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Artur Manuel Rodrigues do Cruzeiro Seixas, born in Amadora, on December 3, 1920, was the last of the Portuguese surrealists, the movement led by Mário Cesariny (1923-2006), at the end of the 1940s.
“It is a work that is not brilliant. It is a testimony,” said Cruzeiro Seixas, in an interview with the Lusa agency, in 2011, on the eve of his 91st birthday. “I put together one of the best art collections in Portugal. And I did some nonsense,” he added, by way of balance.
In the documentary “As Cartas de Rei Artur”, about the artist, concluded by the director Cláudia Rita Oliveira, five years later he affirms: “Of my life nothing will be permanent. I did not live, but I will leave documents of that not living”.
The plastic artist Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas died this Sunday at the Santa María Hospital in Lisbon, revealed the Cupertino de Miranda Foundation.
Cruzeiro Seixas studied at the António Arroio School, in Lisbon, and still went through a phase of neorealist expression, but at the end of the 1940s he began to participate in the activities of the Surrealists with Cesariny, with whom he struck up a great friendship and established a relationship that would mark him. . Then there was “that” that Cruzeiro Seixas called “the miracle”, in the interview with Lusa, in 2011.
“I discovered my personality. He [Cesariny] opened these doors for me. He was a true poet, an intellectual, an extraordinary and passionate person, ”he recalled.
In the same group were António Maria Lisboa, Mário Henrique-Leiria, Pedro Oom, Risques Pereira, Fernando Alves dos Santos, Carlos Calvet, among others.
It was André Breton, a French writer, who published in 1924 the Manifesto of Surrealism, in charge of starting the movement, establishing the principles that influenced many artists around the world, and that went through the adoption of a higher reality, the negative to control the logic of the dominant reason, morality and aesthetics in artistic creation.
“Today’s art world is very poor compared to the extraordinary moment of reinvention that took place during the surrealist period in Portugal, in the 1940s and 1950s,” Cruzeiro Seixas told Lusa in 2011.
“We reinvent the surrealism of time [da ditadura] Salazar, when there was nothing in Portugal. The hunger was so great and there were no books. Nothing came. But we were reinventing ourselves. There were extraordinary ideas, especially in the field of painting ”, recalled the artist, in another interview, in 2008.
“Today the world is very poor, because there is nothing to compare with a time when we needed to invent something,” said Cruzeiro Seixas, insisting on the revolutionary character of surrealism. Nothing had gotten over him since then, he said. We are all desperate looking for a new idea ”.
For the artist, the most important thing has always been “the desire for freedom”.
Although enthusiastic about artistic activity in Portugal, in the late 1940s and the following, Cruzeiro Seixas left for Africa in 1950, with the desire to visit the continent, enlisting in the merchant marine.
He traveled through India and the Far East, settling in Angola in 1952, where he held several exhibitions that deeply marked the society of the time.
Back in Portugal, in 1964, he received a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and, in 1967, he held a retrospective at the Buchholz Gallery, in Lisbon, and an exhibition with Mário Cesariny, in Porto.
Between 1968 and 1974 he directed the São Mamede Gallery, in the Portuguese capital, and, from 1976 to 1983, the Galeria da Junta de Turismo do Estoril, as well as the Vilamoura Gallery, in the Algarve, from 1985 to 1988.
He created stages for the National Ballet Company and for the former Gulbenkian Ballet.
He participated in group exhibitions in France, Brazil, Belgium, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and Mexico.
In 1999, he donated his entire collection to the Cupertino de Miranda Foundation, in Vila Nova de Famalicão, for the creation of the Center for Surrealism Studies and the Surrealism Museum, which were created in the meantime, and today there is the Espaço Cruzeiro Seixas, in the Foundation, with a permanent exhibition dedicated to the artist.
Cruzeiro Seixas is represented in public and private collections and in private and national museums, specifically in the Modern Collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in the National Museum of Contemporary Art – Museu do Chiado and in the National Library, in Lisbon, in the Museum Machado de Castro, in Coimbra, in the Tomar Library and the Cupertino de Miranda Foundation, in Vila Nova de Famalicão, among other institutions
The premiere of the documentary “As Cartas do Rei Artur”, by Cláudia Rita Oliveira, in 2016, the third film dedicated to the visual artist, was followed by “NOMA – Cruzeiro Seixas” (2006), by Carlos Cabral Nunes, and still “Cruzeiro Seixas: O Vício da Liberdade ”(2010), by Alberto Serra and Ricardo Espírito Santo.
