Livio Abramo

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Livio Abramo
Birth name	Livio Abramo
Born	June 23, 1903(1903-06-23) Sao Paulo, Br
Died	April 26, 1993 (aged 89) Asuncion, Paraguay
Occupation(s)	Drawer, Painter

The notorious sketcher, engraver and aquarellist talks of himself: “I was born June 23th, 1903 in Araraquara, Sao Paulo State, Brazil, and son of Italian parents. My father was a liberal in every mean and the father of my father was an anarchist. Those conditions marked permanently my position and the one of my brothers, about the life…”

Although he was born in Brazil, he adopted Paraguay as his nation and it was in this country were he developed the mature stage of a work considered today around the world as emblematic.

The quotation above belongs to the presentation of the exposition “Etapas de un itinerario: grabados, dibujos, acuarelas de Livio Abramo” (Phases of an Itinerary: Engraves, Drawing and Aquarelles From Livio Abramo). In that autobiographic book, the great Brazilian artist also says: “I am drawer, engraver and express the painting using aquarelles. I am entirely autodidactic in the arts. My first engraves and designs coincided with my political and social activities, and have a sharp and expressionist profile.”

1 Beginnings
2 Trajectory
3 Legacy
4 Last years
5 Work
6 References
7 External Links

[edit] Beginnings

After obtaining the major prize of engrave in 1950 he traveled for almost two years to Europe accompanied by his daughter Larissa and visited the most renamed European museums.

He was a journalist for 33 years so he intercalated his artistic activities with his journalistic and syndical activities. It was also because of that, he went to jail many times.

“I don’t see the art as a profession but as human quality, just like the beauty of a waterfall, just like the flight of the birds…” he said.

About his own work, in the same catalog mentioned above he says: “And if it is as the saying goes ‘remembering is to live again’, there is a part of my memories that took artistic form”. About his artistic style, he said: “It’s been said that I’m an exponent of the Brazilian ‘fantastic realism’. Actually, never –except for very brief moments on my artistic beginnings– I have been worried about labeling. I believe that I belong to the great current of artists that from the prehistoric time to the present have used the nature as inspiration.”

[edit] Trajectory

Other relevant facts of his artistic personality

Year	Outstanding activities
1951	Had a special room at the First Biennial of Modern Art of Sao Paulo (maybe the most prestigious visual arts event in Latin America); at the sixth edition had his second special room.
1956	He made an individual exposition at the Modern Arts Museum of Río de Janeiro and another at the one of Sao Paulo.
1957	Founded in Asunción the engraving workshop “Julián de la Herrería”.
1960	Founded with the engraver María Bonomi, the Estudio Gravura at Sao Paulo, an institute that influenced particularly the development of the graving art in this city.
1964	He moved permanently to Asunción, making an extraordinary job training Paraguayan artists.
1976	Makes an introspective show invited by the Sao Paulo’s Biennial.
1978	The Modern Arts Museum of Río de Janeiro invites him to repeat the retrospective.
1983	Exposition in the Cultural Center of Sao Paulo.
1990	The Lassar Segal Museum organizes a retrospective of his work.

[edit] Legacy

His engraves can be found at the British Museum of London, the Museum of the Vatican, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Riverside Museum, the Philadelphia Museum, The National Library of the Louvre in Paris, the Modern Arts Museums of Sao Paulo and Río de Janeiro, the Visual Arts Center in Asunción, and also in numerous private collections.

[edit] Last years

Admired for his extraordinary humility, his essentially human treatment with others and his kindness, the rightness and clearness of his thoughts, the thoroughness in the training of many fundamental artists of Paraguayan contemporary visual arts, and considered with justice as one of the renovators of the xylographic language of the 20th century. Died in Asunción, the capital of the country that gave him his best years, April 26th 1992, a few months before turning 89 years old.

[edit] Work

In another part of the already mentioned biography, Abramo says: “Such memories reunite some of my very first work done as an adult (the works of my first youth, around 200, I’ve lost almost all of them) in the ’30, followed by the series portraits of my kids, of María, mi first and deceased wife, as later one of Dora, mi actual mate”.

Follow the studies about Brazilian nature: “Itapecerica”, “Capos de Jordao” (Fields of Jordao), and others, of eclectic subject. After that, comes the series “Obrero” (Worker) and “Guerra civil española” (Spanish Civil War) and after many years we found the xylo-engrave series made in 1948 to illustrate the book “Pelo sertao” from the Brazilian writer Alfonso Arinos.

In the next three years (1949, 1950 and 1951) I’ve dedicated entirely to design. Belong to this phase the designs and water colors about “Río de Janeiro”, “Macumba” and “Negritude” subjects, in which I tried to show the charm of the Carioca city and the figure of “Dina”, the fascination of the black beauty.

With my first and brief visit to Asunción in 1956 begins the “Paraguayan phase”, a phase that has not finished yet... Such itinerary focuses on diverse subjects: The nature show and the human show. In all my years of artistic work I always avoided the typical, the anecdotic and especially the picturesque.