Sérgio Milliet and Alexander Calder: the seduction of abstract art

• Autor(a) principal: Brandini, Laura
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Terra Roxa e Outras Terras: Revista de Estudos Literários
• Texto Completo: https://ojs.uel.br/revistas/uel/index.php/terraroxa/article/view/46018
• topic: Sérgio Milliet; Alexander Calder; Crítica; Arte; Sérgio Milliet; Alexander Calder; Criticism; Art

The most important proposal of this article is to put in to the light the critical thinking of Sérgio Milliet, one of the protagonists of São Paulo Modernism and who has been little remembered since his activities as a critic ceased in November 9th 1966, the day of his death. A big part of his critical work, written from 1940 to 1956 for O Estado de S. Paulo, was published in the ten books that composes the Diário Crítico (1981-1982) and which is the corpus of my work. More specifically, I will study Milliet’s reflections on the visual arts, in which he first defends a human art and, therefore, in his understanding, figurative art, in an opposite and critical sense of abstract art. In a second moment, associated to the discovery of Alexander Calder’s work, Milliet starts to praise abstraction, even becoming the director of the II, III and IV Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, from 1953 to 1957, events with lots of abstract works and which had repercussions on the production of Brazilian artists.