Maria Martins (1894-1973)

Collection of the artist
Thence by descent

New York, André Emmerich Gallery, The Surrealist Sculpture of Maria Martins, March 19-April 18, 1998, no. 28, p. 88, illustrated in color

Untitled (Bronze): This work is in very good condition overall taking its age into account. The work is displayed on the original base. Minor oxidation is visible on the surface, more specifically within the crevasses. Minor debris is present within the crevasses as well. Untitled (Figure): This work has been examined under glass. The medium is stable. This work is ready to hang and is in generally good condition considering its age. Untitled (Macumba): The medium is stable overall. Yellowing of the paper has occurred due to age/time. Deckling is present along the edges of the paper. There are four faint vertical crease marks running the height of the paper. There is a 4 x 4 inch loss to the lower right corner; however, this has been repaired. There are two repaired tears, measuring between two to three-inches in length, that extend from the lower edge of the paper. These tears have not impacted the main image/composition. There are a few small, repaired tears on the extreme left and right edges. Overall, this work is in generally good condition and is ready to hang.
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On March 22, 1943 the Valentine Gallery opened an unexpectedly combined exhibition, Maria: New Sculptures and Mondrian: New Paintings. The exhibition was a complete commercial success for Maria Martins. Piet Mondrian, however, did not meet the same success, his works went unsold. Unbeknown to Mondrian, Maria Martins approached Valentine Dudensing to purchase Broadway Boogie Woogie with the proceeds from her successful sales, a work she eventually anonymously donated to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Maria Martins, the wife of Brazilian Ambassador Carlos Martins, had been leading a double-life. Already an accomplished artist by this time she had established her artistic residence in New York in a studio on 58^th Street and Park Avenue. Studying sculpting under Jacques Lipchitz and print-making under Stanley William Hayter, she also functioned as the grand Dame of the Washington, D.C. social elite throwing lavish gatherings at her Embassy home.

Maria: New Sculptures, her third exhibition at the Valentine Gallery, featured eight bronze sculptures which were a dramatic shift from what she presented in years prior. Gone were easily identifiable, traditional figures. Instead Maria presented unrecognizable, hybrid vegetal-human forms intoxicated with the myths of the mysterious Brazilian Amazon. This exhibition set the precedent for Maria as an artist and for the predominant theme she would explore in all of her future production: her native Brazil. The Surrealist avant-garde circle in New York, composed of  the  European refugees of World War II Max Ernst, Matta, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, etc., quickly took note particularly the group’s leader, André Breton. Maria was consequently immersed into this circle, concretizing her identity as a Surrealist. More importantly, her fateful meeting with Marcel Duchamp sparked a rapturous affair that would harbor a period of intense and significant production for both artists.

In 1949, Maria Martins returned to Brazil, her “country of green bronze”[1], after spending 25 years abroad. Her body of work by this juncture was fully matured, continuously innovative, and deeply imbedded in the legends of her Amazonia. The bronze sculpture here, Untitled, executed circa 1950, represents Maria’s endless exploration of the complex duality of Brazil’s mystical Amazon: the untamed and the carnal alongside the peaceful and the beautiful.

André Breton describes Maria’s sculpture as carrying “a whole legend on its shoulders, a legend that was nothing less than the Amazon itself.”[2] This unidentifiable, strange organic form is a being from Maria’s imagined and wild Amazonia. The rough, contrasting surface and the elongated, pointed tentacles of Untitled, references the constantly interchanging, ambiguous worlds between the human and the natural: a world where the goddesses and monsters Cobra Grande, Yara and Boina reign with both cruelty and wisdom while also serving as a zone for  mysterious ritual practices, like the coastal Macumba.

Moreover, this sculpture finds itself entrenched in the Surrealist cannon that André Breton underscored as so pivotal, the domain of mystery. Untitled, lives in this world of mystery: it borders the logical and the unconventional, the recognizable and the unknown; it evokes the natural and the supernatural. It invites us to grasp what we can potentially never understand. Have man and nature mutated into a single being? Ultimately, the sculpture of Maria Martins, as she said, “contains more than its image represents, it contains the magic of a double life: the life the artist gave it […] and the life loaned to it by the eyes of the beholder.”[3] As much as we can try to identify this form, Maria leaves us only with infatuation and curiosity; she leaves us with the mysteries of her Amazonia.

[1] Charles Cosac, Maria, Rio de Janiero, 2010 p. 234

[2] Andre Breton, “Maria”, 1947, Preface to the Julian Levy Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, for Maria, November 1947

[3]Messages by Maria, 1947, p. 56