A Way of Being Modern
A Way of Being Modern
A Way of Being Modern
5 × 36 cm
8
A way of being modern
Introduction
9
In the classical representation of men and women, the male genre was usually dif-
ferentiated by darker hues. While Almada evokes his African blood – which he inherited
from his mixed-race mother, the daughter of an Angolan woman2 –, referring to the an-
cient and wise Egyptian civilisation, the connection with the classical male/female dif-
—————
2 This identification with his maternal line is suspected, con- ference allows him to present ethnic miscegenation as a positive feature. Almada’s iden-
sidering how young Almada was and how deeply he must have
been affected by his mother’s untimely death, an absence men- tity affirmation involves evoking a pre-classical and classical, ecumenical root, of which
tioned in several of his known texts, both poetic and hybrid (such
as the conference A Invenção do Dia Claro [The Invention of the
he claims to be the spokesman.3 Miscegenation and universality are equivalent, as made
Clear Day], 1921). There is also the abandonment by his father, evident in his (still narcissistic) poem Rosa dos Ventos [Compass Rose]:4
who, after his wife’s death, sent both his sons to a Jesuit boarding
school in Lisbon (Colégio dos Jesuítas de Campolide) and never re- “It was not by chance that my blood from the South / mingled with my blood from
established a relationship with them. This biographical aspect is
only relevant in as much as it helps us to understand Almada’s the North / it was not by chance that my blood from the East / met my blood from
universalist vocation, at a time when the Portuguese colonial em-
pire was a unanimous and naturalised fact and inter-race relation-
the West / nothing of what I am today is incidental / it has been known since many
ships widely condemned. While his father symbolised the centuries ago / that I would be the one in whom all bloods on Earth would come to-
coloniser (he held a leading position in São Tomé and Príncipe’s
colonial government), his mother stood for the colonised, or, more gether […] / The law is clear: we can only love our own. / And my own are from every
specifically, the miscegenation produced by colonisation. This is
not a question of attributing to Almada an anachronistic stance
blood on Earth / but alas, a curse looms over me, / for no blood on Earth cares to in-
of anti-colonial resistance, but rather of understanding how he clude me among their own!”
sought to integrate his African origin in a discourse, in place since
the late 19th century, in which the terms race and nation were struc- In the gouache painting on the previous page there is still another contrast – the one
tural to the definition of the Portuguese territory. It will also be
necessary in future studies to read this positions in the context of between the figures in the foreground and their replication in a smaller size, as if reflected
the problematic term “lusotropicalism” (Gilberto Freyre, 1953). See
Fernando Arenas, “Reverberações lusotropicais: Gilberto Freyre
in an implausible mirror. In this replication, the colour of the spheres is inverted, and the
em África”, Buala.org, 16 May 2010. scale gives a more schematic appearance to the bodies, while the foreground’s abstract
3 Gustavo Rubim analysed the way in which Almada’s idiom
deals with the problematic notions of race and nation. As terms pattern is replaced by the suggestion of a window. This strange doubling complicates the
that persist throughout the entire first half of the 20th century, it is
of paramount importance to point out that their meaning has var- image, with the different scales acting both as a spatial and a temporal differentiation.
ied. Rubim shows that Almada’s concept of race is universalist (to
him, the claimed ancestral roots are the source of diversity and
The image is, thus, a condensation of contrasts: white/black, man/woman, abstract/figu-
knowledge through writing, and through humanity itself) and, rative, near/far, present/past, movement/stillness, action/contemplation. The study in
above all, Europeanist, and that a nation is only conceivable in
terms of its place in a map, that is to say, “it is a political position question in its enunciating stage – whether it may be a preliminary study or an inconse-
that sets above the affirmation of the nation or the ‘land’ (which,
nevertheless, are not dismissed) the relationship, and particularly quential amusement – is in itself a testament to the contradictory, heteroclite, experi-
the knowledge relationship, with ‘what is happening in the
world’.” Cf. Gustavo Rubim, “O próprio humano – língua, nação e
mental, eclectic and hybrid character of modernity.5
outras paragens no idioma de Almada Negreiros”, Almada Ne-
greiros, Revista de História da Arte, series W, no. 2, 2014.
4 Rosa dos Ventos is an undated poem posthumously published
for the first time in 1971. It is probably not from earlier than 1943.
Cf. José de Almada Negreiros, Poemas Escolhidos, ed. Fernando
Cabral Martins, Luis Manuel Gaspar, Mariana Pinto dos Santos,
Sara Afonso Ferreira (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2016).
Modernisms
5 For different reasons (including the production of a Por-
tuguese canon) José-Augusto França elected Almada Negreiros as
the main Portuguese artist of the 20th century. França is the author Such is the condition that compels the use of the word “modernism” in the plural
of the first monographic study on the artist, an indispensable vol-
ume in Portuguese historiography. There were two comprehensive
form. Following Peter Osborne’s analysis, one might describe modernism as a “discourse
exhibitions of Almada’s work, held in 1984 (at the Gulbenkian of the legitimization of change. […] a collective affirmation of the modern”,6 and the mod-
Foundation’s Modern Art Centre) and 1993 (at the Centro Cultural
de Belém), and curated by Margarida Acciaiuoli and José Monter- ern as a form of historical time focused on the present, without relinquishing the chrono-
roso Teixeira, respectively. The 1984 exhibition’s catalogue was an-
other major milestone in the studies on the artist, as was the par- logical linear time. The temporal logic of the modern rejects the old to affirm the new,
allel exhibition devoted to his graphic work, curated by António
Rodrigues and held at Palácio Galveias. Other catalogues and pub-
and therefore, according to the same author, modern is also a critical term which con-
lications have multiplied the studies on Almada, but the ones fo- stantly enthrones and deposes the new, as much as it produces the old,7 and is thus closely
cusing on his written work are more numerous. As for the art
studies, one should point out the contributions of Raquel Hen- related to the differentiation between development and atavism, civilisation and under-
riques da Silva and Sara Afonso Ferreira, among other researchers
who have tackled particular aspects of his vast body of work. Luis development, progress and backwardness. In this sense, the author states: “[…] modernity
Manuel Gaspar has contributed to the documentation of the
artist’s plastic, graphic and written work, compiling a vast corpus
is not, as such, a project, but merely its form. It is a form of historical consciousness, an
of information on every facet of Almada’s artistic activity. abstract temporal structure which, in totalizing history from the standpoint of an ever-
6 “[…] from its beginnings, modernism was a discourse of the
legitimization of change. In its most general form, then, mod- vanishing, ever present present, embraces a conflicting plurality of projects, of possible
ernism is a collective affirmation of the modern, as such: an affir-
mation of temporal negation, an affirmation of the time determi- futures, provided they conform to its basic logical structure.”8 In other words, it comprises
nation of the new.” Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All.
Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso Books, 2013), p. 73.
a plurality of modernisms.
7 Cf. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time. Modernity and Avant- The idea of a single, naturalised narrative about modernism and modernity is itself
Garde (London: Verso Books, 1995).
