Women’s Modern Art in Brazil and Mexico, 1910-1960
FIRST THINGS FIRST…
This lesson examines the transformative role of women artists in the development of Latin American modernism in Brazil and Mexico between 1915 and 1960, centering on key figures such as Brazilian artists Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, and Maria Martins, and artists based in Mexico including Tina Modotti, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, Elizabeth Catlett, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo. Students will explore how these artists—some born in Latin America, and others who emigrated from the U.S. and Europe—confronted dominant narratives of gender, nation, and modernity through their work, while situating them within broader movements such as Brazilian modernism, Mexican Muralism, photography, and Surrealism.
This lesson enables students to engage meaningfully with Latin American modernism and women’s art and their ongoing legacies. After this lesson, students should be able to identify and recall key artists and movements, summarize the contexts in which they worked, and explain Latin American women’s contributions to modernism. Students should also be able to visually analyze artworks, evaluate and defend their interpretations of these works through critical looking and discussions, and demonstrate their knowledge through group activities, presentations, and/or written assignments.
Background Readings
Introductory Readings
Brehmer, Debra. “Remedios Varo in a Sphere of Her Own.” Hyperallergic, October 25, 2023. https://hyperallergic.com/851649/remedios-varo-in-a-sphere-of-her-own-art-institute-chicago/.
Castro, Maria. “Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporú.” Smarthistory, October 11, 2021, https://smarthistory.org/tarsila-abaporu/.
Cramer, Charles and Kim Grant. “Surrealism and Women.” Smarthistory, March 25, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/surrealism-and-women/.
“I am the Negro Woman: Elizabeth Catlett,” Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,. https://www.pafa.org/museum/collection/item/i-am-negro-woman.
Jiménez, Maya. “Frida Kahlo, an introduction.” Smarthistory, October 31, 2019,.
Jiménez, Maya. “Latin American art, an introduction.” Smarthistory, July 29, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/latin-american-art-an-introduction/.
“Love, friendship & rivalry: Surreal friends,” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/leonora-carrington-7615/love-friendship-rivalry-surreal-friends.
Maria-Reina Bravo, Doris. “Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas).” Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, https://smarthistory.org/kahlo-the-two-fridas-las-dos-fridas/.
“Maria Martins, The Impossible, III, 1946,” MoMA, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81011.
Moriuchi, Mey-Yen. “Latin American modernisms,” in Reframing Art History, Smarthistory, January 15, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/reframing-art-history/latin-american-modernisms/.
Zavala, Adriana. “The origins of modern art in São Paulo, an introduction.” Smarthistory, November 2, 2019, https://smarthistory.org/modern-art-sao-paulo/.
Advanced Readings
Aridjis, Chloe. “The Surrealists Move to Mexico City: What Leonora Carrington and her peers found in their new home.” The Yale Review 112, no. 4 (Dec. 10, 2024): n.p. https://yalereview.org/article/chloe-aridjis-leonora-carrington
Biller, Geraldine P, ed. Latin American Women Artists: 1915-1995. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1995. https://maisterravalbuena.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/1995.-Biller-Geraldine-P.-Latin-American-Women-Artists-1915-1995.-Exh.-cat.-Milwaukee-Art-Museum-1995-p.-122-123.pdf.
Deffebach, Nancy. María Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo: Challenging Visions in Modern Mexican Art. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.
Eburne, Jonathan P. “Leonora Carrington, Mexico, and the Culture of Death.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 5, nos. 1-2 (2011): 19-32. https://www.scribd.com/document/346254160/2011-Leonora-Carrington-Mexico-and-the-Culture-of-Death-pdf
Flores, Tatiana. “Strategic Modernists: Women Artists in Post-Revolutionary Mexico.” Woman’s Art Journal 29, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2008), 12-22.
Geis, Terri. “My Goddesses and My Monsters: Maria Martins and Surrealism in the 1940s.” In Surrealism in Latin America: Vivísimo Muerto, edited by Dawn Ades, Rita Eder, and Graciela Speranza, 157–178. London: University of Texas Press, 2012.
