Tag: portugal

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso

The Artwork of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso

Born in November of 1887 in the town of Manhule, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso was one of the first generation of Portuguese modernist painters. Known for the exceptional quality of his work, his short career covered all the historical avant-garde movements of the early twentieth=century. 

The son of a wealthy landowner and vintner, Amadeo, at the age of eighteen, traveled to Lisbon and entered the Superior School of Fine Arts where he developed his skills as a designer and caricaturist. In November of 1906, he traveled to Paris with his friend and painter Francisco Smith and lived in an apartment on the Boulevard de Montparnasse. After a caricature he had drawn during a dinner was published  in Portugal’s “O Primerro de Jameiro” newspaper, Amadeo decided to devote himself to painting. 

In 1908, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso established himself at a studio located at 14 Cité Falguière , which became a social gathering place for Portuguese artists including Manuel Bentes, Eduardo Viana, and Domingos Rebelo, among others. At this time, Amadeo began to attend the ateliers of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Viti, where he studied under the Spanish painter Angalada Camarasa, whose use of intense coloring presaged the arrival of Fauvism. 

In 1911, Amadeo exhibited his work in the Salon des Indépendents and soon became close friends with writers and artists such as Gertrude Stein, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Archipenko, Robert Delaunay, and the Italian Futurists Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini.  In 1912, Amadeo published his album, “XX Dessuab”, containing twenty drawings with a forward written by author Jerome Doucet, and republished Gustave Flaubert’s “La Légende de Saint Julien to l’Hospitalier” in a calligraphic manuscript with illustrations. Amadeo de Souza Cardoso participated in two important exhibitions in 1913: the Armory Show in the United States that traveled to New York City, Boston and Chicago, and the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon held at the Galerie Der Strum in Berlin. These two exhibitions were the first to present the new wave of modern art to the public. Seven of the eight works Amadeo displayed at the Armory show sold; three of these were purchased by lawyer and art critic Arthur Jerome Eddy, a prominent member of the first generation of American modern art collectors.

Returning to Portugal in 1914, Amadeo began experimentation in all the new forms of artistic expression, and married Lucia Pecetto, whom he had previously met during his 1908 stay in Paris. In April of 1914, he sent three new works for an exhibition at the London Salon; however, due to the outbreak of World War I, the show was canceled. During the war years, Amadeo maintained contact with other Portuguese artists and poets and reunited with Robert and Sonia Delaunay who had relocated to Portugal. In 1916, he published his “Twelve Reproductions” through Tipografia Santos in Porto and exhibited a collection of one hundred-fourteen works at a solo exhibition in Oporto and later in Lisbon, entitled “Abstraccionism”. 

At this time, the Cubist movement had  expanded throughout Europe and was an important influence to Amadeo de Souza Cardoso’s  style of analytical cubism. He continued to explore expressionism and, in his last works, experimented with many new techniques. In 1918, Amadeo was stricken with a skin disease which impeded his painting. On the 25th of October in 1918, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso died, at the age of thirty, in Espinho, Portugal, of the Spanish influenza, a pandemic which savaged the world at the end of World War I. 

After his death, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso’s work was shown in a 1925 retrospective in France which was well received by both critics and the public. Ten years later, the Souza-Cardoso Prize was established in Portugal to distinguish modern painters. Amadeo’s work remained relatively unknown until 1952, when a exhibition of his work in Portugal regained the public’s attention. Since then, only two retrospectives have been held, one in 1958 and one in 2016, both at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Tope Insert Image: Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, “The Hawks”, 1912, India Ink on Paper, 27 x 24.3 cm, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Amadeo de Souza Cordoso, “Self Portrait”, 1913, Graphite on Paper, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

Antonio Botto

The Poet: Antonio Botto

Born in Concavada, Portugal, in August of 1897, António Botto was one of Portugal’s first openly gay writers, a ‘poète maudit’, cursed poet, whose unapologetic and candid verses about homosexual life and passion were both praised and reviled.

