1. Eduardo Viana (1881 - 1967)
Eduardo Afonso Viana was born in Lisbon. After attending the Escola Nacional de Belas-Artes from 1896 to 1905, profoundly disappointed with academic schooling in Portugal, the artist went to Paris, where resided between 1905 and 1915. In Paris, he met and lived with Mily Possoz. Viana attended the Studio and Julien Academies and was a disciple of J. P. Laurens. He sent six canvases from Paris to participate in the I Exposição Livre (1st Free Exhibition), considered the first anti-academic exhibition in Portugal, in 1911 at the Salão Bobone, together with Manuel Bentes, Emmerico Nunes, Domingos Rebelo, Alberto Cardoso and Francis Smith.
" We want to be free! To escape to the teaching dogmas, to the imposition of the masters and whenever possible, to the schools' influence, because we believe that artists have only one school, Nature! One unique dogma: Love"
Manuel Bentes
He was one of the members of the first modern generation in Portuguese painting, like Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Almada Negreiros. However, he was more conservative in his approach to modern painting.
The best examples of his assimilation of the modern styles in his work appears in the paintings he did in 1916, due to the influence of both Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who he befriended during their presence in Portugal. He latter followed Cézanne's style in some of his best paintings.
2. Souza-Cardoso (1887 - 1918)
Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, born in the North of Portugal, died very young, in 1918.
At the age of 18 he entered the Superior School of Fine Arts of Lisbon and two years later goes to Paris, where he intends to continue his studies, but soon quits the architecture course and starts to study painting. In Paris he became close with artists and writers like Gertrude Stein, Juan Gris, Max Jacob and the couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay. He was also a friend of Amedeo Modligliani, who exposed sculptures in his Paris studio. He returned to Portugal during World War I, where he mantained contact with other Portuguese artists and poets like Almada Negreiros, Santa-Rita Pintor and Teixeira de Pascoaes. He died of influenza, before the end of the conflict.
In the first stage, his paintings were close to naturalism and impressionism. Around 1910 he became one of the first modern Portuguese painters, influenced both by cubism as by futurism. His style is aggressive and vivid both in form and colour and the compositional structure of his works may seem random or chaotic at first sight but are clearly defined and balanced. In 1913 he exhibited eight works at Armory Show in USA, - New York and Chicago, famous exhibition that introduced modern painting in the USA -, some of them can be seen in American museums. His work remained almost unknown after his death until 1952 when a room dedicated to his paintings in Amarante Museum gained the public´s attention. Little known internationally, he is one of the most innovative artists of his time. In my view, should he had the chance of living 20 years more, he could have achieved international recognition as one of the master painters of last century.
(...) He is the first (the only one?, at least the best!) Portuguese artist that, closed in the small world of Portugal, understands the means of crossing, within art, what comes from outside with what is inside, what belongs to the heights (in terms of erudition) and what, coming from below, (popular culture) can not be lost.
He is the only one crossing with urgency (not with elegance, but with strength) eros with tanathos (life / love and death) in his work. (...)
excerpt of text by João Lima Pinharanda in "Pinturas com Luz", EDP edition, 1997.
3. Mily Possoz (1888 -1967)
Mily Possoz was born in Lisbon, daughter of Belgium parents. A Modernist painter, illustrator, designer, engraver, lived always in a cultural environment. She studied in Lisbon, Paris and Germany, attending the atelier La Grande Chaumière in 1906. She lived in Paris from 1902 to 1937 and belonged to the group of Jeune Gravure Contemporaine. Mily Possoz has her works belonging to the collections of The Contemporary Art Museum and Chiado Museum in Lisbon, FCG, Brussels, National Gallery of London, Cleveland Museum in Usa, etc. and in many private collections. She collaborated in the ‘Mundo Português’ Exhibition and won the Souza-Cardoso Prize in 1944 – her oneiric and disturbing work manifested an obvious penchant for drawing with her clear, direct trace, which also had a bearing on her work in engraving.
