(1893-1970)
An artist with a yearning for the future
When the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon) assembled over 400 works for a major exhibition to commemorate the 120th anniversary of Almada Negreiros’s birth, one of the aspects that most impressed visitors was the diversity of work he produced.
Painting, ceramics, mosaics, stained glass, drawings, caricature, scenography, film, plays, literature, poetry, essays, dramaturgy and ballets were the “instruments” the artist used to compose one of the most remarkable “scores” in 20th-century Portugal.
A man of his era, the art he left us reflected not just his innate talent, but also the influence of the Modernist movement, which was born at the start of the last century and endured, in Portugal, until the 1970s. The Modernists advocated an unrestricted, non-compartmentalised art in which techniques could intermix freely to create something new.
This incessant quest was the key to its “extraordinary artistic dispersal”, as its surprising eclecticism was described at the time. Not by chance, two years before his death, at 75, Almada created a mural entitled Começar [Beginning] for the Gulbenkian Foundation. More than a title for a new artwork, Começar is a statement. It reveals the attitude to life of this intrepid Portuguese Modernist, who was also a leading figure of the Futurist movement which urged a break with the past and a celebration of modern technology and geometry, the artistic expression of mathematics.
Born in São Tomé and Príncipe on 7th April 1893, José Sobral de Almada Negreiros moved to Lisbon with his family as a child, where he spent most of his life. He went to a Jesuit-run school where he developed an interest in the classics, but he never had any formal training in the arts.
Even without encouragement, his vocation soon became evident. His first works were humorous drawings and his first signed work dates from 1911. As a youth, he frequented the debates in the Baixa district of Lisbon and became familiar with leading figures in the art world and intelligentsia, such as the poets Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá Carneiro, and the painters Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Santa Rita Pintor. With them, he formed the Orpheus Group, responsible for the introduction of Modernism in the Portuguese arts and letters.
While still a young man (1919), Almada was drawn to Paris where the Modernist movement was in full swing. For about a year, he wrote and painted there while doing a wide variety of jobs to sustain himself.
He only left Portugal again in 1927, when he settled in Madrid. During that time, he socialised with the poet Garcia Lorca, the filmmaker Luís Buñuel, and met Marinetti, the founder of Futurism. During his stay in Spain, he created artwork for the Ciudad Universitaria de Madrid and was responsible for decorating the San Carlos and Barceló cinemas and the Muñoz Seca Theatre.
Though irreverent and, as a leading member of the Orpheus Group, set on giving “public taste a slap in the face”, as the Russian poet Mayakovsky, one of Modernism’s advocates, proclaimed, Almada Negreiros was never a political activist. An important part of his work was commissioned by architects and engineers working for Portugal’s dictatorial Estado Novo (New State) (1926-1974), such as Duarte Pacheco and Pardal Monteiro, but through it contributed decisively to the building of 20th-century Portugal.
At a very young age, Almada Negreiros witnessed Portugal’s difficult transition from a monarchy to a republic. He was only 17 when the republic was declared, an act which brought a process of strong opposition to the monarchical regime, culminating in regicide in 1908, to an end.
The times that followed were far from peaceful. The First Republic has gone down in the Portuguese history books as a period marked by struggles between freemasons, republicans and members of the Carbonari (a secret and revolutionary society). In the 16 years the First Republic lasted, there were 45 governments, 8 presidents and 7 parliaments. At the time, the political chaos created an unsustainable economic situation, with the country in a state of bankruptcy and growing social upheaval.
On 28th May 1926, a military coup put an end to this precarious democracy, establishing a dictatorship which from 1933 was called the Estado Novo, “New State”. Salazar was the central figure of this new regime that endured until 1974, four years after the death of Almada Negreiros. For some four decades, Portugal was kept deliberately peripheral, with no social mobility and a human development index far below the European average.
Perhaps due to his disenchantment with both the degrading spectacle of the First Republic and the Salazar dictatorship, Almada Negreiros always presented himself as “apolitical” and cultivated a distance that led the powers that be to consider him an outsider.
Resistant in his own way, the artist used this distance as a space in which he could develop his creativity without constraint, based on a style very much his own and totally outside the established canons.
In the Valmor Prize-winning building where the newspaper Diário de Notícias was housed for decades, there are important works by Almada. A 54-metre map of the world engraved in stone dominated a hall on the ground floor where the paper operated until 2016. There was also a map of Portugal depicting the four seasons of the year. In the lobby, Alegoria à Imprensa [Allegory to the Press] was the artist’s homage to an activity he saw as spreading culture and a testimony for the future.
Inspired by the illustrations in international magazines of the time, in 1913 Almada Negreiros created an oil painting depicting a lady and a knight for the now vanished Cunha Tailor’s in Lisbon’s Baixa district. Full of glamour, but in a relaxed pose, they correspond closely to the early-20th-century stereotype of elegance and the look cultivated by the painter.
At Lisbon Museum – Pimenta Palace, there is a ceramic panel that was commissioned for the Ática Bookshop, since closed down. Its theme is reading and the expression of the reader depicted is one of the purest delight, unsurprising given that Almada Negreiros himself was also a lover of books and author of manifestos, articles, essays, poems and even a novel. Around this reader, the artist drew everything that can be learnt from books: from the mystery of life to the magic of the stars. This piece is in storage and cannot currently be observed.
Source: Catalogue of the exhibition José de Almada Negreiros – A Way of Being Modern
Almada Negreiros’s sole novel, written in 1925 and published in 1938, is essentially about the struggle between an individual’s personality and social norms. The main character is a young man from the provinces who arrives in the city and falls in love with a prostitute.
Although unsuccessful when it came out, it was acclaimed by some critics as an innovative work “of extremely sophisticated simplicity”. It was republished in 2017.
On sale at bookshops
Orphaned at a tender age, Almada Negreiros devoted many of his works to the theme of motherhood. Besides the famous oil painting exhibited at the Gulbenkian Museum, he made a series of drawings of extraordinary dramatic intensity. Of these, 26 were reproduced in a book published in 1982 by the Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda. In 2017, it was republished years after the original print run.
On sale at bookshops
Fascinated by everything that was new and open to all forms of artistic expression, Almada Negreiros also explored film as a scenographer and even as an actor. Standing out amongst his works in this area are the posters he created for the film Canção de Lisboa (1939), a seminal work in Portuguese film.
Source: Catalogue of the exhibition José de Almada Negreiros – A Way of Being Modern
The catalogue for the exhibition to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the birth of Almada Negreiros, organised in 2017 by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, is a precious source of information as it brings together the artist’s most significant works from every field. The over 400 artworks in the exhibition are presented in the catalogue through photos and explanatory texts, alongside a well developed biographical note.
On sale at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation