Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso

Biography

In 1913, of the eight pictures sent to America for the Armory Show, the Portuguese painter Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso sold seven. Three of them, “Saut du Lapin”, “Château Fort” and “Paysage”, were bought by Jerome Eddy, the author of the first book in English on Cubism. That collector’s opinion determined for many years how Amadeo was read: brilliant and refined, but no more than that.

He was born on 14 November 1887 in Manhufe, in the parish of Mancelos near Amarante, into a well-off, devout family of rural bourgeoisie; there were nine children. His father, a wine grower and landowner, wanted to give them a practical education. Amadeo studied at the lyceum in Amarante, then in Coimbra, and in 1905 he entered the preparatory drawing course at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Lisbon. In November of the following year, on his nineteenth birthday, he left for Paris and settled in Montparnasse. He spent the years from 1907 to 1914 there, visiting home from time to time. At first he prepared for admission to the architecture course, partly for the sake of his family, but he abandoned the plan. By then he was already publishing caricatures in Portuguese periodicals, “O Primeiro de Janeiro” (1907) and “Illustração Popular” (1908–1909). As a painter he probably began in 1907, and in 1909 he studied with Anglada Camarasa at the Académie Vitti. His first pieces, small cafés and landscapes, are still timid, but in some of them the lesson of Cézanne can be seen.

His circle of acquaintances in Paris formed quickly. From 1910 his friends included Amedeo Modigliani, Constantin Brâncuși and Alexander Archipenko; later he grew close to Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and through them met Apollinaire, Picabia, Chagall, Boccioni, Klee and Franz Marc. He was also friends with Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Gertrude Stein and Otto Freundlich, whose acquaintance pushed him towards Expressionism. On 5 March 1911 he and Modigliani opened an exhibition in the Portuguese painter’s studio, and Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Derain signed the visitors’ book. In April he showed for the first time at a major international exhibition, the Salon des Indépendants.

In 1912 he published the album “XX Dessins”, with decorative drawings and fantasies about himself: a horseman, a hunter with greyhounds and falcons, a castle on top of the hills (for example, “Les Faucons”). That year he also showed work at the Salon d’Automne. The manner of these years combines a moderate Cubism with decorative arabesques; “Avant la Corrida” (1912) was shown both in Paris and in New York. In 1913, besides the Armory Show, he took part in the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (the First German Autumn Salon) at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin. His “Cozinha da Casa de Manhufe” (“Manhufe’s Kitchen”, 1913) is closer to the Cubist breaking up of form, while other works of that year are closer to Delaunay’s colour or entirely abstract. In 1914 his paintings were shown in London, Berlin and the United States; a series of heads or masks also dates from then, linked both to Expressionism and to Picasso’s African masks.

War caught him in Barcelona. He returned to Portugal and on 26 September 1914 married Lucie Meynardi Pecetto, whom he had met in 1908. They settled in the Casa do Ribeiro in Manhufe, built by his father. The next year the Delaunays, who were living in Vila do Conde, came to visit. Amadeo painted, hunted and rode, but the isolation weighed on him, and he kept dreaming of returning to Paris.

In 1916 several attempts to take part in international exhibitions fell through. Instead he published the album “12 Reproductions” and showed his work in Porto and then in Lisbon: 114 pieces, under the title “Abstraccionism”. The public was bewildered, and some viewers were outraged. In Lisbon he mixed with Almada Negreiros and the circle of the magazine “Orpheu”. In 1917 two of his works, “Farol” (“Lighthouse”) and “Cabeça Negra” (“Black Head”), appeared in the only issue of “Portugal Futurista”.

The last canvases of 1917 are, I think, the strongest thing he did. The paint is mixed with sand and other additives; there is collage, trompe-l’oeil, pieces of wood, mirrors, hairpins, details such as a cash register, words, musical instruments, alongside quite abstract forms (“Entrada”, “Coty”). He did not live to show them abroad.

In 1918 he left Manhufe for Espinho, trying to escape the Spanish flu epidemic. He died there on 25 October 1918, at the age of thirty.

After his death he was almost forgotten. In 1925 a retrospective was held in Paris, at the Galerie Briant-Robert, and in 1935 a prize in his name was founded in Portugal. A room devoted to him opened in the museum at Amarante in 1953, a major retrospective took place in 1958, and the paintings at the Modern Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation became permanently accessible only in 1983. In 2016 he was exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris.