Maria Martins

Maria Martins is best known as a modern sculptor, fusing human, plant and animal forms in writhing, fluid shapes, and often incorporating imagery from Brazilian mythology. She became associated with the Surrealists in the 1940s, and exhibited several times in the Bienal de São Paulo, which she helped to found in 1950.

She is the author of three books: Ásia maior: Brama, Gandhi e Nehru (1961), O Ritual do Ritmo (date unclear) and a memoir, A Ásia Maior: O Planeta China (1968). She also wrote about the life and work of the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and wrote a column for the O Correio da Manhã magazine in Rio de Janiero.

An affair with Benito Mussolini in the 1920s led to her divorce from her first husband. Her second marriage in 1926 was to the Brazilian diplomat Carlos Martins Pereira de Souza, and she moved with him in 1939 when he was named Brazilian Ambassador to the United States. In DC, she kept an art studio in the embassy, hosted diplomatic parties, and became a regular at the exclusive dinners hosted by Peggy Guggenheim. Martins exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and at Valentine Gallery in New York.

From 1946 until her departure back to Brazil in 1951, Martins had an affair with Marcel Duchamp, and served as the model for his final masterpiece the Ètant donnés. Some of her sculpture, ceramics, and etchings are now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Writing in Art in Review in 1998, critic Roberta Smith noted: “She had a flair for fluid, animated entanglements of line—a particularly fierce form of drawing in space—and for grotesque, yet poetically effective distortions of form. She also made skillful use of her Brazilian background, stretching and twisting the limbs of her figures until, resembling snakes or creeping jungle vines, they were intriguingly elusive.”