Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos
1923–2006 · Portuguese surrealist poet and painter
Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos (Lisbon, 1923–2006) was a Portuguese poet and painter, widely regarded as the leading figure of Portuguese surrealism. Although he began as a painter, his work came to center on poetry from the 1950s onward.
He studied at the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts and took music lessons with the composer Fernando Lopes Graça. In Paris in 1947 he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and met André Breton, whose influence led him to found the Lisbon Surrealist Group that same year with Alexandre O'Neill and José-Augusto França, among others. The group protested against the political regime and against neorealism.
Cesariny embraced constant experimentation and popularised the exquisite corpse, a collaborative chain of creation. His major works include Corpo Visível (1950), Manual de Prestidigitação (1956) and Pena Capital (1957).
From 1960 until the Carnation Revolution he was relentlessly harassed by the Polícia Judiciária for alleged vagrancy, a euphemism of the era for homosexuality, which he lived with courage. The persecution contributed to his intermittent stays in Britain and France, and later he spoke about it openly. His legacy endures as a cornerstone of Portuguese surrealist poetry.