• Public

  • Public
  • Network
  • Groups
  • Featured
  • Popular
  • People

A full-body modern portrait of a non-white nude Brazilian woman sitting cross-legged. The choice of subject and style is important in a country which had only recently outlawed slavery and to which modernist painting styles of any sort had only been introduced 10 years before. The figure is highly stylized and interpretive, with skewed lips that appear almost independent of her face, one breast hanging over an arm, and truncated lower-body anatomy. Behind her the background is boldly striped in blue, white, green, red and gold, and industrially stylized (though it may represent a version of traditional architecture and leaves) in what some consider an early intimation toward the "concrete modernism" for which Brazil became so famous a few decades later.