Herzog, Melanie. Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.
Lowe, Sarah M. Tina Modotti & Edward Weston: The Mexico Years. London: Merrell/ Barbican Art Gallery, 2004.
Nonaka, Masayo. Remedios Varo: The Mexican Years. Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2012.
Sneed, Gillian. “Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral: Gender, Brasilidade and the Modernist Landscape.” Woman’s Art Journal 34, no. (Spring/Summer 2013): 31-40.
Walden, Lauren. “Lola Álvarez Bravo: Subverting Surrealist Photography in Mexico,” Photography and Culture 161 (2023): 3-27. https://doi.org10.1080/17514517.2023.218180
The Museum of Modern Art, “The painter of her country | Tarsila do Amaral | UNIQLO ArtSpeaks,” YouTube, accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YijMSds7MA. (3:10)
National Gallery of Art, “Master Printmaker Honors Elizabeth Catlett with a Powerful Portrait,” YouTube, April 23, 2025, accessed July 28, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D3mVVwqkX0.(16:33 mins.)
Tate, “Leonora Carrington – Britain’s Lost Surrealist | TateShots,” YouTube, Mar. 26, 2015, accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqXePrSE1R0. (9:43 mins.)
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas), 1939, oil on canvas, 67-11/16 x 67-11/16″ (Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City)
CONTENT SUGGESTIONS
Key themes and concepts in women’s modern art in Brazil and Mexico can be explored in one hour and fifteen-minutes, through a discussion of these works:
Brazil
- Anita Malfatti, The Fool, 1915–16
- Anita Malfatti, Tropical, 1917
- Tarsila do Amaral, A Caipirinha, 1923
- Tarsila do Amaral, A Negra, 1923
- Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporú, 1928
- Maria Martins, The Impossible, III, 1946
Mexico
- Tina Modotti, Women in Tehuantepec, 1929
- Tina Modotti. Workers Parade, 1926
- Lola Alvarez Bravo, Some Go Up and Others Go Down, c. 1940
- Lola Álvarez Bravo, Burial in Yalalag, 1946
- Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944
- Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939
- María Izquierdo, Self-Portrait, 1940
- María Izquierdo, Dream and Premonition, 1947
- Elizabeth Catlett, I Am the Negro Woman, 1946
- Leonora Carrington, The Pomps of the Subsoil, 1947
- Remedios Varo, Creation of the Birds, 1957
Click for images: slide presentation
Glossary
Cannibalist Manifesto: The Manifesto Antropófago was a 1928 text by Oswald de Andrade arguing that Brazilian culture should “cannibalize” European modernism by absorbing and transforming it along with Brazilian Indigenous and local traditions.
Lost-Wax Casting: A sculptural process in which a wax model is encased in a mold, the wax is melted out to create a cavity, and molten metal is poured in. Once cooled, the mold is removed, revealing a metal replica of the original wax form.
Lusophone: Portuguese language, cultures, or countries, especially those shaped by Portugal’s colonial history.
Mestizo: A term used in Latin America to describe people of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry, often central to national identity discourses in countries like Mexico.
Mexican Revolution: A major armed struggle (1910–1920) that overthrew the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) and led to the 1917 Constitution, which introduced land reform, strengthened labor rights, and sought to reduce social and economic inequality in Mexico.
Modernism: Artistic, literary, and cultural movements of the early-to-mid 20th century that rejected historical traditions and academic conventions in favor of innovation, abstraction, and a focus on modernity. Brazilian and Mexican modernism took place between from the 1910s to the 1950s and often explored national and cultural identity.
Muralism: A form of large-scale wall painting intended for public spaces, often used to convey social, political, or cultural messages to broad audiences. In Mexico muralism became a government-sponsored movement in the 1920s led by artists such as Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, who employed it to forge a new national identity after the Mexican Revolution.
Pre-Hispanic: The period before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, often used to describe the cultures and traditions of Indigenous peoples prior to European colonization of Latin America.
