Grateful for my daughter’s obsession with Tarsila do Amaral – 03/28/2024 – Tati Bernardi

Last month my daughter came home from school very excited, saying that she had studied the life and work of Tarsila do Amaral. She wanted to know more about the modernists and asked me if Anita “Malfatia” was really the painter’s best friend. Finally, she asked me, on an upcoming holiday, to visit the place where Tarsila was born and then go “by plane” to see her main painting, “Bapuru”.

I found your interest incredible and decided to show some photos of the artist on the computer. Rita really enjoyed seeing the portraits of her sister, Cecília, her daughter, Dulce, Oswald de Andrade, her friends from the “Grupo dos Cinco”, her niece who lived with her, her great-niece who is still alive… . and, finally, Claudia Raia dressed as Tarsila. So we printed all these images, painted them, cut them out, made pictures and put together dolls (just paste the cutout onto a stick).

Then, Ritinha requested, with some urgency, modeling clay, clay, baking paper and Styrofoam. And that’s how, in the last few weeks, we built some 198 Tarsilas do Amaral. Then we went to a bookstore and bought books with photos of the main works of the modernists. On the same day, I ended up in a stationery store choosing postcards, notebooks and notebooks whose covers featured the artist’s “Abapuru”, “Negra”, “Operários” and “Self-portrait”. I was also coerced into purchasing refrigerator magnets, key chains, pens, posters and a t-shirt with the word “Anthropophagy” on it.

Grateful because Ritinha’s new obsession did not include princesses and electronic games, I found the animated feature film “Tarsilinha” on Prime Vídeo, which we have already watched 247 times. We know the lines by heart and throughout the film we recognize the painter’s canvases and drawings – such as “A Lua”, “A Cuca”, “O Lago”, “Sol Poente”, “Abaporu” – and we identify characters taken from directly from his works, such as Saci-Pererê, Sapo-Cururu, Lagarta, Trem, among others.

Rita also liked the soundtrack, especially Zeca Baleiro’s music, and wanted to know who the singer Ná Ozzetti and the actress Marisa Orth (who plays the funky voice of the Caterpillar) are. I’m happy to see how art is a path of no return and how one piece of information leads to one more and another, in a kind of spiral of inexhaustible interest.

Yesterday we reached deeper layers: my child is in mourning because she discovered that Dulce, Tarsila’s daughter —who had the same name as one of the painter’s sisters—, died before her mother. She doesn’t understand how a daughter can die before her mother (neither do I). She asked if Tarsila cried a lot and if, afterwards, mother and daughter met and were together in heaven (the nanny instilled a complete Catholicism in the girl, and I respected it).

I got permission from Claudia Raia’s advisor to take a cute six-year-old creature to the musical “Tarsila, the Brazilian”, whose age range is for children over ten years old (the duration is three hours, and my daughter has already said that she thinks little).

The place where the artist spent her childhood, Fazenda São Bernardo, in the municipality of Rafard, is two hours and 17 minutes from my house, and the trip there will certainly be cheaper than taking her to Malba, an Argentine museum in that “Abapuru” is on display (not that she’s going to give up on that idea anytime soon).

I already know what my Easter will be like – while Jesus is reborn, Rita wants to because she wants to find out where Tarsila’s coffin is, but I’m going to convince her to settle for a visit to the Pinacoteca – and I confess that, for now, I’m finding everything wonderful. When she manages to write Menotti Del Picchia without the help of Google, I’ll consider talking to a therapist.