Sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva

Christmas with Art

2011-12-18T14:08:00.000-08:00

In the lobby of Gaia City Council exposed to thepublic we can see two sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva, Maternity andFamily.

Thesesculptures will be on display during the Christmas period included in the"Christmas with Art – Gaia 2011."

Christmas with Art – Gaia 2011

2011-12-13T14:50:00.000-08:00

In the lobby of Gaia City Council exposed to thepublic we can see two sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva, Maternity andFamily.

Thesesculptures will be on display during the Christmas period included in the"Christmas with Art – Gaia 2011."

Gaia City Council

2011-12-12T15:30:00.000-08:00

In the lobby of Gaia City Council exposed to thepublic we can see two sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva, Maternity andFamily.

Thesesculptures will be on display during the Christmas period included in the"Christmas with Art - Gaia 2011."

Art Museum Exhibition

2011-08-09T14:45:00.000-07:00

Opening of the exhibition by Manuel Pereira da Silva at the Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes.

Photos of the Exhibition in Gaia Biological Park

2011-07-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

Sculpture, Painting and Drawing Exhibition "surroundings ..." by Manuel Pereira da Silva, inaugurated on June 23, 2011, in Gaia Biological Park.

Sculpture, Painting and Drawing Exhibition

2011-06-23T15:56:00.000-07:00

Sculpture, Painting and Drawing Exhibition "surroundings ..." by Manuel Pereira da Silva, inaugurated on June 23, 2011, in Gaia Biological Park.

Art Blog

2011-06-20T14:33:00.001-07:00

Photos of the Sculpture Exhibition "surroundings ..." of Manuel Pereira da Silva, inaugurated on March 12 (2011), in Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes.

Sculpture exhibition "surroundings ..."

2011-03-25T02:07:00.000-07:00

Virtual tour of the sculpture exhibition "surroundings ..." by Manuel Pereira da Silva, moments before being inaugurated on March 12, 2011 (Saturday), 15.30, at the Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes. This exhibition will be held until April 23, 2011

Director of the Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes

2011-03-25T01:54:00.000-07:00

Video of the inaugural speech, by Dr. Delfim Sousa, in the sculpture exhibition "surroundings ..." of Manuel Pereira da Silva, which took place on March 12, 2011 (Saturday), 15.30, at the Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes.

Time Out

2011-03-22T16:05:00.000-07:00

The Time Out magazine, of March, says on page 56 as "Our choice for this week: Manuel Pereira da Silva, at Casa Museu Teixeira Lopes, on March 12 (Saturday), a sculpture exhibition of an author representative of the artistic trends of his time."

Sculpture Exhibition "surroundings ..." Manuel Pereira da Silva

2011-03-13T16:11:00.000-07:00

Sculpture Exhibition "surroundings ..." Manuel Pereira da Silva, inaugurated on March 12 (Saturday) and will be held until April 23, 2011, in Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes.

Tuesday, 14:00 to 17:00
Wednesday to Friday from 10h00 to 17 h00
Saturday, Sunday and holidays from 10:00 to 17:00.
Closed on Monday.

Rua Teixeira Lopes, 32
4400-164 V.N. Gaia
Telefone: 22 375 12 24
Telemóvel: 91 103 18 13
Fax. 22 370 20 95
E-mail: cmteixeiralopes@gaianima.pt

Constructivism art

2011-02-25T01:53:00.000-08:00

Constructivism was a movement that was active from 1913 to the 1940’s. It was a movement created by the Russian avant-garde, but quickly spread to the rest of the continent. Constructivist art is committed to complete abstraction with a devotion to modernity, where themes are often geometric, experimental and rarely emotional. Objective forms carrying universal meaning were far more suitable to the movement than subjective or individualistic forms. Constructivist themes are also quite minimal, where the artwork is broken down to its most basic elements. New media was often used in the creation of works, which helped to create a style of art that was orderly. An art of order was desirable at the time because it was just after I World War that the movement arose, which suggested a need for understanding, unity and peace. Famous artists of the Constructivist movement include Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, Olga Rozanova, Alexandra Exter, Naum Gabo, El Lissitzky, Antoine Pevsner, Kasimir Malevich and Alexander Vesnin.

Constructivism, Russian Konstruktivizm, Russian artistic and architectural movement that was first influenced by Cubism and Futurism and is generally considered to have been initiated in 1913 with the “painting reliefs”—abstract geometric constructions—of Vladimir Tatlin. The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was derived; one of the directives that it contained was “to construct” art. Because of their admiration for machines and technology.

