Niobe Xandó

Niobe Nogueira Xando Bloch (1915 – 19 February 2010) was a Brazilian artist.

"Niobe Xando, Pinetre Bresilien." Presence Africaine, no. 70, 1969, pp. 191–192. www.jsotr.org/stable/24350238

1952: São Paulo, at Livraria das Bandeiras, in Praca da Republica.

Niobe transitioned through many styles of art throughout her career. Her art included figuratism, transitional works, flowers, masks, letterism, mechanism, abstractions, collages, reprography, and objects. In the 1950s, Niobe began her career as a figurative painter. She would paint childlike scenes, games, small local bars, and self portraits. She also began her paintings on tree trunks that was avant-garde at her time because it stepped out of the traditional paper. She abandoned figurativism in the later 1950s and began to embrace mythology that depicted mutating beings. Her masks were also predecessors of the surrealistic art that was inspired by ancestral cultures. Niobe began to create original and extravagant pieces using washers, rulers, compasses, and other unusual objects. This type of art was a movement called Mechanismo in which she approached a clash between archaic and contemporary art. It also demonstrated the conflict between humankind and machines. At the end of 1960, Niobe established a base for a new artistic manifesto that led to her letrismo. Letrismo was the break between the words and communication. Her last few works had returned to figurative paintings.

Niobe Xandó was born in Campos Novos Paranapanema, São Paulo, in 1915. Her parents were Antonio da Silveira Xando and Petonilha Nogueira Xando. Niobe lived most of her childhood in the interior of São Paulo by the countryside, but moved to the capital in 1932. At the age of sixteen she married a prominent communist militant, Joao Baptista Ribeiro Rosa. When she moved into the city, Niobe began attending the Communist Party meetings and met many many of the left-wing intellectuals and politicians of that time. In 1951, Niobe separated from her first husband and married Alexander Bloch, a Czech intellectual and scholar. Her husband had a vast culture that led to friendships with other intellectuals, one of whom was Vilem Flusser. Flusser wrote about Niobe's artwork in three articles, two of which were published in the arts newspaper. Through 1968–1971, Niobe and Alexander moved throughout Europe passing through Paris, London, and Stockholm. During this period, a music label in London asked Alexander Bloch for permission to use one of Niobe's works to illustrate the Rolling Stones album. The project fell through because Niobe had a quiet approach in her art and life. She settled in New York for six months in 1981 and 1983, after which she returned to Brazil in 1983. Niobe last works were from 1999, in large part due to her numerous health problems. She died in 2010.