Benedito Calixto (Conceição de Itanhaém SP 1853 - São Paulo SP 1927)
Benedito Calixto was a painter, teacher, historian and essayist. He moved to Brotas, in the interior of São Paulo state, where he acquired basic notions of painting while helping his uncle, Joaquim Pedro de Jesus, restore religious images in a local church. In 1881, he held his first solo exhibition at the headquarters of the newspaper Correio Paulistano in São Paulo. He later moved to Santos, where he worked in the workshop of Tomás Antônio de Azevedo and was commissioned to decorate the ceiling of the Theatro Guarany. In 1883, he went to Paris to study drawing and painting, with funds granted by the Viscount Nicolau Pereira de Campos Vergueiro. He attended the studio of Jean François Raffaëlli and the Académie Julian, associating with renowned painters such as Gustave Boulanger, Tony Robert-Fleury and William-Adolphe Bouguereau. He returned to Brazil in 1884, bringing with him a camera, which he began to use to compose his works. He lived in Santos and later in São Vicente, where he produced numerous seascapes depicting the São Paulo coast. In the early 20th century, he made several panels with religious themes for churches in the capital and in the interior of São Paulo. He also painted views of old parts of the cities of São Paulo, Santos and São Vicente for the Museu Paulista da Universidade de São Paulo - MP/USP, commissioned by the historian Afonso d'Escragnolle Taunay, the museum's director. He also devoted himself to historical studies of the region and to the preservation of its heritage, publishing, among others, the books A Vila de Itanhaém, in 1895, and Capitanias Paulistas, in 1924.
Industrialized art
Another negative factor conspiring against Calixto's art was the large number of commissions he always had to fulfill. Vítor Meirelles, at the end of the 19th century, had already referred to the "haste with which he thinks and the speed with which he executes what he thinks", adding that if Calixto happened to live in Rio, he would try to correct him, "forcing him to paint a large work over two or three years."
In his last years above all, Calixto had become a veritable picture-making machine, as can be seen from this excerpt of a letter sent in May 1919 to a merchant who was responsible for selling his production:
Please take note of the people who want other paintings, so that they can state the size and genre they wish, as well as the spot or place I should reproduce.
In the same letter, disenchanted, he adds:
Now that I am old, the opinion and advice of critics on my work are of little or no use to me. I would only like the newspapers to report on the paintings sold, etc., and nothing more, as I do not need advertising.
Pedrina, daughter and clone
It was the isolation in which Calixto lived that prevented him from taking part frequently in the Salão Nacional de Belas Artes, in whose catalogs his name appears only twice, in 1898 (third-class gold medal) and in 1900. That is also why he only rarely took part in international events, such as the 1904 Saint Louis Exposition, where he also won a gold medal.
Even tucked away in São Vicente, he never ceased to be held in high esteem, as shown by his clients and his large number of pupils, starting with his own daughter, Pedrina Calixto Henriques, whose painting is in fact derivative of his, to the point that many of her works were unscrupulously transformed into originals by her father, a very simple task since, moreover, the artist signed herself only P. Calixto, so that a curved stroke added to the initial P was enough for the more prestigious signature to appear.
Multifaceted painting
Calixto painted seascapes, landscapes, popular customs, and historical and religious scenes. While during his lifetime the tendency was to regard him above all as a history and religious painter (genres in which he left an abundant output, including in the Cathedral and the Bolsa of Santos, the Cardinal's Palace in Rio de Janeiro, the Church of Santa Cecília in São Paulo and the Matriz de São João Batista in Bocaina), today much greater importance is usually given to his port and coastal scenes, in which a character that is perhaps rough, but personal and deeply sincere, overflows in his approach to the various aspects of nature.
The pictures in which he recorded the unloading of coffee in the early port of Santos, besides their purely documentary aspect, have expressive strength, despite the somewhat stiff appearance of the vessels; on the other hand, certain coastal or riverside scenes deserve mention, in which a somewhat naïve drawing and precise color are combined with a clear atmospheric concern and great respect for the environment.
He died on May 31, 1927, in São Paulo, but was buried in the Paquetá Cemetery in São Vicente. Three years earlier, he had received from Pope Pius XI the commendation and cross of Saint Sylvester, Pope, in recognition of the services rendered to the Church through his art.
