Madalena Santos Reinbold
self-taught Brazilian painter and textile artist
Biography
Madalena Santos Reinbolt was a self-taught Brazilian painter and textile artist, associated with naïf or primitive art. Her link to food culture is mainly biographical: she worked as a cook, and her work recalls rural life in the interior of Bahia. Birth and death dates do not agree across the available references.
She was born in Vitória da Conquista, into a farming family. Her mother, a craftswoman and cook, spun cotton, made pottery and prepared butter. Reinbolt never received formal schooling. After working as a domestic servant in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, she settled in Petrópolis around 1949, where she cooked for Lota de Macedo Soares and the poet Elizabeth Bishop. In 1952 she was dismissed for spending too much time painting, and she never managed to live from her art alone.
She first worked in oil on paper, from 1950 to 1963, and then on canvas. Around the late 1960s she turned to wool embroidery on burlap, which she called wool paintings. She died in Petrópolis in 1976. Her work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1978 and is held in collections such as the Museu Afro Brasil and MASP.
Key contributions
- Oil on paper (1950-1963): her earliest known works, with gestural style and quick brushwork.
- Oil on canvas: the continuation of her expressionist painting after 1963.
- Wool tapestries on burlap: a technique using up to 154 needles that carries the energy of her painting into embroidery.
- Agropastoral scenes: memories of rural life in Bahia, shown in both paint and tapestry.
- Venice Biennale, 1978: posthumous international presence of her work.