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Anita Malfatti
The shifting ground of modernism [Part 2]
By Marguerite Itamar Harrison*

Anita Malfatti’s pioneering role in the history of Brazilian Modernism has been unequivocally recognized. This essay delves beneath such recognition to underscore the role international Modernist exhibitions and anti-academic art instruction played in the artist’s early career. In doing so, my purpose is to position the artist within a broader Modernist scope, and thus, validate her role beyond Brazilian parameters.

CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS ISSUE

Between May and September of 1912, the fourth Sonderbund took place in Cologne (the others had previously occurred in Dusseldorf). It was designed to be a didactic retrospective, comprised of twenty-five main galleries, six hundred paintings, and fifty sculptures, as well as four rooms dedicated to the applied arts. With the exception of El Greco, the artists represented were all Modern. The exhibition was organized by artists representing nine different countries (France and Germany had the most contributions).

A large retrospective of Van Gogh’s works was the central focus of the exhibition, with the Norwegian artist Munch’s works receiving the greatest attention after Van Gogh [Altschuler 60]. This exhibition is credited with stimulating new, more radical artistic movements in the pre-war years. It is also the immediate model for the Armory Show in New York. Indeed, organizers of the Armory Show attended the final days of the Sonderbund in Cologne and were intent on duplicating its design.

In connection with Anita Malfatti’s own work, Marta Rossetti Batista states that the Sonderbund legitimized the artist’s own pursuits. "In Cologne the student from São Paulo saw an enormous display of Modern Art that was already well established, that already had a history of continuous evolution, from the Impressionists to the Cubists to the Expressionists" [Batista 19]. This visual context legitimized Malfatti’s own modernist tendencies: "it gave her the conviction to follow her already modern course" [Ibid 18].

Officially entitled The International Exhibition of Modernist Art, The Armory Show emulated the Sonderbund in large part due to Arthur Davies’s vision. As President of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors he is credited with adding the European component to the Show of American art.

In the Fall of 1912 Davies had received the catalog of the Sonderbund exhibition and was quoted as saying: "I wish we could have a show like this" [Goodrich 22]. With the aid of artists Walter Kuhn and Walter Pach, who served as liaisons with the avant-garde artists in Europe, the Armory Show was able to realize Davies’s dream of providing North-Americans with a "firsthand view of European Modernist art" [Ibid 24]. In quantitative terms European art was to represent one-third of the Armory Show’s total entries.

This portion of the show was indeed retrospective in scope: it included Goya, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Cézanne, Seurat and Post-Impressionists, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Picabia, and Delaunay. Cubism was the Armory Show’s main attraction. Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase, its most scandalous entry [Batista 32].

Homer Boss was one of the North-American artists whose works were included in the Show. Boss exhibited two paintings: the first was entitled Portrait, or Young Woman in Blue and Gold, similar in style to the work entitled Young Woman in Black, of 1910. As Susan Udell has noted, "this portrait "represented Boss’s traditional early style of painting" [Udell 17]. Indeed, we might compare it to Anita Malfatti’s Retrato de homem, a male portrait executed in Germany around the same time: at this point the artist had not yet liberated her color palette, but was giving formal attention to facial details through precise brushstrokes, contrasting them with an abstract background.

Boss’s other work in the Armory Show, A Study (Land and Sea), from 1912, was "a landscape in which light and color prevailed." According to Udell, "[w]ith this painting Boss had taken a bold step in a new direction…" [17] This landscape has a direct correlation to the work of Anita Malfatti. Before attending the Independent School of Art in New York, Malfatti had joined Homer Boss and other pupils from the School on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine, during the summer of 1915. Several of Malfatti’s paintings from this summer experience can be related to Boss’s own landscapes, in which light and color are again emphasized. We might compare Boss’s landscape to Malfatti’s Farol (or Lighthouse). And more appropriately, to her A Ventania (or Windstorm).

It is abundantly clear from Anita Malfatti’s biography that her experience at the Independent School of Art in New York between September of 1915 and May of 1916 (and on Monhegan during the summer of 1915) represented a momentous period in her career. Moreover, it is well documented that Malfatti’s sojourn in New York City was one of the happiest of her entire life, and that she credits Homer Boss for directing the methodology of her art while also communicating a philosophy of living that placed art at its core [Batista 31].

