Amadeo finally in the right place – Observer

The purpose of the exhibition that opens this Wednesday at the Grand Palais in Paris, Vasco Rosa travels through the history of the works of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, who now come where deserve to be

Amadeo exposure Souza-Cardoso at the Grand Palais in Paris, included in the cycle of celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the presence of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in the French capital, will by long time in the history of cultural diplomacy (the naive assumption that we have actually one) and certainly for some time in the memory of those French, Portuguese, other Europeans, Americans or Asians to visit. Although his paintings have been shown in Europe and America outside in exhibitions of his own or his with others, especially after the great Lisbon exposure 2006-7 (when they were first systematically seen alongside works of other artists in the vanguard gone in 1910), the privileged and mythical centrality of the place, the authorities and the media involved, foreign art historians who wrote for the catalog, and notably the work of the curators Helena de Freitas and Leonor Oliveira with Parisian counterparts (stating in the plan international, strong our expertise in this sector, in addition to the already recognized João Fernandes and Pedro Gadanho), allow us to rely on happy exceptionality of this achievement that seeks to put the painter Amarante, as early gone, once and for all in high -roda of European vanguards of the beginning of the last century .

it was often equated what would Amadeo de Souza Cardoso have done in October 1918 had not been collected by a devastating outbreak of Spanish flu that decimated part of your family and many thousands of north to south of the country – and left somehow “orphans” the Orpheu, Portugal Futurist and surroundings . But this awareness, which was between us very late, can now grow a little more, because from 2006 to 2016 considerable progress in the historiography of the aesthetic vanguards were encouraged by major exhibitions and monographs. (In the peripheral Portuguese case, the magazine’s centenary Orpheu is the most important.) “Between 1918 and 1956 – Freitas Helena wrote the proven catalog of 2008 (also now reprinted and” added “) – it is known that Amadeo there, you hear talk of his genius but it is not known the true dimension of his work, “which made him” a legend “and therefore” subject to a stubborn claim: the need for to see”. Something that Fernando Rosa Dias call, concisely, “the strong presence of its unreality and exception.”

Apart from exultant José de Almada Negreiros, the critical reception of Amadeo exhibition at the Naval League of Lisbon and the Mercy of Porto, in 1916, was so adverse order to the painter, his widow and heiress, Lucie Cardoso, having promoted a retrospective of Amadeo’s work in a prestigious Parisian gallery in 1925 – when, it should be noted, the great Exhibition of Decorative Arts – will be considered a useless and inconvenient nuisance demote of your apartment in Paris the paintings to be seen a second time by almost blind and southern goons. Some consider, as Alexandre Pomar, it would have been better for the artistic fortune of Amadeo that atavistic retention – although surely love – the paintings of Amadeo by his widow gave way to his revelation to the international art market , where its quality would be exposed to scrutiny and recognized. Were finally needed the gentle persuasions of Paulo Ferreira, who she worked in the House of Portugal (there were also attempts Ambassador Guilherme de Castilho), so that finally the gave way to the spot to be seen in Porto, Lisbon and Amarante in 1951 and 1956. the all great titles António Pedro wrote then (1956): “it is an extraordinary fact that there officially a Souza-Cardoso premium and there is a Museum of Contemporary Art in Portugal, and is relatively easy to collect for a total exposure, work of this artist who is in the hands of half a dozen people have been waiting 38 years after his death and it should be a private initiative, without resources beyond the good will, this incomplete exposure. | Serve it to the attention of those entitled to this unforgivable lapse and would be worth it to have it done. “

At this point, as stated by Helena de Freitas, were primarily painters who best wrote about the work Amadeo, referring, I think, Fernando Lanhas, Nikias Skapinakis and José Escada. One hostility of artistic means to a small second book of José Augusto France on Amadeo (Artis publisher, 1960) was demonstrated in a design acid João Abel Manta out in Lisbon Daily , but the critical intrepid and cultural historian would amend the hand twenty-six years after , a book dedicated jointly to Amadeo and Almada, calling them respectively “the Portuguese force” and “the Portuguese masterless” .

Amadeo and fellows Portuguese friends in Paris (1907), a shyster to a frame of Velázquez (image: Modern Art Centre)

also the calendar here was decisive: in Amadeo centenary de Souza-Cardoso, in 1987, the Gulbenkian Foundation was placed firmly at the forefront of this essential rescue , after seven decades in which the Portuguese State did nothing to acquire, in 1953, five works to the museum of contemporary art, in Chiado. First, it bought a significant amount of core work (who does not remember the Greyhounds to open the old permanent exhibition of Acarte? …) And received donations from longeva Lucie Cardoso, including Corpus Christi . A catalog of 634 pages gives us, today, irrefutable measure of the effort made by the Foundation to remedy this disturbing cultural gap, but the greatest benefit achieved, beyond a first information systematization and location of scattered works in private collectors, it was without doubt the acquisition and qualified safeguard painter’s estate (strictly speaking, only a part of it) of years to this part organized and made available online by the Gulbenkian Art Library. Other progress – and auspicious, as we have seen – it consisted in the appearance and collaboration of two young art historians, recently graduated from the New University of Lisbon: the own Helena de Freitas (1958-) and the ill-fated Antonio Rodrigues (1956- 2008) , author of today fundamental work on Christiano Cruz and Jorge Barradas. The same generation and training, Bernardo Pinto de Almeida (1954-) sign in 2008 the long entry “Souza-Cardoso” in Fernando Pessoa dictionary and Portuguese modernism coordinated by Fernando Cabral Martins.

