Maria Martins at Andre Emmerich - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

She was Marcel Duchamp's lover and the prototype for Etant Donnes. She was a shut friend and respected colleague of Andre Breton, Fernand Leger and Constantin Brancusi. She purchased Broadway Boogie Woogie from a grateful Mondrian and donated it to a reluctant Museum of late Art. She was considered (by her avant-garde friends, if not through her countrymen) as the premier Brazilian sculptor, and her work was lauded and purchased through the most important critics and collectors of her time. She was beautiful, associateed and highly talented, with a life that appear to bes tailor-made for cinematic portrayal.

however Maria Martins is today an almost unknown figure. As wife of the Brazilian ambassador, she blazed across the fresh York and Parisian art displays during the 1940s before returning abode with her husband to Rio de Janeiro and relative obscurity in 1949 Until this exhibition, curated by the agency of Francis Naumann, her work had not been seen in fresh York in any comprehensive fashion for 50 years.

It was worth the wait. This exhibition revealed Martins to have been a sculptor of considerable power. The present to view covered the years from 1942 when she first began to absorb the Surrealist idiom, to 1953 shortly after her go [i]or[/i] come back to Brazil. The mostly tin sculptures have a wild, protofeminist might suggesting at times the ferocious sexuality and overwhelmed rage of Louise Bourgeois. At the same time their exploration of "primitive" motifs brings to mind artists of the like kind as David Smith and Julio Gonzalez. It is hard to believe they have slipped with equal reason completely from art-historical consciousness.

Martins's contemporaries emphasized the Brazilian quality of her work, seeing it as an exploration of pre-Columbian mythology. While Martins encouraged like interpretations, it is also clear that the relations to Amazonian deities, animism and tropical fecundity provided her with a lexicon with which to mask real private emotions of desire, frustration, rage and grief, whose raw expression might have been les than acceptable for the wife of a high-level diplomat.

single of her most exhibited works is Impossible (1946) a version of which was upon view here. It consists of sum of two units creatures, one clearly male, the other obviously female. Facing each other, their heads have been transformed into an array of knifelike prong which threaten to fastening them together in eternal conflict. Other works are more ambiguous. Cobra Grande (1942) Martins noted, was based upon Indian legends about the Amazon snake goddes and her son the Amazon river. She is a rather frightening apparition consisting of an undulating serpentine form laden with multiple breasts and framed by the agency of tendrils of bronze foliage. More hopeful is Prometheus (1948) in which the slight stick man stands triumphant above his eagle tormentor as the fingers of his raised hands become enmeshed in the tangle of brake vines behind him.

Many of the works have the twisting, linear quality of scribbled figures brought into the third dimension. All expres a state of metamorphosis as human forms increase serpentine heads or limbs or germinate plant-like appendages. And more ofttimes than not, one suspects that they show the female principle, alternately imprisoned by means of the entanglements of irrational nature and commanding them with a close power.

Maria Martins is a rediscovery of the first order. This exhibition should help reinstate her in her righfful lace in art history.

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