Tatlin's most famous piece remains his "Monument to the Third International" (1919-20, Moscow), a 22-ft-high (6.7-m) iron frame on which rested a revolving cylinder, cube, and cone, all made of glass which was originally designed for massive scale. After the 1917 Revolution, Tatlin (considered the father of Russian Constructivism) worked for the new Soviet Education Commissariate which used artists and art to educate the public. During this period, he developed an officially authorized art form which utilized 'real materials in real space'. His project for a Monument of the Third International marked his first foray into architecture and became a symbol for Russian avant-garde architecture and International Modernism.

The constructivists believed art should directly reflect the modern industrial world. Tatlin was crucially influenced by Picasso's Cubist constructions (Construction 1914) which he saw in Picasso's studio in Paris in 1913. These were three-dimensional still lifes made of scrap materials. Tatlin began to make his own but they were completely abstract and made of industrial materials. By 1921 Russian artists who followed Tatlin's ideas were calling themselves Constructivists and in 1923 a manifesto was published in their magazine Lef: 'The material formation of the object is to be substituted for its aesthetic combination. The object is to be treated as a whole and thus will be of no discernible 'style' but simply a product of an industrial order like a car, an aeroplane and such like. Constructivism is a purely technical mastery and organization of materials.' Constructivism was suppressed in Russia in the 1920s but was brought to the West by Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner and has been a major influence on modern sculpture.

Other painters, sculptors, and photographers working during this time were usually involved with industrial materials such as glass, steel, and plastic in clearly defined arrangements. Because of their admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern mediums, members were also called artist-engineers.

Constructivism rejected the idea of autonomous art in favor of art as a practice directed towards social purposes. Constructivism had a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar Republic and elsewhere, before being replaced by Socialist Realism. Its motifs have sporadically recurred in other art movements since.

The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. Constructivism first appears as a positive term in Naum Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Alexei Gan used the word as the title of his book Constructivism, which was printed in 1922. Constructivism was a post-World War I outgrowth of Russian Futurism, and particularly of the 'corner-counter reliefs' of Vladimir Tatlin, which had been exhibited in 1915. The term itself would be coined by the sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, who developed an industrial, angular approach to their work, while its geometric abstraction owed something to the Suprematism of Kasimir Malevich. The teaching basis for the new movement was laid by The Commissariat of Enlightenment (or Narkompros) the Bolshevik government's cultural and educational ministry headed by Anatoliy Vasilievich Lunacharsky who suppressed the old Petrograd Academy of Fine Arts and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1918. IZO, the Commissariat's artistic bureau was run during the Russian Civil War mainly by Futurists, who published the journal Art of the Commune. The focus for Constructivism in Moscow was VKhUTEMAS, the school for art and design established in 1919. Gabo later stated that teaching at the school was focused more on political and ideological discussion than art-making. Despite this, Gabo himself designed a radio transmitter in 1920 (and would submit a design to the Palace of the Soviets competition in 1930).

Constructivism as theory and practice derived itself from a series of debates at INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow, from 1920–22. After deposing its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky for his 'mysticism', The First Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Alexei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would arrive at a definition of Constructivism as the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of the object, and tektonika, its spatial presence. Initially the Constructivists worked on three-dimensional constructions as a first step to participation in industry: the OBMOKhU (Society of Young Artists) exhibition showed these three dimensional compositions, by Rodchenko, Stepanova, Karl Ioganson and the Stenberg Brothers. Later the definition would be extended to designs for two-dimensional works such as books or posters, with montage and factography becoming important concepts.

Art in the service of the Revolution

As much as involving itself in designs for industry, the Constructivists worked on public festivals and street designs for the post-October revolution Bolshevik government. Perhaps the most famous of these was in Vitebsk, where Malevich's UNOVIS Group painted propaganda plaques and buildings (the best known being El Lissitzky's poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919)). Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky's declaration 'the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes', artists and designers participated in public life throughout the Civil War. A striking instance was the proposed festival for the Comintern congress in 1921 by Alexander Vesnin and Liubov Popova, which resembled the constructions of the OBMOKhU exhibition as well as their work for the theatre. There was a great deal of overlap in this period between Constructivism and Proletkult, the ideas of which concerning the need to create an entirely new culture struck a chord with the Constructivists. In addition some Constructivists were heavily involved in the 'ROSTA Windows', a Bolshevik public information campaign of around 1920. Some of the most famous of these were by the poet-painter Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vladimir Lebedev.

