A Neglected Modernist - Amadeo de Souza Cardoso

Art in America, Sept, 2000 by Robert J. Loescher

Working in Paris and Portugal early in the 20th century, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso successfully assimilated a range of avant-garde styles. This long-overlooked painter is the subject of an exhibition currently on view in New York.

Marginalized by geography, early death and politics, the talented Portuguese painter Amadeo de Souza Cardoso was long one of early modernism's best-kept secrets. Born in 1887 on his family's estate of Manhufe, near the city of Amarante in the Douro wine region of northern Portugal, Souza Cardoso was isolated for a good part of his life from the European capitals where modern art was centered. Although he spent eight years in Paris, where he was immersed in the pre-World War I avant-garde, much of his most important work was done after he returned to Portugal in 1914. There, he detached himself from the urban artistic worlds of nearby Oporto and distant Lisbon, preferring to embrace his inherited role as a member of the landed gentry. He died at the age of 30, during the influenza epidemic of 1918, and for many decades he remained little more than an occasional footnote in modern art history. Souza Cardoso's reputation continued to languish even in his own country because of the political and cultural conservatism that characterized the troubled Portuguese Republic (1911-26) and the repressive regime of dictator Antonio de Oliviera Salazar (1926-1968).

Things began to change in 1953, when the Museu Municipal of Amarante opened a room with 35 paintings acquired from the Souza Cardoso family. A posthumous retrospective was held in Paris in 1958. These events triggered a rediscovery process that continued to accelerate. By the 1980s, the majority of the works remaining in private hands had been purchased and put on display by the Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon. Outside Portugal, however, just a few of Souza Cardoso's paintings could be seen in public collections. Only now, in a traveling exhibition titled "At the Edge: A Portuguese Futurist, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso" (currently on view at AXA Gallery in New York), are U.S. audiences finally getting an in-depth look at the work of this neglected modernist.

Souza Cardoso arrived in Paris in 1906 as a 19-year-old architecture student, but he soon abandoned his architectural studies to become a painter. While in Paris, he made friends with such artists as Archipenko, Boccioni, Brancusi, Gris, Modigliani and Severini; he experimented in many artistic directions and eventually emerged with his own hybrid modernist style. Shown in the Salon des Independants in 1911, 1912 and 1914 and the Salon d'Automne in 1912, 1913 and 1914, he was also included in New York's famed 1913 Armory Show. When that exhibition traveled to Chicago, collector Arthur Jerome Eddy bought three of the eight Souza Cardoso works in the show: Leap of the Rabbit (1911), Marina at Pont L'Abbe (1912) and Stronghold (1912). The latter is a stunning riff on Cubism with Art Nouveau undertones. A cascading landscape of curved geometric shapes culminates in a fantasy castle whose architectural origins are as Portuguese as the picture's subdued palette of blues and greens. Subsequently, Eddy gave his purchases to the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the few places outside Portugal where Souza Cardoso's paintings can be seen. (Chicago's Arts Club was one of the venues of the recent overview.)

Souza Cardoso's work reveals an interest in line that had several sources, from his architectural studies and early attraction to caricature to the painted tiles and ceramics of his native country. His time in Paris further acquainted him with the stylized curvilinearity of French Art Nouveau, as well as the lyric linear elongations of his friend Modigliani. "Dessins XX" (1911-12), a suite of 20 ink drawings that was reproduced as a lavish portfolio in 1912, marks the culmination of his linear period (and also presages the vitality of Art Deco). Rooted thematically in visions of Africa and medieval Iberia, "Dessins XX" includes works such as The Falconers and The Stag Hunt, feudal hunting scenes in which fast-paced pursuits allowed Souza Cardoso to indulge in a fascination with representing movement, something he shared with the Futurists. Such scenes also reflect his pride in being an agrarian aristocrat. The preening women in Bath of the Sorceress show traces of his interest in African sculpture. The head of one of these figures, in fact, is a further stylization of the graceful curvature traditional to Bambara antelope masks. In considering such African influences, it's important to note that Portugal then had extensive sub-Saharan colonial holdings. This political reality is cleverly satirized in another example from "Dessins XX," The Enchanted Forest, where a sinister figure, whose costume suggests a hybrid of urban businessman and country rancher, seems to be directing a tropical menagerie.

At the time, "Dessins XX" was praised by French critic Louis Vauxcelles as "a new world ... barbarous and at the same time refined, ancient and modern, let's say a decadent Byzantinism." These attributes were partially generated from Souza Cardoso's exposure to Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, whose first Paris season was in 1909. Like others in the avant-garde circles of Paris, he was captivated by the colorful exuberance and orientalizing exoticism of the set and costume designs of Bakst, Benois, Golovine, Goncharova and Sudekine. Luckily, the affluent young artist could easily afford to attend productions such as Scheherazade (1910), Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), Sadko (1911) and Le Coq d'Or (1914). Contact with Russian ballet sparked an appreciation of how Russia and Portugal, two cultures on the periphery of Europe, were both rooted in rich visual traditions, particularly in their decorative and folk arts, that syncretized East and West. In contrast to Western Europe's Renaissance-derived styles, Byzantine Russia and Moorish-influenced Portugal shared a similar emphasis on line, color and the decorative.