Antonio Botto was born in a working class neighborhood, and lived by working a series of menial jobs. He was poorly educated, gaining most of his knowledge from the books in the bookshop where he clerked. In his mid-twenties, Botto entered civil service as a administrative clerk in the state’s offices. He worked briefly in Zaire and Angola, before returning to Lisbon in 1925, where he worked as a civil servant.

Botto’s first book of poems “Tovas” was published in 1917, followed by “Cantigas de Saudade” in 1918, “Cantares” in 1919 and “Cançōes do Sul” in 1920. Botta’s fourth book of poems, entitled “Cançōes (Songs)”. was first published in 1921 and was largely ignored until his friend,  the poet Fernando Pessoa, published a second edition in 1922 under his own publishing company and publicly praised the work. 

Conservatives reacted strongly against the poems and denounced  them as ‘Sodom’s literature”, leading authorities to ban the book in 1923. This public scandal in the Lisbon society granted Botto a life-long notoriety. After the scandal subsided in 1924, the ban was lifted, enabling Botto to publish several revised editions of his “Cançōes “.

On November 9, 1942, Antonio Botto was expelled from the civil service for disobeying a superior’s orders; wooing a male co-worker, addressing him with ambiguous words with tendencies condemned by social morals; and for writing and reciting verses during working hours, thus disrupting workplace discipline. After this dismissal, Botto attempted to earn his livelihood by the royalties from his books, and writing articles and critiques in newspapers. 

With little funds and deteriorating health from refusing treatment for syphilis, Antonio Botto raised funds through recitals for passage to Brazil in 1947. Well received upon arrival, he attended banquets and tributes throughout Brazil. He resided in Sāo Paulo until 1951, when he moved to Rio de Janeiro, surviving on royalties, writing articles and columns in Brazil’s newspapers, and doing radio shows; but gradually his situation deteriorated. 

Rejected in his attempts for repatriation to his home country of Portugal, Botto fell seriously ill in 1956 and was hospitalized for a time. On March 4, 1959, he was run over by a motor vehicle, with the result of a broken skull, and went into a coma. Antonio Botto died on March 16, 1959. His remains were transferred to Lisbon and have been buried since 1966 in the Alto de Sāo João Cemetery.

In his writings, Botto’s poetic voice, personal and intimate, revels in eroticism while expressing the ache of longing, silence, and suffering. Gaining acclaim and notoriety, he was both hailed as one of the great Portuguese poets of his day and condemned for his frank depictions of male to male desire. Antonio Botto and his work fell into oblivion after his death in 1959. However, within the last ten years with the rising interest in gay history, his works, including biographies of his life, have been issued in new editions available both in Portuguese and English.

Rui Palha

The Photograpy of Rui Palha

Rui Palha is a street photographer born in April 1953 in Portugal. He is now living and working in Lisbon. Photography was his hobby since the age of fourteen; now since 2001 he has devoted almost all his time to street photography.

In 1992, Palha won a sivler medal in the Salão Nacional de Arte Fotográfica, He won a gold medal in the black and white category at the 4º Salão Internacional CAF Internet SICAFI in 2003.

“Photography is a very important part of my space…it is to discover, it is to capture giving flow to what the heart feels and sees in a certain moment, it is being in the street, experiencing, understanding, learning and, essentially, practicing the freedom of being, of living, of thinking.” – Rui Palha

Mario Henrique

Mario Henrique, “Red Rhino”, 2018, Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, 149.9 x 149.9 cm, Private Collection

Mario Henrique is a painter based in Cascais, Portugal. He graduated with a degree in Communication Design from Lisbon’s University of Fine Arts in 2005 and earned his Masters Degree in 2007. Working as a creative director, he recruited and led teams working on various digital projects in Portugal, Spain and Brazil. As partner and head of design in one of these projects, he would eventually be part of a successful exit via acquisition, and then shifted his focus to contemporary painting, which had always been a parallel interest.

A prolific portraitist, Mario Henrique is fascinated by the unpredictability of the human behaviour: the brief glances, the impermanence of facial expressions, the sudden movements. Making use of uncommon and “rough” materials, like cardboards, reversed canvases and hardware tools, he paints abruptly and spontaneously. His approach relies on drippings, splashes and paint throws, so that the physicality of the painting process is transparent in the final piece.

