Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos

Biography

By family tradition he was born by chance: his parents were on holiday in Benfica, on the outskirts of Lisbon, when Mário arrived on 9 August 1923. He was the youngest child, after three sisters. His father, Viriato de Vasconcelos, ran a jeweller’s shop and workshop in the Baixa, the lower town of Lisbon. His mother, María de las Mercedes Cesariny, was born in Paris, of Corsican and Spanish descent.

His father wanted to hand the business on to his son. After secondary school the boy was moved to a course in chasing and engraving metal at the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts. There he met Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas and Fernando José Francisco, his future companions in surrealism. He did not like the jeweller’s trade. He prepared for entry to the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon but did not attend it. He studied music with the composer Fernando Lopes-Graça and played the piano well, but his father, in a rage, forbade these lessons.

From late adolescence Cesariny and his friends sat in Lisbon cafés, arguing and reading, and took up first neorealism and then surrealism.

In 1947 he went to Paris on a scholarship, studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and visited Breton. Returning the same year, he founded the Lisbon Surrealist Group together with Alexandre O’Neill, José-Augusto França, António Pedro, Cândido Costa Pinto, Vespeira and others. They met at the Pastelaria Mexicana, a pastry shop. The group arose as a protest against neorealism, which was dominated by the Portuguese Communist Party, while also refusing to come to terms with the Salazar regime. Later Cesariny founded a breakaway “anti-group”, Os Surrealistas; it was joined by António Maria Lisboa, Pedro Oom, Seixas, Fernando José Francisco, Mário-Henrique Leiria and others. In the late 1940s his father left the family and went to Brazil, after which the son grew closer to his mother and his sister Henriette.

He painted and wrote poetry, composing the poems in cafés. In the 1950s came “Corpo Visível” (1950), “Discurso sobre a Reabilitação do Real Quotidiano” (1952), “Manual de Prestidigitação” (1956), “Pena Capital” (1957) and “Nobilíssima Visão” (1959). He published his early books with the publisher Luiz Pacheco, with whom he finally fell out in the 1970s. “Planisfério e Outros Poemas” appeared in 1961, and “Titânia” and “A Cidade Queimada” in 1965. He translated Rimbaud and Artaud.

In painting Cesariny experimented with materials and technique, often leaving the composition to chance, and made collages. He is credited with inventing “soprofiguras”: jets of paint were laid on the support and then blown about. His second technique was called “aquamoto”. In his poems he used typically surrealist devices: chaotic enumerations, nonsense, black humour, parody, puns and automatic writing.

Meanwhile the police pursued him on suspicion of “vagrancy”, the term then used for homosexuality. For years he was under surveillance and had to report to the police station every month. Sources date the start of this period differently: some to the 1950s, others to 1960. It ended only after 25 April 1974, with the Carnation Revolution. He spent part of the 1960s and 1970s in Britain and France. In 1964 the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation gave him a grant for a book on Maria Helena Vieira da Silva; he extended it many times and lived for long periods in London, especially between 1964 and 1969. The book on Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes, “Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes ou O Castelo Surrealista”, appeared only in 1985. His money was scarce, and his family helped. By some accounts, from the mid-1960s he worked chiefly as a painter; by others, poetry had been displacing painting as early as the 1950s. I would not undertake to separate these periods exactly.

From the 1980s the publisher Manuel Hermínio Monteiro reissued his poems, and new readers and young poets noticed them. In his last years Cesariny lived in Lisbon, in the Campolide district, with his sister Henriette, who died in 2004. He became willing to give interviews. In 2004 Miguel Gonçalves Mendes made a documentary about him, “Autografia”. In 2005 he received the Grand Cross of the Order of Liberty and the Grand Prize “Vida Literária” for his body of work. During his lifetime he had given his papers to the Cupertino de Miranda Foundation.

Cesariny died in Lisbon on 26 November 2006. He was buried in the Prazeres Cemetery, in the artists’ plot. In December 2016 his remains were moved to an individual tomb.