“Las Cartas del Rey Arturo” is the result of interviews with Cruzeiro Seixas, which are crossed with images of his painting, of his objects, of the author’s notebooks and drawings, in a set of testimonies from which, in particular, the relationship with Mário Cesariny, which lasted for several decades, marked by friendship, passion and rupture.
The film addresses the homosexuality of both, and the relationship of Cruzeiro Seixas with art, with the way of life of Mário Cesariny and with Africa, of which he said he was the great love of life.
“One of my suicides was in 1975, when I broke up with Cesariny,” he said in the film.
In the “Letters from Mário Cesariny to Cruzeiro Seixas”, which Sistema Solar published in 2016, covering the long period from August 1941 to December 1975, the “inner journey”, the “confessions on the other side of the barricade”, the ” reflections, illuminations, lightning, sparks that tell us about the consummate and elusive love and the successive objects of desire ”, as the researcher Perfecto E. Cuadrado, organizer of the work, later described.
Cruzeiro Seixas dedicated Mário Cesariny to some of his poems. But the artist and his work also served as inspiration for authors such as Herberto Helder, Alfredo Margarido, José Pierre, Juan Carlos Valera, Bernardo Pinto de Almeida, Albano Martins, António Barahona, among others.
In 2012, Cruzeiro Seixas was honored by the Santiago de Chile International Book Fair (FILSA), which dedicated an exclusive issue of the magazine “Derrame”, from the Chilean surrealist group to him. In the same year, he received the Medal of Honor from the Portuguese Society of Authors.
In 2017, the Vila Nova de Cerveira Art Biennial celebrated its 40th anniversary with a tribute to the artist.
A year later, it was the Centro Português de Serigrafia, in Lisbon, to remember his journey, with an exhibition and the publication of a book with the graphic work, which would follow, in 2019, the album “Diário não Diário”, with “all its creative dimension “.
Among his latest exhibitions by Cruzeiro Seixas are “Colaborativa.mente”, with Valter Hugo Mãe, at the Casa da Liberdade – Mário Cesariny, in Lisbon, in 2018, and “Nos Labirintos que Inventei”, at the Museu do Côa, in 2019.
In June of last year it was also associated with the launch of the complete work by Mário Henrique-Leiria, edited by E-Primatur.
Last September, Perve Galeria, in Lisbon, inaugurated a tribute to Cruzeiro Seixas, on the occasion of the artist’s centenary.
Shortly after, in October, the Minister of Culture, Graça Fonseca, presented Cruzeiro Seixas with the Medal of Cultural Merit, as “institutional recognition, but also as personal recognition to those who join the many who admire him and who meet with the eyes that he has always seen deeper and deeper ”.
The delivery took place at the National Library of Portugal, which has a patent, until December 31, the exhibition “O Tempo das Imagens III”, held within the framework of the 35th anniversary of the Centro Português de Serigrafia (CPS), which includes a room entirely dedicated to the work of Cruzeiro Seixas.
In June of this year the first of the four volumes of “Obra Poética”, by Cruzeiro Seixas, was published within the framework of the “Elogio da Sombra” collection, coordinated by Valter Hugo Mãe, for Porto Editora, in a collection organized by the poet and sculptor Isabel Meyrelles, another name for Portuguese surrealism.
The first three volumes of the poetic work of Cruzeiro Seixas collect poems that have already been published, that is, by Edições Quási, but which were sold out on the market, and the fourth, which will close the project, collects unpublished and scattered articles, the Lusa told Lusa. publisher source. The 2nd volume should reach the bookstores by the end of the year and the third, “in early 2021”.
“The worst nonsense in the world today – and Portugal resents it a lot – is that people think that intellectual life, art, culture, are subsidiary things and should remain in the background,” criticized Cruzeiro Seixas, in an interview with Lusa, in 2011.
