Franz Weissmann, 93; Brazilian Sculptor Helped Found Neoconcrete Style

Franz Weissmann, 93, one of Brazil’s leading sculptors and the last surviving founder of the Neoconcrete movement, died Monday at his home in Rio de Janeiro of complications from pneumonia.

Born in Knittefeld, Austria, Weissmann came to Brazil in the early 1920s and studied art at Rio’s Escola das Belas Artes.

In 1948, Weissmann became a Brazilian citizen. In 1955, he joined the seminal Frente movement, which developed and expanded on ideas of geometric abstraction proposed by the European avant-garde in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Frente later merged with the Concrete movement, which relied heavily on the theory that art should be constructed and geometric.

Eventually, Weissmann and other Rio de Janeiro artists felt that the Concrete movement was too cold and insipid, and they founded the Neoconcrete movement to inject informality into their art.

Weissmann’s often-puzzling geometric works were cut, welded and bent out of giant slabs of steel and were admired both for their presence and for the empty spaces and the sense of absence they created.