Critical Commentary
Benedito Calixto showed a leaning toward painting from a very early age. In 1881, he went to live in Santos, a city that inspired several of his pictures. With a grant from the city of Santos, he traveled to Paris, where he stayed for less than a year, bringing back photographic equipment. It was with the painting Enchente na Várzea do Carmo [Flood in the Várzea do Carmo], ca.1892, that the artist gained greater prominence: critics of the time pointed out the admirable accuracy with which he depicted the city of São Paulo and some of its main landmarks, such as the market, Rua 25 de Março, the chintz factory and the houses of Brás.
The artist produced several works for the Museu Paulista da Universidade de São Paulo - MP/USP, commissioned by Afonso d´Escragnolle Taunay (1876 - 1958), mainly scenes of old São Paulo and landscapes, some of them based on drawings by Hercule Florence (1804 - 1879) or on photographs by Militão Augusto de Azevedo (1837 - 1905), among others. For his historical and religious paintings, such as Fundação de São Vicente [Founding of São Vicente], 1900, or Fundação de Santos [Founding of Santos], 1922, he made preparatory photographic studies, for which he drew on meticulous historical research.
Landscapes were the artist's favorite subject. In these works, he presents a smooth painting, with the use of glazes and color always faithful to local characteristics, though handled in a very personal way in his use of greens, blues and ochres.
Benedito Calixto, who had extensive knowledge of the São Paulo coast, also worked as a cartographer, producing draft maps of Santos, and as a historian, writing about the São Paulo captaincies.
Critiques
"Benedito Calixto's artistic activity can indeed be divided into three phases: the first devoted to landscapes and seascapes; the second to the historical themes with which he was particularly familiar; and the last to religious subjects, which were closely related to his deep Christian spirit and which he knew as thoroughly as any theologian".
Emmanuel Guedes
GUEDES, Emmanuel. A arte de Benedito Calixto. Apresentação Emmanuel Guedes. [s.l.: s. n. ], 1946. 78 p.
"Calixto's paintings are testimonies of a moment of transition - the passage from the 19th to the 20th century - when the process of modernization still under way today began in this state, generating radical transformations in the cities, the countryside and the coast. The precision in recording views in which architecture appears, panoramas of the cities and their outskirts, and coastal landscapes, refers to a recent past, revealing settings that are almost unrecognizable today. We look at these pictures with a sense of strangeness, the way one looks at childhood portraits, at places revisited after a long absence, at grandparents' tales. Time frozen in surprising images, in the realization that this is how it was.
Two approaches can be seen in the making of the works gathered here: one, disciplined and restrained, shows concern with architectural and urban documentation, generally using photography as a reference; the other, a less premeditated way of working, reveals an affectionate approach to the landscape captured on the spot. (...)
Discipline and technique allow the painter to venture into large canvases. The city as spectacle in a panoramic view heralds the wide shots of cinema. Buildings spreading over the topography challenge the resistance of the tide, the river, the mountain. In the bird's-eye views, the struggle between the civilizing will and nature is evident. Accelerated urbanization erases the remaining traces of the colonial period. Modernization - initially the fruit of an economic leap resulting from the production and export of coffee and from nascent industrialization, driven by a vast migratory wave - gives urban changes a frenetic pace. Disordered growth results today in cities without memory and in critical environmental conditions.
Calixto lives from his painting. He carries out numerous works under the patronage of the State, the Church and private individuals. His involvement with historical and religious subjects goes beyond his financial needs. He is passionate about the history of São Paulo. He researches and writes about our past and, more than that, recreates it visually. On the threshold of the 20th century he dreams of caravels, Anchieta among the Indians, Martim Afonso de Souza. . .
He rigs sails in his backyard to observe the effects of the wind, and reconstructs historical scenes using family members as extras. He lives the past with a view to producing works of historical reconstruction".
Maria Alice Milliet
OLIVEIRA, Maria Alice Milliet de. Benedito Calixto: memória paulista. In: BENEDITO Calixto: memória paulista. São Paulo: Projeto Banespa, Pinacoteca do Estado, 1990. p. 19-21.
