Earlier this year we went to the Luxembourg Museum in Paris to see Tarsila do Amaral works of art. She was Brazilian painter, draftswoman, and translator and is considered one of the leading Latin American modernist artists who blended local Brazilian content with international avant-garde aesthetics. Born in 1886 in the rural town of Capivari, on the outskirts of São Paulo, do Amaral was raised in the bucolic, Francophile environment of Brazil’s bourgeoisie. At age 34 she left for Paris, where she enrolled at the Académie Julian, the famous school for modern art that drew many international students, while simultaneously studying with French painters André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, and Fernand Léger, who trained their students in Cubism. Here she would fulfill what she referred to as her “military service” with Cubism, while searching for a distinct Brazilian voice within modern art. #tarsiladoamaral