Anita Malfatti was a Brazilian painter. She was the pioneer to bring European and American Modernism to Brazil.
Background
Ethnicity:
Anita Malfatti’s father came from Italy, and her mother was a North American with German ancestry.
Anita Malfatti was born in 1889 on 2 December in São Paulo, Brazil as Anita Catarina Malfatti. She was a daughter of Samuel Malfatti, a civil engineer, and Elizabeth Malfatti who was a design teacher, a talented painter and spoke several languages. It was Elizabeth who encouraged Anita to study art and inspired her passion for drawing.
Anita’s father died when she was about thirteen-year-old girl.
Malfatti’s right arm was atrophied from her birth. Three operations were made, but the arm remained immobile for the rest of Anita’s life.
Education
Born with a congenital defect in her right arm, Anita Malfatti was intensively trained to use her left hand from the early childhood.
Anita was taught the basis of painting and design by her mother, Elizabeth Malfatti.
After the training at the Escola Americana and Mackenzie College, Anita Malfatti was sent in 1910 by her uncle, Jorge Krug, to Berlin in order to enter the Royal Academy of fine arts. Coming late to the beginning of the academic term, she had taken private lessons from Fritz Burger-Muhlfeld, Lovis Corinth, and Ernst Bischoff-Culm for four years.
Then, the painter returned to Brazil. During the return journey, Anita visited Paris where she was impressed by Post-Impressionism and she started to attend Impressionists circles. Malfatti also entered the Academie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture.
From 1915 till 1916, Anita Malfatti was a student of the Art Students League and the Independent School of Art (under the tutelage of Homer Boss) in New York. Homer Boss helped Anita to develop the freedom of expression and to work beyond any restrictions – the first steps to Modernism.
Anita Malfatti’s career started from the first exhibition at the Armory Show in Cologne on May to September 1912.
Three years later, Malfatti’s works were published in Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines.
But the exhibition that became a turning point in Anita’s career was her own solo show organized at Exposição de Pintura Moderna in São Paulo from December 12, 1917, to January 11, 1918 where she demonstrated among others 53 paintings her Tropical and O saci (1916). Malfatti’s artworks received many bad reviews mostly because of the fact that she didn’t look to place Brazilian art into context of globally modernist innovations such as Post-Impressionism or Cubism. That criticism caused Malfatti’s depression.
Although, Anita Malfatti style was noticed by Oswald de Andrade and Menotti del Picchia who later became the members of the Group of Five as well as Anita.
This "Anita Malfatti Affair" led to the Week of Modern Art organized in 1922 by the Group of Five in order to modernize the Brazilian art. Anita Malfatti took an active part in the Week, preparing classes for children which would be expected to encourage children's interest in modernist movement.
A year after the Week, Anita Malfatti received the scholarship from the pensioned art of the State of São Paulo which allowed her to travel to Paris the same year where she had worked and attended multiple courses on designing for the following five years.
After her mother’s death, Anita took a rest and had no exhibitions for some time. During this period, she created her best works which were presented at her solo exhibition in 1955.
The later Malfatti’s creations became more conservative without the shocking combination of Cubism and Impressionism, as O Canal e a Ponta of 1940 which is certainly different in style from one of her most famous masterpieces as The Idiot.
In 1941, Anita Malfatti became a president and director of the Sindicatos dos Artistas Plásticos and had held this post for five years.
Anita Malfatti was a member of the Group of Five (Grupo dos Cinco) related with Brazilian Modernism. Malfattis' colleagues in the Group were such outstanding artists of the time as Tarsila do Amaral, Menotti Del Picchia, Oswald de Andrade and Mario de Andrade.