MASP

After living in Berlin and New York, Anita Malfatti returned to Brazil and in 1917 held a solo show in São Paulo, considered to be the country’s first modern art exhibition. She was one of the creators of the 1922 Modern Art Week in São Paulo. The following year she returned to Europe and spent five years in Paris. Interior de Mônaco [Interior in Monaco] (1925) was probably painted during a trip to the principality. The painting is comprised of two environments and one subject, possibly the artist’s sister, Georgina, with whom she traveled. The chromatic choices and Orientalist references reveal the influence of the Paris School and the work of Henri Matisse (1869–1954). Malfatti structured the painting through patterns: the drapes and the tablecloth introduce floral motifs, while the room’s floor is checkered and finished with red and white arabesques. The room in the foreground is intricately decorated with a flower jar, a fruit bowl, a brown cabinet with its top in glass—allowing a glimpse at the china and crystals inside—a table covered with a leaf-patterned tablecloth, and a pelmet atop the door in the matching fabric. Two portraits on the wall stand out, pointing to yet another motif: paintings within the painting. The doorway with a person at its center can likewise be interpreted as the frame of a painting within the canvas. The room in the background shows the composition’s only human figure, providing greater importance to a space that occupies only a small area of the canvas. The figure, dressed in a robe, seems to be facing a light source that is suggested by a delicate play of light and shadows. The work was included in Malfatti’s solo show at MASP in 1949; the exhibition catalog gave its title as Interior in Münich and dated it from 1927.

— Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator, MASP, 2018

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By Luiz Armando Bagolin
Amidst a towel, curtain pelmet and flowered wallpapers, a door opens, behind which appears a female figure with her back turned to us, dressed in a long white robe bathed in the bluish light of the morning. The interior is typically decorated to the standards of the early 20th century bourgeois belle époque, although it is quite modest in furniture, with two small paintings hanging on the wall. Painted in 1925, almost two years after Anita’s arrival in France, and exhibited in 1926 at the Salón des indépendents in Paris, this canvas reflects the artist’s assimilation of some of the strands of postwar European art, fond of what was called “return to order”, and expressed in the diversity of positions of the Paris School. After the fruitless experiences of the three solo exhibitions held in Brazil, between 1914 and 1921, Anita already showed signs of inclination to change direction, going from a more revolutionary painting or of a cubist-futurist character regarding the expression of shapes and colors, to a more relaxed art in terms of figuration, more palatable to the public. In 1928, after her return to Brazil, she would say about her stay in the French capital that: “extremists no longer have a prominent place. The modern trends I referred to represent moderate currents without, however, ceasing to be characteristically new”. And although the artist declared that she had not followed anyone in particular during this new phase, it is evident, particularly in this painting, the references to the paintings of Les Nabis group, in particular to Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis. Anita attended Denis’ classes, possibly at the Académie Ranson, in late 1923, the same one that Brecheret had attended during 1920. However, in her testimony from 1928, the artist would contemporize: “I was not influenced by any of these great names [...] I attended free-course academies, visited studios, searched in salons for what was most advanced [...] later, I remained independent within the movement that was happening at the time. I went deeper into the primitives, I took advantage of their technique and their simple and strongly characteristic way [...]”. Monaco Interior drew positive reviews in the French journal Les Artistes d'Aujourd'hui, published May 15, 1926: “Son interieur est heuresement composé, les détails y sont traités largement avec un souci d'évocation plutôt que de copie, on sent que l'artiste a voulu, avant tout, recréer l'atmosphère, l'ambiance [Its interior is very well composed, the details are largely treated with a concern for evocation and not copy, we feel that the artist wanted, above all, to recreate the atmosphere, the environment]”.

— Dr Luiz Armando Bagolin is a professor and researcher at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros da Universidade de São Paulo, IEB/USP, 2021

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