Curated by Regina Teixeira de Barros

Having left Brazil in 1910 to study in Berlin and New York, Anita Malfatti gained notoriety when she returned to São Paulo seven years later on account of an exhibition of her Expressionist- and Cubist-inspired paintings. Though stridently defended by Oswald de Andrade and other writers and artists later associated with the Semana de Arte Moderna festival, her paintings incited the polemical objections of such academic critics as Monteiro Lobato, who designated modern art “abnormal,” comparing it to psychopathological art. This exhibition commemorates that inaugural year for modernism in Brazil and will display works representative of Malfatti’s full artistic trajectory, from her portraits and landscapes of the teens to paintings that evoke the return to order of the 1920s, and even examples of her reliance, much later, on regional themes. The overview will provide a rare opportunity to assess Malfatti’s shifting visual language as well as her important contributions to the country’s aesthetic debates.

— Kaira M. Cabañas