Ismael Nery

Nery was born in 1900 in Belém, Pará, of Dutch, Native-Brazilian, and African ancestry. His family settled in 1909 in Rio de Janeiro. In 1915, he began studies the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (National School of Fine Arts). He traveled to Europe in 1920, and attended the Académie Julian in Paris. Back in Brazil, he worked in the architecture section of the National Heritage service at the Ministry of Finance, where he became friends with the poet Murilo Mendes. Nery created numerous paintings, wrote many poems and also helped design Brazil's National Patrimony of the Treasury department. In 1922, he married a poet, Adalgisa Nery. In this period, he produced works with an expressionist tendency. His favorite themes are always linked to the human figure: portraits, self-portraits and nudes. He is not interested in national, indigenous and Afro-Brazilian themes. It diversifies the techniques used. He is also a scenographer. In 1929, he had two solo exhibitions, in Belém and Rio de Janeiro. The welcome disappoints him. He also participates in a group exhibition of Brazilian painting in New York.

That same year 1929, after a trip to Argentina and Uruguay, a diagnosis revealed that he was infected with tuberculosis. He lived in a sanatorium for two years to recover. He then resumed exhibiting and participated in a few shows, such as the Salão Revolucionário in Rio de Janeiro in 1931 and the Exposição de Arte Moderna da SPAM in São Paulo in 1933. In 1933, the disease returned, with irreversible effects. He died in 1934, at the age of thirty-three in Rio de Janeiro while his fame was still only nascent beyond a small circle of connoisseurs. He is buried dressed in Franciscan garb, in a homage of the monks to his ardent Catholic faith.