Primitivism: An early twentieth-century artistic trend in European modern art that appropriated forms and motifs associated with non-Western or Indigenous culture.
Purism: A modern style related to Cubism developed by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier emphasizing geometric and machine-like forms.
Surrealism: An avant-garde art and literature movement, founded by André Breton in 1924, that explored the unconscious through dream imagery and strange juxtapositions.
Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP): The People’s Graphic Workshop was a Mexico City printmaking collective founded in 1937 that produced socially engaged, accessible art (mainly woodcuts and linocuts), promoting leftist, anti-fascist, and post-revolutionary causes.
Tehuana: A woman from Tehuantepec in southern Mexico, particularly associated with the Indigenous Zapotec culture and its distinctive traditional dress, celebrated for its richly embroidered blouses and skirts.
Week of Modern Art: Also known as the Semana de Arte Moderna, this was a festival held in São Paulo in 1922 that introduced international modern art, literature, and music to Brazilian audiences and marked the official beginning of modernism in Brazil.
Lesson
Introduction
Traditional modern and contemporary art history courses privilege U.S. and Eurocentric narratives, leaving the contributions of Latin American women artists underexamined. The 2017–2018 traveling exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 expanded feminist art histories in the U.S. to include Latin American and Latinx voices, but its focus on the later 20th century left the modern period largely overlooked. This lesson plan addresses that gap by exploring how women artists in Brazil and Mexico navigated, challenged, and reshaped modernist art movements of the early-to-mid 20th century, offering a more inclusive account of gender and modernism in Latin America.
Because Latin American modernism gained momentum in the 1910s, the lesson follows a trajectory from that decade through the 1950s, chronologically tracing Brazilian contributions to Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, and modernist approaches to Mexican photography, printmaking, and painting. Key themes include the presence of many women artists from Latin America during this period, their pioneering roles in introducing and innovating modern art forms, and the ways they instilled their work with female subjectivity and representations of national and cultural identity.
As the largest and most influential countries in Latin America, Brazil and Mexico were central to the development of modern art in the region. Both countries fostered artistic environments that allowed women to pursue a career in the visual arts and gain recognition, a stark contrast to the challenges faced by women artists in the U.S. and Europe at the time. This is in part due to Latin American art academies and schools admitting women (which many European schools did not) and fewer cultural restrictions on women becoming professional artists, especially women from the upper classes. Despite the persistence of cultural machismo and the pervasiveness of Catholic conservatism in the region, women in many parts of Latin America nonetheless gained access to artistic training and professional artistic circles. This lesson highlights how these nations provided fertile ground for female artists, who played a significant role in shaping modern art in the region.
One challenge in teaching this material can sometimes be students’ lack of familiarity with Latin American geographies, histories, and cultures. Starting with the maps of Brazil and Mexico can help us orient students to the two countries’ geographies as the largest nations in Latin America. This also provides an opportunity to briefly discuss their histories and cultures for more context.
Brazil was colonized by Portugal in the early sixteenth century and thus is Portuguese-speaking and shaped by Lusophone traditions alongside strong Indigenous and African influences due to the historic transatlantic slave trade. Mexico, colonized by Spain in the same period, is Spanish-speaking and emphasizes its mestizo heritage, blending Indigenous and European elements within a nationalist framework. Geographically, Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world, while Mexico is the third largest in Latin America and serves as a cultural bridge between North America and Central America. These are also the most populous nations in the Americas after the U.S. Both achieved independence in the early nineteenth century, Mexico in 1821 and Brazil in 1822.
Brazil
This lesson begins in the early 20th century in Brazil, less than a century after the country gained its independence. Artist Anita Malfatti (1889–1964) introduced Brazil to modern art after she was exposed to Expressionism and Cubism during her art studies in Germany and New York in the early-to-mid teens. After her return to Brazil, she mounted a solo exhibition of modern painting in São Paulo in 1917, the first of its kind in Brazil, which included works like A Boba (The Fool, 1915–16), portraying a mentally disabled woman in bold colors and abstracted forms, demonstrating the influence of German Expressionism. A comparison of Malfatti’s work with Kirchner’s Street, Berlin (1908) enables students to identify its similarities with German Expressionism, including non-naturalistic color, expressive brushstrokes, and figural distortion.
Another work included in Malfatti’s exhibition was Tropical (1917), which depicts a working-class woman of color standing next to palm leaves while holding a basket of tropical fruit. Engaging with primitivism, which was characteristic of Expressionism, this image links racialized and gendered identity to exoticized national symbols. Malfatti’s exhibition provoked scandal, as Brazilian audiences and critics had never encountered modern art styles before and it was poorly received. As a result, she withdrew temporarily from public life, later turning toward a more conservative, folkloric style.
Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), known simply as “Tarsila” in Brazil, was a friend and colleague of Malfatti, but would go on to reputationally surpass her. Born into a wealthy coffee-producing family, her art training took her to Paris, where she encountered Impressionism, Cubism, and Purism. Returning to Brazil in 1922, just after the landmark Week of Modern Art, she joined the circle of modernists called “The Group of Five,” including Malfatti and poet Oswald de Andrade, whom she later married. Later returning to Paris with Andrade, she studied under André Lhôte, Fernand Léger, and Albert Gleizes, and began to incorporate Cubist geometry and Purist machine-like forms into her work.
One of her first works in this vein, A Caipirinha (The Country Girl, 1923), depicts Tarsila as an abstracted rural “country girl” through bold colors and stylized, geometric forms, blending European avant-garde techniques with Brazilian themes. A comparison of Tarsila’s work with Malfatti’s Tropical (1917) invites students to observe both similarities and differences: both artists focus on female figures connected to Brazil’s landscape and national identity, yet Malfatti’s naturalistic style contrasts with Tarsila’s dynamic Cubism.
That same year, Tarsila painted A Negra (The Black Woman, 1923), a semi-abstract portrayal of an Afro-Brazilian woman that critics celebrated as both a modernist breakthrough and a return to Tarsila’s authentic cultural roots. However, more recently, the work has been critiqued as problematic. Primitivist in style, it draws on racial stereotypes circulating in French and American popular culture at the time, echoing the exaggerated features of racist caricatures, as depicted in Paul Colin’s 1927 Bal Nègre (Black Dance), poster. Some scholars believe the subject was based on a photograph of Tarsila’s former wet nurse, underscoring Brazil’s fraught racial history, as slavery had only ended in 1888, and Tarsila’s complicated relationship to that history as a member of the white elite. This debate has generated significant discussion and can engage students, though some may find the racial imagery offensive, so it is important to prepare them for the conversation with sensitivity.
Tarsila’s most famous work, Abaporú (1928), was painted as a birthday gift for Andrade. The distorted nude figure with oversized limbs next to a cactus and below a radiant sun drew its title from the Indigenous Tupi-Guarani term for “man who eats.” This refers to historical Indigenous cannibalism rituals in Brazil, as represented in colonial-era travelogues and illustrations, such as Theodor de Bry’s 1594 engraving of Brazilian cannibalism. Tarsila’s painting inspired Oswald’s 1928 Cannibalist Manifesto (Manifesto Antropófago), which advocated Brazilian avant-garde artists “cannibalizing” European modernism along with Indigenous and local traditions to create a distinctly Brazilian modern art style. A line drawing of Tarsila’s painting even appeared alongside the printed manifesto, as its source of inspiration.
Maria Martins (1894–1973) forged a distinctive sculptural language that blended Surrealism with myths of the Amazon rainforest, despite never having visited it. She drew on her life as a diplomat’s wife, studying art across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and eventually working with bronze lost-wax casting. While in New York (1939–1948), her social circle included exiled Surrealists such as André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. She began to gain recognition for works that merged the organic, the erotic, and the fantastical. Frequently reimagining the female body with tentacle forms, she explored entangled themes of desire and conflict, as in The Impossible III (1946).
