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Writer's picture@ Cynthia Adina Kirkwood

Portuguese Modernist Almada Negreiros Represents in Spain

In a cultural initiative with Spain, Auto-Retrato em Grupo (Pintura para o café "A Brasileira" do Chiado, Lisboa), or Self-Portrait in a Group (Painting for the cafe "A Brasileira" do Chiado, Lisbon) (1925), oil on canvas, by José Sobral de Almada Negreiros (on the left), is on exhibit in Madrid until January 2025.


Those seated beside the artist (from the left) are the Spanish actress and dancer Júlia de Aguilar, the actress Aurora Gil and the professor Dória Nazaré, at the Brasileira, which he frequented but these were "three people who were not part of his intellectual universe or friendships", and it shows, according to RTP Ensina.


The three, with pale and static faces, look in the same direction – at the sheet of paper that the professor is holding, while Almada Negreiros observes, oblivious to the rest, a sketch that he holds in his hand.


The painter wanted to highlight the absence of friends and artists and, as he himself said, “the lack of others, of others like me, of others who come to me and I to them,” reported RTP Ensina.


Is he holding a sketch of celebrated writer Fernando Pessoa, one of his best friends, whom he depicted in several pieces?

 

Under the aegis of Almada Negreiros' oil painting, Self-Portrait in a Group, the Portuguese and Spanish Ministers of Culture announced the 22nd Cultura Portugal program at the Reina Sofia Museum of the National Art Center in Madrid on October 3, reported Expresso (October 4).


Through December, Cultura Portugal will promote national culture.


"More than 200 Portuguese artists, musicians, writers, directors, dancers, thinkers, architects, actors, editors and illustrators in more than 70 activities will enrich the cultural activity of 21 locations in Spain and Andorra with the best of Portuguese creation," according to the Embassy of Portugal in Spain, reported Expresso.


The director of the Reina Sofia Museum, Manuel Segade, said that it was "a true privilege to be able to exhibit the masterpiece of the Portuguese avant-garde". He said that visitors have the opportunity to view the Almada Negreiros painting in dialogue with pieces by the surrealists Salvador Dalí and Ángeles Santos as well as paintings by Pablo Picasso, including Guernica, which is hung nearby.


José Sobral de Almada Negreiros (Trinidade, São Tomé and Príncipe 1893 -- Lisbon 1970) actually lived in Madrid (1927-1932) for several years after a short stint in Paris (1919-1920) before returning to Portugal, according to Público (February 3, 2017).  


Almada Negreiros challenged the old order by breaking with it.


"Almada Negreiros is part of a certain collective imagination when it comes to 20th century art in Portugal," according to Público.


"Almada derived the idea that modernism had to be present in everything in life, that modernism was not a movement to which one belonged -- it was what one did, what one was," said Mariana Pinto dos Santos, art historian and curator of the 2017 Gulbenkian exhibit, which represented his 60 years of work in 400 pieces of paintings, drawings, ceramics, cinema, graphic novels, theater and ballet. It also included guided tours of his frescoes at the maritime stations of Alcântara and Roche de Conde de Óbidos, a play (Antes de Começar) and a concert (La Tragedia de Doña Ajada).


"José de Almada Negreiros does whatever he wants. He is the great acrobat of modern Portuguese art . . . For Almada Negreiros, art is a showcase of toys. He winds up this one, he winds up that one -- but he does not decide on any of them . . . Almada does not decide on any art. All art, however, decided on him," said António Ferro, a writer and force behind the autocratic Estado Novo's cultural policy, in Diário de Lisboa (1921), according to Público.


"The Portuguese man without a master" was a power with the written word as well as in the visual arts. His first signed drawing was published in 1911, in A Sátira, according to Visão (June 14, 1995). He would gain fame in 1915 with the legendary Anti-Dantas Manifesto, in full, published on the occasion of the premiere of a play by Júlio Dantas, who was fiercely critical of the avant-garde Modernist movement.


With writers Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon 1888 -- Lisbon 1935) and Mário de Sa-Carneiro (Lisbon 1890 -- Paris 1916), Almada Negreiros became part of the first Portuguese modernist group, which was influenced by European aesthetic movements, such as Futurism and Expressionism. The three collaborated for the first issue of the scandalous Orpheu, edited by António Ferro (Lisbon 1895 -- Lisbon 1956), and became known as the Geração d'Orpheu, or the Orpheu Generation.


The Renaissance man of São Tomé described the two issues of Orpheu as "the first modern cry to be heard in Portugal", reported RTP Ensina.


Almada Negreiros was the eldest son of António Lobo de Almada Negreiros, a native of Aljustrel in Beja District, and Elvira Freire Sobral, who was born on the island colony of São Tomé, the daughter of a plantation owner, according to Visão. His father, a municipality administrator, was a writer and journalist. His mother, educated in Portugal, was the daughter of a woman from Benguela, Angola, also a Portuguese colony. After her death in 1896, when the future artist was three, Almada and his brother, António, lived with their maternal uncles in Cascais.


In 1900, they entered the Jesuit College in Campolide, Lisbon, as boarding students. After the establishment of the Portuguese Republic on October 5, 1910, the college was forced to close its doors. Almada, then, attended the Liceu de Coimbra and, later, the International School of Lisbon.


Today, the Jesuit College is part of the heritage of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences is called Colégio Almada Negreiros.

 

José Sobral de Almada Negreiros (Trinidade, São Tomé and Príncipe 1893 -- Lisbon 1970) (Photo from Público)

 






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