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Lot Essay
A latecomer to Surrealism and one of its classic femmes fatales, Martins ranks among the most important--though for many years, all but forgotten--Brazilian sculptors of her generation. Known simply as "Maria," she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro and later in Paris and Belgium under Catherine Barjanski and Oscar Jespers. The wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, Carlos Martins, Maria moved to Washington, D.C. in 1939 and for the next decade commuted between Washington and New York, where she kept a studio-apartment. Maria became involved with the expatriate Surrealist community in New York during the 1940s, coming into contact with André Breton, collaborating on the journal VVV, and studying at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17. Muse and secret lover to Marcel Duchamp, she served as the model for the female figure in his enigmatic and final work, Étant Donnés. An exponent of Surrealism in Brazil, where she returned in 1949, Maria helped to organize the first São Paulo Bienal and worked in later years as a promoter of modern art.
Maria's wood sculptures from the 1940s and early '50s count among her most iconic and representative works, and they draw liberally from both Surrealist tropes and Brazilian legend. Her subjects ranged across religion and mythology--from St. Francis and Salomé to Prometheus, for example--and Amazonian folklore served as a point of departure in such works as Macumba, Yara, and Cobra Grande, all from the early 1940s. Among her characteristic themes was the samba, the exuberant Afro-Brazilian dance that came to be celebrated as an expression of national identity during the 1930s. "She has interpreted the soft, ecstatic movements of the national dance, the samba, producing, like Portinari, the miracle of bringing powerful hands and feet into graceful, docile patterns," Robert C. Smith wrote in a contemporary review. The present work suggests a languid interpretation of the dance, aptly illustrating what Smith termed the "synthesis of sturdy body, awkward nonchalance, and sensual gestures" embedded in her Afro-Brazilian source.[1]
Carved from Brazilian Jacarandá or rosewood, Maria's principal medium, Tem cheiro de mato, from the Samba series, simply depicts a female samba dancer, the curves of her body swaying gently to the rhythms of the dance. The robustness of her form and relaxed fluidity of her movement convey the powerful sensuality and absorptive pleasure of the samba: her eyes closed, the figure appears detached from the world, all but entranced by her expression of the dance's motion. "Maria's [work] owes nothing to the sculpture of the past or the present," André Breton remarked in the 1940s of his friend. "She is far too sure, for that, of the original rhythm which is increasingly lacking in modern sculpture, she is prodigal with what the Amazon has given her--the overwhelming abundance of life."[2]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Robert C. Smith, "Sculpture by Maria Martins," Art in America 30 (January 1942): 67.
2) André Breton, quoted in Penelope Rosemont, ed., Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 216.
Maria's wood sculptures from the 1940s and early '50s count among her most iconic and representative works, and they draw liberally from both Surrealist tropes and Brazilian legend. Her subjects ranged across religion and mythology--from St. Francis and Salomé to Prometheus, for example--and Amazonian folklore served as a point of departure in such works as Macumba, Yara, and Cobra Grande, all from the early 1940s. Among her characteristic themes was the samba, the exuberant Afro-Brazilian dance that came to be celebrated as an expression of national identity during the 1930s. "She has interpreted the soft, ecstatic movements of the national dance, the samba, producing, like Portinari, the miracle of bringing powerful hands and feet into graceful, docile patterns," Robert C. Smith wrote in a contemporary review. The present work suggests a languid interpretation of the dance, aptly illustrating what Smith termed the "synthesis of sturdy body, awkward nonchalance, and sensual gestures" embedded in her Afro-Brazilian source.[1]
Carved from Brazilian Jacarandá or rosewood, Maria's principal medium, Tem cheiro de mato, from the Samba series, simply depicts a female samba dancer, the curves of her body swaying gently to the rhythms of the dance. The robustness of her form and relaxed fluidity of her movement convey the powerful sensuality and absorptive pleasure of the samba: her eyes closed, the figure appears detached from the world, all but entranced by her expression of the dance's motion. "Maria's [work] owes nothing to the sculpture of the past or the present," André Breton remarked in the 1940s of his friend. "She is far too sure, for that, of the original rhythm which is increasingly lacking in modern sculpture, she is prodigal with what the Amazon has given her--the overwhelming abundance of life."[2]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Robert C. Smith, "Sculpture by Maria Martins," Art in America 30 (January 1942): 67.
2) André Breton, quoted in Penelope Rosemont, ed., Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 216.