Nadir Afonso

Biography

The name Nadir was suggested by a gypsy who met his father on the way to the registry office: the boy was about to be registered as Orlando. That is how the story of the artist’s life goes, and it can no longer be checked.

He was born on 4 December 1920 in Chaves, in northern Portugal, the son of the teacher and poet Artur Maria Afonso and Palmira Rodrigues Afonso. According to family tradition, at the age of four he drew a perfect red circle on a wall of the house. At seventeen he won his first national prize. In Porto he was sent to enrol in the School of Fine Arts to study painting, but the clerk at the desk told him that his school diploma entitled him to enter architecture, and that architecture was the safer career. Afonso later admitted that he had been wrong to listen. He completed the course, though he failed the third year: some of his teachers would not accept his style.

In Porto he designed houses and industrial buildings, while painting the city in oils under his second surname, Rodrigues. He belonged to the artists’ collective Independentes and took part in all its exhibitions until 1946. His painting “A Ribeira” was bought in 1944 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon; the painter was twenty-four. His first steps towards abstraction also date from the first half of the 1940s, among them “Évora Surrealista” (1945).

In 1946 he left for Paris with unfinished works from his “Iris period” and began signing himself Afonso. The Brazilian painter Candido Portinari helped him obtain a French government scholarship to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts. The scholarship lasted a year, so Afonso went to work for Le Corbusier: in 1946–1948 and again in 1951. Knowing of his passion for painting, Le Corbusier let him off work in the mornings without cutting his pay. For a time he also used the studio of Fernand Léger. It was in these years that his geometric manner took shape. In 1948 in Porto he defended the thesis “Architecture Is Not an Art”, which grew out of a project he had worked on under Le Corbusier: in his view architecture is a science and a team effort, and too cramped for a solitary temperament. In Chaves he built a bakery that is regarded as one of the notable works of twentieth-century Portuguese architecture.

In 1949 he left Paris and for a while gave himself wholly to painting: first came a “Baroque” period, inspired by Portuguese Baroque, then an “Egyptian” one. In December 1951, at the invitation of Oscar Niemeyer, he sailed for Brazil and spent three years on “necessary architecture and obsessive painting”, among other things on the Ibirapuera Park project for the four hundredth anniversary of São Paulo. The obsession won: at the end of 1954 he returned to Paris to look for artists working in Kinetic art.

There he joined the circle of the Denise René Gallery, alongside Victor Vasarely, Richard Mortensen, Auguste Herbin and André Bloc. He exhibited at the gallery in 1956 and 1957, and in 1958 showed “Espacillimité”, with moving forms, at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles; the painting is now in the Chiado Museum in Lisbon. The same year his first book, “La Sensibilité Plastique”, appeared, and in 1959 the first large retrospective took place at the Maison des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He twice represented Portugal at the São Paulo Art Biennial, in 1961 and 1969.

Paris, with its fierce competition, did not suit him. In 1965 Afonso went back to Chaves, closed his architecture practice and lived in seclusion, devoting himself to painting and theory. From time to time he travelled to Paris to see friends: the philosopher Roger Garaudy, Vasarely, the critic Michel Gaüzes. On Garaudy’s advice he went to Toulouse to see the aesthetician Pierre Bru and discuss the structure of his forthcoming book “Les Mécanismes de la Création Artistique” (1970), in which art is presented as an exact science. His idea is simple and stubborn: art is not an act of imagination but of observation, perception and the manipulation of form. He argued with Kandinsky, reproaching him for subordinating geometry to the human spirit.

In 1968 Vasarely called him the most important Portuguese painter of his day and added that the world knew his work unjustly little, which, to my mind, sounds like indignation on a friend’s behalf. Afonso himself shunned publicity, probably remembering the Paris gallery that had turned him away in 1946. In 1967 he received the National Prize for Painting, and in 1969 the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Prize. In 1970 the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation showed his retrospective in Paris and Lisbon, and in 1974 he had a solo exhibition in New York.

In his last decades he painted, exhibited and published books, among them “Le Sens de l’Art”, “Universo e o Pensamento”, a book on the life and work of Van Gogh, and “Manifesto: O Tempo Não Existe” (“Time Does Not Exist”). The periods of his painting followed one another: ogival, perspectival, organic with female figures, then fractal in the twenty-first century. The Cities series remains the best known: one painting per city, from Seville to Kuala Lumpur. His works are in museums in Lisbon, Porto, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Budapest, Paris (Centre Pompidou), Würzburg and Berlin.

Retrospectives were held at the Soares dos Reis National Museum in Porto and the Chiado Museum in Lisbon (2010), at the Carlo Bilotti Museum in Rome and at the Palazzo Loredan in Venice (2012). The Lusíada University and the University of Porto awarded him honorary doctorates. He founded a foundation in his name and gave it his personal collection, and he entrusted the design of its building in Chaves to Álvaro Siza. The Nadir Afonso Arts Centre in Boticas opened in July 2013. Afonso died on 11 December 2013 in a hospital in Cascais, a week after his ninety-third birthday.