Cipriano Dourado
#inthisday February 8, 1921, Cipriano Dourado was born, plastic artist, pioneer of Portuguese engraving, watercolorist, illustrator. Anti-fascist.
He was born in Penhascoso, in Beira Baixa, but lived in Lisbon where he soon started working as a designer-lithographer and later attending the evening course at the National Society of Fine Arts. He participated in all the General Expositions of Plastic Arts, marked by the repression of PIDE and the withdrawal of works of art.
In 1949 he did an internship at Academia Livre Grande Chaumière, in Paris, and in 1953 he participated in the Rice Cycle, a collective artistic experience that he brought together in the fields of Ribatejo, Júlio Pomar, Lima de Freitas, Rogério Ribeiro, António Alfredo and Alves Redol. In 1956 he founded “A Gravura” with other artists and a year later he participates in the Tokyo Print Biennial, he also taught at the António Arroio Artistic School. He was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party.
He also collaborated in periodical publications, namely Vértice, Seara Nova, Coloquio-Letras, Cassiopeia-Anthology of Poetry and Essay, Tree-Leaves of Poetry; and illustrated several books of poetry and prose, such as A Paz Inteira, by Armindo Rodrigues; Seven Odes of Common Corner, by Orlando da Costa (apprehended by PIDE in press); 20 Poems of Love and a Desperate Song, by Pablo Neruda; Lady Chaterley’s Lover, by D. H. Laurence.
Cipriano Dourado took a position as a militant artist and inspired many other artists to go out for public intervention. Filipe Diniz, remembers him as someone “with an amazing ease of drawing, but part of his struggle was precisely to hinder that dexterity, so he reproduced very complex scenarios, such as pieces of forest, for example. This is an aesthetic attitude, but also an ethical one ”. Dourado is one of the leading figures in the connection between art and intervention.
“His artistic work is part of the Portuguese neo-realist aesthetic movement, having worked incessantly in the production of many hundreds of works in the areas of drawing, printmaking, painting and watercolor. His line is rigorous, agile and expressive, and the wavy rhythms of his works express unmistakably and poetically the two most recurring themes: Women and the Earth. ”