As a part of the early Soviet youth movement, the constructivists took an artistic outlook aimed to encompass cognitive, material activity, and the whole of spirituality of mankind. The artists tried to create works that would take the viewer out of the traditional setting and make them an active viewer of the artwork. In this it had similarities with the Russian Formalists' theory of 'making strange', and accordingly their leading theorist Viktor Shklovsky worked closely with the Constructivists, as did other formalists like Osip Brik. These theories were tested in the theatre, particularly in the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had set up what he called 'October in the theatre'. Meyerhold developed a 'biomechanical' acting style, which was influenced both by the circus and by the 'scientific management' theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Meanwhile the stage sets by the likes of Vesnin, Popova and Stepanova tested out Constructivist spatial ideas in a public form. A more populist version of this was developed by Alexander Tairov, with stage sets by Aleksandra Ekster and the Stenberg Brothers. These ideas would go on to influence German directors like Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, as well as the early Soviet cinema.

Tatlin, 'Construction Art' and Productivism

The canonical work of Constructivism was Vladimir Tatlin's proposal for the Monument to the Third International (1919) which combined a machine aesthetic with dynamic components celebrating technology such as searchlights and projection screens. Gabo publicly criticized Tatlin's design saying Either create functional houses and bridges or create pure art, not both. This had already led to a major split in the Moscow group in 1920 when Gabo and Pevsner's Realistic Manifesto asserted a spiritual core for the movement. This was opposed to the utilitarian and adaptable version of Constructivism held by Tatlin and Rodchenko. Tatlin's work was immediately hailed by artists in Germany as a revolution in art: a 1920 photo shows George Grosz and John Heartfield holding a placard saying 'Art is Dead – Long Live Tatlin's Machine Art', while the designs for the tower were published in Bruno Taut's magazine Fruhlicht.

Tatlin's tower started a period of exchange of ideas between Moscow and Berlin, something reinforced by El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg's Soviet-German magazine Veshch-Gegenstand-Objet which spread the idea of 'Construction art', as did the Constructivist exhibits at the 1922 Russische Ausstellung in Berlin, organized by Lissitzky. A 'Constructivist international' was formed, which met with Dadaists and De Stijl artists in Germany in 1922. Participants in this short-lived international included Lissitzky, Hans Richter, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. However the idea of 'art' was becoming anathema to the Russian Constructivists: the INKhUK debates of 1920–22 had culminated in the theory of Productivism propounded by Osip Brik and others, which demanded direct participation in industry and the end of easel painting. Tatlin was one of the first to answer this and attempt to transfer his talents to industrial production, with his designs for an economical stove, for workers' overalls and for furniture. The Utopian element in Constructivism was maintained by his 'letatlin', a flying machine which he worked on until the 1930s.

Constructivism and Consumerism

In 1921, a New Economic Policy was set in place in the Soviet Union, which reintroduced a limited state capitalism into the Soviet economy. Rodchenko, Stepanova, and others made advertising for the co-operatives that were now in competition with commercial businesses. The poet-artist Vladimir Mayakovsky and Rodchenko worked together and called themselves "advertising constructors". Together they designed eye-catching images featuring bright colours, geometric shapes, and bold lettering. The lettering of most of these designs was intended to create a reaction, and function on emotional and substantive levels – most were designed for the state-run department store Mosselprom in Moscow, for pacifiers, cooking oil, beer and other quotidian products, with Mayakovsky claiming that his 'nowhere else but Mosselprom' verse was one of the best he ever wrote.

In addition, several artists tried to work in clothes design with varying levels of success: Varvara Stepanova designed dresses with bright, geometric patterns that were mass-produced, although workers' overalls by Tatlin and Rodchenko never achieved this and remained prototypes. The painter and designer Lyubov Popova designed a kind of Constructivist flapper dress before her early death in 1924, the plans for which were published in the journal LEF. In these works Constructivists showed a willingness to involve themselves in fashion and the mass market, which they tried to balance with their Communist beliefs.