(...) A certain innocence of sensorial freshness appears on Mily Possoz's works that she assumed at her twenties showing a rare capacity of living by the senses. That is why Mily was one of the astounding rare cases of Portuguese "fauve" painting. (...)
(...) Beyond the optical qualities of her paintings, Mily Possoz had a fairy lyricism. In her works, landscape of places she loved like Sintra, Alentejo and may other Portuguese villages appear frequently; also cats, young girls, flowers and popular cultural items, appear portrayed as feminist themes, simple and tender. But her big love was, surely, painting itself. (...)
by Rui Mário Gonçalves - excerpt of text - Catalogue of Miliy Possoz Centennial Birth Exhibition - 1988
4. Almada Negreiros (1893 - 1970)
In 1913 José Sobral de Almada Negreiros made his first individual exhibition and along with Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro publishes poems and texts in the artistic magazine Orpheu, that would introduce modern literature in Portugal. In the following years his artistic production will be wide and prolific; from easel paintings to murals, glass-windows, illustration, printmaking and scenography, from novels, playwrights to poems, essays and panfletary manifests, he became a key artist in Portuguese modern art, influenced by Cubism and, mainly, by Futurism. In 1934 he marries with painter Sara Afonso, after coming back from stays in Paris and Madrid, and continues his role of "artistic agitator" within Portuguese oppressed society of the time until his death..
Almada Negreiros always called himself a futurist artist, inspired by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and other modern artists, however his style is wider, and it is hardly defined into a category. Adding to this modern approach his works also reveals a decorative and arabesque richness and sometimes a geometrical abstraction. His public art is often political engaged as mural of "Gare Maritima de Alcantara" shows, however, many of his paintings and drawings show common people in daily affairs or attitudes usual in socialist art. His work as visual artist extends to tapestry, printmaking, theater and ballet scenography.
(...) I see Almada Negreiros the same way that one looks at a fabulous mythological animal of ancient times, arrived to a planet, due to a cosmic cataclysm that everybody ignores. Sooner or later, our young ones will have to admit that the technic spirit that everybody praises, abstracts, surrealists, neo-realist, etc. is just a prescription that leads to the academics that we are fed up. (...)
Mário Cesariny, in "Open letter to Maria Helena Vieira da Silva", journal Cartaz, 1952
5. Carlos Botelho (1899 - 1982)
Carlos António Teixeira Bastos Nunes Botelho was born in Lisbon where he lived and died at the age of 83, leaving his last work unfinished. He was the only son of musicians, music dominated his work. In 1932 he holds his first individual exhibition at the Bobone Room in Lisbon. In 1938 he receives the Souza-Cardoso Prize for the portrait of his father "The Pianist Carlos Botelho" in the "Modern Art Exhibition" at SPN, Lisbon. In 1939, he makes an important and lengthy stay in the U.S., as decorator member of the team in charge of decorating the portuguese pavillions for the International Exhibitions of new York and San Francisco. He wins First Prize in Painting at the "International Contemporary Art Exhibition" in San Francisco. During his stay he executes a series of famous drawings and oils depicting New York and New Orleans.
He participated on the most important exhibitions of his time: "25th Biennal of Venice", several Biennals of São Paulo, Geneve, Lausanne, New York, London, URSS, Paris, etc. Carlos Botelho made also tapestry, mural painting, tiles and also stage sets for theater and ballet.
(...) The passion for the City is always visible, carried by different screens; as in the theatre where you can build a distinct atmosphere and a stage space using slide panels, cycloramas and theatre platforms, there is always in Botelho's painting a constant and similar utilization of the constructive pieces of the painting space. (...)
(...) In Botelho's work, in his mayor work, nothing is after all separated and from the expressionist rudeness to the lyric quiteness of the last <<vedutti>>, the same pleasure of the painting recreates the wisdom obtained by exercising the pleasure. (...)
Fernando de Azevedo in Carlos Botelho, The experimental decade, Lisboa 94
6. Vieira da Silva (1908 - 1982)
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was born in Lisbon. At the age of eleven she had began seriously studying drawing and painting at that city's Academia de Belas-Artes. In her teen years she studied painting wit Fernando Léger, sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle and engraving with Stanley William Hayter, all masters in their respective fields. She also created textile designs.
