Magda Andrade (Venezuela, 1912 – Paris, 1984). Tropical Magic. Landscape with Palms and Figures

Magda Andrade (Venezuela, 1912 – Paris, 1984)

Tropical Magic. Landscape with Palms and Figures

Oil on canvas, approx. 80 × 60 cm

Magda Andrade, born in Maracaibo in 1912 under the name Magdalena Schottman, moved to Paris in 1935 with a Venezuelan government scholarship. There she studied at the Académie André Lhote and came into contact with Marie Laurencin, Othon Friesz, and Marcel Grommaire, absorbing the vibrant atmosphere of the French avant-garde. While influenced by post-Cubism, Fauvism, and Surrealist currents, Andrade retained her Venezuelan roots, enriching her identity as a painter with the tropical light, rhythms, and imagery of her homeland.

This painting depicts a tropical village, with a simple house on the left, slender palm trees, female figures, animals, and exotic birds rendered with a deliberately dreamlike touch. The surreal light and colors reminiscent of Fauvism transform the everyday scene into an oneiric vision. Decorative rhythms and vivid contrasts recall affinities with Raoul Dufy, though Andrade maintained her own distinct style, a fusion of Caribbean identity and Parisian modernism.

Andrade herself described her work as magie tropicale, a term used in her Paris exhibitions of the 1950s (Pont des Arts, Galerie Lucie Weill, 1957). The present painting embodies this aesthetic: a lyrical, dreamlike vision in which reality is transfigured into fantasy.

The dedication on the canvas refers to Carlos Deambrosis Martins (1900–1981), a Uruguayan intellectual and translator active in Paris and Madrid, further testifying to Andrade’s international cultural connections.

Her career spanned both Europe and Latin America, with exhibitions in Paris, Rome, Madrid, Caracas, Houston, Luxembourg, and New York, where in 1960 she became the first Venezuelan woman to exhibit at the prestigious Wildenstein Gallery. Today her works are preserved in major collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris (Portrait de l’oiseau qui n’existe pas, 1959) and the Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas (Puerto viejo de Saint-Tropez and Serenata).

This Landscape with Palms is a quintessential example of Andrade’s art: a painting where the memory of Venezuela merges with Parisian avant-garde currents, yielding a poetic and dreamlike tropical magic.