8 Idem, p. 23. an outcome of the modern temporal logic, generating its victors and maintaining in
10
anonymity those it regards as the defeated.9 However, one can find within modernity it-
self a critique of this mode of producing the modern and of the temporality it implies,
namely in Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) rejection of the “history of the victors” and his
injunction to brush history against the grain.10
In art history, to pluralise the term modernism is all the more urgent considering
the denouncement in feminist and post-colonial studies of the exclusions implied in the
so-called dominant narratives (master narratives11), a critique which authors such as Béa- —————
trice Joyeux-Prunel or Piotr Pietrowski have very recently applied to the discussion of the 9 Such is the narrative of historicism. Historicism’s historical
time is homogeneous and continuous, and the historicist historian
modernisms in the so-called peripheral European countries. These authors advocate a is not someone conditioned by his or her own biographical cir-
cumstances, but an impartial vehicle that reports concrete and ir-
horizontal and transnational art history,12 breaking away from the operating hierarchies refutable historical facts. Historicism creates a falsely unitary,
that produce centres as much as peripheries, within a logic according to which the geo- continuous and progressive temporality, wherein the new dictates
the chronological progression, in an evolutionary process natu-
graphical distance to a hypothetical centre is equated with backwardness.13 The “periph- ralised by the historiography. On this issue, see idem, p. 138 and ff.
10 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
ery” itself has produced a historiography wherein it detracts or exalts itself against a “cen- [1940], in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken
Books, 1968).
tre”, highlighting artists according to their formal proximity to the art produced in that 11 Cf. James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents (New
centre14 – as far as modernity and modernism are concerned, the capital city thus distin- York: Routledge, 1995).
12 Cf. Piotr Pietrowski, “Toward a Horizontal Art History of the
guished was, for the first half of the 20th century, Paris. European Avant-Garde”, in Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Mod-
ernism and the Fate of a Continent, ed. Sascha Bru et al. (New York:
This dominant narrative, with such a temporal and spatial model, is western and De Gruyter, 2009); and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Provincializing
Paris. The Center-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of
male, and generates the canon, which is nothing else than a history of victors. In the par- Quantitative and Transnational Approaches”, Bulletin 4, no. 1, 2015.
ticular case of art history, the canon is frequently based on the choice of “geniuses” and 13 On the periphery as a term that generates spatial and corre-
spondent temporal differences, see Foteini Vlachou, “Why Spatial?
of some art forms (painting) to the detriment of others. The canon is a discursive exercise Time and the Periphery”, in Visual Resources (Routledge, 2016) – on-
line journal: DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2016.1132500.
which produces a knowledge that establishes a hierarchy of power, constructing norms 14 On the narrative of backwardness, see my article “Estou
to contain whatever it elects. It is always a production of exclusions. In historiography, atrasado, estou atrasado! – Sobre o atraso da arte portuguesa diag-
nosticado pela historiografia”, in Representações da Portugalidade,
therefore, the critical path should not be a mere question of replacing a canon with an- ed. André Barata, António Santos Pereira, José Ricardo Carva-
lheiro (Lisbon: Caminho, 2011); and “O legado de José-Augusto
other, the centre with the periphery, the coloniser with the colonised, the man with the França na escrita da história da arte em Portugal: caracterização
crítica do cânone e de exemplos da sua persistência”, Revista Práti-
woman, and so forth, for that would still be a production of hierarchical value. A relevant cas da História. Revista sobre teoria, historiografia e usos do passado,
critical exercise in historiography would be the questioning of the differentiation devices no. 1, Instituto de História Contemporânea da Faculdade de Ciên-
cias Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, July 2015.
upon which the dominant narrative relies to produce hierarchies,15 and which involves, See also Joana Cunha Leal and Mariana Pinto dos Santos, “As Sete
Cabeças do Modernismo”, in Arte, Crítica, Política, ed. Nuno Crespo
for instance, “provincializing the center”16 or establishing that there are only peripheries.17 (Lisbon: Tinta-da-China, 2016).
15 Cf. Joana Cunha Leal and Mariana Pinto dos Santos, “As Sete
Considering the modern as a form of historical time, and its critical character, the Cabeças do Modernismo”, op. cit.
modernisms were different ways of understanding the modern, and the new. In the con- 16 Cf. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Provincializing Paris. The Cen-
ter-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and
ference he delivered in Madrid in 1927, O Desenho [Drawing], focusing on his solo exhibi- Transnational Approaches”, op. cit.
17 “Generally speaking, […] we only have peripheries. We do not
tion organised by La Gaceta Literaria, one of the periodicals he contributed to during his have centers. The centers are interesting only if we take them as
peripheries. Of course, if we talk about a master narrative we have
five-year period in the Spanish capital, between 1927 and 1932, Almada states: “To be mod- to ask what that means and for whom it is the master narrative. If
ern is just like being elegant: it is not a way of dressing, but a way of being. To be modern we use the tools of art history that deal with the art market, or with
tourism, then we have, of course, something of a master narrative
is not to use the modern calligraphy, but to be the genuine discoverer of the new.”18 created in the so-called centers. [However,] everything is a perip-
hery, everything is rooted in a particular context.” Piotr Pietrowski,
While the modern may be seen by some as the adoption of a certain style, a certain “A way to follow – interview”, in Richard Kosinsky et al., Artmargins
online, 29 January 2015 (print version on MITPress).
fashion, Almada defines it rather as a way of being,19 which involves not only embracing 18 José de Almada Negreiros, Manifestos e Conferências, ed. Fer-
the present time, but also acting upon it, not the adherence to the modern, but the act of nando Cabral Martins, Luis Manuel Gaspar, Mariana Pinto dos
Santos, Sara Afonso Ferreira (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2006), p. 156.
making it happen. This concept of modernism as action that generates modernity is Almada was probably reacting to António Ferro, a journalist and
a writer that would come to be the ideologist of the cultural policy
closely related to the idea of avant-garde. of the Estado Novo, the dictatorial regime created by Oliveira
Salazar in 1933, after his appointment as President of the Council
of Ministers, which allowed him to increase his power within the
dictatorship established in 1926. Back in 1921, Ferro wrote: “Just
now as I write this article, my Art is out there browsing shop win-
dows, gazing at Worth’s, on the verge of going in to buy a robe,
Avant-gardes and modernisms that Moroccan black crêpe robe, all embroidered with gold
thread… My Art is Portuguese, Portuguese to the core, but it buys
its garments in Paris…” – António Ferro, “O Maior Pecado da Arte
de Almeida Garrett”, in António Ferro 1 – Intervenção Modernista:
The avant-garde’s temporality is, according to Peter Osborne, the negation of the Teoria do Gosto [1921] (Barcelos: Verbo, 1987), p. 261.
19 In 1873 Rimbaud had prescribed: “One must be absolutely
present for the sake of a future, but its action upon the present is exerted on behalf of spe- modern”, in his poem A Season in Hell.
