Critical Commentary

With her extremely individualised poetics, Maria Martins appears as a singular figure in the history of modern Brazilian art. Due to her marriage to the ambassador, Carlos Martins, in 1926, she spent most of her adult life abroad. In her youth, she studied music and painting and began to dedicate herself exclusively to sculpture in Belgium, in 1936, under the guidance of Oscar Jesper. In 1939, she moved to Washington D.C., remaining in the United States until 1948, where she developed most of her artistic output, gaining recognition from avant-garde circles of the day.

Over time, Maria Martins became known as one of the principal sculptresses linked to the Surrealist movement. At the same time, at her first exhibition in 1941 at the Corcoran Art Gallery, in Washington D.C., she showed realist figurative sculptures in various materials (plaster, wood, terracotta and bronze), with themes drawn from Brazilian culture or religion. In the same year, she established a studio in New York, where she studied with Jacques Lipchitz (1891 - 1973) and Stanley William Hayter (1901 - 1988). At this point, the city was experiencing a climate of artistic effervescence due to the arrival of various European artists who had moved there to escape the Second World War (1939-1945). This experience probably led the artist to absorb new content, incorporating surrealist elements.

This change became visible in her second solo exhibition in 1942, at the Valentine Gallery, in Nova York, in which she presented oneiric forms, of surrealist inspiration in bronze. As a result of this show, she met exponents of Surrealism such as the critic and writer, André Breton (1896 - 1966), the artists, André Masson (1896 - 1987), Yves Tanguy (1900 - 1955), Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968),¹ Max Ernst (1891 - 1976) and Michel Tapiè (1909 - 1987). Her second exhibition at the New York gallery in 1943, Amazonia, was a genuine success.² The artist continued to work with themes drawn from Brazilian myths and traditions, with the references to nature coming to symbolise the power of the wild and of desire, in counterpoint to the nature tamed by Western civilisation. Maria Martins thus created organic forms in bronze that were progressively liberated of any realist figuration, using suggestive titles, as was characteristic of other Surrealist artist. Of note among her works of this period were Não Te Esqueças Nunca que Eu Venho dos Trópicos [Never forget that I come from the Tropics] (1942), Cobra Grande [Great Cobra] (1943) and Sem Eco [Without Echo] (1943).

Her emphasis on the force of the savage and of desire, enchanted Breton, who in a text of 1947, wrote: "Maria, and behind her, that is, in her, the marvellous Brazil where, over its vast spaces?the wing of the unrevealed still hovers. The immense door only half ajar onto the virgin regions where untouched forces, completely new forces, of the future, hide themselves. (...) The anguish, the temptations, the agitations, but also the sunrises, the happiness and even from time to time, the pure delights, these are what Maria has succeeded in capturing like nobody else at their primitive source, in bronzes such as Yaci, Bouina and Yemanjá. (...) She owes nothing either to the sculpture of the past or to that of the present".³ From this period onwards, Maria Martins took part in major Surrealist shows, such as the one organised by the French writer in Paris, in 1947.

In Maria Martins' work, the evocation of a nature undominated by technology is united with elements of the unconscious to create images with a strong visual impact, charged with eroticism and violence, but also a certain docility and lyricism. In the work, Impossível [Impossible] (1944), of which she made various versions in bronze, one of which was acquired in 1946 by the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA), hybrid beings (a man and a woman with aspects of ancestral animals) are placed face to face, suggesting a state of profound desire, but also of aggression and death, as if pointing out the limits of a full union between the two.⁴ In this sense, certain animals such as the cobra and the spider emerge from the mythological universe of Amazonian legends to incarnate symbols related to the artist's experience. In However (1944), the serpent of desire compresses the body of a woman, imprisoning her. In the case of A mulher Perdeu Sua Sombra [The Woman Lost her Shadow] (1946), two snakes emerge from the head of a stiff woman's body, probably as a reference to libidinous thoughts.

In 1948, Maria Martins moved to Paris, becoming a friend of Constantin Brancusi (1876 - 1957), Benjamin Péret (1899 - 1959), Amédée Ozenfant (1886 - 1966) and Michel Seuphor (1901 - 1999).⁵ In 1950, she returned to Brazil for good, aiding with the organisation of the 1^st International Bienal of São Paulo, in which she took part as an invited artist. At the same time, her Surrealist poetics was not well received in Brazilian artistic circles of the first half of the 1950s that were dominated by issues of Constructivism and Abstract Art, and she was relegated to a marginal position with regard to the dominant version of modern Brazilian art.

Her last individual exhibition was held in 1956, at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo - MAM/RJ [Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro], an institution that she helped to found. From what we may observe from its catalogue, it was already taking place in a hostile climate, since she published a text in which she defended the artist's freedom of expression.⁶ Having said this, important critics wrote about her work, such as Mário Pedrosa (1900 - 1981) and Murilo Mendes (1901 - 1975). It is interesting to note that both critics pointed to the challenge of uniting the Surrealist technique of 'psychic automatism' with works in bronze. It may also be noted that her works from this period became more abstract, albeit without losing the allusive sense of their titles (e.g. O Canto do Mar [The Song of the Sea] (1952), and A Soma dos Nossos Dias [The Sum of Our Days] (1954/1955).

Notes

1 The artist carried on an intense romantic relationship with the French artist. Cf: CANTON, Kátia. Maria Martins: a mulher perdeu sua sombra. In: BIENAL INTERNACIONAL DE SÃO PAULO, 24., 1998, São Paulo, SP. Núcleo histórico: antropofagia e histórias de canibalismos. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998. p. 288. 

² On this occasion, Maria Martins shared the gallery space with her friend, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). While she managed to sell almost all her work, Mondrian's exhibition of the New York series was a failure. At the end of the show, Maria Martins decided to buy the work, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, from her friend, which she donated to the MoMA of Nova York.

³ O texto Maria foi escrito para o catálogo da exposição da artista na Galeria Julian Lévy, em Nova York (1947), e posteriormente republicado no livro de Breton Le Surréalisme et la Peinture.

⁴ Sobre a obra a artista afirmou: "O mundo é complicado e triste, é quase impossível que as pessoas se compreendam".

⁵ Seuphor, em seu Dictionnaire de la Sculpture Moderne, apresenta Maria Martins como a grande escultora do surrealismo.

⁶ Nesse catálogo são publicados também textos de André Breton, Benjamin Péret e Murilo Mendes. Citações de Marcel Duchamp e Rainer Maria Rilke falam da liberdade do artista e sua relação de hostilidade com a crítica.