Brazil Slide Series: Collection Modern Brazilian Painting, Slide No. 0031.

Teaching ResourceTeaching Resource31. Morro da favela (Shantytown Hill), 1924. Tarsila painted the Black inhabitants of a Rio hillside slum using a palette of colors influenced by Brazilian folk and colonial art and executed in a style that learned from the geometric reductions and spatial alterations of Cubism. Her Brazilwood paintings, like Oswald's poetry of the period, were picturesque, modern, deceivingly naive, and intended for "exportation." Like the Brazilwood that was cut from forests and shipped to Europe in the Sixteenth century, this was a "tropical product" for foreign consumption. Domestica1ly, it was the discovery of a way to modernize stylistic language in Brazil as a container for authentica1ly Brazilian content