Mira Schendel
| Mira Schendel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
1919 Zurich, Switzerland |
| Died | 1988 |
| Nationality | Brazilian |
| Occupation |
Artist Painter Sculptor |
| Religion | Catholic with Jewish heritage |
| Spouse(s) | Josep Hargesheimer (1941-1953); Knut Schendel (1960-1988) |
| Children | Ada (daughter) |
| Parent(s) |
Karl Leo Dub Ada Saveria Büttner |
Mira Schendel (1919–1988) was a Brazilian artist best known for her drawings on rice paper, but who was also a painter and sculptor.
Biography
Early life
Mira Schendel was born Myrrha Dagmar Dub in 1919 in Zurich, Switzerland.[1][2][3] Her father, Karl Leo Dub, was a fabric merchant, and her mother, Ada Saveria Büttner, was a milliner.[3] Although she had Jewish heritage, she was brought up as a Roman Catholic in Italy.[2][3] In the late 1930s, she began to study philosophy at university in Milan.[2] Because of racial laws introduced in Fascist Italy in 1938, she was designated as Jewish, stripped of her Italian citizenship and forced to leave university, and so decided to flee Italy in 1939.[2] After travelling through Switzerland and Austria, she joined a group of refugees heading to Sarajevo. After spending the war in Sarajevo, she returned to Italy, with Josep, working for the International Refugee Organisation in Rome. Having applied to various countries in the Americas, in 1949 she emigrated and settled with Josep in Brazil.[2][3]
Career
When she arrived in Sao Paulo in 1953, Brazilian modernism was dominated by a debate between figuration and abstraction.[3] During the 1930s and 1940s figurative 'modernismo' had been dominant, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s abstract-geometric art began to be shown in Brazil and led to the founding of the Concrete art movement Ruptura in 1952. In Sao Paulo, an immigrant city that was industrial and undergoing rapid growth, Mira found a circle of emigre intellectuals from different disciplines with whom she could discuss ideas about aesthetics and philosophy; this included the Czech-born philosopher Vilem Flusser, the physicist Mario Schenberg and the psychoanalyst Theon Spanudis among others. She became a prolific modernist painter and sculptor.[2] She used paint with talc and brick dust, and made many drawings on rice paper.[2]
In the early 1960s, Mira received a gift of rice paper from Mario Schenberg and in 1964 began to use this to make monotype drawings. She worked rapidly and in little over a year she had made he majority of approximately 2000 drawings. In these works she also first combined multiple languages, using words and phrases from her principle spoken languages - Italian, German and Portuguese but also adding words in French, English, Croat and Czech. One important group of monotypes was inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen's Song of the Youths (1955-6), an early piece of electronic music that employed vocals drawn from the Biblical Book of Daniel. A number of these were included in the 1965 Sao Paulo Bienal.
Personal life
In 1941 in Sarajevo, she married Josep Hargesheimer, a Croat, and they emigrated to Brazil together.[2][3] They lived in Porto Alegre but in 1953 Mira left the city and Josep and travelled alone to Sao Paulo, where she settled. In Sao Paulo she met Knut Schendel, a German emigre and owner of an important bookshop, Canuto's, which was a hub for Sao Paulo's intellectuals. In 1957 Mira and Knut had a daughter, Ada.[3]
She died in 1988, at the age of sixty-nine.[1][3]
Secondary source
- Tanya Barson and Taisa Palhares Mira Schendel (Tate Publishing, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2013).