Eduardo Vernazza

Eduardo Vernazza (13 October 1910 – 26 May 1991) was a Uruguayan artist, and art critic.

Vernazza was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He was the second child of a family of seven whose parents immigrated from Genoa, Italy. He was an illustrator and art critic for the Uruguayan newspaper El Día.

Early Life

After finishing elementary school, Eduardo worked as a road sweeper, a dish washer and a clerk in order to help his family through difficult times. His father, Juan Bautista Vernazza, was a woodcarver. Some of Montevideo's building facades were sculpted by him during the 1920s. Eduardo attributed a great esthetical value to his father’s work, usually considered as a craft or a minor art. When he was eighteen, the newspaper El Día offered Eduardo a position as a crime scene and court artist for that newspaper's police page. During this time he also took courses with his uncle, the artist Marcelino Buscasso. He frequented the Circle of Fine Arts of Montevideo where he was able to expand his limited artistic views with some of South America's famous artists. Soon, the newspaper transferred him to the entertainment section of the newspaper. This began an association which started in 1930 and continued until El Día closed its doors in 1980.

During this fifty-year span Eduardo reflected, through his sketches and paintings, the scope and grandeur which was the nature of the performing arts in Uruguay, including what is often referred to as the Golden Age of the arts in that country, the decades spanning the 1930s to the 1950s.

At the beginning of the 1940s, he was introduced to Daisy Massioti, a ballerina who presented her own choreographies at Theater Solís. He created a sketch of her entitled Winged Ballerina, which appeared in El Día. They were married on 11 November 1944. Eduardo dedicated all his exhibitions to her. He also incorporated her likeness into many of his ballet paintings. He sketched at the theater at night and painted in his studio until dawn.

During these years, he consolidated his career as a drawer, a painter, and an art critic. In 1949, the couple visited Europe. Together with other Latino American artists, Vernazza exhibited his work at the Museum of Beaux Arts of the City of Paris (Petit Palais).

Vision

Vernazza did not visit Paris only as an artist, UNESCO chose him to be a representative of the Art Critics of Uruguay. He did not come from any Academy. He did not see art as a theoretician but as a technician. He knew the tools, the materials, the colours, and the natural progress of how art is created. He also admired those who designed the wardrobe for entertainers, like the Russian painter Léon Bakst, or those who illustrated fairy tales like the Barcelonian Freixas and the Russian Iván Bilibin. He studied the drawings that appear in fashion magazines and sometimes he designed Daisy's dresses. Rooted in tradition, Eduardo always lived with the original meaning of techné: the ability to make something well.

By the 1960s his vision had evolved, influenced by other conceptions of art: ready – made, conceptual art, installation, and postmodernist art.

Postmodernism is a theoretical approach to art. In postmodernist art a linguistic support is often necessary. Without it is impossible for the public to understand the different layers of meaning that the artist expresses. Vernazza was far away from this position. The titles of his paintings are Clown, Dancer, Actress. Thus, they confirm the images the public sees. or they have no title. In the fifties, Vernazza refused a position as a professor of Theory of Art at the School of Humanities and Sciences at the University of the Republic. He found it against his nature to translate drawings, paintings, and sculpture into verbal language. He never spoke about his own work. If he delivered concepts concerning what he did, he would destroy the mystery of this silence.

The mime Marcel Marceau praised Vernazza for his work. Vernazza had created a series of drawings of Marceau during a series of the mime's South American tours. The mime also pointed to the relationship between his work and Spanish dance. Arms up, bodies that transform the dancers into trees or beasts, and the only sound is music and stamping hard on one's feet. Vernazza also drew and painted important figures of Spanish dance: Carmen Amaya, Antonio Gadez, and Cristina Hoyos.

Landscapes

In summertime, the newspaper sent Eduardo Vernazza to Punta del Este in order for him to make sketches of life in Gorlero and the performances that are exhibited at the seaside resort. He also painted watercolours and oils. They represent lakes and woods that no longer exist. There is a Punta del Este covered with low houses surrounded by gardens. The streets are narrow and picturesque characters wonder around. This quiet villagescape has now been replaced by a Miami like mini-city. While Eduardo worked, Daisy made cloth sculptures of clowns, children and animals. She also worked with paper, aluminium, and cork in order to represent flowers, stars or just beautiful forms. During these later years, an illness interrupted the flow of Eduardo's work at El Día. But Daisy's steady inspiration and his passion for learning restored him back to health. Even while he was seriously ill he continued to work, drawing, engraving woodcuts, and painting. He took advantage of this enforced rest to pursue his research into literature and art history. These disciplines soon started leaving traces on his work. In the 1970s he started what he called rhythms: a trip through vibration and movement.