11
cific futures. The affirmation of the present by the modern makes it generate the new and
the old, and therefore implies a certain degree of anticipation of the future; however, un-
like the avant-garde, this anticipation is abstract: it is simply the new, without specifying
what sort of new this may be.20
When Almada embraces futurism, writing the four important manifestos of the Por-
tuguese avant-garde in the 1910s,21 he focuses his artistic activity on acting upon the pres-
ent. Such action does not involve the intensive production of an individual visual work. It
involves performative writing, in the sense that the written words are in themselves the
action they enunciate, which is intensified when they are given a particular typographical
arrangement that affects the way they are read, or when the punctuation is absent (as in
the 1916 short-story “Saltimbancos (contrastes simultâneos)” [Street Acrobats (simultane-
ous contrasts)]), or when the text is entirely written in capital letters, like a continuous
shout punctuated by a typographical hand shaped as a revolver, shooting at its target
2. Manifesto Anti-Dantas e por extenso, 1916
(Manifesto Anti-Dantas, 1916 [cat. 2]).22 It involves provocation and public scandal, with
spontaneous or rehearsed actions performed in cafes – mostly at A Brasileira in Chiado –,
or such gestures as, for instance, dyeing his dog – a hound – green and taking him for
walks around the city.23 But also his participation in collective projects, such as the maga-
zine Orpheu, his actions with Guilherme de Santa Rita (for instance, the futurist confer-
ence delivered at Teatro República – now São Luiz –, in Lisbon), and the ballets he choreo-
graphs and performs with young Lisbon aristocrats, and for which he also designs sets
and costumes. However, these collective projects must not be regarded as an attempt to
create a group,24 but rather as a desire to participate in the creation of a total action, one
that would prove able to truly shake up the present time.
In the avant-garde of the early 20th century, one of the most important ways of artistic
intervention was the creation of periodical publications that could easily circulate.25 Al-
mada was intensely involved in the making of Orpheu, exerting his influence so that it
wouldn’t be an exclusively literary magazine, but rather a publication opened to visual
artists (Santa Rita contributes to number 2, and Amadeo was expected to collaborate in
the following issue, which was never published), and co-edited, with Santa Rita, Portugal
Futurista, which also included contributions from artists, and which would be immediately
————— confiscated by Sidónio Pais’s political police.26 Aspiring to be an international magazine,
20 Cf. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All. Philosophy of Con-
temporary Art, p. 74. Portugal Futurista included several manifestos by Portuguese, as well as Italian and French,
21 Manifesto Anti-Dantas [The Anti-Dantas Manifesto] (1916), Ex-
posição Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Liga Naval de Lisboa [Amadeo de
authors, in a transnational avant-garde affirmation similar to its counterparts from sev-
Souza-Cardoso Exhibition at the Naval League of Lisbon] (1916), Os eral other countries. Among other elements of provocation, the magazine shocked the pub-
Bailados Russos em Lisboa [The Russian Ballets in Lisbon] (1917), and
Ultimatum Futurista às Gerações Portuguesas do Século XX [Futurist lic due to the explicit sexuality in Almada’s poem “Mima-Fataxa. Sinfonia Cosmopolita ou
Ultimatum to the 20th-century Portuguese Generations] (1917).
22 For this manifesto, see Sara Afonso Ferreira’s critical edition: Apologia do Triângulo Feminino” [Mima-Fataxa. A Cosmopolitan Symphony, or In Praise
Manifesto Anti-Dantas (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2013).
23 Cf. Maria José Almada Negreiros, Conversas com Sarah Af-
of the Female Triangle], in his short-story “Saltimbancos (contrastes simultâneos)”, or in
fonso (Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1993), pp. 42-44. Valentine de Saint Point’s Manifesto Futurista da Luxúria [The Futurist Manifesto of Lust].
24 Cf. José de Almada Negreiros, Orpheu 1915-1965 (Lisbon: Ática,
1965). Almada’s futurism is the outcome of a creative soup, mostly concocted in the social and
25 Cf. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Provincializing Paris. The Cen-
ter-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantative and intellectual gatherings at the café A Brasileira in Chiado, comprising the humour of his con-
Transnational Approaches”, op. cit.
26 Sidónio Pais (1872-1918) was the fourth President of the Por-
tributions to the press since 1911 and to the Humourists’ Salons, the latest news in art, often
tuguese Republic. With dictatorial leanings, Pais governed the sent from Paris by José Pacheko, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Guilherme Santa Rita, and dis-
country between December 1917, after the coup he had lead
against Afonso Costa’s government, and 5 December 1918, the date cussions of Fernando Pessoa’s poetic sensationism and intersectionism.27 Furthermore, Al-
of his assassination.
27 See Fernando Pessoa, Sobre Orpheu e o Sensacionismo, ed. Fer- mada’s futurism is directly related to the Delaunay couple’s pictoric ‘simultaneous contrasts’,
nando Cabral Martins and Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim,
2015).
and he planned by letter several (never consummated) collaborative projects with Sonia De-
28 Cf. Sara Afonso Ferreira and Mariana Pinto dos Santos, “Al- launay,28 who at the time was living with her husband Robert in the north of Portugal (Vila
mada e Sonia Delaunay”, in O Círculo Delaunay/The Delaunay Circle,
ed. Ana Vasconcelos (Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2015). do Conde), where they took refuge after the outbreak of the First World War. Finally, the ar-
12
rival in Lisbon of Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes was also an important milestone,
with Almada writing a manifesto calling for the education of an audience to attend those
ballets, just as he had urged the public to visit Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso’s exhibition. The
pressing need to create an audience for modernity was also a need to create an audience for
his own work: Almada places himself at the epicentre of modernity and the avant-garde.
Almada Negreiros kept the programme from the Ballets Russes’ 1917 season, which
was possibly given to him by the company’s director (or, later on, by Erik Satie, whom he
met in Paris), and includes two costume designs by Picasso, a text by Jean Cocteau, and
Apollinaire’s text on Parade, the ballet with music by Satie. Here Apollinaire had coined
the term “surréalisme” to describe the denaturalisation of the anti-narrative of that ballet,
whose costume and set designs by Picasso had caused a scandal [cat. 3]. Already a chore-
ographer himself, Almada would show Diaghilev the drafts for his next works. In April
3. Ballets Russes Programme, 1917
1918, at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, he presented the ballet A Princesa dos Sapatos
de Ferro [The Princess with the Iron Shoes], performing the roles of ‘the Witch’ and ‘the
Devil’ [cat. 126], and, a few months later, staged another ballet, O Jardim da Pierrette [Pier-
rette’s Garden], at Teatro da Trindade [cat. 132-140].
These interconnections would be fundamental for his conception of art and the
artist’s role, and they all have in common the understanding that the invention of the new
implied the rejection of symbolism and of naturalism, and the creation of another reality
with the available elements of the real. The humour in Almada’s first drawings (and the
following ones) was already a way of disregarding naturalism. These early endeavours,
which are routinely considered as minor by historiography,29 were evoked by the artist
himself in 1969, during an interview in the highly popular television show “Zip-Zip” – his
first and last live appearance on television. In that show, Almada states that it was humour
that made the transition from the 19th century to the 20th possible, referring to humouristic
drawing and regarding it, therefore, as a condition of modernity.