Mexico
Mexican modernism emerged in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) as artists sought to construct a new national identity rooted in Indigenous heritage, folklore, and peasant life. In the early 1920s, muralism became the central medium of the postrevolutionary period, with Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—los tres grandes (the three greats)—creating large-scale public artworks that celebrated Mexico’s past and promoted political ideals. Printmaking was also revitalized as a tool of political critique and mass communication, while other artists experimented with photography and easel painting, blending avant-garde styles with Mexican subject matter. Mexico also became a crucial site for émigré artists from the U.S. and Europe, whose work helped shape a more international, yet distinctively Mexican, modernism.
Our discussion of women Mexican modernists begins in the 1920s with two important female photographers: Tina Modotti (1896–1942) and Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903–1993). Italian-born but raised in the U.S., Modotti moved to Mexico in 1923 with her lover, the U.S. photographer Edward Weston, and remained there until 1930. In Mexico, she developed a modernist style that reflected her leftist politics. While Weston influenced her interest in geometry and abstraction, Modotti redirected these strategies toward the social realities of postrevolutionary Mexico, photographing peasants and folk traditions.
For instance, her Women in Tehuantepec (1929), portrays Indigenous women whose physical presence and cultural identity became emblematic of new national ideals after the Revolution. This is because the Tehuana women of this region were celebrated as postrevolutionary symbols of strength, independence, and authenticity. A comparison of Modotti’s photograph with Rufino Tamayo’s Women of Tehuantepec (1939) allows students to see how both artists emphasize the women’s distinctive dress, their traditional balancing of baskets of their heads, and the rhythmic geometries of their figurative pairings. However, Modotti’s starker black-and-white image contrasts with Tamayo’s vivid colors and Cubist-inflected composition. Tamayo’s image, based on memories of his aunt’s fruit stand, merges Cubist and Surrealist strategies with Indigenous motifs to evoke a deliberately folkloric sensibility, whereas Modotti’s photographs remain grounded in documentary clarity and resist any sentimentality.
Another photograph by Modotti further reveals her interest in repetition and abstraction. Workers Parade (1926), taken from a high vantage point during a May Day demonstration, transforms a crowd of laborers into a field of circular sombreros, a symbol of Mexico’s working class. The faceless workers merge into a unified mass, their identities signaled not individually but collectively, emphasizing a sense of solidarity. In this way, Modotti fuses the formal qualities of abstraction with her revolutionary politics.
Modotti’s social circle included Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. His wife, Lola Álvarez Bravo (1907–1993), also became a major modernist photographer in her own right. Born Dolores Martínez in Jalisco and orphaned at a young age, she first assisted Manuel in the darkroom before beginning her own photography practice. After their separation in 1934, she built an independent career documenting everyday life across Mexico with a profound sense of composition, light, and form.
A comparison of Modotti’s Worker’s Parade with Bravo’s Some Go Up and Others Go Down (c. 1940), enables students to note their shared emphasis on geometry, repetition, and rhythm as strategies for fostering abstraction within their representational photographs. Bravo’s image, which captures three lone figures on a zigzagging staircase, transforms the scene into a study of angles. The pronounced diagonals, coupled with bars of light and shadow, push the composition toward abstraction, positioning the work as an example of Modernist aesthetics brought into an image of ordinary life. In another photograph, Burial at Yalalag (1946), Bravo captures an Indigenous Zapotec funeral procession in which women in traditional dress, their faces hidden by scarves, walk apart from the men. By contrasting the white of their flowing garments with the dark coffin and landscape, she creates a rhythmic, almost otherworldly composition.
Like Bravo, who explored themes of identity and cultural tradition through photography, her close friend Frida Kahlo(1907–1954) grappled with gendered and cultural identity in her paintings. Kahlo’s early life was marked by illness: she contracted polio as a child, which left her with a weakened leg. At age 18, she was severely injured in a bus accident. She sustained multiple fractures to her spine, pelvis, collarbone, and ribs, along with extensive damage to her foot and shoulder, resulting in a lifetime of surgeries and chronic pain. During her convalescence, Kahlo began painting, adopting the vivid colors and flattened forms of Mexican folk art that remained central to her style.
In 1929, she married the muralist Diego Rivera, with whom she shared a turbulent marriage defined by her bisexuality, their mutual infidelities, divorce, and remarriage. Encourage students to assess and critique media portrayals of Rivera and Kahlo by comparing a New York Times article about Rivera that casts him as an epic, heroic muralist with a Detroit News piece on Kahlo that diminishes her as a housewife who merely “dabbles” in art.
Though Kahlo was not taken seriously at first, her career grew over time. Her numerous self-portraits became a means of probing her fractured body and fragmented sense of identity. In the work The Broken Column (1944), she presents her nude body as split open, her spine replaced by a crumbling column, her flesh pierced with nails, and her torso bound by a surgical corset. Tears streak her face, yet her gaze is direct, confronting the viewer with a stark visualization of pain and resilience.
With a father of German Hungarian descent and a mother of mestizo ancestry, Kahlo’s identity was marked by diverse cultures, a theme she explored in The Two Fridas (1939), painted shortly after her divorce from Rivera. In it, she depicts two versions of herself against a stormy sky: one in a European-style white lace dress and the other in a Tehuana dress that emphasizes her connection to Indigenous culture. The two figures are linked by a vein running from one exposed heart to the other. Through this doubled self, she articulates her cultural duality. Despite the dreamlike quality of her paintings, Kahlo firmly rejected the Surrealist label, remarking, “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” For her, art was an honest expression of her lived experiences, memories, and traumas, not a dream.
Around the same time, another Mexican artist, María Izquierdo (1902–1955), also turned to self-portraiture infused with dreamlike and folkloric imagery. Izquierdo was the first Mexican woman artist to exhibit internationally, yet she never achieved Kahlo’s renown. Born in Jalisco, she was forced into an arranged marriage at age 14, later left her husband, and pursued art studies in Mexico City while raising three children. Trained at the San Carlos Academy under Rivera, Izquierdo developed an intimate style informed by popular traditions and Pre-Hispanic motifs. She also faced obstacles from her male peers, including Rivera and Siqueiros blocking a major mural commission in the 1940s.
Like Kahlo, Izquierdo employed self-portraiture to explore questions of identity and female experience, but she engaged enigmatic restraint over Kahlo’s visceral candor. In Self-Portrait (1940), she depicts herself in a long dress with a rebozo(shawl) draped across her back, a pose rooted in both Indigenous and colonial traditions. The work conveys dignity and cultural pride while withholding access to her inner life. A comparison of Kahlo’s The Two Fridas with Izquierdo’s Self-Portrait invites students to consider how both used self-portraiture, Tehuana dress, and dreamlike imagery to negotiate questions of cultural identity, gender, and self-representation.
Dream and Premonition (1947) is Izquierdo’s most overtly Surrealist work, portraying herself emerging from a window holding her own severed head, its hair entwined with tree branches, while headless figures drift beneath a stormy sky and grave-like mounds. Tears from the head fall into a basin with a blue cross, fusing imagery of sacrifice, mourning, and spiritual foreboding. Painted shortly before a series of strokes ended her career, the work can be seen as both personal lament and Surrealist experiment.
Lastly, during the 1940s, Mexico became a haven for foreign artists fleeing WWII, fascism, and discrimination. Among them was Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012), an African-American sculptor and printmaker who moved to Mexico in 1946 and joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular. The Taller was central to the postrevolutionary resurgence of socially engaged printmaking in Mexico. Within this context, Catlett created her groundbreaking series I Am the Negro Woman (1946). Consisting of 15 linocuts, the series commemorates the oppression, resistance, and survival of African American women, from historic figures like Harriet Tubman to workers and mothers. With bold contrasts and close-cropped faces, the prints situate the struggles of Black women within a transnational language of resistance fostered by Mexico’s politicized print culture.
