Museu Homero Massena, Vila Velha

The Homero Massena Museum is a museum in the city of Vila Velha, Espírito Santo, formerly the residence of Homero Massena and his wife Dona Edy Massena, who lived there until 1974, when the painter died. The museum portrays the way the artist lived in his time. The interior of the museum tries to reconstitute the environment in which the artist worked and lived: balcony, living room, atelier, two.. There you can find the artist's works, paintings, and personal objects.Son of capixabas, Massena was born on March 4, 1886. After a vacation in Vila Velha, he returned to his hometown. He studied dentistry in Rio de Janeiro under his father's pressure and practiced the profession for two years. He was a journalist and editor of A Batalha, O País, Jornal do Comércio and A Tarde, having previously worked as a watchmaker and guitar tuner. He was also a politician, having been mayor of Bonfim, Minas Gerais, where he took a painting course at the Fine Arts School of Minas Gerais. He studied in Europe, at the Julien Academy, in Paris. In 1951 he was invited by the governor of Espírito Santo, Jones dos Santos Neves, to inaugurate and direct the State's School of Fine Arts and started living in the house where today is located a museum in his memory. "To live well, it has to be in Paris or in Vila Velha". Homero Massena, one of the greatest artists in the state of Espírito Santo, lived from 1951 to 1964 in a house at Rua Antônio Ferreira Queiroz, 281, in Prainha, Vila Velha, which today has been transformed into the Homero Massena Museum. It is a typical beachfront construction from the 40s and 50s. The house was declared a cultural heritage site on September 27, 1979.There are paintings on the walls in all rooms, as well as personal objects, such as furniture and paintings. The preparation of the canvases was done by the painter himself, in a back room of the house, which is still preserved today.Documents, photos, newspaper and magazine clippings, correspondence, recorded tapes, studies, and other documents are part of the Museum's collection. He himself decorated the walls of the house with his works.Kleber Galveas, one of his main disciples, says that in Massena, color creates form in the excellent impressionist sense.The subtleness of the brushstrokes gives him a higher style and there is no academic rigidity. His stains, rich in values, correspond to the perfect illusion of movement and fill his pictures with an infinity of precious details.The apparent unconcern with the foreground, which is an average distance of 10 meters, translates his eagerness to have, not spectators, but actors, who feel his work from the inside.Homero Massena wrote two books: "Miracema", still unpublished, and "Atribulações de um Capichaba", precariously published in 1965 by the official press. During his life as a painter, Massena was awarded 28 medals, besides diplomas and other prizes.