Tereza de Arriaga

Tereza de Arriaga, (Belém, Lisbon, 5 February 1915 – 12 August 2013) was a Portuguese painter.[1] Having a very discrete and unusual career, she started with plastic arts motivated by the Neorealism in the 1940s, developing then to more abstract works of geometric character. However it is only at the end of the 1960s that her work becomes more consistent. Maintaining her social sensibility as an aspect of her plastic expression, she will develop into a deep exploration of colour and lines, inspired by the poetry of human relationship with the mystery of natural elements.[2] Her works are simply signed "Tereza Arriaga" or "Tarriaga".

Biography

Tereza Arriaga, whose original full name is Maria Thereza d' Almeida Pinheiro d' Arriaga, is the granddaughter of Manuel de Arriaga, the first President of the Portuguese Republic. She was born in the Palácio de Belém (Belém Palace), because her father, Roque Manuel de Arriaga, was by that time personal assistant of the President and lived with his family in a rented part of the Palace. Due to a revolution which ended the presidential mandate on 14 May 1915, Tereza Arriaga had to leave early this address, under fire. At the age of three her mother dies of Spanish flu at the age of 27.

Tereza Arriaga is educated in a culturally privileged and politically clarified environment where republican ideas prevailed which helped her to understand the social problems at an early age. Her childhood is spent in Monte Estoril, where the first education was given by her father, just like her brothers, but she experiences other forms of education such as by an English tutoress and by the religious boarding school Colégio da Pena, in Sintra. As these forms of education did not achieve the aimed results, the family goes back to Lisbon and Tereza attends at last one school, the Colégio Inglês (English College). It is a private school of sever orientation and where she finishes her primary education.

Despite of her father being a republican her education tended towards the bourgeois ideal of the time: knowing how to write and read, how to play the piano and speak French. This education delayed her artistic and academic career. She tried to follow the piano study but it is in drawing that she will invest strongly and by her own motivation in the end of adolescence and she decides to prepare herself for the School of Arts. Meanwhile she attends the atelier of Raquel Roque Gameiro, who is the daughter of the famous aquarellist Roque Gameiro, and who advised her to leave as what was taught and painted there did not satisfy Tereza at all.

She attends the night school in the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes (SNBA), where she is the only woman. In this school she is the student of Frederico Aires, who lends her plaster busts of his own atelier for Tereza to practice drawing.

Due to her dedication and ambition one year later she manages to enter the School of Arts and to attend a Painting course «in a time when only few women followed a professional artistic career». There she gets to know the student and future painter Jorge de Oliveira, whom she meets later on in Leiria and with whom she gets married.

By the end of the third year she decides to start working and suspends the course. Afterwards she teaches Drawing at the Industrial School of Marinha Grande, a city known for its glass manufacture located in a region called Pinhal de Leiria in the centre of the country and where she lives from 1944 to 1945. This School was located within the area of the ancient Fábrica Nacional dos Vidros (National Glass Factory), the largest glass factory of the country and later on named Fábrica-Escola Irmãos Stephens (Stephens Brothers Factory School), founded in 1769 by William Stephens (glassmaker), and where today is the Museu do Vidro (Glass Museum). Besides of her activity as a teacher trying to implement some pedagogical methods by the art, she has direct contacts with the working reality and draws a series of drafts, “Meninos operários” (Child workers), a lot of them on packing paper. In this series she pictures mainly gestures and tired faces wrinkled by dehydration of the children working in the glass factories.

In 1952 she finishes her Painting course with a thesis (an oil painting of large dimensions) called “Vidreiros” (glass makers), based on the experience of Marinha Grande and which can be found at the Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon).

From 1944 to 1985 she taught Drawing at different schools, including the Escola de Artes Decorativas António Arroio (School of Decorative Arts Antonio Arroyo).

Dedicated to both motherhood (she becomes a mother one single time in 1948) and work and due to her discretion her career as a painter will stay on a secondary level for several years. In a different way her husband, Jorge de Oliveira, whose work is a reference in Portuguese Art History, participates in the emerging movements of Neorealism and Surrealism, and he was one of the pioneers of Abstract Geometrism in Portugal.