Mexico also welcomed European Surrealist émigrés escaping fascism. Leonora Carrington (1917–2011), from England, arrived in 1942 after fleeing Nazi-occupied France, and developed a fantastical visual language that merged occult symbolism with Mexican landscape and myth. Her painting The Pomps of the Subsoil (1947) imagines a subterranean world of hybrid beings and ritual, evoking transformation and magical energies. Remedios Varo (1908–1963), a Spanish exile who reached Mexico in 1941 after escaping Franco’s Spain, created intricate, visionary canvases that fused science, mysticism, and dream imagery. In Creation of the Birds (1957), a mystical figure channels light into birds with a violin-like tool, an allegory of creation itself. Together, Carrington and Varo cultivated a Surrealist enclave in Mexico, reframing exile and displacement as sources of profound imaginative freedom.
AT THE END OF CLASS…
At the end, emphasize that women artists working in Brazil and Mexico from the 1910s to 1950s made crucial contributions to modernism by expanding its forms, subjects, and meanings. Through photography, painting, sculpture, and printmaking, they explored questions of gender, race, national identity, and personal subjectivity. They found, in some cases, greater opportunities than their counterparts in Europe and the U.S.
Two possible small-group activities for further discussion are as follows:
- Students could compare and contrast Tarsila’s A Negra (1923) with Catlett’s I Am the Negro Woman (1946), both works already examined in this lecture, in relation to racial iconography and each artwork’s message surrounding the intersections of race, gender, and class.
- Alternatively, students could be introduced to three self-portraits not covered in the lecture: Tarsila’s Self-Portrait (The Red Coat) (1923), Carrington’s Self-Portrait (ca. 1937–38), and Kahlo’s Diego on My Mind (1943). Based on what they know of these artists from the lecture, and what they see in each image, ask them to discuss how each artist uses self-portraiture to explore the relationship between their interior and exterior lives.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Artist Biographies
Alperstein, Deborah Dorotinsky. “Lola Álvarez Bravo,” AWARE, accessed July 28, 2025. https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/lola-alvarez-bravo.
Aebi, Kiko. “Elizabeth Catlett.” MoMA, accessed July 28, 2025.
https://www.moma.org/artists/1037-elizabeth-catlett.
Barat, Charlotte. “Frida Kahlo.” MoMA, accessed July 28, 2025.
https://www.moma.org/artists/2963-frida-kahlo.
Grimson, Karen. “Tarsila do Amaral.” MoMA, accessed July 28, 2025.
https://www.moma.org/artists/49158-tarsila-do-amaral.
Lepoittevin, Anne. “Maria Martins.” AWARE, accessed July 28, 2025.
https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/maria-martins.
Murphy Turner, Madeline. “Leonora Carrington.” MoMA, accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.moma.org/artists/993-leonora-carrington.
Padilla, Liliana. “María Izquierdo.” AWARE, translated by Anna Knight, accessed July 28, 2025. https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/maria-izquierdo.
Pesapane, Lucia. “Anita Malfatti.” AWARE, translated by Lucy Pons, accessed July 28, 2025. https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/anita-malfatti.
Sidley, Kelly. “Tina Modotti.” MoMA, accessed July 28, 2025.
https://www.moma.org/artists/4039-tina-modotti.
Tobias, Jennifer. “Remedios Varo.” MoMA, accessed July 28, 2025.
https://www.moma.org/artists/8317-remedios-varo
Videos
The Art Institute of Chicago, “Remedios Varo: Science Fictions | Exhibition Stories,” YouTube, Oct. 5, 2023, accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coKWZWko7ZM. (5:19 mins.)
The Art Assignment/PBS, “What this painting tells us about Frida Kahlo,” YouTube, accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vigep1nYT6o. (9:37 mins.)
CBS Sunday Morning, “Tarsila, the mother of Brazilian Modern Art,” YouTube, Mar. 11, 2018, accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9prEjZUG63Y. (4:33 mins.)