Concrete art

2011-02-24T03:35:00.000-08:00

Concrete art and design or concretism is an abstractionist movement that evolved in the 1930s out of the work of De Stijl, the futurists and Kandinsky around the Swiss painter Max Bill. The term "concrete art" was first introduced by Theo van Doesburg in his "Manifesto of Concrete Art" (1930) published in the first and only issue of magazine Art Concrete:

1. Art is universal;

2. The work of art must be entirely conceived and shaped by the spirit execution. It does not receive data from the formal nature, or sensuality, or the sentimentality. We want to exclude lyricism, dramatism, symbolism, etc;

3. The canvas is to be built entirely with purely visual elements, his plans and colors. A pictorial element has no meaning other than "himself" in the canvas the consequence is "himself";

4. The construction of the canvas, also controllable visually;

5. The technique should be mechanics, anti-impressionist;

6. Effort to absolute clarity.

In his understanding, this form of abstractionism must be free of any symbolical association with reality, arguing that lines and colors are concrete by themselves.

Ever since the cave age, man has been painting still lives, landscapes, and nudes. These artists do not wish to copy nature. They do not wish to reproduce but to produce. But then nothing is less abstract than Abstract art. This is why Van Doesburg and Kandinsky have suggested that Abstract art should called Concrete art.

Artists should not sign their works of Concrete art. These paintings, sculptures, objects should remain anonymous and form part of nature’s great workshop as leaves do, and clouds, animals, men. Yes, once again become part of nature. These artists should work communally as did the artists of the Middle Age.

The Swiss artist Max Bill later became the flag bearer for Concrete art organizing the first international exhibition in Basle in 1944. He stated that the aim of Concrete art is to create 'in a visible and tangible form things which did not previously exist to represent abstract thoughts in a sensuous and tangible form'. In practice Concrete art is very close to Constructivism and there is a museum of Constructive and Concrete art in Zurich, Switzerland.

The movement came to fruition in Northern Italy and France in the 1940s and 1950's through the work of the groups Movement of art concrete (MAC) and Space.

Bauhaus

2011-02-03T03:39:00.000-08:00

Like no other institution in Germany, the Bauhaus represents the modern age in the 20th century. The cultural heritage of the Bauhaus is preserved in Germany by three institutions, which are located at the historic sites of its work. The Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Foundation of Weimar Classics are joint publishers of the bauhaus-online.de web portal.

Bauhaus 1919-1933

The Bauhaus occupies a place of its own in the history of 20th century culture, architecture, design, art and new media. One of the first schools of design, it brought together a number of the most outstanding contemporary architects and artists and was not only an innovative training centre but also a place of production and a focus of international debate. At a time when industrial society was in the grip of a crisis, the Bauhaus stood almost alone in asking how the modernisation process could be mastered by means of design.

Founded in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus rallied masters and students who sought to reverse the split between art and production by returning to the crafts as the foundation of all artistic activity and developing exemplary designs for objects and spaces that were to form part of a more human future society. Following intense internal debate, in 1923 the Bauhaus turned its attention to industry under its founder and first director Walter Gropius (1883–1969). The major exhibition which opened in 1923, reflecting the revised principle of art and technology as a new unity, spanned the full spectrum of Bauhaus work. The Haus Am Horn provided a glimpse of a residential building of the future.

In 1924 funding for the Bauhaus was cut so drastically at the instigation of conservative forces that it had to seek a new home. The Bauhaus moved to Dessau at a time of rising economic fortunes, becoming the municipally funded School of Design. Almost all masters moved with it. Former students became junior masters in charge of the workshops. Famous works of art and architecture and influential designs were produced in Dessau in the years from 1926 to 1932.

Walter Gropius resigned as director on 1st April 1928 under the pressure of constant struggles for the Bauhaus survival. He was succeeded by the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (1889–1954) whose work sought to shape a harmonious society. Cost-cutting industrial mass production was to make products affordable for the masses. Despite his successes, Hannes Meyer’s Marxist convictions became a problem for the city council amidst the political turbulence of Germany in 1929, and the following year he was removed from his post.

Under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) the Bauhaus developed from 1930 into a technical school of architecture with subsidiary art and workshop departments. After the Nazis became the biggest party in Dessau at the elections, the Bauhaus was forced to move in September 1932. It moved to Berlin but only lasted for a short time longer. The Bauhaus dissolved itself under pressure from the Nazis in 1933.

Bauhaus and German modernism

Defeat in World War I, the fall of the German monarchy and the abolition of censorship under the new, liberal Weimar Republic allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts, previously suppressed by the old regime. Many Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. Such influences can be overstated: Gropius himself did not share these radical views, and said that Bauhaus was entirely apolitical. Just as important was the influence of the 19th century English designer William Morris, who had argued that art should meet the needs of society and that there should be no distinction between form and function. Thus the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design.

However, the most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay as far back as the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism. The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus—the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit—were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded. The German national designers' organization Deutscher Werkbund was formed in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius to harness the new potentials of mass production, with a mind towards preserving Germany's economic competitiveness with England. In its first seven years, the Werkbund came to be regarded as the authoritative body on questions of design in Germany, and was copied in other countries. Many fundamental questions of craftsmanship vs. mass production, the relationship of usefulness and beauty, the practical purpose of formal beauty in a commonplace object, and whether or not a single proper form could exist, were argued out among its 1,870 members (by 1914).

The entire movement of German architectural modernism was known as Neues Bauen. Beginning in June 1907, Peter Behrens' pioneering industrial design work for the German electrical company AEG successfully integrated art and mass production on a large scale. He designed consumer products, standardized parts, created clean-lined designs for the company's graphics, developed a consistent corporate identity, built the modernist landmark AEG Turbine Factory, and made full use of newly developed materials such as poured concrete and exposed steel. Behrens was a founding member of the Werkbund, and both Walter Gropius and Adolf Meier worked for him in this period.

The Bauhaus was founded at a time when the German zeitgeist ("spirit of the times") had turned from emotional Expressionism to the matter-of-fact New Objectivity. An entire group of working architects, including Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut and Hans Poelzig, turned away from fanciful experimentation, and turned toward rational, functional, sometimes standardized building. Beyond the Bauhaus, many other significant German-speaking architects in the 1920s responded to the same aesthetic issues and material possibilities as the school. They also responded to the promise of a "minimal dwelling" written into the new Weimar Constitution. Ernst May, Bruno Taut, and Martin Wagner, among others, built large housing blocks in Frankfurt and Berlin. The acceptance of modernist design into everyday life was the subject of publicity campaigns, well-attended public exhibitions like the Weissenhof Estate, films, and sometimes fierce public debate.

Weimar

The school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919 as a merger of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Its roots lay in the arts and crafts school founded by the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1906 and directed by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde. When van de Velde was forced to resign in 1915 because he was Belgian, he suggested Gropius, Hermann Obrist and August Endell as possible successors. In 1919, after delays caused by the destruction of World War I and a lengthy debate over who should and socio-economic reconciliation of the fine arts and the applied arts (an issue which remained a defining one throughout the school's existence), Gropius was made the director of a new institution integrating the two called the Bauhaus. In the pamphlet for an April 1919 exhibition entitled "Exhibition of Unknown Architects", Gropius proclaimed his goal as being "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." Gropius' neologism Bauhaus references both building and the Bauhütte, a premodern guild of stonemasons. The early intention was for the Bauhaus to be a combined architecture school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. In 1919 Swiss painter Johannes Itten, German-American painter Lyonel Feininger, and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, along with Gropius, comprised the faculty of the Bauhaus. By the following year their ranks had grown to include German painter, sculptor and designer Oskar Schlemmer who headed the theater workshop, and Swiss painter Paul Klee, joined in 1922 by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. A tumultuous year at the Bauhaus, 1922 also saw the move of Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg to Weimar to promote De Stijl ("The Style"), and a visit to the Bauhaus by Russian Constructivist artist and architect El Lissitzky.

From 1919 to 1922 the school was shaped by the pedagogical and aesthetic ideas of Johannes Itten, who taught the Vorkurs or 'preliminary course' that was the introduction to the ideas of the Bauhaus. Itten was heavily influenced in his teaching by the ideas of Franz Cižek and Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel. He was also influenced in respect to aesthetics by the work of the Blaue Reiter group in Munich as well as the work of Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. The influence of German Expressionism favoured by Itten was analogous in some ways to the fine arts side of the ongoing debate. This influence culminated with the addition of Der Blaue Reiter founding member Wassily Kandinsky to the faculty and ended when Itten resigned in late 1922. Itten was replaced by the Hungarian designer László Moholy-Nagy, who rewrote the Vorkurs with a leaning towards the New Objectivity favored by Gropius, which was analogous in some ways to the applied arts side of the debate. Although this shift was an important one, it did not represent a radical break from the past so much as a small step in a broader, more gradual socio-economic movement that had been going on at least since 1907 when van de Velde had argued for a craft basis for design while Hermann Muthesius had begun implementing industrial prototypes.

Gropius was not necessarily against Expressionism, and in fact himself in the same 1919 pamphlet proclaiming this "new guild of craftsmen, without the class snobbery," described "painting and sculpture rising to heaven out of the hands of a million craftsmen, the crystal symbol of the new faith of the future." By 1923 however, Gropius was no longer evoking images of soaring Romanesque cathedrals and the craft-driven aesthetic of the "Völkisch movement", instead declaring "we want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars." Gropius argued that a new period of history had begun with the end of the war. He wanted to create a new architectural style to reflect this new era. His style in architecture and consumer goods was to be functional, cheap and consistent with mass production. To these ends, Gropius wanted to reunite art and craft to arrive at high-end functional products with artistic pretensions. The Bauhaus issued a magazine called Bauhaus and a series of books called "Bauhausbücher". Since the country lacked the quantity of raw materials that the United States and Great Britain had, they had to rely on the proficiency of its skilled labor force and ability to export innovative and high quality goods. Therefore designers were needed and so was a new type of art education. The school's philosophy stated that the artist should be trained to work with the industry.

Weimar was in the German state of Thuringia, and the Bauhaus school received state support from the Social Democrat-controlled Thuringian state government. From 1923 the school in Weimar came under political pressure from right-wing circles, until on December 26, 1924 it issued a press release accusing the government and setting the closure of the school for the end of March 1925. In February 1924, the Social Democrats lost control of the state parliament to the Nationalists.The Ministry of Education placed the staff on six-month contracts and cut the school's funding in half. They had already been looking for alternative sources of funding. After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, a school of industrial design with teachers and staff less antagonistic to the conservative political regime remained in Weimar. This school was eventually known as the Technical University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, and in 1996 changed its name to Bauhaus University Weimar.

Dessau

Gropius's design for the Dessau facilities was a return to the futuristic Gropius of 1914 that had more in common with the International style lines of the Fagus Factory than the stripped down Neo-classical of the Werkbund pavilion or the Völkisch Sommerfeld House. The Dessau years saw a remarkable change in direction for the school. According to Elaine Hoffman, Gropius had approached the Dutch architect Mart Stam to run the newly-founded architecture program, and when Stam declined the position, Gropius turned to Stam's friend and colleague in the ABC group, Hannes Meyer.

Meyer became director when Gropius resigned in February 1928, and brought the Bauhaus its two most significant building commissions, both of which still exist: five apartment buildings in the city of Dessau, and the headquarters of the Federal School of the German Trade Unions (ADGB) in Bernau. Meyer favored measurements and calculations in his presentations to clients, along with the use of off-the-shelf architectural components to reduce costs, and this approach proved attractive to potential clients. The school turned its first profit under his leadership in 1929.

But Meyer also generated a great deal of conflict. As a radical functionalist, he had no patience with the aesthetic program, and forced the resignations of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and other long-time instructors. As a vocal Communist, he encouraged the formation of a communist student organization. In the increasingly dangerous political atmosphere, this became a threat to the existence of the Dessau school. Gropius fired him in the summer of 1930.

Berlin

Although neither the Nazi Party nor Hitler himself had a cohesive architectural policy before they came to power in 1933, Nazi writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg had already labeled the Bauhaus "un-German" and criticized its modernist styles, deliberately generating public controversy over issues like flat roofs. Increasingly through the early 1930s, they characterized the Bauhaus as a front for communists and social liberals. Indeed, a number of communist students loyal to Meyer moved to the Soviet Union when he was fired in 1930.

Even before the Nazis came to power, political pressure on Bauhaus had increased. The Nazi movement, from nearly the start, denounced the Bauhaus for its "degenerate art", and the Nazi regime was determined to crack down on what it saw as the foreign, probably Jewish influences of "cosmopolitan modernism." Despite Gropius's protestations that as a war veteran and a patriot his work had no subversive political intent, the Berlin Bauhaus was pressured to close in April 1933. Emigrants did succeed, however, in spreading the concepts of the Bauhaus to other countries, including the “New Bauhaus” of Chicago: Mies van der Rohe decided to emigrate to the United States for the directorship of the School of Architecture at the Armour Institute (now IIT) in Chicago and to seek building commissions. Curiously, however, some Bauhaus influences lived on in Nazi Germany. When Hitler's chief engineer, Fritz Todt, began opening the new autobahn (highways) in 1935, many of the bridges and service stations were "bold examples of modernism" — among those submitting designs was Mies van der Rohe.