Anita Malfatti assertively describes the Independent School of Art as having " an atmosphere unlike any other I’ve seen elsewhere." [Batista 51] Emphasis on experimentalism provided Malfatti with the necessary incentives to express herself freely. This sense of philosophical and artistic harmony, reinforced by the congeniality Anita felt toward her fellow students, was in turn reflected in her art. It is said that the portraits she painted at the School, such as The Woman with Green Hair, are considered to be the finest of her entire career [Batista 43].

It is important to stress that within the work done by pupils of the Independent School, Malfatti’s is of exceptional quality, and this excellence discredits any reductionist belief that she "learned" from her North-American peers. From a critical point of view, Malfatti’s work was equal to, if not better than, that of most of her colleagues. What is underplayed, perhaps, is that Anita Malfatti’s writings about her New York experience have in turn served to validate Homer Boss’s own contributions to North-American Modernism, and in particular, to his radical method of art instruction. In her essay on Boss, Udell credits Anita Malfatti’s fame, as one of Brazil’s premier Modernists, with playing a significant role in the recognition of Homer Boss as art school director, teacher, mentor, and visionary [Udell 18-19].

On the subject of Boss, Walter Pach has stated: "If an artist is willing to float with the stream, it will carry him along quite nicely; if he wants to strike out on a new course, to express the ideas that are his own and no other man’s he must expect that it will take a certain time for the public to follow him" [as reproduced in Udell 70].

According to Boss’s principles, the Independent School was defined as follows: "That it be a school independent in the fullest sense of the word. Have no affiliations, conform to no dogma or creed of Art, impose no formula upon its members and exercise no authority over them." The Independent School of Art created an exceptional environment largely due to Boss’s style of teaching. In Boss’s own words: "I believe that the function of the teacher is to be the helper, not the master—the dictator" [Ibid 18].

According to Marta Rossetti Batista, the Independent School was a Modernist school, with an insurgent, rather than academic spirit [Batista 38]. Boss’s methods of teaching were original. For instance, several artists, including Malfatti, have underscored his emphasis on the body’s musculature, and his insistence on anatomy lessons. A NYTimes article published in May of 1916 described Boss’s life classes: "Mr. Boss has adopted the ingenious plan of building up a muscular organization on the scaffolding of a human skeleton—[on a rotating platform]—with clay or wax, so that his pupils can follow each development of anatomical relations as directly as possible and can at once perceive the bony structure and its drapery" [as reproduced in Udell 19]. In conjunction with this process of building certain muscles on a skeleton, Boss would use a live model to demonstrate the movement of the muscles in question.

That the Armory Show directly influenced the character of the Independent School is unquestionable. One need only read the following personal statement by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, a contemporary of Anita Malfatti’s at the School, who captured the School’s atmosphere: "Everybody was talking about the Armory Show. Cubism was in the air. Reproductions of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the masters of the late nineteenth century filled the walls of the school" [as quoted in Udell 18].

The Independent School was further exceptional in the diversity of people who frequented its space: it attracted not only visual artists but writers, dancers, and other performing artists as well, from both North America and Europe. Other Modernists associated with it included Isadora Duncan and her dance troupe (some of the female dancers served as artists’models), Diaghilev and members of the Russian ballet, the French artist Marcel Duchamp, and the Russian writer Maxim Gorki. Discussions between visitors, pupils, and instructors did not strictly revolve around aesthetic issues, but also touched on the finer points of literature, music, ballet, choreography, and set design [Batista 38-39].

The revolutionary paintings of Anita’s that so shocked the Brazilian public in 1917, and that subsequently were to awaken Brazil’s first modernists, were portraits of these international citizens, often newly-arrived immigrants and refugees to New York City. The model for O Homem Amarelo, [see Illustration 4] for instance, was a poor Italian immigrant off the street [Batista 52]. Another of her works from this time, O Japonês, could, perhaps, be a portrait of fellow artist Kuniyoshi.

During her tenure at the Independent School of Art, Anita Malfatti was also influenced by the school’s manager, A.S. Baylinson, who was originally from Russia [see Malfatti’s charcoal drawing which is a portrait of "Baylie," as he was affectionately called]. Malfatti and Baylinson were said to have painted side-by-side Cubist Nudes. Several of Baylinson’s paintings were included in the 1917 exhibition in São Paulo, and seem to have been the target of much criticism, although they did not receive the invective to which Malfatti’s own paintings were subjected.

