Instituto Tomie Ohtake

This guide to Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo follows the painter Tomie Ohtake, a housewife who left Japan in the 1930s and didn't pick up a brush until age thirty-nine, working blindfolded at the easel to escape the rigid abstraction fashionable in Brazil at the time. Critics dismissed her at first as a late-starting amateur. Her son Ruy grew up to become an architect, trained on the same city she had made her home.