"Part of his work increasingly seeks a documentary character, based on research and on photographic records of the past. Many of the pictures in the Museu Paulista, the Museu de Arte Sacra de São Paulo, the Fundação Benedito Calixto and the Santos City Council reproduce imagery drawn from other people's photographs, sometimes modified with information obtained from archives and suggestions of his imagination.
(...)
Lévi-Strauss passed through Santos in 1935 and described the landscape as follows: 'The outskirts of Santos, a flooded plain riddled with lagoons and swamps, crisscrossed by narrow streams and canals whose outlines are perpetually blurred by a pearly mist, resemble the earth itself emerging at the beginning of creation. The banana plantations that cover it are of the youngest and tenderest green imaginable... '
It is precisely these tones that stand out in his works: yellow combined with blue, and the pearly hues, which in contact with green produce the brown of earth and brick; it is a restricted palette, in which the code of chromatic values is complete and precisely resolves the landscapes, vegetation and houses. (...)
A considerable part of Calixto's work is an important contribution to the memory of the cities of São Paulo, Santos, São Vicente and other places in São Paulo state. These works show provincialism, the quiet life, the lingering colonial features in architecture, and the sparsely populated outskirts where nature appears almost untouched".
Dalton Sala
SALA, Dalton. Benedito Calixto: memória paulista: fragmentos críticos e biográficos. In: BENEDITO Calixto: memória paulista. São Paulo: Projeto Banespa, Pinacoteca do Estado, 1990. p. 101, 111-112 e 117.
"Immersed in producing an iconographic universe for São Paulo and for the Catholic Church (which was expanding through the interior of the state, following the coffee trail), divided between his experience as a landscape painter - moved by the peculiarities of the São Paulo coastal landscape - and as a researcher of São Paulo history and hagiography, Calixto, a researcher who paints, developed an extremely peculiar body of work.
While in the first years of his career one could still sense a desire to rise to the same level as other colleagues - linked by affinity to landscape painting of a naturalist flavor -, over time this desire tends to fade.
Instead of refining his interpretation of the landscape around him and of the subjects dear to him (the history of São Paulo's cities, the history of the saints) - as several artists of his generation did, each in their own way -, Calixto seems to have preferred to stick to the scrupulous description of reality, even when that reality was an evocation of times past.
If in the aforementioned Partida da Monção, by Almeida Júnior, one clearly perceives subservience to the description of the models and the local landscape, one also notes how the artist appropriates a typical aspect of the place's nature - the morning mist - to create in the painting a halo of mystery that only adds interest to the work. In Calixto's Fundação de São Vicente, by contrast, nothing merely documentary becomes an interpretation of the scene itself. Everything is laid out there, itemized, by a scientist's sensibility that seems to override the artist's, that of a painter who seems to trust photography more than painting itself.
This fact, in turn, makes his work even more interesting: Calixto is one of the rare artists who, in São Paulo, in the first three decades of the 20th century, used photography as the structural basis for his works.
It is remarkable how much photography helped painting reflect on its specificity as a two-dimensional plane. However, that was not the lesson Calixto learned from this new technology of image production. He used it instrumentally to reaffirm his concept of the world as theater, as a space for the staging of life and its events".
Tadeu Chiarelli
CHIARELLI, Tadeu. Benedito Calixto: Um pesquisador que pinta. In: CALIXTO, Benedito; SOUZA, Marli Nunes (coord.). Benedito Calixto: um pintor à beira-mar. Texto Caleb Faria Alves, Tadeu Chiarelli. São Paulo: Fundação Pinacoteca Benedicto Calixto, 2002, p. 33.
"The request for information addressed to Calixto is extremely significant. Not that his painting lacked intrinsic artistic value or could not be admired for its purely aesthetic qualities. But the buyer wanted more than that: he wanted to be able to tell his guests about the figures and historical events that took place at the painted site; he wanted to be able to link the admired seascape unmistakably with São Paulo. No other painter had Calixto's qualities to meet both this new appreciation by São Paulo people for art and for their coast. Only Calixto, born and raised on those beaches and a student at the Académie Julian in Paris, had the geographical knowledge and the training in painting the task required.
His unique knowledge of the São Paulo coast even made Calixto an authority for Brazil. He informed historians, politicians and intellectuals about viewpoints and sites essential to understanding Brazilian history. (...)
