Although in the United States during the 1940s, Maria Martins had enjoyed the recognition and acceptance of the art world, especially from artists connected with surrealism, when she returned to Brazil in the 1950s she confronted a certain degree of hostility.

In contrast to an artist such as Tarsila do Amaral, who in the Ë20s returned from France stimulated by a collective movement which aimed at the construction of an artistic discourse, a discourse capable of understanding and representing Brazilian cultural values in an innovative fashion, Maria Martins, upon her return to Brazil, did not share the same commitment to the creation of a modern discourse which would embrace a renewed Brazilian identity.

Maria MartinsËs marginalization was due to the fact that, in the 1950s, the artist created forms which sprang from an emotional, anti-rationalist impulse, and which were foreign to any commitment to represent the Brazilian landscape. Her freedom and her vocation to sculpt narratives with her personal signature within a mythical and magical universe, clashed with a milieu in which, based on international influence, especially the influence brought by the I Bienal de Arte de São Paulo in 1951, a great interest in abstract and constructivist art was sparked in Brazil.

Maria Martins, was in fact, one of the main thrusts behind the concept and realization of the I Bienal. In its first edition, Maria took part in the show as guest artist from Brazil. She was the only woman to show there, next to Bruno Giorgi, Portinari, Di Cavalcanti, Lasar Segall, Livio Abramo, Goeldi and Victor Brecheret. The second time, she received the second prize of the Bienal and, the third time, in 1955, she was awarded "Best Brazilian Sculptor." In that show, Maria shared the floor with artists such as Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Luiz Sacilotto, Maurício Nogueira Lima, Geraldo de Barros, Waldemar Cordeiro, Fiaminghi, Flexor and Judith Lauand, all of whom were directly linked to concrete art.

In 1956, on the occasion of her show at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, and anticipating the harshness of the critics vis-à-vis her work, Maria wrote in her catalog:

"It doesnþt matter which form of expression an artist uses, as long as the artist successfully transmits a message of his or her own, expressed in his or her own language, refraining from the use of †fad.Ë These †fadsË are often responsible for the impoverishment of artists of great value. In other words, for me, whenever a painting or a sculpture draws immediate attention to the school or movement to which the author claims to belong, while not awakening any further interest, be it of surprise or disgust, that work is nothing more than a †fadË and it will perish, even if it meets with momentary success."

The 27th of April 1957, Mário Pedrosa published in the Jornal do Brasil, in Rio de Janeiro, a review describing MariaËs work entitled "Maria, the sculptor":

"The volumes in her sculpture, in bronze, polished metal or wood, have no consistency, articulation or hierarchy of planes. They tend to level each other out, treated only as if they were a mere flowing surface or a porous surface [. . .] In later phases, the solid volumes are hollowed out; cracks appear in them, and the surrounding space tends to penetrate them."

In reality, contrary to what critics say, Maria MartinsËs constructions do not follow formal commitments. They are born rather out of an intimate need to embody personal narratives about the nature of human life.

The art of Maria Martins springs from a distinctly feminine sensitivity. Manipulating hybrid cultural and aesthetic realms, the artist borrows and rearranges diverse elements, such as the native exuberance of an imaginary Brazil, the oneiric and dramatic stance of European surrealism and a liking for ornamentation, typical of countries such as India or Tibet, in which she has and maintains a particular interest.⁷

Her forms defy the limits of the figurative and the abstract, positioning themselves on a threshold which contemporary art now handles in a skillful way. Each work becomes raw material, molded with a myriad of contents, appropriates the symbols charged with a previous meaning·such as cobras, drawn from the mythology of the Amazon rainforest·and transforms them into sinister and beckoning commentaries on the human condition.

In the amalgam between humans, plants and animals, Maria Martins builds a biological preserve of her own, which, in its metamorphic symbiosis, is capable of capturing and synthesizing the aspects of life in its sensuality, pain, solitude, eroticism and evanescence.

The artist confronts her art as a discourse, permeating it with texts, poems and titles which imbue it with a literariness emblematic of contemporary art at this turn of the century. In that sense, as recently occurred in the case of Louise Bourgeois,⁸ it is necessary to realign the position of Maria Martins in the history of Western art, which practically ignored her. For this purpose, a revision and redefinition of the canons of art history would be indispensable.