Which returns us to the subject of the reception—one might as well say "rejection"—of Anita Malfatti’s 1917 Modernist Show in São Paulo, for all practical purposes a one-woman affair, which may at least in one critical respect have pivoted on the nature of the exhibition itself. The huge Modernist retrospectives in Europe and North America—by dint of their very internationalism and pictorial diversity—compressed time and space, creating an inclusive, fast-paced avant-garde climate one might metaphorically deem cubist in nature. By contrast, Anita Malfatti’s exhibition ruptured this kind of exhilarating conjunction, splintering time and space back into older, more alienating modes of perception.

The exhibition’s very singularity—one woman’s work seen without much historical or international context—simply could not support the weight of the shock of the new. Such singularity was dismissable: unlike much larger exhibitions that challenged viewers by virtue of sheer numbers of exhibited entries and artists, Anita Malfatti’s portraits and landscapes were brushed aside as anomalies. Viewers and critics, shielded from "Modern" criticism by sheer distance, comfortably retreated into older, less threatening ways of seeing—retreated, one might say, into the past—leaving Malfatti’s work stranded out of Brazilian time in the twentieth century, all on its own.

In New York she was au courant; on Brazilian soil she was caught in a time-warp beyond understanding. It would be years before visual artists in Brazil caught up to the artwork she had executed before 1917. [This said, her work was celebrated by a small group of writers and intellectuals, even though according to Marta Rossetti Batista, Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade were the only ones to understand the revolutionary aspect of Anita Malfatti’s North-American portraits at the time [Batista 74]. Almost thirty years later fellow artist Tarsila do Amaral would proclaim that Malfatti’s 1917 exhibition "[had been] the first Modern Art exhibition seen in Brazil" [Amaral 207].

Correspondingly, Anita Malfatti’s paintings were further condemned as having been imported from elsewhere—from another continent far away—making them spatial anomalies as well, unacceptable in a Brazilian art community that was at the time seeking to define a national style. Indeed, Monteiro Lobato’s wrathful criticism of the 1917 exhibition echoed this sentiment by reproaching the artist for trying to situate her work within an international context. Lobato ironically declared that she should strive to remain more authentic to her national identity and therefore avoid being integrated into "this farse that they call Modern art" [Batista 70].

Malfatti’s portraits were foreign because they were of foreigners, strangers—unidentified men and women (she did not give these titles proper names)—that, like the visual mode in which they were wrought, were without context or identity. From a Modernist community in New York, where international boundaries and picture planes alike were broken without compunction, Anita Malfatti brought the progeny of that environment to Brazil, which, in terms of visual art, at least, had yet to enter the twentieth century.

I conclude this essay on a somewhat negative note because for Anita Malfatti the 1917 exhibition had adverse, even devastating, consequences. In a vacuum, the 1917 exhibition could be seen to cast Malfatti as a Modernist martyr. To many of Brazil’s budding Modernists, however, Anita Malfatti’s 1917 exhibition came to symbolize a new direction in art, in much the same way that the Sonderbund exhibition had ignited European artists several years earlier [Batista 85].

These Brazilian intellectuals would formulate Modernist viewpoints in their collective defense of Malfatti. During subsequent decades, several prodigious changes would occur to validate Malfatti as a precursor of and catalyst for Brazil’s own Modernism. Beyond Brazil, and in a broader scope of twentieth-century art, however, Anita Malfatti has stood firm far longer on the various shifting grounds of Modernism.

List of Illustrations

1. Anita Malfatti, Ritmo (torso), 1915-16. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 61 x 46.6 cm, Collection Museu de Arte Contemporânea da USP, São Paulo.

2. Anita Malfatti, Tropical, c. 1916. Oil on canvas, 77 x 102 cm, Collection Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo.

Works Cited

Altschuler, Bruce. The Avant-Garde in Exhibitions: New Art in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Amaral, Tarsila do. "Anita Malfatti, 6-12-45." In Tarsila Cronista. Edited with an introduction by Aracy Amaral. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2001, 207-210.

A.S. Baylinson, 1882-1950: a Memorial Exhibition of Paintings and Conté Crayon Drawings in the Art Students League Gallery, October 21st to November 10th, 1951. New York: Art Students League Gallery, 1951.

Bastos, Eliana. Entre o Escândalo e o Sucesso: A Semana de 22 e o Armory Show. Campinas, São Paulo: Editora da UNICAMP, 1991.

Batista, Marta Rosetti. Anita Malfatti: No Tempo e no Espaço. São Paulo: IBM Brasil, 1985.

Goodrich, Lloyd. Pioneers of Modern Art in America: Decade of the Armory Show. New York: Whitney, Praeger Publishers, 1963.