Millôr Fernandes (Rio de Janeiro RJ 19231 - Idem 2012)
Cartoonist, caricaturist, illustrator, writer, poet, playwright, translator.
His first drawing was published in O Jornal in 1934. At the age of 13 he was hired by the magazine O Cruzeiro, where he carried out a variety of tasks in the editorial production: he wrote captions, did page layout and worked as an office boy. Seeking to improve his skills, he attended the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios do Rio de Janeiro between 1938 and 1943. In 1939, after winning a short-story contest held by the magazine A Cigarra, he was invited by Frederico Chateaubriand to write for it. He then created the section Poste-Escrito, signing as Emmanuel Vão Gôgo. Under the same pseudonym he began writing a column in the Diário da Noite. He later ran A Cigarra for three years. He also directed O Guri, a comic magazine, and O Detetive, a crime fiction magazine. In 1945, he produced Pif-Paf, the humor section of O Cruzeiro, with texts he wrote, also signed as Emmanuel Vão Gôgo, illustrated at first by Péricles (1924 - 1961) and later by himself. In 1964, after leaving O Cruzeiro, he published the periodical Pif-Paf, which ran for only eight issues. Between 1964 and 1974, he contributed weekly to the Portuguese newspaper Diário Popular. From 1969 to 1975, he took part in the Rio de Janeiro weekly O Pasquim, alongside Jaguar (1932 - 2025), Tarso de Castro, Sérgio Cabral (1937 - 2024), Henfil (1944 - 1988), Paulo Francis (1930 - 1997) and Ziraldo (1932 - 2024), among others. Besides his work in print media, Millôr hosted programs on TV Itacolomi, in Belo Horizonte, and on TV Tupi, in Rio de Janeiro. He wrote poems, texts, adaptations and translations for the theater, as well as film scripts, and published dozens of books.
Critical Commentary
With more than 50 years of uninterrupted production, Milton Viola Fernandes, or simply Millôr Fernandes, became an icon of Brazilian humor. Part of the generation that rose to prominence in the 1950s in magazines such as O Cruzeiro, Millôr's graphic and literary humor bears witness, with an ever-sharp intelligence, to the many cultural and political changes Brazil went through in the second half of the 20th century. His intense comic verve found masterful expression in a range of media, so much so that Millôr is one of the few Brazilian humorists who did not stand out in just one field: he was a cartoonist, writer, poet, playwright, translator, screenwriter, songwriter, editor and more.
But Millôr liked to be seen as a journalist.2 He discovered the language of comics in the early 1930s, particularly through American classics of the genre such as Flash Gordon, and at an early age, in 1938, began his career as an errand boy and layout assistant at the then small magazine O Cruzeiro. Soon after, while still a student at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios do Rio de Janeiro, he won a chronicle contest held by the magazine A Cigarra. Before long he was writing the magazine's humor column Poste Escrito under the pseudonym Emmanuel Vão Gôgo. He returned to O Cruzeiro and, in 1945, began publishing his work in the humor section O Pif-Paf, in a historic partnership with the graphic humorist Péricles (1924 - 1961). There he published some of his wittiest works, such as the series of kinetic, geometric and mathematical poems. In 1949, he released Tempo e Contratempo [Time and Mishap], the first collection of his work, still under the pseudonym Emmanuel Vão Gôgo.
In 1950, the magazine began to stand out, foreshadowing the success of the whole decade. These were highly productive years: in 1953, his first play, Uma Mulher em Três Atos [A Woman in Three Acts], premiered at the Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia - TBC in São Paulo. In 1955, he shared first prize at the International Exhibition of the Museu da Caricatura de Buenos Aires with the American artist Saul Steinberg (1914 - 1999). Steinberg, together with the Frenchman André François (1915 - 2005), exerted a strong influence on modern Brazilian humorists, Millôr Fernandes above all. Like the American artist and cartoonist, Millôr understood drawing as a way of thinking on paper, and through it mixed references from high and low culture in his creations. In formal terms, the concise stroke, the two-dimensional line as the structure of three-dimensional form and the value given to blank space in Steinberg's drawings are elements found in the work of the Brazilian, who is regarded as one of the modernizers of humorous drawing in Brazil. In 1956, Millôr began illustrating all his texts in O Cruzeiro; in 1957, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro - MAM/RJ organized the first exhibition of his drawings, and he began his series of haiku. By the end of the 1950s, O Cruzeiro reached a circulation of 750,000 copies a week, and Millôr was one of those responsible for that success.
The 1960s were marked by profound changes. In 1962, he began signing all his work published in O Cruzeiro as Millôr. In 1963, he left the magazine amid conflict. In October of that year, the magazine itself published A Verdadeira História do Paraíso [The True Story of Paradise], a volume gathering a series of texts and illustrations Millôr had created since the late 1950s about the biblical account of the creation of the world. The story angered a group of Catholics and, under pressure, the director Leão Gondim de Oliveira ordered an editorial against the artist, disclaiming responsibility and claiming to have been unaware of its publication. Millôr, who was in Europe, was outraged; on his return he resigned from the magazine and filed a lawsuit, which he won. The affair had wide repercussions in artistic and press circles at the time, and a dinner was held in solidarity with Millôr.3 On the episode, he said: "I feel like a ship abandoning the rats". From then on, Millôr worked for the country's leading newspapers and magazines, such as Correio da Manhã, Veja, IstoÉ, Jornal do Brasil, O Dia, O Estado de S. Paulo, Folha de S.Paulo and the Portuguese Diário Popular. In 1964, he launched the humor weekly Pif-Paf, considered a forerunner of the alternative press in Brazil, which closed for financial reasons after its eighth issue. Along the same lines, in 1969 Millôr co-founded the humor newspaper O Pasquim, which played one of the most important roles in the struggle against the military dictatorship.
