Oswaldo Goeldi

Oswaldo Goeldi (Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 1895 - idem 1961). Engraver, draftsman, illustrator, professor. Son of the Swiss scientist Emílio Augusto Goeldi. When he was only one year old, he and his family moved to Belém, Pará, where they lived until 1905, when they moved to Bern, Switzerland. At the age of 20, he enrolls in the engineering course at the Polytechnic School in Zurich, but does not finish it. In 1917, he enrolled at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Geneva, but abandoned the course as he considered it too academic. He then took classes at the studios of the artists Serge Pahnke (1875 - 1950) and Henri van Muyden (1860 - s.d.). In the same year, he held his first solo exhibition, in Bern, at the Wyss Gallery, when he became acquainted with the work of Alfred Kubin (1877 - 1959), his great artistic influence, with whom he corresponded for several years. In 1919, he settled in Rio de Janeiro and began working as an illustrator for the magazines Para Todos, Leitura Para Todos and Ilustração Brasileira. Two years later, he held his first individual exhibition in Brazil, in the lobby of the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios. In 1923, he met Ricardo Bampi, who introduced him to wood engraving. In the 1930s, he published the album 10 Woodblock Prints by Oswaldo Goeldi, with an introduction by Manuel Bandeira (1886 - 1968), and made drawings and prints for periodicals and books, such as Cobra Norato, by Raul Bopp (1898 - 1984), published in 1937, with his first color woodcuts. In 1941, he worked on the illustration of the Complete Works of Dostoyevsky, published by José Olympio. In 1952, he began his career as a teacher at the Escolinha de Arte do Brasil and, in 1955, he became a professor at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (Enba), in Rio de Janeiro, where he opened a woodcut workshop. In 1995, the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil held an exhibition commemorating the centenary of his birth, in Rio de Janeiro.

Por: Galeria Gravura Brasileira