Biography

Oswaldo Goeldi (Rio de Janeiro, 1895 - idem, 1961). Engraver, draughtsman, illustrator, lecturer. The son of the Swiss scientist, Emílio Augusto Goeldi. At the age of one, he moved with his family to Belém do Pará, where they lived until 1905, before moving back to Berne, in Switzerland. At the age of 20, he began the engineering course at the Polytechnic School of Zurich, but did not conclude it. In 1917, he enrolled in the École des Arts et Métiers, in Geneva, but abandoned the course as he found it too academic. He then began to take lessons in the studios of the artists Serge Pahnke (1875 - 1950) and Henri van Muyden (1860 - n.d.). In the same year, he held his first individual exhibition in Berne at the Wyss Gallery, where he became familiar with the work of Alfred Kubin, his great artistic influence, with whom he corresponded for a number of years. He settled in Rio de Janeiro in 1919 and began to work as an illustrator for the magazines, Para Todos [For Everyone], Leitura Para Todos [Reading for Everyone] and Ilustração Brasileira [Brazilian Illustration]. Two years later, he held his first individual exhibition in Brazil, in the entrance hall of the School of Arts and Crafts. In 1923, he met Ricardo Bampi, who introduced him to woodcuts. During the 1930s, he published the album 10 Gravuras em Madeira de Oswaldo Goeldi [10 Woodcuts by Oswaldo Goeldi], with an introduction by Manuel Bandeira (1884 - 1968), made drawings for magazines and books, such as Cobra Norato [Norato Serpent], by Raul Bopp (1898 - 1984), published in 1937, with his first colour woodcuts. In 1941, he worked on illustrating the Complete Works of Dostoyevsky, published by José Olympio. In 1952, he began a teaching career at the Escolinha de Arte do Brasil [Little Art School of Brazil], and in 1955 became a lecturer at the National School of Fine Arts (Enba), where he opened a wood engraving studio. In 1995, the Cultural Centre of the Banco do Brasil held a retrospective exhibition to commemorate the centenary of his birth, in Rio de Janeiro.