Increasingly drawn to the theater, from the mid-1960s Millôr wrote, adapted, translated and took part in several plays, for example: Liberdade, Liberdade [Freedom, Freedom], a musical written with Flávio Rangel (1934 - 1988) and staged at Teatro Opinião (1965); a musical adaptation of Memórias de um Sargento de Milícias [Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant] with an all-Black cast (1966); Do Fundo do Azul do Mundo [From the Depths of the Blue of the World], with Elizeth Cardoso (1920 - 1990) and Zimbo Trio (1968); and Momento 68 [Moment 68], with Caetano Veloso (1942), among others (1968). His greatest theatrical success is the play É..., written for Fernanda Montenegro (1929) in 1976.
Millôr's vast output is the product of a mind attentive to everyday events and ready to interpret them with refined humor, in which literary forms and references, as well as historical facts, are often reworked to give free rein to comic discourse. In many cases, the comic effect comes from playing with the language itself, as in the priceless O Livro Branco do Humor [The White Book of Humor] and in his collection of Perguntas Cretinas [Idiotic Questions]. Time has not dulled his creative power: his cartoons and texts continue to appear almost daily and can be found on the Millôr Online website, launched in 2000, which also gives access to most of his work.
Notes
1 Millôr Fernandes was born on August 16, 1923, but was registered on May 27, 1924. For this reason, his year of birth appears as 1924 in several sources.
2 In an interview on his website Millôr Online.
3 Those present at the dinner included Fernanda Montenegro, Glauber Rocha (1939 - 1981), Jaguar (1932 - 2025), Jânio de Freitas, Mário Pedrosa (1900 - 1981), Paulo Francis (1930 - 1997), Rubem Braga (1913 - 1990), Sérgio Porto (1923 - 1968), Tom Jobim (1927 - 1994) and Ziraldo (1932 - 2024), among others.
Critiques
"The most important thing I have to say about Millôr Fernandes is this: I know that his fame was built on his ability to deploy irony with style, on his high cultural standards, and on his colloquial language, which is more stimulating to the intellect than the dead language favored by academics. Even so, I find something in him that I never see mentioned and that seems fundamental to me: the revitalization of the Portuguese language that results from his habit of making the reader read the same word twice, deepening its potential. Inattentive, some scholars of his texts saw in this effort a mere fondness for puns (a traditional form of humor). They were wrong. The old pun is just a joke, a superficial game, whereas Millôr uses the rereading of a word to make the reader think. As an example, I cite the article O que é O PASQUIM [What Is O PASQUIM], in which he discusses freedom of the press in Brazil at the time O PASQUIM was founded: ...liberdade de imprensa - o mais forte tem todo o direito de imprensar o mais fraco [freedom of the press - the strongest has every right to press (squeeze) the weakest]".
Norma Pereira Rego
REGO, Norma Pereira. Millôr Fernandes. In: ______. Pasquim: gargalhantes pelejas. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 1996. p. 89.
"An admirer of Steinberg and André François, whose works he introduced to his friends in Brazil, Millôr developed a drawing style of remarkable creativity and virtuosity that has deeply marked every illustrator and caricaturist in the country since the 1950s".
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
LAGO, Pedro Corrêa do. Millôr. In: ______. Caricaturistas brasileiros: 1836-1999. Rio de Janeiro: Sextante Artes, 1999. p. 148.
Solo Exhibitions
1957 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Drawings, at MAM/RJ
1961 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Drawings, at Petite Galerie
1975 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Galeria Graffiti
Group Exhibitions
1955 - Buenos Aires (Argentina) - Group show, at Museu da Caricatura de Buenos Aires
1963 - Canada - Canadian Humor Salon
1977 - Belo Horizonte MG - 5th Global Winter Salon, at Fundação Palácio das Artes
1977 - Brasília DF - 5th Global Winter Salon
1977 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 2nd Arte Agora: Visão da Terra [Art Now: Vision of the Earth], at MAM/RJ
1977 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 5th Global Winter Salon, at MNBA
1977 - São Paulo SP - 5th Global Winter Salon, at Masp
1981 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Pablo, Pablo!: uma interpretação brasileira de Guernica [Pablo, Pablo!: A Brazilian Interpretation of Guernica], at Fundação Nacional de Arte
1985 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Old Habit: Brazilian Drawing, at EAV/Parque Lage
1986 - Porto Alegre RS - Paths of Brazilian Drawing, at Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul Ado Malagoli
1988 - São Paulo SP - 63/66 Figure and Object, at Galeria Millan
1989 - Recife PE - Memory Game
1989 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Memory Game, at Montesanti Galleria
1989 - São Paulo SP - Memory Game, at Galeria Montesanti Roesler
1997 - Belo Horizonte MG - O Humor Gráfico nos Anos 30, 40 e 50 [Graphic Humor in the 1930s, 40s and 50s], at Itaú Cultural
1997 - São Paulo SP - O Humor Gráfico nos Anos 30, 40 e 50 [Graphic Humor in the 1930s, 40s and 50s], at Itaú Cultural
1998 - Brasília DF - O Humor Gráfico nos Anos 30, 40 e 50 [Graphic Humor in the 1930s, 40s and 50s], at Itaugaleria
1998 - Penápolis SP - O Humor Gráfico nos Anos 30, 40 e 50 [Graphic Humor in the 1930s, 40s and 50s], at Itaugaleria
2001 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Caricaturists, at Instituto Cine Cultural
2002 - Austin (United States) - Brazilian Visual Poetry, at Mexic-Arte Museum
2005 - São Paulo SP - Faces de Mário [Faces of Mário], at IEB/USP
Source: Itaú Cultural
