsila, that is understanding the culture and art that had been forgotten, and for Leger, understanding the social makeup of the time period that they were living