Sérgio Milliet (São Paulo SP 1898 - idem 1966)
Sérgio Milliet was a writer, art critic, sociologist, teacher, translator and painter. He completed his primary and secondary education in São Paulo. In 1912, he moved to Switzerland, where he began a course in economic and social sciences in Geneva, completing it in Bern. In 1916, he began contributing to the magazine Le Carmel and, in the following years, published his first books of poetry: Par le Sentir (1917) and Le Départ Sur la Pluie (1919). He returned to Brazil at the end of 1920. He took part in the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, embracing the modernist platform and becoming a defender and promoter of the group's new ideas on art and literature.
In 1923, he returned to Europe and settled in Paris, where he followed the development of new artistic theories. He contributed to Brazilian magazines such as Klaxon, Terra Roxa, Ariel and Revista do Brasil, sending foreign texts for publication in Brazil and translating poems by Brazilian modernists for the magazine Lumière. He associated with Brazilian modernist artists and writers until he returned to Brazil for good in 1925. That same year, together with Oswald de Andrade and Afonso Schmidt, he founded the magazine Cultura. In 1927, he became manager of the Diário Nacional, the São Paulo newspaper of the newly created Partido Democrático.
In 1935, he joined the group of intellectuals formed by Paulo Duarte, Mário de Andrade, Rubem Borba de Morais and Tácito de Almeida, among others, who conceived the creation of the Culture Department of the São Paulo City Hall. He was appointed head of the department's Historical and Social Documentation Division. From 1937 to 1944, he taught at the Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo, with which he had been associated since its founding, having served as its secretary between 1933 and 1935. He met the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and helped him make his ethnographic expedition possible.
From 1938, he began writing regularly on art and literature for the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, beginning a phase of intense production in art criticism. He published Pintores e Pintura (1940), O Sal da Heresia (1941), Fora de Forma (1942) and A Marginalidade da Pintura Moderna (1942). He grew close to São Paulo painters and began to paint. Between 1941 and 1944, he contributed to the magazine Clima. In 1943, he traveled to the United States and, on his return, published A Pintura Norte-Americana. He took over as director of the Biblioteca Municipal de São Paulo and promoted various cultural activities, such as lectures and round tables with the participation of Luís Martins, Lourival Gomes Machado, Osório César, Roger Bastide and Luis Saia, among others.
In 1944, he published Pintura Quase Sempre and the first volume of Diário Crítico, an anthology that would run to ten volumes by 1959. At the opening of the 1st Brazilian Writers' Congress in 1945, he inaugurated the Art Section of the Biblioteca Municipal, forming the first public collection of Brazilian modern art. That same year, he joined the Esquerda Democrática.
He was one of the main driving forces behind the creation of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM/SP), founded in 1948 and opened to the public in 1949, serving on its board for painting and sculpture. He took part in the meetings for the return of the Partido Socialista in 1947. In 1949, he was one of the founders and the first president of the Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte (ABCA). He conceived the Tarsila do Amaral retrospective at MAM/SP in 1950, writing the catalog's introductory text. He published Panorama da Poesia Brasileira in 1952.
He was artistic director of MAM/SP between 1952 and 1957 and directed the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, between 1953 and 1958. He retired in 1959. In 1967, MAM/SP organized a retrospective of his painting. The reissue of Diário Crítico began in 1981, with a celebrated preface by Antonio Candido in the first volume. In 1998, the centenary of his birth, commemorative events were held at the Biblioteca Municipal de São Paulo Mário de Andrade, the Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS/SP) and the Universidade de São Paulo (USP).
Critical Commentary
A literary critic and intellectual active in Brazil's artistic and cultural milieu, especially in São Paulo, he is highly relevant for the influence he exerted both on the modernist generation and on the generation of artists and writers who emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Deeply interested in the problems of his time, his critical reflection followed the paths of Brazilian modern art from the 1920s to the early 1960s. At first, he worked in the press mainly as a literary commentator. Influenced by the ideas prevailing in the Brazilian sociocultural milieu of the period, he took a stance in favor of a Brazilianism in artistic and literary production, albeit with reservations about the more nationalist positions.
The 1930s marked a change of direction, when he set poetry aside to devote himself to criticism. In 1932, the book Terminus Seco was published, named after the column he wrote in the Diário Nacional, with articles of art criticism. In 1936, he published Marcha a Ré, a collection of commentaries on art and literature. His texts reflect on the problems of modern life, contemporary man and the crisis surrounding him. Alongside discussions of art, he addresses political ideas and topical issues of Brazilian reality at the time, such as the so-called social literature. From 1938, he began writing for the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, and his activity devoted to the visual arts became more regular. In 1938, he published Ensaios, a collection of texts on literature, the arts and social history, many of them originally published in the Revista do Arquivo or in his column in the Estado. His texts on art almost always refer to everyday events: exhibitions by emerging artists, salons, cultural topics in vogue, etc. Almost all of his books of criticism bring together articles, notes, essays or personal jottings, generally published in newspapers. With a very personal, fluid, poetic, flexible style of writing, he adopted the diary as his favorite form of expression, which also reflects the journalistic nature of most of his output.
