Carlos Botelho

Biography

Carlos Botelho's first solo exhibition took place in 1918 at the Pedro Nunes Lyceum in Lisbon, where he was still a pupil. He was eighteen.

He was born on 18 September 1899 in Lisbon, the only child of musicians. His father taught piano. The boy began to learn the violin shortly before his father's death in 1910, and he kept it with him all his life. At the lyceum he became friends with Bento de Jesus Caraça and Luís Ernâni Dias Amado. In 1919 he enrolled at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, in the class of Ernesto Condeixa, but left after little more than a year, disappointed by the academic teaching. He received no further formal training and is regarded as self-taught, like his contemporaries Mário Eloy and Bernardo Marques.

In 1922 he married Beatriz dos Santos, a primary-school teacher; they had a son, José Rafael, and a daughter, Raquel. Botelho himself was then working in a bank, in 1924 took a job at a ceramics factory, and after some successes in poster competitions devoted himself from 1926 solely to graphic art, illustration, humorous drawing and comics. Until 1929 he regularly drew colour comics for the children's weekly ABCzinho, being the author of almost the whole front and back page of every issue (more than 400 pages). In 1928 he began a page called “Echoes of the Week” (Ecos da Semana) in the weekly Sempre Fixe and kept it going without a break until 8 December 1950. It mixed trivia of Lisbon life with international events, chronicle, autobiography and satire. Domestic Portuguese politics, under censorship, was left out of the commentary, but his drawings of Mussolini and Hitler in the years before the war were sharp.

In 1929, by then a well-known humorist, he left for Paris, where he attended the open academies of the Grande Chaumière and Colarossi; on the way he briefly visited London. By the general view of scholars, this trip settled his choice in favour of painting. His first view of Lisbon dates from the same year: the dome of the Estrela Basilica, geometrically constructed and painted in dense, expressive paint.

From 1930 he lived and worked in a studio on the Costa do Castelo, beside St George's Castle, in a house that his wife was entitled to through her post. To my mind, the view from that place explains a great deal in his subjects. He lived there until 1949.

In the 1930s he often travelled abroad. He worked on the Portuguese pavilion at the Colonial Exhibition at Vincennes (1930–1931) and on the Portuguese stand at the Lyon fair (1935), and from 1937 he belonged to the team of decorators of the SPN, the Secretariat for National Propaganda, the Portuguese state propaganda office, together with Bernardo Marques and Fred Kradolfer. This team designed the Portuguese pavilions at the exhibitions in Paris (1937), New York and San Francisco (both 1939). In Paris in 1937 he saw a retrospective of Van Gogh, which, in his own words, made a very strong impression on him; on a short trip to Flanders he discovered Ensor. His painting of the 1930s is close to Expressionism and follows three lines. The first is the urban landscape: Lisbon, but also Paris, Florence, Amsterdam, New Orleans and above all New York (“Nocturne – New York”, 1939). The second is acrobats, blind men and fishermen, dense, heavy figures with which he wanted to move beyond his reputation as a humorist. The third is portraits of his wife, parents and children. The portrait of his father, a musician (1937), won him the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso prize in 1938. The portraits of his children are painted without sentimentality, brusquely.

In 1939 he won first prize at the international exhibition of contemporary art in San Francisco. The money allowed him to buy a plot of land and build a house with a studio at Buzano, in Parede near Lisbon. In 1940 he worked on the decoration of the Portuguese World Exhibition in Lisbon, received the Columbano Prize, and designed sets and costumes for the Verde Gaio ballet company. In 1941 he was awarded two Portuguese orders. From the 1940s until his retirement in 1969 he worked in the technical services of the SNI, the National Information Secretariat, at the Palácio Foz.

In 1949 he had to leave the house on the Costa do Castelo and moved to Buzano. From 1955 he lived again in Lisbon, in the new district of Areeiro, far from the old centre. His painting was changing: the Expressionist intensity softened, and the canvas became flat and frontal. In the 1950s this went almost as far as abstraction: in “Velho Casario” (Old Houses, 1958) the line is autonomous and traditional perspective is set aside. Later the same devices returned in his cityscapes, where light organises colour and space. The impulse came from the abstraction of the School of Paris and from Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

He took part in the Venice Biennale in 1950 and 1960, in the São Paulo Biennial (1951, 1955, 1957, 1965), in the exhibitions of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon (1957, 1961; in 1961 he won first prize for painting) and in the Brussels exhibition “50 Years of Modern Art” (1958). In 1955 he was given an honourable mention in São Paulo. Retrospectives were held in Lisbon in 1959, 1989 and 1999.

Botelho died on 18 August 1982 in Lisbon. His works are held at the Chiado Museum in Lisbon, at the Modern Art Centre of the Gulbenkian Foundation, in the Lisbon City Council collection and at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo.