Martins (born Maria de Lourdes Alves, 1894–1973) was a Brazilian sculptor. She grew up in Campanha, studied music, then took up sculpture while living abroad with her husband, the diplomat Carlos Martins Pereira e Sousa. In New York in the 1940s she learned bronze casting from Jacques Lipchitz, showed with the Surrealists, and was taken up by André Breton, who linked her writhing, plantlike forms to Amazonian myth. She bought Mondrian’s *Broadway Boogie Woogie* and later gave it to MoMA.
She made several versions of this sculpture between 1944 and 1949, in different sizes and materials. MoMA’s label quotes her directly: “It is nearly impossible to make people understand each other.” The fuller remark she used for the work was “The world is complicated and sad—it is nearly impossible to make people understand each other.”
The two figures are usually read as male and female. Their bodies touch and lean into one another, but the spikes that erupt from their heads stop short of meeting. MoMA describes that as an embrace that is both opposition and attraction — desire and refusal at once. A *Time* reviewer, seeing a plaster version in 1946, said it looked like “a disagreement between two anthropomorphic snowstorms.”
Later writers have also tied the title to her affair with Marcel Duchamp, which began around the year she made this piece. She was married to the Brazilian ambassador and had no intention of divorcing; Duchamp later used her as the model for the nude in *Étant donnés*. That reading is interpretive. What she herself said the sculpture was about is the near-impossibility of two people actually understanding each other.–Grok
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