By 1930 Vieira da Silva was exhibiting her paintings in Paris; that same year she married the Hungarien painter Árpád Szenes. After a brief sojourn back in Lisbon and a period spent in Brasil during World War II, Vieira da Silva lived and worked in Paris the rest of his life. Vieira da Silva received the French government's Grand Prix National des Arts in 1966, the first woman so honored. She was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1979.
By the late 1950s Vieira da Silva was internationally known for her dense and complex compositions, influenced by the art of Paul Cézanne and the fragmented forms, spatial ambiguities, and restricted palette of cubism and abstract art. She is considered to be one of the most important post-war abstract artist, however she is not a "pure" abstract painter. Her paintings often resemble mazes, cities seen in profile or from high above or even library shelves in what seems to be an allegory to a neverending seek for Knowledge or the Absolute.
She exhibited her work widely, winning a prize for painting at the Biennal in são Paulo in 1961.
In 1970 the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation organised a retrospective of all her works. Following de 25th of April Revolution, she was awarded the “Grã Cruz de Santiago e Espada”, by the President of the Republic. From the 70s there are widely renown canvases such as: New Amsterdam I and II (1970), Les Trois fenêtres (1972-73), Bibliothèque en feu (1970-74) and Arcanne (1978).
During the 1980s, her work was frequently interrupted by her husband’s illness and then later by his death. Nevertheless in 1986 she re-emerged with Soleils, an unforgettable work, contemporaneous with other important pieces such as, Chemins de paix (1985), Déchirure (1984-85), L’Issue lumineuse (1983-86) and Le Retour d’Orphée (1982-86). In June 1988, her eightieth birthday, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in a joint effort with the Centre National d’Arts Plastiques, inaugurated a selected exhibition of her work and the Portuguese government reiterated its homage by awarding her the “Grã Cruz da Ordem da Liberdade”.
In November 1994, it was inaugurated the Arpad Szenes - Vieira da Silva Foundation, in Lisbon, a museum that displays a large collection of paintings by both artists.
7. Júlio Resende (1917)
Júlio Martins da Silva Dias was born in Oporto. After finishing his art studies at Escola Superior de Belas-Artes do Porto, he stayed in Paris one year (1947). Resende participated in countless exhibitions, both in Portugal and abroad, namely São Paulo Biennials, SNI Modern Art Exhibitions, First Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Art Exhibition (1957), Brussels (1958), Venice, Oslo, Lugano, Madrid, Ohio, Helsinqui and Rome.
He made individual exhibitions at Lisbon (1946), Kristiandsund (1950), Brussels (1959) and Madrid (1960). He was a team member of <<Mar Novo>>, winner of the contest for the Monument to Infante D. Henrique, The Navigator.
Resende won several prizes including the National Painting Award from Academia Nacional de Belas-Artes (1945), Armando Basto Award (1945), Souza-Cardoso Award (1949 and 1952), 2nd Prize on the First FCG Exhibition, Diogo de Macedo Award (1960), etc.
His works can be seen at the permanent exhibitions of National Museum of Contemporary Art, Soares dos Reis Museum, São Paulo Modern Art Museum, FCG, Helsinqui Museum, Júlio Resende Foundation in Gondomar (north of Portugal), Aalesund Kunstforening Museum, Norway, etc.
His work, made through successive and well defined stages, is characterized by a strong construction, with the intelligent and vigorous use of the pictorial material that generates intense value games, treating figures on a expressionist way, in popular themes
Rui Mário Gonçalves - Portuguese Art on the 50's Exhibition Catalogue
8. Júlio Pomar (1926)
Júlio Artur da Silva Pomar was born in Lisbon, em 1926. He started his studies at Escola de Belas Artes de Lisboa, in 1942 and after 2 years he moves to Escola de Belas Artes do Porto.
The works of Portinari and the mexicans - Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros - encourages young painter Pomar to use his artwork as a vehicle of social-political intervention.
