Critical Commentary

Milton Dacosta represents a singular trajectory within the history of Brazilian art. During some 50 years of production, he reached artistic maturity in the mid-1950s, with abstract canvases of a constructivist tendency, developed on the basis of a reflexive and silent confrontation with some of the leading figures and movements of modern art.¹

Following an early vocation, he began painting and drawing in 1929, in the studio of the German teacher, A. Hantv, in Niterói, the city of his birth. In 1930, he spent three months attending the open course of Marques Júnior (1887 - 1960) at the National School of Fine Arts (Enba) in Rio de Janeiro. During this time, he met Antônio Parreiras (1860 - 1937), whose studio he visited and to whom he showed his first works, albeit without receiving formal training from the latter. He also developed an interest in Post-Impressionist painting. At the age of 16, he helped to found the Bernardelli group, an independent group of artists working in the basement of Enba under the guidance of Edson Motta (1910 - 1981).² Several years later, when asked what had remained of his experience with the group, Dacosta declared: "apart from my friends, freedom of artistic creation and greater openness to research".

Dacosta's output during the 1930s was characterised by his acquisition of the principles of modern painting, with him taking the School of Paris as a model. He produced landscapes, nudes, seascapes, urban scenes, and portraits, paying scant attention to his subject matter but taking care to acquire the elements of such painting with a systematic discipline. We may observe that he is not concerned with picturesque detail or with capturing of a 'Brazilian' quality. His colours are no longer local ones. On the contrary, they are autonomous and affirm themselves in modular and structural brushstrokes, as a natural assimilation of Paul Cézanne (1839 - 1906) in a natural way. As the critic Mário Pedrosa (1900 - 1981) observed, between the perceptive conscience of the artist and external reality, a geometric formalisation inserts itself in these works. In canvases such as Paisagem em Santa Teresa [Landscape in Santa Teresa] (1937) we may already perceive "that Dacosta's painting is ruled by a principle of economy at an elementary level. He does not linger over lengthy elaborations, but is concerned with the synthetic capturing of the plastic structure".³

At the start of the 1940s, Dacosta moved towards the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico (1888 - 1978). In works such as Composição [Composition] (1942), the surface of the canvas displays defined planes of colour and an enigmatic space, both of which would prove fundamental in his subsequent constructivist development. In 1944, he won the foreign travel prize of the Modern Section of the National Salon of Fine Arts, leaving for New York in the following year. During 1945-46, Dacosta remained abroad, going directly from the United States to Europe, but producing little during this period. He dedicated his time to visiting museums and exhibitions, studying artists at close hand whose work he knew only through illustrations, such as Georges Braque (1882 - 1963), Cézanne, the Impressionists, Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954), Amedeo Modigliani (1884 - 1920), Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944) and Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973). He commented that this experience "allowed me to return with greater confidence to a more complete conceptual and formal discipline that is present in all my work". He returned to Brazil in 1947, marrying the painter, Maria Leontina (1917 - 1984) in 1949.

Between 1949 and 1951, Dacosta realised the Figuras [Figures] and Naturezas-Mortas [Still Lifes] series in which a greater geometrisation of the figure and space may be observed, as may the use of the line as an important structuring element. In these works, the artist carries on a dialogue with analytic cubism, albeit unlike Picasso, he maintains the unity of the figure, the mystery of its interiority. His temporality is closer to fixation than to simultaneity. The colour is also dense and opaque, resisting the total externality of transparency. These works contain one of the principal characteristics of Dacosta's painting: the conflict between the universal and depersonalised clarity of structure and the subjectivity of the artist revealed in colour.

From 1952-54, Dacosta studied in Europe with his wife. On returning to Brazil, he began the series of still lifes organised as a geometric grid that does not cover the whole canvas but preserves a centralised composition. He also began the Castelos e Cidades [Castles and Cities] series, in which the figure is reduced to coloured rectangles and squares, accumulated in lively but sober colours, at the centre of the canvas, generally on a black background. This series heralds a singular cross between Mondrian and Giorgio Morandi (1890 - 1964),⁴ which generates a poetics of his own that a few years later evolves into pure constructivist abstractions in which the canvas is limited by the play of vertical and horizontal lines and a few geometric elements at the centre of the picture. In the canvases Em Vermelho [In Red] (several versions, 1957-1958), Em Branco [In White] (1959) and Composição [Composition] (1958-1959), the artist silently synthesises his most important contribution to Brazilian painting. In opposition to the universal and impersonal rationality of Constructivism, Dacosta's work carries the mediation of our culture, as it is "intimate, introspective and centred on a measured, lyrical ego".⁵ Or more appropriately, painting is confronted with the persistence in a mysterious unity that is capable of resisting the undifferentiated, generalised nature of the individual in the modern world.⁶

As the critic, Paulo Venâncio Filho, has pointed out, however, the artist's fame is based on a less authentic output at a lower artistic level: the series of female figures known as Vênus [Venuses] that Dacosta developed from the mid-1960s until the end of his life. His constructivist works, on the other hand, are still only appreciated by a small minority.

Notes

1 Direct dialogue with the culture of modern painting without lingering over the nationalist premises of Brazilian modernism of the 1920s and 30s is a characteristic of many artists who developed their careers from the 1940s onwards.

² The group arose as an alternative to the official teaching of the school with the aim of achieving freedom of research. Bruno Lechowski (1887 - 1941), Manoel Santiago (1897 - 1987) and Quirino Campofiorito (1902 - 1993) were among the lecturers who guided the artists. At the same time, everyone was free to seek their own path.

³ VENÂNCIO FILHO, Paulo. Dacosta. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 1999. p. 10.

⁴ The critic, Mário Pedrosa, observed this cross, perhaps for the first time, in a text of 1957.  Through him, Dacosta and Maria Leontina made the acquaintance of Morandi in Italy, visiting his studio.

⁶ Perhaps this is a characteristic of our late constructivism, as Paulo Sérgio Duarte observes: "These paintings carry with them a positive persistence of the subject, thought to have been superseded in urban and industrial society, in the context of a craftsmanlike execution within a studio (...) an entire poetics in the process of formation may be captured in these geometries, which oscillate between the interior and exterior, between an intimate world and the public universe". DUARTE, Paulo Sérgio. Modernos fora dos eixos. In: AMARAL, Aracy (coord.). Arte construtiva no Brasil: Coleção Adolpho Leirner. São Paulo: DBA, 1998. p. 201.