Candombes and people of Montevideo

In the 1980s Eduardo's series, Candombes, became world-famous. Through his drawings and paintings, Eduardo Vernazza perceived Montevidean society in its complexity: the middle class, the slums, the poor reduced to pulling carts of recyclable trash. He was distant in his relationship to politics. He attended no demonstrations or political engagements. However, through his art, he illustrated poverty and marginality. Tramps, vagabonds, and the homeless found a voice in his expressions of their suffering.

Nevertheless, in general, Vernazza approached people with a quiet sense of humour. The artist showed men and women in tenements and streets, gossiping, with arms akimbo, that his comic approach exaggerated.

Candombe has its source in Africa. UNESCO considers it a humanity’s cultural immaterial patrimony. Candombe reunites theater, dance and music. It was conceived as a mockery of the coronation of African kings. Its musical center are the long, wooden drums. Around this pulsating circle the prototypical characters dance. The rite also includes pantomime with colorful Uruguayan costumes. It also reflects images of the Passion plays belonging to the Bantu and the Catholic religions. Little by little, it has become a cultural attribute of Uruguay. Under his dark or red skies, Vernazza shows the very vibration of the rite. At the same time the artist’s grace confers witty and religious traits to each character. Thus, the one who observes may mock candombe’s symbolism and admire them simultaneously. Thus Vernazza’s humour apprehends the ceremonies characters in a way that reunites what is visible, what is spiritual and what is mysterious. In front of Candombe and its origins, Vernazza’s art is an emotional response to joy.

Theater

Vernazza's work on theater reflects a historical time of performance. He conveyed the mimicry, the gesture, the posture. Thus he allows to recognize actors and, above all, conceptions concerning how to act in the 20th century. In this way, Vernazza’s art opens the possibility to recreate Uruguayan and international theatrical esthetics in Montevideo, during six decades. These features transform his work in an entry to intangible patrimony (body language, conceptions of space, ideas of gender) during a period of Uruguayan society. But, as an artist, Vernazza not only had a historical language. He also invented. He played with which is supposedly with doubt, with what the public believes concerning the time and the characters. Therefore, even if his art contains some veracity. it displays blurred, opened, images.

Dance

Dance was at the core of Eduardo Vernazza’s work. He drew and painted the Russian versions of Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, and The Swan’s Death. Complementary, the artist perceived and recorded the influence of the Russian ballets on Uruguayan performances. In 1940, when Leonid Fiódorovich Miasen presented Petrushka, many Uruguayan ballerinas danced with them. In this way young dancers like Olga Banegas and Juanita de León had the opportunity to work with Russian artists such as Tamara Toumánova, Tamara Grigorieva and Roman Jasinsky.

On the other hand, Uruguayan dancers as Miguel Terekov, become part of the Russian ballets. Yurek Shabelevski, a polish member of the Russian ballets, teaches generations of Uruguayan ballerinas. Later on, great Russian artists like Alexander Godunov and Rudolf Nureyev dance in Montevideo. The choreographies, the design of wardrobes, the beauty of performances impact the conception of dance in Uruguay.

Sitting in the first row of the seats, Eduardo Vernazza and his pencil captured the steps, the colors, the vibrations of the Russian ballets. He also records the Uruguayan versions of the Russians. The way he perceives dance is at the same time meticulous and evanescent. Therefore, today, the Uruguayan dancers that visit his workshop recognize the Russian ballerinas and distinguish themselves through a hand or a hair dress. But they are never sure to be themselves. Vernazza paints the clothes of one character. He mixed up the colours of the different dancers’s clothes. Or he paints the body of a great Russian dancer. But the face is Daisy’s.

