Ernesto CANTO DA MAIA (1890-1981)

Born in 1890 in Ponta Delgada, S. Miguel, the Azores, Canto da May died in 1981, in Prestes, on his isle of birth.

For Ernesto Canto da Maya, sculpture was a sort of personal and highly intimate diary. The artist’s individuality, often allegorically referred to as “insularity”, owes much to his aristocratic origin, through he gathered the premises of elegance and refinement.

Canto da Maya arrived in Lisbon in 1907. He enrolled in a General Drawing Course at the School of Fine Arts which he left in 1911, leaving his first year of the Special Course in Architecture incomplete. His entrance into Portuguese modernity was made at the Salão dos Humoristas Portugueses exhibition in 1912.

At the end of this same year, Canto da Maya was to be found in Paris. He frequented the Parisian School of Fine Arts and the Grande Chaumière Academy as a disciple of Bourdelle, who greatly influenced his work at the time.

During this phase, Canto da Maya sought inspiration in the work of Rodin with the use of ample volumes, brutal anti-academic modelling and great plastic force, featured in the sculpture O Desespero da Dúvida (The Despair of Doubt) from 1916.

Influenced by Symbolism, Maya’s works possess extremely literary titles, seen as a vital method in the communication of his ideas. A pleasant, almost pagan lyricism is rendered by the serene and classic stylisation, by the solemn gestures and the stationary nature of the bodies; the pieces seem to hold the promise of a subtle interior significance. One of the examples of this aesthetic of interior silences is the group Beni soit le fruit de tes entrailles, successfully presented at the Parisian Autumn Salon in 1922. The characters were arranged to face the interior of the composition in order to transmit greater intimacy. In its passages of simplicity, this painting escapes the earlier influence of Rodin. On the other hand, the affectation of form contributes towards the set’s artificialness.

Training with sculptor Júlio António in Madrid in 1916 provoked an aesthetic volte-face. The dyad Comédia e Tragédia (Comedy and Tragedy), presented in Paris at the Autumn Salon in 1926, exemplifies the archaic inspiration that reigned at the time, revealed by the monolithic presence of columns, hieratic gestures and the schematic portrayal of the hair and drapery, a pre-classical Greek influence. The themes selected by the artist arise operate within this paradigm. We have, on the one hand, the drama of pain and tragedy and, on the other, joy and laughter of comedy, with gestures that speak of openness, pleasure and the desire to revel in a contained voluptuousness. Both images employ the same contours and volume, yet they develop in opposite directions. Another important aspect concerning this set is the recourse to the language of Art Déco, a tendency which was consecrated in 1925 at the International Exhibition of Ornamental Art in Paris. Canto da Maya participated and was honourably mentioned in this exhibition for his statues Pomona and Flora, integrated into the gardens of architect Forestier’s City Pavilion.

In Lisbon, Maya participated in one of the most significative events of the time: the decoration of the elegant Bristol Club, with a bas-relief that confirms his Art Déco tendency, entitled A Dança e a Música (Dance and Music).

The artist had signed all his works to date as Ernesto de Canto, but in 1927, he changed his signature to Canto da Maya, evocating the Indian goddess of Illusion, which confirms his interest in the hedonic side of life as exhibited in some of his pieces. The set Adão e Eva (Adam and Eve), also known as Juventude or Hino de Amor (Youth or Hymn of Love, c. 1929), created in polychrome terracotta, is a synthesis of his works of this period. Outside of the citations from Etruscan sculpture, Maya also utilised biblical themes, using clay as the quotation of ancestral materiality, clearly linked to the earth which he often evoked in his work by alluding to the melancholy of a lost paradise. 

The compositions which approach the theme of the family became a constant during this period: rendered through the narrative of the Virgin and Child, or the tragedy of personal occurrences– marked by the drowning of his eldest son and the successive death of his premature children during his second marriage– as featured in the works Filho Morto (Dead Child, 1942) and Naúfragos (The Shipwrecked, 1943).

During the 1940s and 1950s Maya dedicated himself to the production of statues within the official spirit. The monumental group, D. Manuel, Vasco da Gama and Pedro Álvares Cabral, from the Commemorative Exhibition of the Second Centennial Anniversary in 1940, represent the most important work of this period. This group earned the Official Degree of the Ordem de Santiago.

CARLA MENDES