Rui Barbosa, Euclides da Cunha, Washington Luis and other figures in our history were interested in getting to know in person those places recently discovered by history and immortalized by Calixto, and invariably turned to him as their guide: (...)
Calixto even advised state bodies on the geographical landmarks that needed to be set up. (...)
Calixto thus combines qualities we are used to seeing separately. His seascapes are at once history paintings and products of the modern romanticism that valued contact with these remote places in which man entered into communion with himself."
Caleb Faria Alves
ALVES, Caleb Faria. Mar Paulista. In: CALIXTO, Benedito; SOUZA, Marli Nunes (coord.). Benedito Calixto: um pintor à beira-mar. Texto Caleb Faria Alves, Tadeu Chiarelli. São Paulo: Fundação Pinacoteca Benedicto Calixto, 2002, p. 45-49.
Solo Exhibitions
1881 - São Paulo SP - First solo exhibition, at the Correio Paulistano headquarters
1890 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Casa Levy
Group Exhibitions
1883 - Paris (France) - Shows the work Longe do Lar [Far from Home], winner of a history painting competition
1898 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 5th General Fine Arts Exhibition, at Enba - 3rd-class gold medal
1900 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 7th General Fine Arts Exhibition, at Enba
1902 - São Paulo SP - Exhibition of Industrial Fine Arts
1904 - Saint Louis (United States) - International Exhibition - gold medal
1911 - São Paulo SP - First Brazilian Fine Arts Exhibition, at Liceu de Artes e Ofícios
Posthumous Exhibitions
1935 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Liceu de Artes e Ofícios
1940 - São Paulo SP - Retrospective Exhibition: Works by the Great Masters of Painting and Their Disciples
1953 - São Paulo SP - 18th São Paulo Fine Arts Salon, at Galeria Prestes Maia
1970 - Itanhaém SP - Benedito Calixto Week, sponsored by the local city hall
1970 - São Paulo SP - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo 1970
1980 - São Paulo SP - The Brazilian Landscape: 1650-1976, at Paço das Artes
1981 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 4th National Visual Arts Salon, at Funarte
1981 - São Paulo SP - Four Great Painters in São Paulo, at Fundação Bienal
1982 - São Paulo SP - Seascapes and Riverscapes, at Museu Lasar Segall
1984 - São Paulo SP - Benedito Calixto: Unpublished Works, at Dan Galeria
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: A Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, at Fundação Bienal
1985 - São Paulo SP - 100 Itaú Works, at Masp
1986 - São Paulo SP - Dezenovevinte: A Turn of the Century, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1987 - São Paulo SP - Brazil Painted by National and Foreign Masters: 18th - 20th Centuries, at Masp
1988 - Curitiba PR - Artist of the Month: Benedito Calixto, at Museu de Arte do Paraná
1989 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Machado de Assis's Rio de Janeiro, at CCBB
1989 - São Paulo SP - Exhibition of the Art and Cultural Collection of the São Paulo State Government Palace, at Palácio do Governo
1989 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Painting 19th Century: Works from the Banco Itaú Collection, at Itaugaleria
1990 - São Paulo SP - Benedito Calixto: São Paulo Memory, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1991 - São Paulo SP - São Paulo Images, at Paço das Artes
1994 - São Paulo SP - Bienal Brasil Século XX, at Fundação Bienal
1994 - São Paulo SP - A Critical Look at the 19th-Century Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1995 - Belém PA - Path of the Waters, at Mabe
1995 - Campinas SP - From Seascape to Still Life
1998 - Brasília DF - Brazilian Like Me, Like Whom?, at Ministério das Relações Exteriores
1998 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Seascapes in Major São Paulo Collections, at Museu Naval e Oceanográfico. Serviço de Documentação da Marinha
1999 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Like Me, Like Whom?, at MAB/Faap
2000 - São Paulo SP - 7th Art and Antiques Salon, at A Hebraica
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brasil + 500 Mostra do Redescobrimento, at Fundação Bienal
2000 - São Paulo SP - Coffee, at Banco Real
2001 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian Watercolor, at Centro Cultural Light
2002 - São Paulo SP - Benedito Calixto: A Painter by the Sea, at Jockey Clube de São Paulo
2003 - São Paulo SP - Painters of the São Paulo Coast, at Sociarte
Source: Wikipedia, Itaú Cultural
