Almada Negreiros

Biography

In 1917, on the stage of the Teatro da República in Lisbon, a young man in a flying suit read out the “Futurist Ultimatum to the Portuguese Generations of the Twentieth Century”. It was Almada Negreiros, not yet twenty-five.

He was born on 7 April 1893 on the estate of Roça Saudade, near Trindade on the island of São Tomé, then part of the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe. His father, António Lobo de Almada Negreiros, was a cavalry officer and district administrator; his mother, Elvira Sobral, came from the same island. She died in 1896. In 1900 the boy and his brother António were sent to the Jesuit boarding school in Campolide, Lisbon, where they lived until the school was closed after the republican revolution of 1910. After a short spell at the lyceum in Coimbra, he attended the Escola Internacional in Lisbon from 1911 to 1913. He seems not to have had systematic art training: some accounts call him self-taught, others mention study at an art school.

He began drawing and publishing while still a schoolboy. From 1911 his caricatures appeared in the humorous magazine A Sátira; in 1912 he wrote and illustrated an entire handwritten newspaper, A Paródia, and showed work at an exhibition of Portuguese humorists. His first solo show took place in 1913 at the same school: ninety drawings. Fernando Pessoa answered it with an article, and that was how their acquaintance began. In 1914 Almada was art editor of the monarchist weekly Papagaio Real.

In 1915 he published prose in the first issue of Orpheu, the magazine that introduced modernism to Portuguese literature and art, and brought out the “Manifesto Anti-Dantas”, a sharp, mocking attack on the physician and writer Júlio Dantas, who had criticised the magazine, and on the older, bourgeois generation in general. The same year he wrote the novella “A Engomadeira” (published in 1917) and the poem “A Cena do Ódio” (“The Scene of Hatred”). A year later he backed the first Lisbon exhibition of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso with a manifesto, calling him Portugal’s first discovery in Europe in the twentieth century. With the painter Santa-Rita Pintor he produced the single issue of Portugal Futurista; the “Ultimatum” was delivered at about the same time. Oddly, he called himself a futurist in his texts, but in painting he barely came near the Italian Futurists. Cubism entered his language much later.

In the winter of 1917–18 Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes came to Lisbon. Almada led an amateur ballet company and served in it as scenarist, choreographer, costume designer and sometimes dancer. In 1918 Santa-Rita and Amadeo died, and he was left almost alone among the avant-garde.

In 1919 Almada left for Paris. He earned his living as a cabaret dancer and a warehouse worker, drew, and wrote the prose poem “Histoire du Portugal par coeur”. He looked for the avant-garde artists there but, in his own words, found no common cause with any of them. Back in Lisbon in 1920, he gave a lecture, “The Invention of the Clear Day”, in which the earlier aggressiveness gave way to a constructive tone. In 1921 he played one of the leading roles in the film “O Condenado”. In 1925 he painted two pictures for the Lisbon café A Brasileira, among them “Self-Portrait in a Group”, and wrote the novel “Nome de Guerra” (published in 1938). In 1926–27 he painted a nude for the Bristol Club, a nightclub.

In March 1927 he went to Madrid, took part in the gatherings at the Café Pombo, wrote for Spanish publications, composed the play “El Uno, tragedia de la Unidad” and made murals, among them a panel for the San Carlos cinema. He came back to Lisbon for good in 1932.

In 1934 he married the painter Sarah Afonso; in 1935 their son José was born. In those years he began working with the architect Pardal Monteiro: stained glass for the church of Nossa Senhora de Fátima and murals for the building of the newspaper Diário de Notícias. This period also covers his dealings with the Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime of António de Oliveira Salazar: he drew the poster “Vote for the New Constitution” (1933), designed a stamp with Salazar’s phrase “Everything for the Nation” (1935), and in 1965 was appointed to the Corporative Chamber, the regime’s advisory body. At the same time he publicly objected to Marinetti when the Italian visited Lisbon in 1932, and until 1940 he kept clear of official art policy.

The exhibition “Almada: Thirty Years of Drawing” (1941) was a turning point: the artist was accepted. In 1942 he received the Columbano Prize, and in 1946 the Domingos Sequeira Prize. In 1943 he designed sets for the opera “Inês de Castro”, then painted the murals of the maritime terminals at Alcântara (1945–47) and Rocha do Conde de Óbidos (1946–48). The Óbidos murals, in which Cubist frontality is combined with theatrical poses, on the departure of emigrants and a Lisbon Sunday, are considered by many the best mural painting in Portugal. I would say that his whole earlier drawing can be heard in them.

In 1954 he painted the “Portrait of Fernando Pessoa”: the poet sits in the Café Martinho da Arcada, the second issue of Orpheu on the table, his posture recalling a harlequin Almada had drawn in 1922. For more than thirty years he worked on Nuno Gonçalves’s Saint Vincent Panels, studying proportion, geometry and numerology, and declared that he had solved their construction. From 1957 he made panels for the façades of buildings at the University City of Lisbon, tapestries, and engravings on acrylic glass. In 1963, for his seventieth birthday, the first monograph on him appeared, written by José Augusto França. On 13 July 1967 he was made a Grand Officer of the Order of Saint James of the Sword. In 1968–69 he made the panel “Começar” for the entrance of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation building. In July 1969 he appeared in public for the last time, on the television programme Zip-Zip.

Almada Negreiros died on 15 June 1970 in Lisbon, in the Hospital of São Luís dos Franceses, in the same room where Pessoa had died.