The futurist conference delivered at Teatro República on 14 April 1917 was a provoca-
tive spectacle, and aimed at shocking and upsetting the usual spectators at the city’s con-
ferences and soirées, awakening them to the 20th century. The Ultimatum Futurista às Ge-
rações Portuguesas do Século XX, read at the occasion by Almada, was a gloss on Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto, praising war and proclaiming the need for
an absolute rejection of the past in order to construct “the Portuguese homeland of the
20th century”, without “saudade” or “fado”. However, the violence of his words was part of
a mise-en-scène that included the costume he wore on stage – overalls – and a dialogue,
falsely spontaneous, between him and Santa Rita Pintor, sitting amid the audience,
wherein humour was the main device of shock.30
Almada’s written production from those years is defined by a synesthesia intended to
transform language through the sense of vision by means of a paradoxical composition of
literary images, wherein characters, descriptions, objects and landscapes double and per-
meate each other in fast succession. This process is apparent both in his poetry and his
prose, where colour is the text’s raw material, and culminates in the publication of K4 O
Quadrado Azul [K4 The Blue Square] [cat. 4], co-edited with Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, in —————
29 For a critique of the lesser role attributed by the history of
which the narrator gives his lover the unique definition of “blue square”, personifying that art to illustration and graphic narrative, see Luís Henriques, “Ilus-
tração. Imagem da Modernidade em Portugal”, PhD thesis pre-
geometrical figure. The short-story is a practical application of the equation 1 + 1 = 1, with sented in 2015 to the Facultat de Belles Arts da Universitat de
the one, the individual, being equated to infinity and translating in the transfiguration of Barcelona (available in http://diposit.ub.edu/dspace/handle/2445/
66422).
the narrator into his lover, when he wakes up in her body. That equation was also an ex- 30 See the press reports on the event published in the following
days: for instance, in the 15 April 1917 issues of Diário de Lisboa or
change between the two artists: in 1916, Amadeo had sent Almada a postcard from Paris, A Capital.
13
congratulating him on the publication of the Manifesto Anti-Dantas – “Almada: Hail. Hail.
Substantive. Odd number. One.”, and he had previously enunciated the formula in 1914, in
the title of one of his paintings: Even Uneven 1 2 1. Almada reciprocates in the dedication of
K4 O Quadrado Azul. Also in Álvaro de Campos’s Ultimatum, also written in 1917, one can
read the proclamation: “one plus one are no more than one, as long as one plus one don’t
make up that One which is called Two”.31 1 + 1 = 1: such was, in those years, the operating
symbol of artistic collaboration: the singular work of art resulting from the collaborative
effort of two individuals, who remained undivided and independent from each other.
His visual work mainly comprises assorted drawings and commissioned pieces, hu-
morous illustrations for the press and, later on, short graphic narratives. But also, the
costume designs for ballets, namely the drawings he exchanges with the young women
he had befriended and who joined him in the “Club das Cinco Cores” [Five Colours Club]
in 1918-1919, with each member adopting a different colour (Almada chooses green, a
4. K4 O Quadrado Azul, 1917 colour already recurrent in the texts he had written in the previous years). Within the
Club, he would further his experimentation with words and images, reinventing a futur-
ism that would have more to do with youthful joyousness than with the exaltation of
technology, while still being in search of an entirely new beginning. There he found the
space to keep pursuing his goal of collaborative work after the death of those who had
been his main artistic interlocutors, Amadeo and Santa Rita.32
In 1919 Almada leaves for Paris, where he will find a very different city from the one
described by friends before the Great War. For someone who had focused his artistic in-
tervention on action, through public, editorial and performative provocation, through
participation in collaborative projects, rather than on individual material work, post-
————— war Paris would be an unwelcoming place. Several artists and catalysts of the avant-
31 Cf. Álvaro de Campos, “Ultimatum”, Portugal Futurista, 1917.
32 Both killed by the Spanish flu that ravaged Europe in 1918.
gardes had died (such as Apollinaire, in 1918), others dispersed, and the already well-es-
See, on this issue, Almada’s interview with Diário Nacional in 20 tablished art market was mainly centred on painting, making it hard for newcomers to
June 1918: “I myself often marvel at the thought of the chance,
maybe unique in all times, of these five children of such independ- thrive in a city depleted by the First World War.33 The forging of the myth of Paris and
ent convictions to have come together with such an intense desire
for mutual agreement, and in agreement with my own ten years cubism, with Picasso – the artist whom Almada most admired – as the pivotal figure,
in Art. This is what I find interesting to tell you about the ballet O
Jardim da Pierrette, with music by Chopin and Grieg, and per-
was examined by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, who points out the reigning rivalry and com-
formed by D. Maria Thereza Moraes Amado as the ‘Poet’ who reads petition, stirred up by gallery owners extremely adroit at promoting their artists.34
the script, D. Maria Magdalena Moraes Amado as ‘Pierrette’, D.
Maria da Conceição de Mello Breyner as ‘Harlequina’, D. Maria Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso’s exclusive marchand since 1907, developed a market-
Adelaide Soares Cardoso as ‘Pierrot’, and D. Maria José Soares Car-
doso as ‘Harlequin’”.
ing strategy that would enhance Picasso’s myth, deciding not to exhibit his work in the
33 Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “Paris and Surrealism in the Interna- French capital, but elsewhere, in close connection with a group of clients whose taste he
tional Geography of Modernism. 1920-1940. Reassessing canonic
‘Centralities’ with the Study of Artistic Circulations”, communica- had gradually educated, starting by showing them paintings from the artist’s blue and
tion presented at the Avant-Garde Migrations Symposium, Lisbon,
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 19 and 20 November 2015. rose periods, and later on, after 1913, pieces which were cubist, always in retrospective
34 “From then on [after the Demoiselles d’Avignon], the Parisian
avant-gardes no longer fought against the past, but against each
exhibitions to illustrate an obvious evolution. Thus the myth grew in Paris, where Pi-
other.” [«Désormais, les avant-gardes parisiennes ne luttaient plus casso’s paintings were nowhere to be seen – simply through the news of his commercial
contre le passé, mais les uns contre les autres.»] Béatrice Joyeux-
Prunel, “La construction internationale de l’aura de Picasso avant success, fostered by his marchand.35 Kahnweiler’s strategy inaugurates the dominant
1914. Expositions différenciées et processus mimétiques”, in Col-
loque Revoir Picasso, 26 March 2015. modern evolutional discourse on art: Picasso’s evolution towards cubism reflects the
35 This issue was studied by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel in “La con-
struction internationale de l’aura de Picasso avant 1914. Exposi-
general narrative of the modern art’s evolution towards an ever increasing abstraction.36
tions différenciées et processus mimétiques”, op. cit. Now, this does not account for the whole variety of modernist practices that proliferate
36 Kahnweiler would write a book on the subject, titled The Rise
of Cubism (1949). and reach a larger audience than the few collectors well educated to appreciate cubism.
14
Those practices include cubism, but do not end there, and may even diverge from it – as
indeed Picasso himself would diverge.
It is significant that Almada, shortly after his arrival in Paris, had precisely sought to
get involved in collaborative work. In a letter to Lalá (Maria Adelaide Burnay Soares Car-
doso, from the “Club das Cinco Cores” and his other friends, he writes: “Do you remember
the CATRINETA SHIP? It’s almost ready. Score, text and choreography, all by Zé Almada. […]
5. Letter from José de Almada Negreiros to Amadeo
I wrote the score for piano, and Erik Satie is composing for the orchestra together with me. de Souza-Cardoso, 4 January 1917
Erik Satie is the author of Parade, ballet cubiste. He gave me the Parade’s manuscript for pi-
ano four hands, and I shall send it to Tatão and Tareca. I will also send them my own
CATRINETA SHIP manuscript for piano, which is dedicated to my 4 Portuguese friends
Tareka, Tatão, Lalá, Zeca. […] I need to talk a whole lot about music with you, oh yes, for now
the tune has changed: now it’s going to happen!” None of this would have any consequence.
The awareness that he is bound to failure in Paris echoes in a sarcastic joke he in-
cluded shortly after in another letter: “I, too, did a kolossal [sic] painting, it is called Hoarse-
ness. It’s about a broad (broad is a bad word) who is so so hoarse that the people looking at
the picture can’t hear a thing. They’ve already told me it’s a pity that I am not French, be-
cause if I was, this picture of mine would be highly prized. I felt very sorry for not being
French. Maybe next time.”37 In his work he does not relinquish the performative, hybrid
(between writing and drawing) and processual character of the creative praxis. In a letter
dated 26 March 1920, he encloses three delicate and intricate calligrams [cat. 214-216] and
an amusing demonstration of his ability to draw several figures with a single line, without
lifting the pen from the paper, an exercise he would pursue in many pieces and studies
until the end of his life, in an attempt to synthesise expressions of movement in which
the act of drawing the line is equally or more valued than the final outcome. If the action
upon which he had based his artistic intervention was not the right path to the artistic
universality he had hoped to find in Paris, where he endured moments of dire economic
distress, upon his return to Portugal, Almada would embrace the notion that universality
may best be achieved through the particular of each individual. From then on, the equa- Letter from José de Almada Negreiros to the
“Club das Cinco Cores”, Paris, February 1920
tion 1 + 1 = 1 would also refer to a geographical situation in the world: an artist must create
from his own individual place in the world so that his voice may be universal. Almada’s
nationalism, apparent in the Catrineta Ship theme he chose to show Satie, and which he
would later develop in the Alcântara Shipping Terminal frescoes, must be understood in
this light. The device does not differ from the nationalisms present in other countries’
artistic contexts, both in the avant-garde sectors and in the more conservative ones, and
is closely related to the primitivisms that so vehemently urged the need to learn from
black art and to embrace local roots and the “ancestral” vernacular culture.38 In 1926, in a
conference titled Modernismo [Modernism], Almada states: “Art has a politics, a homeland,
and its universal meaning is intimately linked to each country on Earth.”39 —————
37 Almada Negreiros’s letters to Lalá, from 14 April and 29 May
Besides these considerations, Almada delivers a conference where he reformulates 1919; private collection.
modernity as a deliberate naivety (or voluntary ingenuousness, as he called it), in which 38 See Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, “Primitivism”, in Crit-
ical Terms for Art History, eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff
the new is defined by the reinvention of words and of the gaze upon the world, in an ex- (Chicago: University Press, 1996), pp. 170-184.
39 José de Almada Negreiros, “Modernismo” [1926], in Mani-
perience of the present that should be similar to that of a child’s. In A Invenção do Dia festos e Conferências, p. 144. The conference was delivered on 30 No-
Claro40 [The Invention of the Clear Day] (1921), a deeply poetic text, the subject at stake is, vember 1926, at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes [National
Society of Fine Arts], in Lisbon, during the closing ceremony of the
once again, the duality of particular/universal. The individual gaze is always unique, but, II Salão de Outono [Second Autumn Salon], inaugurated on 17 No-
vember. This salon was organised by magazine Contemporânea,
when it is also naïve, not encumbered by all the accumulated information, it has the uni- and showed pieces owned by the Bristol Club. Almada’s confer-
versality of a first contact with discovery and knowledge, in a development of the “zero ence was published in the weekly Folha do Sado, Alcácer do Sal, on
5, 12, 19 and 24 December 1926, and 16 January 1927.
degree” proclaimed by futurism. The notion of naivety allows us to extend the experience 40 José de Almada Negreiros, “A Invenção do Dia Claro” [1921],
in Manifestos e Conferências, p. 79. The conference was published
of the new to everything, including the old, for everything can be seen as if for the first in 1921 by Fernado Pessoa’s Olisipo.
15
time. Only through his own particular way of looking at the world can an artist pursue
the originality demanded by the temporality of the modern.
The association between the experience of modernity and childhood is not at all un-
heard of – in fact, it comes from Baudelaire.41 Therefore, one must revisit Baudelaire’s
seminal text about the “painter of modern life”, whom he identifies as the one that appre-
hends and quickly renders the moment with perceptiveness and the ability to discern in
it the modern, which he illustrates and comments on with a caricature or a humorous
tale. Graphic narrative is a fast language of immediate communication, one that acts di-
rectly upon the present and is able to transform anything into something new. It is pre-
cisely there, in the anecdotes and short stories that he publishes in the newspapers, that
Almada develops what one might call a modernism of the quotidian. In other words: a
modernism which is present in everyday life and speaks to everyone.42
—————
Modernisms and the Estado Novo
41 “The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always
drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the
delight with which a child absorbs form and colour. I am prepared A quotidian modernism is what he practiced in the years he lived in Madrid (1927-
to go even further and assert that inspiration has something in
common with a convulsion, and that every sublime thought is ac- -1932), with various collaborations with writers, musicians and architects, effortlessly es-
companied by more or less violent nervous shock which has its
repercussion in the very core of the brain. […] But genius is nothing
tablishing himself in the Madrilenian artistic scene. His willingness to experiment with
more nor less than childhood recovered at will – a childhood now different mediums allowed him to work with one or more collaborators, always for the
equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a
power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw mate- sake of a greater, composite work, combining different contributions – for instance, writ-
rial which it has involuntarily accumulated.” Charles Baudelaire,
“The Painter of Modern Life” [1863], in The Painter of Modern Life ing and drawing (with Ramón Gómez de la Serna), or music, short-story and magic
and other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 8.
42 The term “quotidian modernism” is used by Tiago Baptista
lantern (with Manuel Abril and Salvador Bacarisse) [cat. 74-79].
in this same catalogue, quoting Miriam Hansen, to characterise, He returns to Portugal in 1932, at the time when António de Oliveira Salazar becomes
in the context of modernity, cinema and its reception as vernacu-
lar forms of modernism. I owe him the use of the expression “mod- Prime Minister. In the following year, Salazar alters the Constitution, in order to legitimise
ernism of the quotidian” in the present essay, where the context of
its usage is linked to the idea of the quotidian as a space and time his authoritarian single-party government – the Estado Novo –, and, in 1933, he installs the
potentially divergent from a dominant uniformising strategy. See
Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life [1958] (London: Verso,
Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional [Secretariat for National Propaganda] (SPN), to pro-
2014), and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life [1980] mote and propagandise the image of the regime and the nation. The agency would be led
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
43 In 1927 António Ferro publishes the book Viagem à Roda das by António Ferro, the ideologist who, based on the observation of other dictatorships,43
Ditaduras [A Journey Around Dictatorships], and later, in 1930, en-
deavours to interview Adolf Hitler. Cf. Luís Trindade, O Estranho would conceive for Portugal a propaganda (and correlated censorship) machine that would
Caso do Nacionalismo Português. Salazarismo entre a Literatura e a
Política (Lisbon: ICS, 2008).
rely on modern art as much as on a nationalist revivalism. Portugal’s image as constructed
44 Cf. Luís Trindade, op. cit., and Vera Marques Alves, Arte Popu- by the SPN – aiming to promote it abroad as a simultaneously modern and picturesque
lar e Nação no Estado Novo. A Política Folclorista do Secretariado da
Propaganda Nacional (Lisbon: ICS, 2013). country, as well as to further the nationalist indoctrination of the country’s middle and
45 Vera Marques Alves, op. cit., pp. 121-122.
46 To those events, where the superficiality of the new mingled upper classes –, was the outcome of a combination of modernism and tradition, with the
with popular nationalism, Almada would call “portuguesadas”. Cf.