the expository approach and historiographical science then gave evident qualitative leaps, and a first chance for internationalization of the painter’s work would appear shortly after from September to December 1991 in Brussels Europalia. In the catalog, the Acciaiuoli Margaret Commissioner says Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, whose work “remains suspended in the silence of the bridges launched for the future”, it “pays more than anyone revisiting” while Pierre Cabanne (one French critic specializing in Picasso and Duchamp famous interviewers) points out that “all young Portuguese painters Paris attracted Souza-Cardoso is the one who deals with modernity, its modernity.” In 1999 a choice of tables went to Washington and Chicago, integrating Amadeo the historiographical reassessment underway a major European art exhibition in New York, Chicago and Boston, known for The Armory Show , where he He participated in 1913. Laura Coley wrote for the catalog of “Amadeo and America,” Rosemary O’Neill on Amadeo and Delaunays, Kenneth Silver on “Amadeo in the Tower of Babel” (in this case, even Paris), and a magazine Robert J. Loescher be admitted Amadeo “a neglected artist” (this is the very title of the article), and “the best kept secret of the first modernism”. Exposed in Hamburg in 2007, the work of Amadeo caused a similar sense of discovery and revelation, recognizing the critical art plastic affinities with German modernism. In fact, he had exposed in Berlin, in the magazine’s gallery Sturm in 1915.

Although his paintings have been shown in Europe and America outside in exhibitions of his own or his with others, especially after the great Lisbon exhibition 2006-7, the privileged and mythical centrality of place , the authorities and the media involved, foreign art historians who wrote for the catalog, and notably the work of the curators Helena de Freitas and Leonor Oliveira with Parisian counterparts, let us trust the happy exceptionality of this achievement

This extraordinary or extravagant evidence of a European periphery painter who went through the eye of the avant-garde drilling and then, in a short hectic period in the isolation of a minhoto corner (his home in Manhufe, Amarante ), produce the best of his plastic experimentation , and then by an obtuse coincidence, welcome and dialogue with Robert and Sonia Delaunay, exiled painters in Vila do Conde and delighted with Portuguese folk art (with which dreamed exhibit in Barcelona), it would be increasingly evaluated in the following years, until the exposure of 2006-7 which, under the concept of a “vanguards of dialogue”, mobilized for two or three years a considerable comparative laboratory art history of the first two decades of the twentieth century, and whose success was confirmed by 117,000 visitors in three months view.

it can be said that in Portugal, only the financial capacity and tradition or prestige cooperation institutional beyond the borders of the Gulbenkian could have carried out such a demanding and expensive project , we also made three albums illustrated, documentary very rich, and how to toast the first edition facsimile d ‘ Legend of Saint Julian Hospitable Gustave Flaubert, who Amadeo illustrated and caligrafou in 1912. we are talking about 1700 large format pages devoted to a single artist, what makes Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso – that the Gulbenkian holds most of the works: 200 in total – the Portuguese painter to the foundation dedicated to more continuous, complex and consistent museological and archival attention. Not by chance, I think, the party birthday cake thirties the Modern Art Centre in 2013, was inspired by a detail of a frame her.

Lucie Cardoso in Paris, with the paintings of Amadeo (photo: Collection Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Art Library FCG-)

the campaign of the Paris exhibition this year is not a simple replica of the work done for 2006, or could be, really . These ten years – a full ephemeris decade of great artists and aesthetic movements (our Orpheu , the Armory American Show, and others) and review of the first war influence on European art – new fields of research were created by free access or facilitated the personal and institutional archives (particularly in the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris), the expansion of digital consultation of periodicals of the time and the critical or historiographical curiosity by said “modernismes Périphériques”. In this retrospective globalized context, the “question Amadeo” win a good opportunity to be seen internationally as such “hidden treasure” that the US Loescher referred. Internally, new approaches to Amadeo emerged however, with Joana Cunha Leal highlighted.

Amadeo exhibition catalog at the Grand Palais, Sylvie Hubac, president of the Réunion des musées nationaux, says Amadeo “L ‘ histoire de l’art to pourtant longtemps oublié son génie “(something like” the history of art has long forgotten his genius “), an alarming and hopeful statement. Collaborate, and Helena de Freitas, with the beautiful and inspired essay “Jumping Rabbit” (reference to Amadeo frame acquired in 1913 by an important American collector), art historians Christian Briend, which presents the critical reception the painter in his Parisian period, Javier Arnaldo, which focuses on the painter’s relations with the Berlin movement Blaue Reiter, while Christine Gernier writes about identity and modernity in Amadeo, Jean-Claude Marcadé discusses the final stage of masks heads. Filomena Molder, prefaciadora of Flaubert Amadeo, publishes a new essay entitled “The library in flames” and Catarina Alfaro, who has collaborated in the Lisbon exhibition and is the author of a monograph on Amadeo, signs a painter’s biography, but there is clearly here a step forward, given the prevalence and variety of foreign attention on his work. What if this critical role of Souza-Cardoso can not be regarded as a strict novelty, it is also a good indicator of the proper conduct of this campaign for its international valuation , which takes, as I said, the general movement reassessment of the history of plastic and aesthetic vanguards. It may be that – as with Fernando Pessoa. – Are now “experts” foreign to lead the study and recognition of “our best painter of all time”

Working “like an animal” (his own words ) in his studio in Manhufe, Amadeo planned to return to Paris and show what he had done. For him there is finally in the right place at the right time.