Júlio Pomar

Biography

In 1948 a mural on which Pomar had worked for two years was destroyed. It was the decoration of the Batalha cinema in Porto, and it was pulled down at the government's demand. The artist was twenty-two.

He was born on 10 January 1926 in Lisbon. He lost his father a few months after his birth. He studied at the António Arroio art school, and at sixteen held his first exhibition, together with former schoolmates, in a rented room on Rua das Flores. Among the visitors was Almada Negreiros, who bought the painting “Saltimbancos” (The Acrobats); it is now lost. In 1942 Pomar entered the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon, in 1944 he transferred to the School of Fine Arts in Porto, and two years later he left it after a disciplinary process. In those years he took part in exhibitions of the group known as the Independents in Porto, Coimbra and Lisbon.

From June to October 1945 he ran the art page of the newspaper “A Tarde”, where he wrote about the Mexican muralists Orozco and Siqueiros, about George Grosz and about the Brazilian Candido Portinari. He wrote for the magazines “Seara Nova”, “Vértice” and “Mundo Literário”. In 1945 he joined the Communist Youth, then illegal, of the Portuguese Communist Party; he later left the party gradually.

His neo-realist period, 1945 to 1957, was openly political. The first fully neo-realist painting was “Gadanheiro” (The Mower, 1945). His best-known work was “O Almoço do Trolha” (The Lunch of the Bricklayer), on which he worked from 1946 to 1950: the art historian Rui Mário Gonçalves saw in it one of the main milestones of neo-realism, with a subject taken from proletarian life and hands and feet accentuated in the manner of Portinari. Pomar was one of the main organisers and exhibitors of the General Exhibitions of Plastic Arts (1946 to 1956). At the second of them, in 1947, the political police seized his painting “Resistência” (Resistance) as subversive. That same year he had his first solo exhibition, at the Portugália Gallery in Porto, and was imprisoned for four months, arrested as a member of the leadership of the youth section of the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), the opposition coalition. In 1948 he painted the official portrait of the opposition presidential candidate General José Norton de Matos, and in 1949 he lost his post as a drawing teacher in the technical schools because of his part in that campaign.

At the same time he worked on illustration, ceramics and small clay sculpture. The “Rice Cycle” (1952 to 1955) grew out of trips to the rice fields of the Ribatejo with the writer Alves Redol. From about 1956, without a sharp break and without renouncing his earlier convictions, his path began to lead in other directions. In 1956 he helped found the Gravura cooperative and until 1963 was its main driving force. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation awarded him its prize for printmaking in 1957 and first prize for painting in 1961.

In June 1963 Pomar settled in Paris. From 1964 to 1966 he held a Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship. He joined no groups, took up none of the fashionable tendencies and kept a critical distance, remaining faithful to gesture and line. In 1967 he made his first assemblages from found objects, and the following year he began two series, one of them on the events of May 1968. From 1969 he was represented in Portugal by Manuel de Brito’s Gallery 111 in Lisbon. He was in Lisbon during the revolution of April 1974. His first retrospective was held in 1978 at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and at the Soares dos Reis National Museum in Porto. He returned home only occasionally, and bought a house with a studio in Lisbon only twenty years after leaving.

In later decades he painted tigers, monkeys, umbrellas and portraits, and turned to literary and mythological subjects. His painting “Lusitânia no Bairro Alto” (1985) combines portraits of Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Santa-Rita Pintor and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso. In 1992 he painted the official portrait of the President of Portugal, Mário Soares. His work also includes tile panels (azulejos) for the Alto dos Moinhos station of the Lisbon metro (1983 to 1984) and stage design for the theatre. He published three books of essays on painting, among them “Da Cegueira dos Pintores” (On the Blindness of Painters, 1986), and two books of poetry. It seems to me that the most interesting thing about Pomar is his habit of not abandoning earlier work but revisiting it: the late pieces keep traces of the earlier layers.

In 2003 he received the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Grand Prize. A year later the Berardo Collection Museum in Sintra showed the retrospective “Pomar/Autobiografia”.

In 2013 the Atelier-Museum Júlio Pomar opened in Lisbon, in a building bought by the municipality in 2000 and remodelled to a design by Álvaro Siza Vieira; the artist donated hundreds of his works to it. That same year the University of Lisbon awarded him an honorary doctorate. Pomar died on 22 May 2018 in the Luz Hospital in Lisbon.