José de Almada Negreiros, “Vistas do Sudoeste”, Sudoeste, no. 2 (Lis- latter being especially explored through the appropriation and manipulation of folk art
bon: ed. UP, 1935), p. 11.
47 “Política do Espírito” was the name adopted by António
and culture.44 As pointed out by Vera Marques Alves, the SPN prized the perceived authen-
Ferro, taken from a Paul Valéry conference he had attended (La ticity of folk art, even if it had to fabricate it. Folk art would be combined with modernist
politique de l’esprit, notre souverain bien, Université des Annales, 15
November 1932), to designate the cultural policy of the Estado functionalism in “staged and spectacularised” events,45 aiming at a visual impact that was
Novo, for which he took responsibility when he became the direc-
tor of the SPN in 1933, at the invitation of António de Oliveira simultaneously modernising and regionalist.46 The difference between the 1920s and 1930s
Salazar. Cf. António Ferro, Entrevistas de António Ferro a Salazar
(Lisbon: Parceria A.M. Pereira, 2003).
relative artistic freedom and the Política do Espírito [Politics of Spirit]47 established by An-
48 The conferences are Direcção Única [The Only Direction] tónio Ferro was strongly felt by Almada, who would react against it.
(1932), Arte e Artistas [Art and Artists] (1933), Embaixadores Desco-
nhecidos [Unknown Ambassators] (1933), Cuidado com a Pintura! Between 1932 and 1936, while accepting commissions from the State for official
[Mind the Painting!] (1934), Os Artistas Raridades de Excepção e Ou-
tras Palavras Alto e Bom Som [The Artists, Exceptional Rarities, and stamps and posters as a means to earn a livelihood, he also delivers a series of conferences
other Words Spoken Out Loud] (1935) and Elogio da Ingenuidade ou
as Desventuras da Esperteza Saloia [In Praise of Ingenuousness or
with an urgent political character, prolonged in his essays for the magazine he creates in
the Misadventures of Saloia Cleverness] (1936). Cf. José de Almada 1935, Sudoeste.48 For Almada, the conference is an artistic genre in its own right that per-
Negreiros, Manifestos e Conferências.
16
sists beyond his futurist period and in which the word is seen as an artistic act for actual-
ising the modern.49
In the conferences of this period, he continues a series of reflections on problematic
terms such as nation and race, in their constant double association with the particular
and the universal, the individual and the community, but he does so in order to empha-
sise, repeatedly, the condition of modernity as freedom, and that the artist is the great
representative of the universal humanity.50 1932 is also the year of Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti’s visit to Portugal, at the invitation of António Ferro, against which Almada re-
acts violently, regarding the Italian futurist as the very embodiment of the artist who
relinquishes his freedom to become an artist of the regime.51 To Ferro, Marinetti was the
ideal example of what a modernist artist should be. In 1936 Almada wrote a text (which
remained unpublished) against António Ferro and the official exhibitions he had organ-
ised from 1935 on, denouncing his instrumentalisation of the modernist artists for the
6. Manuscript Não António Ferro Não, [1936]
sake of the State and of his own ascension to power .52 However, if until 1941 Almada does
not take part in the Estado Novo’s official exhibitions, he starts doing it sporadically after
being awarded the Prémio Columbano [Columbano Prize] in 1942. There may have been
several reasons for this change: it is possible that Almada saw no other way of exhibiting
his work,53 or wished to be recognised as a great artist, or simply needed the work (from
1934 onwards, he had a family to provide for) and there was virtually no other employer
besides the State.54
The artistic collaboration he valued so much was now practically impossible outside —————
the contexts determined by the State, especially the commemorative exhibitions and pub- 49 Fernando Cabral Martins discusses the singularity of the
conference as a genre of Almada – a public presentation of a writ-
lic works, which saw an unprecedented development, and for which a special budget for ten text as a form of public intervention and with a theatrical com-
ponent – in the afterword “O texto em cena”, in José de Almada
art and decoration was usually allocated. His ability to work with various techniques, Negreiros, Manifestos e Conferências.
50 “The social and human position of the modern artist is this:
which he quickly learned to master, such as fresco painting, stained glass or ceramics, the freed man. Freed from the past, freed from the abstract, freed
made him one of the most regular collaborators with the architect Porfírio Pardal Mon- from the concrete, freed from heaven and hell, freed from myth and
reality, absolutely freed from any kind of chassis, and splendidly
teiro. But the situation was always extremely difficult or even penurious for artists in harmonious within the unfathomable limits of humanity. As far as
I can see, in this age of crowds, artists are probably the last individ-
general, who longed for commissions to make ends meet.55 It was probably due to eco- uals in existence. Today more than ever, the exact expression of the
modern artist is that of the protagonist of humanity!”, José de Al-
nomical reasons that, in the few paintings he made in the 1940s and 50s, he mainly used mada Negreiros, “Cuidado com a Pintura!”, in Manifestos e Conferên-
cardboard or wood instead of canvas. cias, p. 235. In the conference Elogio da Ingenuidade ou as Desventuras
da Esperteza Saloia, naivety is also associated with freedom.
The combination between modernism and the creation of national symbols, in the 51 Cf. “Um ponto no i do futurismo”, Diário de Lisboa, 25 Novem-
ber 1932, in José de Almada Negreiros, Obras Completas, vol. 6, Tex-
search for an authentic identity in “tradition”, in the vernacular, in folk culture, is a distinc- tos de Intervenção (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1974), p. 135. Cf. also
“Outro ponto no i do futurismo”, Diário de Lisboa, 29 November
tive feature both of the European authoritarian regimes and of the primitivisms assumed 1932, idem, p. 139. And also “Encorajamento à juventude por-
tuguesa para o cinema e para o teatro”, Sudoeste, no. 2, Lisbon, 1935.
by a considerable part of modernist art as structural modern values. Mark Antliff describes A facsimile edition was published in Lisbon by Contexto in 1982.
how in Hitler’s Germany some segments of the Nazi party regarded expressionism as a 52 Cf. “Não António Ferro Não”, facsimile manuscript published
in the magazine Colóquio/Letras, no. 190, September 2015 (intro-
specifically German value, prizing artists such as Emil Nolde. Similarly, in Italy, Mussolini duction by Mariana Pinto dos Santos: “Almada Negreiros con-
fronta António Ferro: um documento inédito”).
would choose artists of the Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical school to paint urban land- 53 The tentative independent exhibitions, such as the 1936 Ex-
posição dos Artistas Modernos Independentes [Independent Modern
scapes of homogenised modernity, or introspective artists such as Giorgio Morandi; they all Artists Exhibition], held on the sidelines of the II Salão de Arte Mo-
favoured the portrayal of an impeccable urban life devoid of any signs of social conflict. derna do Estado [Second State Salon of Modern Art], would be dis-
continued.
