Brazil Slide Series: Collection Modern Brazilian Painting, Slide No. 0030.

Teaching ResourceTeaching Resource30. Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil (Brazilian Central Railroad), 1924. Tarsila do Amaral is a leading figure of the Brazilian modernist movement of the 1920s. After her studies in Brazil with Pedro Alexandrino, she went to Paris and learned from the Cubist painters, including Fernand Léger. Along with poet and polemicist Oswald de Andrade and other Brazilians in France during those years, Tarsila learned the idiom of modern art. Better than any other painter, she brought it back to Brazil, naturalized it and created a modern, nativist Brazilian art. In this painting from her Pau-Brasil (Brazilwood) period-defined by the artistic manifesto of Oswald de Andrade-she celebrates both the modernity and traditional of folkloric aspects of Brazil. Here she depicts the dynamism of the booming industrial city of São Paulo within the context of tropical, traditional culture