In 1945, Pomar exhibits one of his early master pieces - O Gadanheiro - at Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (SNBA). Mário Dionísio writes an article called "The beginning of a great painter ?" . He has exhibited in major countries and won many awards.
In 1950, another individual exhibit at SNBA, shows some of his neo-realist best known works like "O Almoço do Trolha, Menina com um Galo Morto, Varina Comendo Melancia or O Cabouqueiro". That same year, Pomar goes to Spain to study Goya which will influence his work for paintings like "Maria da Fonte and os Cegos de Madrid". He was an active founder in 1956 of Gravura, a graphic workshop run for the benefit of the member artists.
In 1963 he made his permanent home in Paris in order to be closer to the centre of progressive new arts. He worked mainly on portraits, leaving oil and specializing on acrylics; he uses colour saturation and geometrical precision. His monochromatic projections fill the canvas, establishing a dialog between emptiness and punctual body representation of the subject portrayed. This phase of his work might be called a sort of neo-expressionist style.
Recent public exhibitions: 2006 - "The 40s and 50s" in the Museu do Chiado; 2004 - "A Comédia Humana" at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon; Galerie Patrice Trigano, Paris, 2003 - Contemporary Art Collection CGD, Lisbon
His works are prseent in the permanet collections of Modern Art Centre FCG, CGD, Museu do Chiado, MAC São Paulo, etc.
9. Manuel Cargaleiro (1927)
Painter and ceramist, Cargaleiro was born in Chão das Servas, Vila Velha de Ródão. In 1957 he goes to live in France, a sort of second fatherland to him. Proof of this are the countless work commissions he received from the French Ministry of Culture, since the seventies, like the metropolitan station of the Champs-Elysées.
A sort of flagship of his portuguese-french soul is the making with polychrome ornamental tiles of the front of the headquarters building of the Instituto Franco-Português in Lisbon (1983) and the metro station Colégio Militar-Luz (1987). No wonder he has received the double nomination of "Commendador de Sant'lago da Espada" from the Portuguese Republic President (1982) and "Officier des Arts et des Lettres" from the French Government (1984). In 1990 he creates at Lisbon, the Manuel Cargaleiro Foundation.
The Italian period of his work begun in 1999, when he wins the Viaggio International Prize through his ceramics works.
Fascinated by the land of the glass, Cargaleiro spends long periods living in Viaggio and donates to the city 150 works of his personal collection. This is a collection not only of precious Portuguese paintings from the XII, XVII, XIX now kept at the "Museo Provinciale Villa Guariglia at Raito",but also personal works made at Vietri sul Mar.
Those works, together with works from italian and other artists constitute the bulk of the collection of the Fondazione Museo Artistico-Industriale Manuel Cargaleiro that has been established in dec/2003 in Salerno - Italy.
10. Paula Rego (1935)
Paula Figueiroa Rego, once confessed “I paint to identify fear”. The descendant of a high bourgeoisie family, she was born in Lisbon in 1935 and went to St Julian’s college. Her talent for painting was soon recognised and she was encouraged to pursue a career, but painting in Portugal was seen as a brief reverie of dilettante young men and women on the eve of marriage or motherhood. Her studies in London determined another outcome altogether; accepted by the Slade School of Art (1952-56), she met painter Victor Willing, her husband to be. Through him, she became acquainted with easel painting, a method she called “adult art”.
In 1988, Willing died after suffering for some years from multiple esclerosis. Rego was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989 and was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa by Oxford University in June 2005.
Gestural and spontaneous, used to drawing on the floor and in direct contact with the objects of painting, this new form of creation moved her away from her infantile universe, derived from her stays with her grandparents in Ericeira, her aunt's terrifying stories, her grandfather's illustrations of Blanco Y Negro and Pluma y Lapiz and books with her father engravings.
The 1960swere marked by group exhibitions in england and her first soloexhibition in Portugal at the Galeria de Arte Moderna (belas-Artes, 1965-66). She won a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation bursary to undertake research into children's tales in 1975.
