ALMADA NEGREIROS

José de ALMADA NEGREIROS (1893-1970)

For all those who knew him, Almada Negreiros was a charismatic figure. His name has become almost synonymous with twentieth century Portuguese art (a century he practically traversed, having died in 1970), and his popularity stretches beyond the confines of the specialist art audience, extending deep into the hearts of the general public.

The artist’s popularity is mostly attributable to the witty manner in which he allied his profound understanding of the values of modern times (for instance, his pioneering and passionate promotion of Modernism in Portugal through the Futurist movement between 1915 and 1917) with his fondness – manifest in his artistic and intellectual maturity – for the aesthetic and ideological values of tradition.

His success in negotiating this difficult equilibrium – as his extensive oeuvre of paintings, drawings, ballets, poetry and prose, essays and his theoretical and critical reflections confirms – conferred a degree of recognition upon Almada that remains unique amongst the artists of his era.

Almada Negreiros skirted around traditional artistic education (he did not study at any particular art school) and was first foisted on the public in 1912 at the I Salão dos Humoristas, in the halls of Lisbon’s Grémio Literário. His creative activity at the time encompassed illustration and caricature, which he published in satirical newspapers and magazines.

His interest in the graphic arts comprised publicity, posters, magazine covers, such as Contemporânea (1922) and interior decoration. His first paintings were of a decorative nature. Almada conceived works for several commercial establishments in Lisbon; for instance, the four figurative panels he executed in 1913 for the Alfaiataria Cunha (a tailor), which where followed at a later stage with other projects for Chiado’s A Brasileira café (As Banhistas [The Bathers] and Auto-Retrato num Grupo [Self Portrait in a Group]), and a large Nu (Nude), painted in 1926 for the Bristol Club – an important set of works that illustrates the first phase of his pictorial oeuvre [CAMJAP collection]).

Dance was another of his great passions. He began to dedicate himself to some choreographic projects in 1915 (for example, the ballet O Nome da Rosa), and managed to join the cast of Helena Castelo Melhor’s Ballet Company in 1918 as the first dancer, lead choreographer and costume designer.

He simultaneously wrote the novels Saltimbancos or Mima Fataxa (1916), K4 Quadrado Azul (1917), Histoire du Portugal par Coeur (1919), the latter having been written during a brief stay in Paris, and A Intervenção do Dia Claro (1921). These are merely some examples of his literary work; besides which he pursued his critical and programmatic interventions which culminated at the moment of his public reading of the Ultimatum Futurista às Gerações Portuguesas do Século XX (The Futurist Ultimatum for the Twentieth-Century Portuguese Generations) which took place in Lisbon at the Teatro da República in 1917. Throughout his life, Almada regularly collaborated with newspapers and magazines. He also published numerous articles of a critical and cultural nature in newspapers like the Diário de Lisboa, permanently defending the values of Art, visual creation and the artist’s social role in the Modern era.

Between 1927 and 1932, he established himself in Madrid, where he pursued his activities as a craftsman, illustrator and essayist. On his return from Spain, Almada committed his energies to acts of cultural promotion: he tabled conferences (Arte e Artistas [Art and Artists] in 1933, Elogio da Ingenuidade [Eulogy to Naiveté] in 1936; composed critical essays (Cuidado com a Pintura [Beware of Painting], 1934), published his novel (Nome de Guerra [Name of War], 1938), and created posters alongside stamps or official illustrated brochures. His friendship with António Ferro, ever since the Orpheu period (1915), led him to his collaboration with the recently created Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (Secretary of National Propaganda, 1935), the state organism that arranged his first retrospective exhibition in 1941 (Almada – Trinta Anos de Desenho [Almada, Thirty Years of Drawing]), awarding him the “Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro” Prize a year later, on the occasion of the VII Exposição de Arte Moderna (VII Exhibition of Modern Art).

Almada Negreiros was an artist of great merit, and was officially recognised as such during this period. His collaboration in numerous projects to decorate public buildings, belonging to the “Estado Novo”, affirmed itself in 1934 with his creation of the first studies for the stained glass windows of the new Nossa Senhora de Fátima Church, which was concluded in 1938. This modernist project would reveal a fecund partnership with architect Pardal Monteiro. Their collaboration was renewed in several projects, two of which deserve to be singled out: the two maritime platforms of Lisbon, which were realised in the 1940s (Gare Marítima de Alcântara, 1944 and Gare Marítima da Rocha do Conde de Óbidos, 1948).

Almada also experimented with other mediums, namely tapestry (Bailarina, 1949) and tiles or mosaics (for the Bloco das Águas-Livres in 1956), returning to stained glass with his drawings for the Santo Condestável Church in Lisbon (1951), to eventually embrace some interior design projects with his proposal for one of the rooms in the Ritz Hotel (Lisbon, 1959).From a plastic point of view, Almada’s work maintains its foundations in the persistence of drawing as the medium and objective of his creative activity. Neither Colour nor pictorial matter ever outdoes the limits imposed by the reason of his line. Even when he embraces greater experimentalism, informed by the experience of a post-cubist grammar where line cuts across plane, the contours of bodies remain synthetically resolved through an natural quality of delineation, which is often partakes of geometric definition (circles, arcs of circles, ovals…).

His preferred shapes were those belonging to people – the minstrels (Acrobatas [Acrobats, 1919]) and harlequins (Arlequim e Colombina [Harlequin and Colombina, 1938]); elegant women (Banhista [Bather, 1932]) and common female “types” (A Engomadeira [The Ironing Lady, 1938]; A Criada [The Maid, 1948]), and mothers with their children (Maternidade [Maternity, 1948]). The places regularly inhabited by these characters (Interior, 1948) – the cities with their cafés, the taverns and ports, these crowded places full of people in transit can be found in the large frescoes of the Gare Marítima da Rocha Conde de Óbidos, where the post-cubist idiom is transferred to the extremely colourful riverside scenes of Lisbon, the rhythm of work in the bay, the engines, cranes, stairs and hulks of ships.

The large Retrato de Fernando Pessoa (Portrait of Fernando Pessoa, 1945), an emblematic piece of pictorial production from the 1950s, was executed for the Lisbon restaurant Irmãos Unidos. The Modern Art Centre possesses a second version of this portrait, painted in 1964. Friends since 1913, Pessoa had already been portrayed by the artist in a drawing, exhibited in 1913 at the II Salão dos Humoristas. Fernando Pessoa majestically appears at the centre of this composition from 1954 with his felt hat and glasses, an image celebrated in endless reproductions.

At the end of the 1950s, Almada conceived works of an abstract nature, for instance, the four oils he created in 1957 (A Porta da Harmonia [Harmony’s Door], O Ponto de Bauhutte [Bauhutte Point], Quandrante 1 [Quadrant 1], Relação 9/10 [9/10 Relation] from the CAMJAP collection). Subordinated to the theme of geometric progression, these works seem to share the same thirst for order – perhaps the most mystical instant in Almada’s entire visual oeuvre. In this brief interval from his preferred figurative idiom, we find abstraction firmly inscribed within the limits of rational control – which is thereby classically humanised, the works never leaving margin for irrational or free expression.

Almada would recover the abstract syntax later on in the large allegorical mural Começar (concluded in 1968). These incisions in stone cover the main atrium of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s headquarters in Lisbon. The magical progression of numbers, translated by the geometric shape, is affirmed as is the formal principle of this composition.

Born in São Tomé in 1893, Almada became an orphan at the tender age of three. Living far from his father, who had sent him to Lisbon to study in 1900, Almada Negreiros spent his childhood as an intern in Lisbon colleges. An uprooted man, Almada attempted to fill the existential gap he carried throughout life with the polyvalent extensiveness of his oeuvre and his desire to affirm the plural artist he was. He thus created an emblematic self-image, according to a permanent act of narcissistic self-creation, with two large black asymmetrical eyes, delineated with thick eyebrows, and a face reduced to a scheme of straight lines, in permanent self interrogation (Auto-Reminiscência [Self-Reminiscence, 1949]).

The oeuvre of Almada Negreiros, for whom being a painter was “to be the absolute owner of ones self”, has received multiple awards and was subjected to an important retrospective at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, in 1993.

ANA FILIPA CANDEIAS