Biography
Lívio Abramo (Araraquara, São Paulo, 1903 - Asunción, Paraguay, 1992). Engraver, illustrator, draughtsman. Moved to São Paulo, where, in 1909, he began to study drawing with Enrico Vio (1874-1960) at the Colégio Dante Alighieri [Dante Alighieri School]. At the start of the 1920s, he made illustrations for small magazines and came into contact with the work of Oswaldo Goeldi (1895-1961) and German Expressionist engravers, making the first engravings of his own in 1926. At the start of the 1930s, he was influenced by the Anthropophagy phase of Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973). During the Getúlio Vargas regime, he joined the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) [Brazilian Communist Party], from which he was expelled in 1932. He was arrested twice for political reasons. Also at this time, he abandoned engraving to concentrate on trade union issues. Returning to engraving in 1935, he incorporated social themes into his work. In 1947, he illustrated the book, Pelo Sertão [Through the Backlands] by the writer, Afonso Arinos de Mello Franco, published in 1949 by the Sociedade dos Cem Bibliófilos do Brasil [Company of the Hundred Bibliophiles of Brazil]. With this series of illustrations, presented at the Salão Nacional de Belas Artes (SNBA) [National Salon of Fine Arts], he won the foreign travel prize, going to Europe in 1951. In Paris, he attended the Atelier 17, perfecting his metal engraving technique with Stanley William Hayter. Upon returning to Brazil, in 1953, he was awarded the prize as best national engraver at the 2ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo [São Paulo International Biennial]. He gave classes in wood engraving at the School of Crafts of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM/SP) [Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo], where his pupils included Maria Bonomi (1935) and Antonio Henrique Amaral (1935). In 1960, he founded the Estúdio Gravura [Engraving Studio] with Maria Bonomi. In 1962, he was invited by the Brazilian Foreign Ministry to join the Brazil-Paraguay Cultural Mission, later the Centre for Brazilian Studies. Moving to Paraguay, he directed the Visual Arts Section until 1992. He was a founder of the Paraguayan Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute.

Critical Commentary
Lívio Abramo began studying drawing with Enrico Vio in 1909. Encouraged by his teacher, he followed an artistic career, making his first illustrations for small publications during the 1920s. A self-taught engraver, in 1926, he realized his first prints, working in a rudimentary way, with broken blades on pieces of wood, shortly afterwards acquiring his first gouges. In 1928 and 1929, he made his first linoleum cuts for the journal, Lo Spaghetto, in which he portrayed the lives of workers in a highly simplified way and in a Cubist style. At the end of the decade, he came into contact with the engravings of Oswaldo Goeldi, and visited exhibitions by German Expressionists, being affected by the power and expressiveness of their art, full of colour and feeling, which manifested the desire for transformation that the artist was attempting to define in his own work.

Lívio Abramo's work at the start of the 1930s was strongly influenced by the Anthropophagy movement, showing large, rounded forms in the manner of Tarsila do Amaral, with stylised landscape elements and deformations in his characters. During the Vargas era, he entered politics, joining the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) [Brazilian Communist Party], from which he was expelled in 1932, on the accusation of being a Trotskyite. He joined the Partido Socialista Brasileiro (PSB) [Brazilian Socialist Party] in the following year, becoming a friend of the art critic, Mário Pedrosa (1900-1981). In 1931, he began to work as an illustrator on the newspaper, Diário da Noite, but his cartoons, such as Inundação no Canindé [Flood in Canindé], c.1932, were considered too critical, leading him to be appointed headline writer for the paper's international section, a position he held until 1962. In parallel, he devoted himself to the trade union movement. In the mid-1930s, he incorporated social themes into his work in definitive fashion, another result of his political engagement. Both the works of his worker phase and those with war as their theme, use an Expressionist language, marked by the dramatic and monumental quality of their scenes. Impressed with the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), he executed the Série Espanha [Spain series], 1938, with incisive engravings that reveal his opposition to the conflict.

During the 1940s, he met the German, Adolphe Köhler, a professor of engraving, who helped him to achieve a technical refinement in his work, both in the treatment of the wood used for his plates and in the use of more sophisticated striped burins that cut the wood with several parallel cuts in a single stroke, producing differentiated and varied nuances. In 1947, he illustrated the book, Pelo Sertão [Through the Backlands], by Afonso Arinos de Mello Franco (1905-1990), published by the Sociedade dos Cem Bibliófilos do Brasil [Company of the Hundred Bibliophiles of Brazil], with woodcuts on rice paper. For this project, he travelled to the Caatinga region of Minas Gerais and Bahia, reading Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) and Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909). He moved away from an expressionist aesthetics, seeking a new formal solution that was simpler and more synthetic. The use of top wood allowed greater delicacy of cut, which, allied with new instruments, served to Express more effectively his concept of light, colour and the form of the Brazilian landscape.

In the following years, he began the drawings, gouaches and watercolours of the Série Macumba [Macumba series], in which his interest in capturing rhythm and dance may be observed. He subsequently made woodcuts on this theme, achieving greater intensity by amplifying the sensuality of the lines in their alternation of areas of light and thick shadow.

After winning the Foreign Travel Prize of the Salão Nacional de Belas Artes, he went to Europe in 1951. He visited the studio of Stanley William Hayter and perfected his command of metal engraving. Following his return from Europe, he made the Rio, c.1953, Festa [Party], c.1954 and Mandala, c.1955 series of engravings, which tended towards abstraction and achieved a better crystallisation of his graphic language, enhanced by the diversity of tones and textures linking figures and planes. His Série Rio [Rio series] won him the prize of Best Brazilian Engraver at the 2ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo.

He gave classes in wood engraving at the School of Crafts of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, and in 1960, together with Maria Bonomi, he founded the Estúdio Gravura [Engraving Studio]. In 1962, he moved to Paraguay to work in the Brazil-Paraguay Cultural Mission (subsequently the Centre for Brazilian Studies). In the engravings of his Paraguayan phase, he recreates the landscape of that country, using stipple and lines that resemble the delicate local lace, nhanduti. The simplification of the form intensifies, with horizontal and vertical elements predominating to give an intense, lyrical and sometimes dramatic rhythm to almost abstract compositions in which the artist maintains his visual reference, seeking to translate the geometry of the façades of houses and settlements.

Lívio Abramo's output lies between figuration and abstraction. His engagement in the Modernist programme gradually gives way to the non-figurative trends that began to arrive in Brazil after the Second World War (1939-1945). Abramo managed to reconcile these two opposed concepts in a peculiar way, with his work presenting formal solutions of great aesthetic interest and technical refinement.