The newspaper is another vehicle through which he engaged in dialogue with other intellectuals, taking part in debates and controversies. One of the most famous was waged with the concrete artist Waldemar Cordeiro (1925 - 1973) in the 1950s. Sérgio Milliet's reservation about abstract art and the aesthetic project of concretism concerns hermeticism, a risk artists run when they overemphasize formal exercise, compromising the communicability of the work. Cordeiro, who wrote articles for the newspaper Folha da Manhã, countered by accusing him of defending an official, traditionalist art. Once the debate cooled down, Sérgio Milliet acknowledged the importance of the concrete contribution to Brazilian art, but kept warning against the danger of endlessly exploiting formulas, which is also why he was wary of so-called engaged art.
Until 1945 there was a period of great activity in the field of the visual arts, marked not only by his writing but above all by his involvement in countless cultural events and movements on the São Paulo scene. One of his main concerns was certainly to work with the public in a didactic way, seeking to free it from prejudice against modern art and bring it closer to the new aesthetic values. His critical output and cultural activity are anchored in this premise. For him, the critic's task is to inform, explain, clarify and understand a fact according to its historical perspectives, bringing these relationships and meanings within the public's reach and opening up understanding in multiple directions. His production is guided by the aims of elucidating, guiding and stimulating the public.
Committed to introducing an understanding of modern art into society, he did not follow a single theoretical position, moved rather by the desire to reveal different points of view. Hence he found in the form of the Diário Crítico the ideal way to express his thoughts and impressions, to show the transience and flexibility of ideas without adhering to any one stance or current. The diary allowed him to record a reflection in progress, to note things down without having to reach conclusions. In the ten volumes of Diário Crítico, his understanding of the function of criticism is revealed - the interplay of reason and intuition, the relativity of arguments about facts - along with the central problems that concern him: the communicability of the work of art, its capacity to be transmitted, the artist's participation in society, artists' relationship with the time in which they live, the social and cultural conditioning of works, among others.
His work at the Biblioteca Municipal sheds light on the ethical and humanist orientation of his activity, devoted to dissemination as well as to care for the preservation and memory of the arts. Expanding the remodeling begun by his predecessor and friend Rubem Borba de Morais, during his tenure he organized the collections, made new acquisitions, promoted lecture series and created the Art Section, which played an important formative role for the generation of young artists and the general public.
The Art Section's collection of works on paper, built on the model of European and North American libraries, contains drawings, prints and paintings. Sérgio Milliet and his collaborator Maria Eugênia Franco favored the production of artists committed to the languages of their own historical moment, incorporating many of the young artists of the 1940s and 1950s.
His important role in the process that led to the creation of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo - MAM/SP should be highlighted. From 1938, Milliet argued in the press for the creation of a museum of modern art in São Paulo, insisting on the importance of creating bodies to legitimize the various contemporary artistic currents.
His work in organizing the first biennials reveals the pedagogical character of his critical project. The exhibitions he organized, besides showing contemporary production, reviewed the main artistic movements of the 20th century, in a clear strategy of familiarizing the public with the course of international modern art.
His distrust of orthodox positions, which frees his analysis from prejudice, sometimes makes him too flexible and lenient toward the production of his time. But for Sérgio Milliet, flexibility and reticence toward rigid positions follow a broader, methodological orientation. They stem from his contact with North American sociology and anthropology, from his work as a teacher at the Escola de Sociologia e Política, and from his choice of a relativist approach to the artistic phenomenon.
The lecture entitled Marginalidade da Arte Moderna [The Marginality of Modern Art], presented at the 1st International Congress of Art Critics - Aica, in 1948, offers a sociological reflection on art. In it, Milliet discusses the function of aesthetic taste in the organization of society, drawing on readings in anthropology and sociology, and questions the influence of art on the construction of social consensus. On this basis, he builds his interpretation of modern art, linking the formal characteristics of production to aspects lived in the modern period, such as the multiplication of contacts between people, liberation from constraints and the uprooting caused by rapid change in the social order. From this, in his view, comes the marginal situation of modern art in relation to prevailing taste and the isolation of contemporary artists.
An organizer of concerted action in favor of modern art, always involved in the practice of intellectual and artistic life, Milliet exerted an undeniable influence on the country's artistic and cultural development and left an important contribution to Brazilian visual arts criticism.