The regeneration promoted by these regimes led to the search of artistic values also able to 54 At the end of his life he would also accept the State decora-
tion of the Grande Oficialato da Ordem de Santiago e Espada, in
reflect it.56 However, Emil Nolde would be shunned when he decided to move on from the 10 June 1967.
55 One learns as much in Hein Semke’s journal, or in Sarah Af-
“German primitives” to the “primitives from Africa and Oceania”, an option which the Nazi fonso’s interviews with her daughter-in-law. Cf. Hein Semke, A Voz
Interior, Excertos do Diário 1950-52, 1956-61 (Lisbon: Abysmo, 2015),
party, with its ideals of racial purity, could not tolerate.57 Besides the appropriation of mod- and Maria José Almada Negreiros, Conversas com Sarah Affonso.
ern art by the “blood and soil” politics, functionalism in architecture and design, derived 56 Following Roger Griffin’s concept, Mark Antliff defines the
modernising intent of those regimes as palingenesis, which means
from the Bauhaus school closed by the Nazis in 1933, was also fully adopted, as well as the “rebirth”. Cf. Mark Antliff, “Fascism, Modernism and Modernity”,
The Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 1, March 2002.
new graphic forms of montage introduced by photography and cinema. 57 Cf. idem.
17
The mythification of the national past is thus a complex matter, originating in 19th cen-
tury romanticism, a period of reinvention of traditions, and prolonged in the glorification
of national specificities regarded as evidences of superiority.58 As Luís Trindade has pointed
out, nationalism was not invented by Estado Novo – it was already present in the collective
consciousness; the regime gave it an authoritarian voice and structured it according to the
images that best suited its interests, linking it to an idea of civilisational progress, which it
aimed to lead, and promoting modernity as an instrument of regeneration.59
In such a context, it is necessary to review the primitivism implied in Almada’s no-
tion of deliberate naivety (or voluntary ingenuousness, to use his terms), in which he pro-
claims the freedom of seeing, and in its implicit miscegenation, contrary to the theses of
racial purity. The freedom of the uncivilised primitive man, which Salazar condemns (see
note 59), is the same freedom that Almada, in the wake of other artists, embraces. T.J.
Clark understands such modernism as an apparently paradoxical rejection of progress.60
Catalogue-invitation for Exposição dos Artistas Mo-
dernos Independentes, 1936 But the analysis must rather point out that, in general terms, in the first half of the 20th
century, the notions of progress and anti-progress were part of modernity, both acquiring,
at different moments, either a revolutionary or an authoritarian sense, sometimes attrib-
uted by the same protagonists. In a dictatorial 20th century, this is the dichotomy within
which Almada would be situated.
Thus, one should emphasise his contribution – at the invitation of the then neo-real-
ist Ernesto de Sousa, who was at the time 25 years old – to the Semana de Arte Negra
[Black Art Week] in 1946, an exhibition of comparison between African art and modern
art, with the assistance of Diogo de Macedo, the director of the Museu Nacional de Arte
Contemporânea [National Museum of Contemporary Art] [cat. 7].61 For the exhibition,
which showed reproductions and the Sociedade de Geografia’s [Geography Society] col-
lection of Beninese sculptures, Almada lent his painting by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso
and contributed one of his own drawings. In 1934, Diogo de Macedo had written the book
————— Arte Indígena Portuguesa [Portuguese Indigenous Art], whose cover had been designed by
58 Cf. Eric Storm, “The Nationalisation of the Domestic Sphere”,
Nations and Nationalism, vol. 23, no. 1, Wiley Online Library, 18 Oc- Almada [cat. 8]. One must take into account that the “indigenous” art was seen as Por-
tober 2016; and Eric Hobsbaum and Terence Ranger, The Invention
of Tradition (Cambridge: University Press, 1983). tuguese, and that the exploration of the “national” roots could thus justify, in the light of
59 Cf. Luís Trindade, op. cit. The author quotes the following ex-
cerpt from a long interview of António Ferro with Salazar, in 1932,
a wide conception of nationalism, the possibility of learning from African art. However,
before the ascension to power of both of them: “Absolute authority that was very far from the civilisational values upheld by Salazar, according to which the
is possible. Absolute freedom is never possible. Trying to combine
the concept of freedom with the concept of progress is a serious colonies were proof of Portugal’s superiority over cultures that supposedly had nothing
mistake. Freedom diminishes as men become increasingly ad-
vanced and civilised. From the primitive man, absolutely free in
to teach. Furthermore: in the context of a voluntary ingenuousness, according to which
his forest, to the man of today, who must obey traffic signs and every individual could recover their inner artistic gaze by brushing aside centuries of cul-
drive along the city streets on the right or on the left, what a long
way we have come, how many advances achieved… Therefore, let ture and civilisation, Almada’s own roots were in Africa, and thus, for him, to recover
us entrust freedom to authority, because only authority knows
how to administer it… and to defend it.” what primitivism saw as an African ancestral wisdom meant a search for his own mixed-
60 T.J. Clark overgeneralises, stating that retrogression is the
most persistent feature of the 20th-century art between 1905 and
race origin. However, Africanist primitivism, regardless of its contributions to anti-colo-
1956, in an unrelenting refusal of progress. He calls it “primitivism, nialism, was not anti-colonial and never represented anything outside Europe.62
nostalgia, regressiveness, cult of purity, creation of private
worlds”, and he asks: “What is modern art but a long refusal, a long
avoidance of catastrophe, a set of spells against an intolerable
present?” Cf. T.J. Clark, “Introduction”, in Picasso and Truth. From
Cubism to Guernica (Princeton; Oxford/Washington: Princeton
University Press/National Gallery of Art, 2013), pp. 3-21.
61 At the Escola Superior Colonial [Colonial School], 1946.
62 On this issue it may be useful to quote Patricia Leighten on
Decorative and quotidian
Picasso’s primitivism: “Picasso’s Africanism was paradoxically
both a consequence of colonialism and an anticolonialist mani-
festation: it aimed mostly to scandalize and act upon his own Eu- Several works by Almada display the same set of contrasts we have pointed out in
ropean civilization, and not to give voice to the African culture it
thrived on.” Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril. Colonialism, l’Art
the image commented on at the beginning of this text, namely the difference between the
Nègre, and Les Demoiselles D’Avignon”, in The Liberation of Paint- characters’ skin tones, or the antithesis between light and shadow, reality and reflection,
ing. Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Garde Paris (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 59. profile and frontal view [cat. 108, 371 and 372]. Or in the painting conventionally named
18
The Contortionist, where two characters (and not just one) intertwine, one of whom is car-
rying the other [cat. 163].63 The same scheme is also apparent in the silhouettes of the
magic lantern The Tragedy of Doña Ajada, or in the stucco panels for the façade of Cine
San Carlos, which were black and white, like the films they alluded to. There is also the
ambiguous representation of Mary in the Annunciation scene on one of the Santo Con-
destável Church’s stained-glass panels, with darkened glass in the figure’s face.
