˜Green is the colour of my memory.˜
(Cícero Dias)
Cícero Dias was born on 5 March 1907, on the Jundiá plantation in Escada, Pernambuco. He was the seventh of eleven children to Pedro dos Santos Dias and Maria Gentil de Barros, and on his maternal side was also the grandson of the Baron of Contendas. At 13 years old, he went to Rio de Janeiro. Surprising his family, he decided to become a painter.
However, no art gallery was interested in modern art in 1928 in the Marvellous City. In this sense, the first exhibition of Cícero – the mural Eu vi o mundo [I Saw the World], which was fifteen metres wide – was in a madhouse, being the only available space he could get. Three years later, however, he would open an exhibition at the Salon of Fine Arts at the invitation of painter Di Cavalcanti. Breaking with the classical school, the exhibitions and works of the artist generated debates and scandals, since few understood them. There was even the case of a man who tried to destroy his works with a knife.
Cícero Dias was a friend of Gilberto Freyre and with the anthropologist would remember his past as a boy raised on a plantation. For being a Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) sympathiser, the artist was persecuted in 1937, when then President Getulio Vargas set up the Estado Novo dictatorship. Several times his studio was raided by police troops. For this reason, disgusted with this reality, the artist decided to move to Paris. There, in 1943, he would marry Frenchwoman Raymonde and have a daughter.
It should be noted that During World War II and being Brazilian, Cícero was arrested in the German city of Baden-Baden after the country broke off diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, along with writer João Guimarães Rosa, who was part of the same group of detainees. Fortunately, however, this group was exchanged for Nazi spies that were imprisoned in Brazil.
Cícero Dias was the author of Latin America’s first abstract mural. The mural, completed in 1948, was painted on the building of the Pernambuco Secretariat of Finance. Despite living so far from Recife, its cane fields, manor houses, row houses, as well as the Capibaribe River and the sea of Boa Viagem were always present in the painter's imagination. In the 1960s, he would produce several paintings with portraits of women. After this phase, he would paint flowers, landscapes and diverse characters.
In his first artistic phase, Cícero Dias favoured watercolours and oils, and produced the following paintings: Sonho de uma prostituta [Dream of a Prostitute] (1930-1932), Engenho Noruega [Norway Plantation] (1933), Lavouras [Crops] (1933), Porto [Port] (1933) and Ladeira de São Francisco [Saint Francis Slope] (1933). During his second phase (1936-1960), when figuration and abstraction prevailed, the following works stood out: Mulher na janela [Woman in the Window] (1936), Mulher na praia [Woman on the Beach] (1944), Mulher sentada com espelho [Seated Woman with Mirror] (1944), Composição sem título [Untitled Composition] (1948), Exact (1958), Entropie [Entropy] (1959). Finally, in his third phase (1960-2000), in which the woman was a constant symbol, he would paint Composição sem título [Untitled Composition] in 1986.
Regarded as one of the pioneers of modernism in Brazil, Cícero Dias was a friend of many modernist artists, such as composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, artist Ismael Nery and poet Murilo Mendes. In France, he became friends with several distinguished personalities, like poets André Breton and Paul Eluard and painter Pablo Picasso, who had sought asylum in Paris before the end of the Spanish Civil War. The latter had become godfather to his daughter and, next to him, Cícero would accompany the preparation of Guernica, the famous epic on that war. Moreover, it can be said that Picasso exerted a strong influence on the work of the artist from Pernambuco.
In 2000, the painter was in Recife for a fitting tribute: the inauguration of a square with his name. However it is worth remembering that the public area was designed by the artist himself. He would return to Recife in February 2002 to launch the book Cícero Dias: uma vida pela pintura [Cícero Dias: a life for painting], authored by journalist Mário Hélio. On this occasion, he exhibited some of his works at Galeria Portal in São Paulo. That same year, at the age of 93, inspired by his piece Eu vi o mundo ele começava no Recife [I saw the world it began in Recife], the artist would create a significant piece for Recife: on the ground at Marco Zero Square, a beautiful large wind rose placed at the centre of the city.
The artist remained lucid, healthy and productive until the end of his life. On 28 January 2003, at age 95, he died at his home on Rue de Longchamp in Paris, where he had lived for forty years. Present with the painter were his wife, Raymonde, their only daughter, Sylvia, and her two grandchildren. Cícero Dias was buried in Montparnasse cemetery in the French capital.
Recife, 25 October 2005.
sources consulted
CÍCERO Dias. Disponível em: <http://www.pe-az.com.br/biografias/cicero_dias.htm>. Acesso em: 6 ago. 2005.
CÍCERO DIAS [foto neste texto]. Disponível em: <https://www.guiadasartes.com.br/cicero-dias/telas>. Acesso em: 15 mar. 2018.
GALERIA. Disponível em: <http://www.cicerodias.com.br/gale.htm>. Acesso em: 6 ago. 2005.
ÍCONES de Pernambuco. Recife: Jornal do Commercio, Recife, fascículo 2, 2004.
PEREIRA, Marcelo. Modernismo vira a última página. Jornal do Commercio, Recife, 29 jan. 2003. Caderno C, p. 1.
PINTOR pernambucano Cícero Dias morre aos 95 anos em Paris. Folha Online, Recife, 28 jan. 2003. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 6 ago. 2005.
how to quote this text
VAINSENCHER, Semira Adler. Cícero Dias. In: Pesquisa Escolar. Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, 2005. Available at:https://pesquisaescolar.fundaj.gov.br/en/artigo/cicero-dias/. Accessed: month day year. (Exemple.: Aug. 6, 2009.)