However her creative impulse was always present and although she did not have a systematic work she makes different drafts and projects, a lot of them on train tickets or on telephone tickets and which later on will turn into developed sketches. In this long period she also dedicates to aquarelles, exploring her technical potential by making projects for oil canvas and which will be used for the majority of her works. As Tereza Arriaga says: "oil is like digging the earth". The aquarelle offers more liberty and speed in the moment of creation. Being also a skilful drawer, in the 1950s and 1960s she dedicates principally to Portrait. The paintings of geometric atmosphere are made in these years, 1951 and 1952. In 1966 and 1967 she also cooperates with the Sociedade Cooperativa de Gravadores Portugueses (Portuguese Engravers Cooperative Society), known as Cooperativa Gravura, participating in the exhibitions of the courses‘ end.

But it is only in the end of the 1960s that Tereza Arriaga starts to dedicate more to painting, adopting the style which she maintains until today.[3]

Political resistance

Still in Marinha Grande, moved by the awful reality she witnessed and motivated by the conjuncture (end of Second World War and the development of political activities against Salazar regime), she develops different cultural and political initiatives, namely, through working class clubs and associations, conferences on women's rights, music or history bringing to the industrial town intellectuals and artists from Lisbon such as Fernando Lopes Graça, Maria Isabel Aboim Inglês or the historian Flausino Torres.

At the same time (40s and 1950s) she gets involved in an antifascist participation so that she is arrested by the PIDE and brought to prison in Caxias for 110 days. This imprisonment will bring her several professional problems.[4]

Phases of plastic creation

Despite of several drafts (such as a charcoal series on child workers with a neorealistic tendency) and more developed punctual creations it is only in 1967 that Tereza Arriaga will become a more consistent and professional painter.[4]

It is very difficult to speak of plastic phases, but the author herself divides her studies into three series, which correspond to three periods: Bioburgos, Helioburgos and Biohélios. All of them are based on the search of an ideal of perfection and the expression of internal agitation.[2] The dominant semiological element varies: the „bioburgos“ are, according to the author, ourselves, town animals but biologic, that means they are inserted in a wider system as all the animal have towns. On the other hand, the element “helium” refers to the confrontation between the being and the light. The semiology of the vital elements is inserted in an emotional and intellectual search for cosmic connections between beings that are indefinite to conscience[4] and thus can only be expressed by the threshold, i.e. by the ambiguity between dream and emotion, inside and outside, near and far, finding and losing.[5] She expresses in this poetry a reverential relationship to living elements – which are all elements of the Universe- without any sacrality. She prefers to call this type of relationship “comradeship”.[4] Her paintings are, according to her own definition, “places to go”.[5] In this search she often shows either an ironical and critical or a traumatic and philosophical tone.

Thus, her plastic project explores, above all, the power of colour in relation to geometrical shapes, which melt in a conceptual and suggestive threshold.

Her work is represented in the collection of the Museu do Chiado, and in institutional and private, national and foreign collections.[2]

Works

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the most significant works of Tereza Arriaga:

BIOBURGOS

HELIOBURGOS

(more...)

BIOHÉLIOS

(more...)

Exhibitions

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ http://sol.sapo.pt/inicio/Cultura/Interior.aspx?content_id=82556
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Santos, Luiza: Tereza Arriaga – Pintura, in Exhibition catalogue 22/06 - 21/07, Câmara Municipal de Vila Franca de Xira, 2007.
  3. ↑ de Carvalho, Orlando M. P. N.: "Entrevistas a Tereza Arriaga e Jorge de Oliveira, 2005-2007", Documentation Centre of the Museu do Neo-Realismo, Vila Franca de Xira, 2007.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 De Carvalho, Orlando M. P. N.: "Entrevistas a Tereza Arriaga e Jorge de Oliveira, 2005-2007", Documentation Centre of the Museu do Neo-Realismo, Vila Franca de Xira, 2007.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Tereza Arriaga, Helioburgos, Exhibition catalogue in Galeria Espiral, Oeiras.