curadoria Katia Canton
Maria Martins: the woman has lost her shadow Maria, the girl from Minas Gerais, the daughter of a minister, schooled in the Colégio Sion; Maria, the pianist, the mother and wife; Maria, an ambassador's spouse and a citizen ofthe world; Maria, the sculptor who in the 1940S dazzled the European and American art world; Maria, the muse ofBreton's and Duchamp's surrealism; Maria, the art promoter who contributed to the creation ofthe first Bienal de São Paulo and the Museum ofModern Art in Rio de Janeiro; Maria, the writer and mature woman who left the trace ofher cosmopolitan life in her books and articles. It is not one, but many Marias who, like the scattered pieces of a puzzle ultimately converge, at the end of this twentieth century, to reveal an artist of uncommon originality, boldness and talento Maria de Lourdes Alves was born in 1894 in Campanha, a town in the south of Minas Gerais, where she was raised for a traditional family-life role: she studied piano, married the historian and literary critic Otávio Tarquínio de Souza and had a daughter. She changed her name to Maria Martins when she married again, this time to the Brazilian ambassador Carlos Martins, with whom she lived, starting in 1926, in Quito, Paris, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Brussels and Washington. She became known as Maria onlywhen she moved to Washington in 1939, to follow her husband on his appointment as ambassador to the United States until 1948. And it was then that she began to simply sign as "Maria" while her works earned a reputation for their sensuous forms and for the exuberance with which they evoked a distant and exotic Brazil. Maria Martins began a fruitful career in the United States with her first solo shaw at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1941. That sarne year, after pursuing training with the Belgian sculptor Oscar Jespers in Brussels, she went on to study with Jacques Lipchitz and Stanley William Hayter in New York, where she rented an apartment. The art world in New Yorkat the time was populated by key artists ofthe European avantgarde who had emigrated to the United States during the Second World War. Itwas through contact with these artists that Maria's work assumed a new shape and content, incorporating surrealist elements. During her second exhibit at the Valentine Gallery in New York in 1942, Maria met André Breton. That sarne year, Breton introduced her to a group of artists connected with surrealismo The group included artists such as Michel Tapie, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.l "[ ... ] it was the Amazon itself which sang in her work that I had the joy to admire in N ew York in 1943. With all its voices from time immemorial, it sang of the passion of man, from birth
295 Maria Martins Katia Canton