Her earlier work, during 60s and 70s is neo-dadaist or informal style, using a mixed media with collage and painting, playing with childish, fetish or traumatic images, which would be essential in her mature style. She became part of Londoon Group, with other fellow artists like David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj with whom he exhibited. Rego then started an illustrative and more figurative art, related as well to Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud but such as Beatrix Potter books and fairy tales were important influences. Her work often uses imagery from fairy tales with a sinister edge in which there is a malicious domination, a subvertion of natural order or exposes social realities that are unpolite or polemic like abortion. Rego's style is often compared to cartoon illustration. As in cartoons, animals are often depicted in human roles and situations. Later work adopts a more realistic style, but sometimes keeps the animal references - the Dog Woman series of the 1990s, for example, is a set of pastel pictures depicting women in a variety of dog-like poses (on all fours, baying at the moon, and so on).
Rego has also painted a portrait of Germaine Greer, which is in the Natioal Portrait Gallery in London, as well as the official presidency portrait of Jorge Sampaio.
11. José de Guimarães (1939)
José Maria Fernandes Marques was born in the city of Guimarães, north of Portugal.
was born in the city of Guimarães, north of Portugal.
In 1957 he started his engineering studies, graduating in 1965 at the Military Academy in Lisbon. In 1961 he visits Paris having his first contacts with fauve painting and adopting his artistic name. Between 1967 and 1975 he lived in Angola where he is influenced by native culture and art and publishes the manifest "Arte Perturbadora".
After his definitive return to Portugal, he won a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation bursary to undertake research into serigraphy an photography fully committed to artwork. Soon after, José Guiimarães made several exhibits in Portugal and Belgium. Frequent references to his work appear in Europe, USA and Canada as well as several articles in art magazines.
In 1978, the CGF launches an exhibit dedicated to the theme «Rubens and José de Guimarães». In 1979, at Antwerp, a book dedicated to his life is edited. with texts from Marcel van Jole, José Augusto-França, Remi de Cnodder, Fernando Pernes, among others. In 1980, he wins, for the 2nd time the bronze medal award of «Prix Europe de Peinture de la Ville de Ostende».
Paul Enbel, director of the Oska Goethe Intitute invited him in 1989 to build and paint his famous paper kites and during some time he perfects Japanese technics and creates the figure of D. Sebastião. He made exhibits in Tokyo, Chicago, Bassel, Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Salzburg.
In 1990 he is awarded by the Portuguese Republic President the "Comendador da Ordem do Infante D. Henrique" medal and several of his works are acquired by important institutions and museums.
Since 1995, he lives and works in Paris and Lisbon.
12. Julião Sarmento (1948)
Julião Sarmento was born in Lisbon in 1948.
He has exhibited regularly since the mid-70s. Represented by renowned galleries in Lisbon, Porto, London, Berne, Madrid, Barcelona, Munich, Turin, Brussels, New York, Beverly Hills, São Paulo, and Nagoya, the internationalisation of his career started early and has remained a constant that evidences not only a recognition of the quality of his work, but also his characteristic and committed undertaking in terms of the creation of a mobility and visibility.
The use of varied media(painting, drawing, film, photography, installation) always corresponds to un artistic coherence that nonetheless permanently assures the opening of new universes and configurations. Important global reviews of his work have occurred at the Witte de With (Rotterdam, 1991), The Centro deArte Reina Sofia (Madrid, 1992) and the Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 1993 and 2000).
Some of the more striking examples of the aforementioned internationalization would include his presence at The Kassel Documenta of 1982 and 1987: at the Venice Biennials, first in 1997, representing Portugal and later in 2001 in a partnership with Atom Egoyan; his contribution to the Metropolis exhibition in Berlin in response to un invitation by Harald Szeeman and his presence at 2002 Sao Paulo Biennial.
The artist considers himself an experimenter, whose first and definitive testing ground is his own sensibility. There he reindulges in the pleasure to be found in the work's consummating risk and in the realisation of its independent quality of seduction.
Leonor Nazaré, Fundação Calouste Goulbenkian
