Love is color and abundance, it is seeing in the world that which one wants — not only what there is, but what there may be (“Blind inside out/ as in a dream/ I see what I desire”, Caetano Veloso would say): a blue hill, monumental banana trees, coconut wind vanes. Sitting together and looking at the landscape, mixing all the colors, opening oneself to the improbable beauty, locking shoulders, arms and hair, experiencing belonging: the couple alternates in their body the colors that repeat in their surroundings.
White, red-orange, blue, yellow: the couple converses, above all, with the house and the floor. Nature, round and opulent; is affirmative: here is a cheerful painting. The word idílio (idyll) dates back to ancient lyrical poems that draw on brevity and simplicity to deal with bucolic and pastoral themes in the kingdom of love. As an outcome, the term has gained metonymic meanings, in which it is understood as a synonym for the word “love”, “fantasy”, or is used to designate “relationships between lovers”, according to Houaiss dictionary. Tarsila do Amaral, thus, paints her own idyllic poem and adds her contribution to the tradition started by Theocritus during the Hellenistic period of Ancient Greece.
Although produced in the year of 1929, that is, during Tarsila’s anthropophagic phase (1928-1930), we see in Idílio a return of motifs and colors mainly linked to her “pau-brasil” (1924-1928) phase. When the artist, arriving from her transforming stay in Paris in the year of 1923, started to be concerned with approaching the colors and landscapes of Brazil in her paintings, elements that until then had been ignored in her work as a consequence of her academic and Europeanized formation.
It was during her “pau-brasil” phase, from her trips to Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro that Tarsila began to work with tonalities until then considered “tacky”, unworthy of being incorporated into painting, but which she considered to be very Brazilian: “In Minas Gerais I found the colors that I used to love as a child. Later, they taught me that they were ugly and crude. I followed the monotony of refined taste... But then I took revenge on the oppression by taking them to my paintings: the purest blue, violet pink, lively yellow, singing green, all in more or less strong gradations according to the mixture of white.”
Thus, in repeating its shapes and colors, Idílio corresponds with paintings like O Pescador (1924, Hermitage Museum), Morro de Favela (1924, Private Collection) and O Mamoeiro (1925, IEB Collection), even if none of them bring about the theme of love – an aspect, one might say, unusual in Tarsila’s work, which makes this painting unique among her pieces. Another important element to highlight from our comments on Idílio is that Tarsila’s phases were not watertight periods, but rather, interpenetrable. There is a cohesion in the artist’s path throughout the 1920s, which justifies the presence of common elements in works from different periods.
Another exemplary case of dialogue and intersection of the artist’s phases is the outcome of the work, A Negra, from 1923: paired with the central figure from Abaporu (1928) in the painting Antropofagia from 1929, it started to be read as a foreshadowing of the artist’s anthropophagic phase still in the first half of the 1920s. Idílio, therefore, is one more facet of a very Brazilian Tarsila working with her favorite colors. As Drummond wrote in a poem in her honor:
“Blue and pink and green forever.”