Rhythms

Rhythms represent movement itself. If one takes a distance from this apparent chaos they perceive individuals who try to emerge, bodies that are changing of form, beings in process. This is the dimension of what semiologist Julia Kristeva calls semiotics itself. Maybe the rhythms relate to the mother and her symbols. Thus, through his work, Vernazza creates what could be called mother art. The figures still have the initial warmth. But they permit to perceive a ballerina, a couple of lovers, a life that announces itself. Theoretical discourse is against the rhythms. Decodified, the rhythms stop existing. They are only analogous to music. Some are gray or have multiple colours. They are visual yet they caress. Eduardo Vernazza’s rhythms propose a chaotic conception of the body. Sometimes it is a being still united to its mother, sometimes it is an orgy, sometimes it is a wheel. Sometimes there are bodies that are making their ascent, breaking their limits suggesting infinity.

Sitting up high on his stool, his arms stretched out to paint a huge rhythm, Eduardo Vernazza died on 26 May 1991. His work does not only have an aesthetic value. It contains the performances produced by multiple cultures that displayed their art in Montevideo over six decades.

Detailed History

He held his first exhibition of his works at the Moretti Gallery in the year 1937, gathering one hundred productions, among croquises, drawings and watercolours. In 1938 he exhibited a number of coloured illustrations for poems at The Young Men's Christian Association. In 1943 he held a highly successful exhibition of his works at the Sodre theater, entirely devoted to the dancers Clotilde and Alexjando Sakharoff; immediately afterwards he held a more complete show at the Athenea of Montevideo, which he called "Dancing Moves". In 1944 he published his album entitled "50 Sketches" In 1951, at the Great hall of the theater Solis, in Montevideo, he exhibited a series of theatrical sketches of interpreters from the National Comedy. At the museum of the Theater exhibition held in the foyer of the Solis Theater, he exhibited numerous sketches that remained the possession of the theater.

He was a draftsman and art critic of the newspaper El Dia for fifty years and contributed illustrations for the magazine Mundo Uruaguay. He has been exhibited at the National (Uruguay) Gallery of Fine Arts, obtaining the following awards; Second prize in drawing (Silver Metal) in 1937, again in 1939, and first prize (Gold Metal) in 1940

He exhibited in Paris in 1949, taking part in the International Congress of Art Critics at the behest of UNESCO. He represented Uruguay and President of the Uruguayan National Section.

He was self-taught in painting, engraving and drawing. He became the illustrator of the magazine Uruguayan World and of the newspaper El Dia. He attended the free courses at the Circle of Beau Arts, Montevideo

He had one man exhibitions in: Moretti hall (1937), Christian Association of Young people (1938), SODRE shows titled “Reasons for Dance” (1943), National Hall Beautiful Arts (1958), Moretti Gallery, as of 1958 continuously created a series of landscapes, oil paintings on dance and the circus, more ahead drawings acuarelados on the same subjects; sample of Modern Painting (1968) in which faces the dance in its diverse reasons, or modern one or of ballet, in the geometric forms and the composition of the color; in Punta del Este (1968), series of reasons for the landscape of Maldonado and Punta del Este. In the outside, in Gallery Insel, New York, also their theater notes in several parts of the world were set out.

Some of the obtained prizes: 2° Prize Bronze medal by its Chinese red “Landscape”, in the first Hall the Coast of Plastic Arts (Jump, 1950). In national halls: 2° Prize Silver medal to the drawing “Croquis” (1937), 2° Prize by “Desnudo” (1939), to 1er. Prize Gold medal by its drawing-sepia “Fatigue detail” (1940), Prize Municipal Intendance Bronze medal by its Chinese red “Landscape” (1949) and red Chinese “ Street of Maldonado ” in 1951; Prize Municipal Intendance Bronze medal by its wood engraving “Entered the Burnet forest” (1952); Prize Bank of the Republic Bronze medal by its Chinese red “Street in winter” (1954) and 1955 by its wood engraving “Bichicome”; to 1er. Prize Gold medal by its watercolor “Fished” (1957); 2º Prize Silver medal by its pen and watered down “ Landscape of winter ” (1959). Published albums: “50 theater notes”, on famous figures of the scene, the dance, the concert (1944); “New theater notes” in which it locates, besides famous universal artists, to actors of the National Comedy (1955). The important libraries, as much of Europe as of the United States and other countries, count on their albums.

It is represented in the museums National and Municipal of Beau Arts of Uruguay and in numerous private collections and cultural centers of Uruguay and of the international world. Twice it gained the First Prize to the Critic of Art of the National Hall.

References

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