Critiques
"Ever since he began to paint, his concept of painting changed. He understood the pictorial problem so well that his first move was to step away from visual arts criticism. To his close friends, especially painters, he said repeatedly: 'If they knew how hard it is to paint, they wouldn't write so much about painting'. In 'Considerações Inatuais', Sérgio says, among other things: 'It always seemed ridiculous to me for the critic to believe in the normative value of his lucubrations. Worse still is for him to consider himself a superior being who would exist even without the artist...' Further on, he states: 'The function of art is to express the emotion through which we rise above the common herd and partake of the deep human, which is in reality the divine'. This note on Sérgio could go on. He was one and many. His life - always illuminated by a human touch - shone without the coloring of a will-o'-the-wisp... Our friend has left, left without telling anyone, from one moment to the next and without any publicity fanfare. He left accompanied by the great silence".
Quirino da Silva
HOMENAGEM a Sérgio Milliet. Apresentação de José Geraldo Vieira e Quirino da Silva. São Paulo: MAM, 1969.
"In Sérgio Milliet's criticism, good sense translates into 'the need for plastic construction' (balance); curiosity into 'sensitivity'; 'imagination' is inventiveness, freedom of research. These are the aesthetic constants. For Sérgio, there is no art without lyricism, but restraint is needed so as not to fall into facile solutions that deny the plastic. He wants to explain the 'chaos' of art's failure to communicate with the public. He finds the reason in the breakdown of the classical standards of artistic practice and, in society, points to the accelerated changes in social norms and values as the cause. For art to recover its social function of communicating with the public, society must be brought back to stability, and the new stability will come with socialism".
Lisbeth Rebolo Gonçalves
GONÇALVES, Lisbeth Ruth Rebolo. Sérgio Milliet, crítico de arte. São Paulo : Perspectiva, 1992, p. 45.
"As early as the 1920s, for example, he felt and expressed what Mário de Andrade would only perceive in the 1940s: that he had (they all had) somehow failed. Milliet created (while others engaged in the illusions of triumphalism) an eminently (self-)critical spirit that took shape in his poetic work and, later, in his critical and historiographical work. ´So that they'll believe me a modernist poet/I speak of rails/of automobiles/but how this exoticism of steel weighs on me´ (Saudade, 1925). For the modernist poet, the way out of the abyss the subject saw in history was, first of all, a deep reflection on the Self in the face of the nationalist project. Unlike the nationalist vogue of various shades that took over modernist culture, especially after the Week, Milliet always kept a wary and even ironic stance toward the obligation to take ´the things of Brazil´ as compulsory material for thinking about modernity, unlike the ´critical boaster´ Oswald de Andrade (as Roberto Schwarz defined him) or Mário de Andrade's optimistic Brazilianness. This led him to a detached, though participatory, stance toward the ways intellectuals of the period acted".
Francisco Alambert Júnior
ALAMBERT JÚNIOR, Francisco [1992]. Milliet, contra o exotismo do aço. O Estado de S. Paulo. Cultura. Suplemento, p.2.
Group Exhibitions
1942 - São Paulo SP - 7th Salon of the Visual Artists' Union, at Galeria Prestes Maia
1948 - São Paulo SP - Mario Zanini, Rebolo, Sérgio Milliet and Volpi, at Galeria Domus
1952 - Venice (Italy) - 26th Venice Biennale
1954 - Goiânia GO - Exhibition of the National Congress of Intellectuals
1954 - São Paulo SP - Contemporary Art: Exhibition of the Collection of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, at MAM/SP
1956 - Venice (Italy) - 28th Venice Biennale
Posthumous Exhibitions
1969 - São Paulo SP - Tribute to Sérgio Milliet, at MAM/SP
1980 - São Paulo SP - The Brazilian Landscape: 1650-1976, at Paço das Artes
1982 - São Paulo SP - From Modernism to the Bienal, at MAM/SP
1982 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Universe of Football, at MAM/RJ
1992 - São Paulo SP - Sérgio's View of Brazilian Art: Drawings and Paintings, at Biblioteca Municipal Mário de Andrade
1993 - São Paulo SP - 100 Masterpieces from the Mário de Andrade Collection: Painting and Sculpture, at IEB/USP
1997 - São Paulo SP - Mário de Andrade and the Modernist Group, at Centro Cultural e de Estudos Aúthos Pagano
2000 - Valencia (Spain) - De la Antropofagia a Brasilia: Brasil 1920-1950, at IVAM. Centre Julio González
2002 - São Paulo SP - From Anthropophagy to Brasília: Brazil 1920-1950, at MAB/Faap
2004 - São Paulo SP - Everything Is Drawing, at CCSP
2004 - São Paulo SP - Paper Cabinet, at CCSP
Source: Itaú Cultural
