The brilliant explosion of color of Anita Malfatti's New York work (1915-1917) faded upon her arrival in Brazil. It was here that the chromatic vibration of her painting waned. Tropical, the first major work Malfatti completed in Brazil, bordered on regression, transforming tropical joy into a lament.¹ She retook drawing as her main guide, replacing the figure/ground relationship and forgoing luminosity. She seemed to reawaken the old Renaissance dispute of disegno versus colore. Gone was the boldness of O homem amarelo [The yellow man]. Paradoxically, it was in the tropics that color died. All went back to good academic manners, as M�rio de Andrade complained. Vis-�-vis Malfatti's work, the writer Monteiro Lobato expressed a state of perplexity that emotionally devastated the artist: "paranoia or mystification?"² It is a patriarchal voice of doubt: if this is the work of a woman, to what entity of limited responsibility can it be compared: the art of the mentally disturbed or that of children? Reacting to pressures from her environment, Malfatti discontinued her observations of chromatic phenomena. She was as much an involuntary martyr of modernism, as a sort of index of the impossibility to be modern in her own country.

Shortly before the Semana de Arte Moderna [Week of Modern Art], Gra�a Aranha, one of her promoters, published Est�tica da vida [An aesthetics of life]. In that piece, Gra�a Aranha pointed out that the Brazilian soul had little communion with nature because the "three races" that formed Brazil behaved according to a cultural artificiality: Portuguese melancholy, "African childishness" (illusionistic before natural reality, creating a "cosmic terror"), and the Indians' "metaphysics of terror" (filling with ghosts the spaces between the human spirit and nature).³ There was an urge to turn sensations into landscapes-color, line, planes, masses-into art. "Brazilian culture should be constituted from a new relationship with Brazilian nature," according to Eduardo Jardim de Moraes, who confirmed the contribution of Gra�a Aranha to modernism.⁴ According to Benedito Nunes, Oswald de Andrade effected "a parodic inversion of Gra�a Aranha's philosophy": barbaric metaphysics was rescued as anthropophagy.⁵

Vicente do Rego Monteiro inaugurated the modernist color project. He studied and drew artifacts from Amazonian archaeology at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro in 1920 and at the Mus�e de l'Homme in Paris in 1923. He read Barbosa Rodrigues and Couto Magalh�es.⁶ His O atirador de arco [The archer] (1925) was inspired by Debret. His drawings based on indigenous legends⁷ which were exhibited in Rio de Janeiro in 1921, laid the framework for the formulation of Brazilianness and revoked Chateaubriand's model of the Indian. Rego Monteiro's work incorporated certain artistic values from the Amazon, such as color, volume, form and the reduction of the figure. The colors are reminiscent of terracotta. His figures seem to jut out like a ceramic bass relief. It is even possible to trace some of his paintings to specific ceramic pieces he elaborately copied. The child in Menino sentado [Seated boy] (1923) and Madona e menino [Madonna and child] (1924) was taken from a moon-shaped ceramic piece from Santar�m. The head, ears, breasts, and legs folded in parallel of the madonna follow the shape of funerary urns of the Tapaj�s-Trombetas from Miracangueira, as in the pieces (Inv. 9702 and 8628) of the Rio de Janeiro museum. The funerary urns with turtle designs from Marac� (Amap�), drawn by Rego Monteiro at the Mus�e de l'Homme and which resemble the piece 5445 at the Museu Nacional in Rio, are the direct source of the painting O menino e a tartaruga [The boy and the turtle] (1924). The heads of the figures in the religious series from 1922-25, including A crucifix�o [The crucifixion], Fuga para o Egito [The flight to Egypt], A descida da cruz [The descent from the cross], A adora��o dos reis magos [The adoration of the magi], and A santa ceia [The last supper], were inspired by the head-shaped Marac� urn covers copied by Rego Monteiro in Rio de Janeiro. Although lacking the same theoretical framework, Rego Monteiro preceded Torres-Garc�a in the incorporation of native South American symbolism into art. Torres-Garc�a came up with a model of continental dimensions only partially, because Uruguay did not constitute a distinctive archaeological region. The most complex ceramics in Brazil came from the Amazon region.⁸ Analyzing the crisis of the idea of history, Gianni Vattimo stated that "the Enlightenment philosophers, Hegel, Marx, positivist and historicist thinkers of all kinds jointly thought that the meaning of history was to be found in the achievement of civilization by the modern European man."⁹ We'd like to stress that if for Hegel the jungle was the space outside of history, for Brazilian artists it was the only way to affirm an autochtonous history, prior to colonization, in their modern political project of cultural emancipation.

