About the artist:

Maria Martins was a Brazilian visual artist who was particularly well known for her modern sculptures.

Maria de Lourdes Alves was born on 7 August 1894 in Campanha, Brazil.[1] to a minister father and a pianist mother. Her first husband was a literary critic named Otavio Tarquinio de Souza, with whom she had a daughter. However, when she married the young diplomat Carlos Martins in 1926 she changed her name to Maria Martins.

Maria Martins is known in the international world as “the sculptor of the tropics” and “the great sculptor of Surrealism”.

Martins studied in diverse geographical locations in her early years, representing a time frame 1894 to 1938. Her initial education was in music at a French school in Rio de Janeiro, pursuing a career as a professional musician. Early in her first marriage she became interested in sculpture, and studied in Paris under Catherine Barjansky. While living in Japan she studied ceramics and Zen philosophy with D. T. Suzuki at the University of Kyoto.

Her interest in sculptural abstractions was inspired by simple large wooden sculptures of her early Belgium instructor Oscar Jespers. This sculptural interest evolved to Surrealism, exploration of her Brazilian - Amazonian roots, and bronze casting under the teaching of Jacques Lipchitz. Lipchitz introduced Martins to bronze casting using the Egyptian lost-wax casting technique, which she evolved by adding fat to the wax to increase the detail in her bronze sculptures. Eventually bronze became her creative process of choice.

Martins' association with the 1940s expatriate artist community in New York helped formulate her view on art’s political power. These views on art, its role in peace, and the responsibility of artists is articulated in an essay that was read into the U.S. congressional record on June 18, 1947 by Congressman Jacob Javits of New York. In the essay, titled Art, Liberation and Peace, she describes a world in which differences of race, nationalities, religions, social conditions and opinions are freely discussed, thereby negating the impacts of politics and wealth. She highlighted Adolf Hitler’s destruction of works of art as the beginning of his “nihilistic drive of conquest, domination and destruction”. She describes art as an appeal to emotions, a liberation and is immortal emphasizing that art’s value is to mobilize human beings to counter the impacts of war.

In 1939, her husband Carlos became the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, moving their family to the States. During her US residency from 1939 to 1949, Martins studied with the sculptors Jacques Lipchitz and printmaker Stanley William Hayter. Lipchitz introduced her to bronze casting and encouraged exploration of Surrealism and her Brazilian roots. She evolved to using the Egyptian lost-wax casting technique as her creative process of choice. In 1941 Martins had a solo exhibition of her work, entitled Maria, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 1943 the Valentine Gallery in New York City organized a two-artist exhibition with Martins and Piet Mondrian, Maria: New Sculptures and Mondrian: New Paintings. Martins later bought Mondrian's famous work from the exhibition, Broadway Boogie Woogie, for only $800, though she eventually donated it to the Museum of Modern Art. Also in 1943 she met André Breton and other surrealists in exile and collaborated with them in the surrealist journal VVV. Breton celebrated her sculpture and wrote the preface to the catalogue for her 1947 solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, it states that “Maria owes nothing to the sculpture of the past or the present – she is far too sure, for that, of the original rhythm which is increasingly lacking in modern sculpture; she is prodigal with what the Amazon has given her”. She took part in the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris in 1947.