Listed in various private collections across Europe, America and Asia, he has exhibited in galleries both locally and abroad, and was awarded an Honourable Mention for his participation in the Brasília Biennial of Contemporary Arts 2016. He is featured in Saatchi Art’s Inside The Studio and is currently represented by the prestigious Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. Mario owns a studio-gallery at the Marina, in Cascais, Portugal, where some of his paintings are publicly exhibited.

Calendar: January 6

Year: Day to Day Men: January 6

Just Slightly Peeking

On the sixth of January in 1501, construction began on Portugal’s Jerónimos Monastery in the parish of Belém of the Lisbon Municipality. This monastery became the necropolis of the Portuguese royal dynasty, the House of Aviz, in the sixteenth-century until its secularization in December of 1833 by state decree. Its ownership was then transferred to the Real Casa Pia de Lisboa, a charitable institution. 

The Jerónimos Monastery was designed by architect Diogo de Boitaca, an influential architect and engineer of some of the most important buildings in Portugal. In this church, he continued his concept of a nave, the central part of the church, and two side aisles of equal height which unified the inner space as in a hall church. The richly ornate vaulting in the main chapel shows ribs with the shape of a twisted rope, a common theme of the Manueline style which incorporated maritime elements. The Jerónimos Monasteryis considered the most prominent of the late Portuguese Gothic Manueline style of Lisbon architecture. 

The Jerónimos Monastery was erected near the Tagus River launch point of Vasco de Gama’s first journey; its construction was funded by a five percent tax on the profits of the yearly Portuguese India Armadas. With the influx of such riches as imported spices and the redirection of funds from other proposed monasteries, Diogo de Boitaca was not limited to small-scale plans. He chose calcário de lioz, a gold-colored limestone for its construction. During his span of overseeing the construction, De Boitaca was responsible for drawing the plans and contracting work on the monastery, the sacristy and the refectory. 

Architect Juan de Castillo succeeded Diogo de Boitaca in 1517. He moved from the Manueline to the Spanish Plateesque style, an ornamentation that included decorative features constructed of silverware, plata. With the death of King Manuel I, construction halted until 1550, at which time architect Diogo de Torralva was in charge. He was followed by Jérôme de Rouen who added some classical elements. Throughout the following years, construction was halted several more times before the monastery’s completion, a span of work that lasted over one hundred years.

The Jerónimos Monastery became in 1640 a burial place for the Portuguese royal families. Among those entombed within the monastery were four of the eight children of John IV, King Alfonso VI, the Infanta Joana, and Catarina de Bragança. In 1880, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s remains and those of poet Luís de Camões, who wrote “The Lusiad, a celebration of da Gama’s first voyage, were moved to newly carved tombs in the monastery’s nave, just a few feet from the tombs of Kings Manuel I and John III, who da Gama served. The monastery is classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

Ygor Marotta and Ceci Soloaga

Ygor Marotta and Ceci Soloaga, Projected Animation

Artists Ygor Marotta and Ceci Soloaga of VJ Suave were recently invited to participate in the Walk&Talk art residency on São Miguel Island, Azores, Portugal. The duo transformed their projected street art animations to happily dance across the trees, cliffs, and shores of the the island including the Lagoa das Empadadas, Porto da Ribeirinha, Cachoeira do Cabrito and Lagoa das Sete Cidades. Using long exposure, VJ Suave captured their interventions with nature, creating the two GIFs seen here.

Walkways Along the Paiva River

Walkways Along the Paiva River in Portugal

Paiva Walkways, designed by C. M. Arouca and Trimetrica, embraces the Paiva river with an extension of 8km, providing a walking path with a breathtaking natural beauty, with picturesque landscapes, waterfalls and a variety of fauna and flora species.

More than a simple walk in contact with the nature, this is an unique experience deeply characterized by a dramatic landscape and an infrastructure that interferes as little as possible with the landscape.

This is an unusual experience marked by winding stairs to the top of the hill with stunning sceneries, and a very narrow wooden bridge which spans across the river among cliffs and abundant vegetation. The walkway continues along the topography, with rest stops and strategic panoramic points to admire the view.