Lot 45: Waldemar Cordeiro (b. 1925)

Id‚ia vis¡vel tempera on plywood 24 x 24in. (61 x 61cm.) Painted in 1952 PROVENANCE Cordeiro family collection, Sao Paulo Galeria Brito Cimino, Sao Paulo LITERATURE Cintrao, R. grupo ruptura: revisitando a exposi‡ao inaugural, Cosac & Naify, Sao Paulo, 2002, p. 35, n.n. (illustrated in color) NOTES Waldemar Cordeiro was one of the founding members of the ruptura movement created in Sao Paulo in 1952. As such, he believed in the power of lines and colors as the means to reclaim a true artistic language in which "lines and colors do not wish to be pears or men." Abstraction was a subject that had made a shy appearance in the artistic circle of Sao Paulo in 1939, when European abstract artists had been invited to exhibit in the III Salao de Maio. Nevertheless, it was not until Cordeiro's arrival to Sao Paulo in 1946, along with his keen interest in the theories of pure visual form and gestalt, that abstraction became a major issue in the artistic production of the city. In Rio de Janeiro, the Grupo Frente was also advocating the ideas of pure abstraction. The present painting was probably included in the exhibition Do figurativismo ao abstracionismo, that took place in the Museo de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo in 1952. An exhibition widely criticized at the time for its purely abstract content directly in opposition to figuration.