Long Obscure, Self-Taught Artist Madalena Santos Reinbolt Is Stepping Out of the Shadows

You’d be forgiven for not knowing the name Madalena Santos Reinbolt (1919–1977). Her current exhibition at New York’s American Folk Art Museum is the self-taught Afro-Brazilian artist’s first museum solo show in the U.S.

It showcases her riotously colorful embroideries on burlap sacks, which she dubbed , or “wool paintings,” as well as earlier oil paintings depicting busy landscapes. But in bringing the show to the city from Brazil’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), where it originated in 2022, Folk Art Museum curator Valérie Rousseau had her work cut out for her.

“When MASP produced this show, they had very little interpretation on the wall. Very little historical research about her had been produced,” Rousseau told me.

Santos Reinbolt was born and raised on a farm in the rural region of Bahia. As an adult, she became a domestic worker, moving to the south to pursue employment and eventually settling in Petrópolis, a city north of Rio de Janeiro that was often used as a summer getaway for wealthy families.

During her lifetime, Santos Reinbolt gave only one two-part interview, speaking just a few years before her death to art critic and anthropologist Lélia Coelho Frota in 1974 and ’75. (Coelho Frota would go on to include a work by Santos Reinbolt in the Brazilian pavilion at the 1978 Venice Biennale.)

The exhibition title—“A Head Full of Planets,” or in Portuguese—comes from that interview, and Santos Reinbolt speaking of her inner world, and the creative impulses that fueled her art.

MASP had tracked down some 60 known works by the artist in putting together the show—a number that has since hit 90, and continues to grow as more collectors have come forward—but had very little information about them. (The Folk Art Museum is hoping to soon finalize the acquisition of one.)

To add context to the exhibition, Rousseau, with the curatorial assistance of Dylan Blau Edelstein, set out to speak with the collectors who had loaned Santos Reinbolt’s work, often providing valuable context about their creation and subject matter.

“We now know that some of these are depicting family scenes, of people she knew. Others are works of her imagination,” Rousseau said.

One piece is celebrating a young man’s life milestones, from birth to his college graduation, given as a gift to his parents. Other works seem to illustrate rituals or ceremonies. Repeated motifs include a mountain range and a lake that looks like an eye.

But there is more research to be done. Though she never had children of her own, Santos Reinbolt came from a large family. Rousseau is interested in tracking down the artist’s siblings’ descendants to see if they can share any new details about her life and art, as well as the family history and whether their ancestors were enslaved.

There is also so much we don’t know about what inspired Santos Reinbolt. Some of the works seem to allude to race and class, depicting both Black and white figures. But how would the artist have thought about those issues, and experienced their effects, working as a household servant in a wealthy community?

“When you look at this moment here, you see a white woman almost absorbed by the textile,” Rousseau said of one work. “Maybe this implies some tension between between races.”

Santos Reinbolt spoke about having made art from a young age, drawing on repurposed sheets of newspaper. But her earliest surviving works date to the early 1950s, when she began working as a live-in cook for Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares (1910–1967) and her partner, American poet Elizabeth Bishop, (1911–1979).

In addition to beginning her art practice, Santos Reinbolt also met her husband, Luiz Augusto Reinbolt, while working there. Initially, she was painting on canvas, but then she developed an allergy to oil paints. As an alternative, her husband began bringing her discarded burlap sacks from a nearby warehouse.

“She seemed to have enjoyed the irregular mesh of the burlap,” Rousseau said, pointing the incredibly neat and tidy reverse on a work displayed to show both sides. “It gives a lot of expressive finish to the surface. It’s less confining, a lot of freedom, and she really took advantage of that.”

Santos Reinbolt also made her own clothes, sometimes incorporating those fabrics into her art. (Most of the works are undated, but the switch to yarn came in the mid 1960s.)

Although self-taught, Santos Reinbolt was part of a rich cultural milieu working in the Bishop-de Macedo Soares household. The couple were cultural luminaries in their own right, with friends who included the famed Brazilian Modernist Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994). They also collected Modernist works by the likes of Alexander Calder (1898–1976), Tarsila do Amaral (1896–1973), and Candido Portinari (1903–1962).

“We imagine that Santos Reinbolt had been looking and paying attention to these artists, and had even met some of them,” Rousseau said.

But the family cook might have been a little interested in the art she was encountering, at least to her employers’ liking. They fired Santos Reinbolt because “it finally got to be a choice between art and peace, and tranquility seemed more important than a masterpiece every afternoon,” Bishop wrote in a letter.

“The family was very annoyed that she was spending too much time creating her own work, instead of taking care of the cooking,” Rouseau said.

Bishop also wrote of a feeling of competition with Santo Reinbolt: “Her [paintings] are getting better and better, and the rivalry between us is intense—if I paint a picture, she paints a bigger and better one.”

Santos Reinbolt’s next post was a better fit. She was working at a family’s second home, giving her plenty of time to devote to her craft while they were in the city. The artist even sold her work: one piece on display in the exhibition with the back visible shows the price written on the painting’s reverse in Brazilian currency.

“She was aware of the value of the work,” Rousseau said. That value has gone up considerably recently, she added, from around $5,000 just a few years ago to upwards of $150,000—although it may prove hard to find one. “People don’t want to sell them. They want to keep them!”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com