In the 1940s, the sculptor Victor Brecheret engraved archaic symbols from the Amazon into six stones¹⁰ that had been naturally hewn by water. This is the case of works such as Luta de on�a [Jaguar fight] and �ndia e o peixe [Indian woman and the fish]. Max Ernst's Oval bird (1934) established a precedent for this type of work. According to William Rubin, the Easter Island Bird-Man artifact at the British Museum is a probable parallel to Ernst's work. Ernst sculpted on a naturally hewn stone. Brecheret engraved the stone surface only with minor interference, in an effort to establish cosmogonies and identities. History becomes a kind of writing that must be deciphered.

Di Cavalcanti�s hedonism can be viewed as a self-representation of the art of miscegenation. His painting Samba, similarly to the Rio carnival, is the "celebration of race" of Oswald de Andrade�s "Manifesto pau-brasil" from 1924. Luis Martins says that Di Cavalcanti�s paintings "exude the strong, penetrating and lascivious scent of naked mulatto women."¹¹ Hans Nobauer, from Guignard�s circle, painted the first version of the Mangueira carnival parade, which would later become Hélio Oiticica�s anthropophagic territory. In carnival cartography, the painter Tarsila do Amaral explored Madureira, the Rio suburb which housed the Portela and Império Serrano samba schools, located in the vicinity of the hill of Serrinha. There she found an image of the Eiffel Tower in part of the decoration of the festivities. Ismael Néri�s painting Rio/Paris is another allegory of the significance of French culture for Brazilian modernism in a decade where travel to Europe was fundamental for most artists.

"In the midst of the virgin forest, Macunaíma, the hero of our people, was born. He was pitch black and was the child of the fear of the night," proclaimed Mário de Andrade. Nature in Brazilian modernism was symbolized by the forest. "Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness," Oswald de Andrade wrote in his "Manifesto antropófago" [Anthropophagite manifesto]. Long before that, Mário de Andrade had summoned Tarsila to return to their national roots, which were to be found in that very forest: "go back to your inner self [. . .] Abandon Paris! Tarsila! Come to the virgin forest."¹² Tarsila returned and she invented another Brazil in modern painting.¹³

But it was in Paris that Tarsila discovered Brazil. She traveled with Oswald de Andrade and studied with Lhote, Gleizes and Léger. It was in Paris that they discovered the negro in a different light. African culture until then had been a disenfranchised culture in Brazil, a remainder of the Brazilian tradition of slavery. It was also notoriously absent from Brazilian academic painting�almost completely excluded from Almeida Junior�s painting and controversially portrayed in the work of Modesto Brocos.

A negra [The negress] is an episodic work form 1923. In that year Tarsila and Oswald met Blaise Cendrars who introduced them to Brancusi. Cendrars had always had an interest in African culture. His Anthologie nègre was well known to Oswald. The couple had contact with other Brazilians in Paris who were all engaged in projects connected to Brazilianness. Villa-Lobos was making headway with his music, which combined European, African and Indian elements. Rego Monteiro had already given coherence to his project involving indigenous archaism. Tarsila painted A negra. During a conference in Paris in 1923, Oswald affirmed having felt, in Paris, "the suggestive presence of the Negro drum and of Indian songs. These ethnic forces are in the midst of modernity." In closing, Oswald made reference to Rego Monteiro "who, in a personal way, stylized our indigenous motifs [. . .] Tarsila do Amaral, who allied the subject-matter of the Brazilian field to the most avant-garde processes of contemporary painting."¹⁴

Monumental works such as A negra, Abaporu and Antropofagia, were thus born. In 1923 Mexican muralism was just beginning. Lhote�s Traité du paysage offers certain clues that can be somewhat misleading, since the first edition only appeared in 1939. Lhote maintained that the artist should continuously "EXAGGERATE, DIMINISH, SUPPRESS whether it be lines, values, colors or surfaces."¹⁵ It is necessary to know what Léger was thinking and painting around 1923 when Tarsila frequented his studio.¹⁶ In an article Léger states that "the exhibition of volumes, lines and colors, demands absolute order and orchestration." Furthermore, he concludes that "for the state of organized plastic intensity [. . . ] I use the law of contrasts, which is eternal as a means of equivalence to life."¹⁷ In texts such as "A propos de l�élement méchanique" [On the mechanical element], Léger was concerned with mechanization in painting: "We live in a geometrical world, this is an undeniable fact and as such, in a frequently contrastive state."¹⁸ Tarsila�s Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo seem bucolic vis-à-vis the bustle of European futurist and cubist cities.