After 1933, this scheme was often the outcome of a compromise between the com-
mission’s predetermined theme and Almada’s artistic choices, resulting in a mixed solu-
tion. Although there were themes he had to more strictly satisfy, there were also small de-
tours, sometimes only perceptible as private jokes [cat. 190-192], which are a testament to
the difficult balance between abiding to the commission’s terms and exercising his artis-
tic freedom. In the recurrent theme of Pierrot and Harlequin, there is also an opposition
at stake, which translates into another relationship, this time of a mythological nature,
between Eros and Psyche. Pierrot and Harlequin symbolise opposing personas within the
artist – the one who refuses to confront the public, and the one who must perform a spec-
tacle. Almada explores these figures often, directly or projecting them in other characters,
as in the 1959 intaglio for the Ritz Hotel, in which Pierrot may be identified as the voyeur
who peeks out from behind the tree (column), and Harlequin as the man who openly and
ostensibly stares at the recumbent woman.
The decorative, a term that has acquired a pejorative connotation in dominant histo-
riography,64 was the field reserved for modernist visual artists by the politics of construc-
tion and celebration of the Estado Novo, which fostered the integration of the arts65 so that
every artistic expression would serve a higher idea. But in the decorative arts, on occasion, Annunciation, stained-glass window, Santo
one could create a space for communication beyond the imposed constraints. Graphic nar- Condestável Church, architect Vasco Regaleira,
Lisbon, 1951
rative, as a form of storytelling through images, is still present in the pieces Almada made
for buildings, at a time when mordant commentary on politics or social mores in the news- —————
63 The presence of a second, darker, character, carrying the
papers had been very restrained and was often replaced with photographic images. other one, has been ignored until now, but is visible. It becomes
explicit when one considers a 1948 drawing that seems to reprise
“I draw, I write, I sculpt, I do stained glass, I dance, I do theatre, I do film, and, if my art and clarify the theme [cat. 162]. The painting is dated 1940, and
therefore, either it is in fact earlier than the drawing, or one of
doesn’t speak through any of these voices, what can we do then?”, Almada stated in 1942.66 them has been wrongly dated.
It is symptomatic to see an artist like Júlio Pomar, in his neo-realist period, advocat- 64 Adolf Loos in his lecture Ornament and Crime (1908), as well
as Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger in the book Du Cubisme (1912),
ing the decorative in the arts, and trying to recover its positive value and emphasising its or, later on, Piet Mondrian, spoke against the decorative in the
arts, which became a term of negative connotation. As the argu-
potential to become the most efficient communicational space of a socially engaged art, ment went, decorative art was not “real” art. One of the main ad-
vocates of the thesis was Clement Greenberg, who used the term
due to its presence in everyday life.67 In fact, mural painting would be one of the art forms to distinguish between high painting (major art) and low painting
most championed by the neo-realists, as well as engraving, the graphic arts, and also tap- (minor art). Cf. Elissa Auther, “The Decorative, Abstraction and the
Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Green-
estry, on behalf of an improved circulation of art, a wider reception and the conveying of berg”, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, 2004.
65 Cf. Ana Mehnert Pascoal, A Cidade do Saber: estudo do
a message to a greater section of the population. Their position towards these arts, al- património artístico integrado nos edifícios projectados pelo arquitecto
Porfírio Pardal Monteiro para a Cidade Universitária (1934-1961),
though with opposite purposes, was similar to that of the Estado Novo, which used them master thesis, 2010 (Faculdade de Letras: archive of the University
as a means to promote a certain image of the nation and the empire. The moments when of Lisbon).
66 Interview by Luís de Oliveira Guimarães, “A dama do meu
Almada, in these contexts, uses his decorative work to transgress the imperialist and na- amigo José de Almada Negreiros”, in Dize tu, direi eu, 1942.
67 On this issue, see the catalogue of the exhibition curated by
tionalist themes are moments of political criticism. While sometimes he conforms to the Catarina Rosendo Decorativo, apenas? Júlio Pomar e a Integração das
Artes (Lisbon: Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar/Documenta, 2016); and
imposed imperialist and nationalist formulas (as in the panels for the Rectory of the Uni- Júlio Pomar, “Decorativo, apenas?”, Arquitectura, Lisbon, no. 30,
April-May 1949.
versity of Lisbon), in other cases, depending on the available leeway, he takes an ambiva- 68 His contribute for the Colonisation Pavilion in the Exposição
lent direction, characterised by a subtle, graphical humour: he portrays urban life and do Mundo Português [The Portuguese World Exhibition] of 1940
was described: “poor art that exhagerates human members with-
characters more bluntly, caricaturises national symbols68, and his panels for the Rocha out the grandeur demanded by great themes”, Brotéria (December
1940) quoted by Margarida Acciaiuoli, Exposições do Estado Novo
do Conde de Óbidos Shipping Terminal (1945-1949) are definitely non-conformist, featur- 1934-1940 (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1998), p. 169. One must con-
sider the possibility of a deliberate attitude in portraiting the na-
ing dock workers, acrobats, African fishmongers, and the theme of emigration. The fres- tional symbols in that way.
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coes outraged several government officials who demanded their destruction, and were
ultimately saved by the intervention of João Couto, the director of the Museu Nacional de
Arte Antiga [National Museum of Ancient Art].69 In the previous year, Júlio Pomar had
seen the destruction of the mural frescoes he had done for Cinema Batalha, in Porto, one
year after their completion. His themes were not very different: Pomar had painted street
acrobats amid scenes of poverty.
Almada’s final works, in which he takes the path of geometrical abstraction, seem in
accordance to the dominant modernist narrative, which, in any case, is the same he
adopts in the 1958 draft for a documentary film on Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (never
made); in it, Amadeo evolves towards abstraction and is the forerunner of abstractionism,
which would become, after the Second World War, the new modern art par excellence.
7. Exhibition flyer Semana de Arte Negra, 1946 However, this abstraction results from a combination between his commissioned work-
shop pieces, which led him to exhaustive studies of the compositional rules and the prop-
erties of the materials (such as glass, lead, tile, and the lime and sand in fresco painting),
and a continual attempt to create a free creative space and to communicate a universal
knowledge. In Almada’s work, mathematical and geometrical abstraction is not an end
in itself, but a means to discover a common language – with no homeland, timeless and
immemorial – of visual communication, the root of all representation. A rejection of rep-
resentation is not, thus, the issue at stake in Almada Negreiros’s geometrical works, which
in fact represent and narrate several models of the mathematical construction of space.
On the walls of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation he left the testimony of such a nar-
ration, from which, as he understood it, all art springs. To Begin is in fact a motto that
places geometry at the basis of art making, but it also embraces the free experimentation
in art and its ever-unfinished condition.
Almada’s artistic practice and the basis of his abstractionism contradict the notion
of evolutional linearity, and rather attest to the complex temporal web of modernity in
which his artistic route is enmeshed. To show this is to set Almada Negreiros’s work in
the context of the broad transnational and horizontal debate on modernity and mod-
ernisms in art history.
—————
69 Cf. Paula Lobo, “Almada and the maritime stations: the por-
trait of Portugal that the dictatorship wanted to erase”, Almada Ne-
greiros, Revista de História da Arte, series W, no. 2, 2014.
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