Architectural output

The paradox of the early Bauhaus was that, although its manifesto proclaimed that the ultimate aim of all creative activity was building, the school did not offer classes in architecture until 1927. The single most profitable tangible product of the Bauhaus was its wallpaper.

During the years under Gropius (1919–1927), he and his partner Adolf Meyer observed no real distinction between the output of his architectural office and the school. So the built output of Bauhaus architecture in these years is the output of Gropius: the Sommerfeld house in Berlin, the Otte house in Berlin, the Auerbach house in Jena, and the competition design for the Chicago Tribune Tower, which brought the school much attention. The definitive 1926 Bauhaus building in Dessau is also attributed to Gropius. Apart from contributions to the 1923 Haus am Horn, student architectural work amounted to un-built projects, interior finishes, and craft work like cabinets, chairs and pottery.

In the next two years under Meyer, the architectural focus shifted away from aesthetics and towards functionality. There were major commissions: one from the city of Dessau for five tightly designed "Laubenganghäuser" (apartment buildings with balcony access), which are still in use today, and another for the headquarters of the Federal School of the German Trade Unions (ADGB) in Bernau bei Berlin. Meyer's approach was to research users' needs and scientifically develop the design solution.

Mies van der Rohe repudiated Meyer's politics, his supporters, and his architectural approach. As opposed to Gropius's "study of essentials", and Meyer's research into user requirements, Mies advocated a "spatial implementation of intellectual decisions", which effectively meant an adoption of his own aesthetics. Neither van der Rohe nor his Bauhaus students saw any projects built during the 1930s.

The popular conception of the Bauhaus as the source of extensive Weimar-era working housing is not accurate. Two projects, the apartment building project in Dessau and the Törten row housing also in Dessau, fall in that category, but developing worker housing was not the first priority of Gropius nor Mies. It was the Bauhaus contemporaries Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig and particularly Ernst May, as the city architects of Berlin, Dresden and Frankfurt respectively, who are rightfully credited with the thousands of socially progressive housing units built in Weimar Germany. In Taut's case, the housing he built in south-west Berlin during the 1920s, is still occupied, and can be reached by going easily from the U-Bahn stop Onkel Toms Hütte.

Impact

The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Israel (particularly in White City, Tel Aviv) in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled, or were exiled, by the Nazi regime. Tel Aviv, in fact, has been named to the list of world heritage sites by the UN due to its abundance of Bauhaus architecture in 2004; it had some 4,000 Bauhaus buildings erected from 1933 on.

Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy re-assembled in Britain during the mid 1930s to live and work in the Isokon project before the war caught up with them. Both Gropius and Breuer went to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked together before their professional split. The Harvard School was enormously influential in America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing such students as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.

In the late 1930s, Mies van der Rohe re-settled in Chicago, enjoyed the sponsorship of the influential Philip Johnson, and became one of the pre-eminent architects in the world. Moholy-Nagy also went to Chicago and founded the New Bauhaus school under the sponsorship of industrialist and philanthropist Walter Paepcke. This school became the Institute of Design, part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Printmaker and painter Werner Drewes was also largely responsible for bringing the Bauhaus aesthetic to America and taught at both Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. Herbert Bayer, sponsored by Paepcke, moved to Aspen, Colorado in support of Paepcke's Aspen projects at the Aspen Institute. In 1953, Max Bill, together with Inge Aicher-Scholl and Otl Aicher, founded the Ulm School of Design (German: Hochschule für Gestaltung - HfG Ulm) in Ulm, Germany, a design school in the tradition of the Bauhaus. The school is notable for its inclusion of semiotics as a field of study. The school closed in 1968, but the ′Ulm Model′ concept continues to influence international design education.

One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology. The machine was considered a positive element, and therefore industrial and product design were important components. Vorkurs ("initial" or "preliminary course") was taught; this is the modern day "Basic Design" course that has become one of the key foundational courses offered in architectural and design schools across the globe. There was no teaching of history in the school because everything was supposed to be designed and created according to first principles rather than by following precedent.

One of the most important contributions of the Bauhaus is in the field of modern furniture design. The ubiquitous Cantilever chair and the Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breuer are two examples. (Breuer eventually lost a legal battle in Germany with Dutch architect/designer Mart Stam over the rights to the cantilever chair patent. Although Stam had worked on the design of the Bauhaus's 1923 exhibit in Weimar, and guest-lectured at the Bauhaus later in the 1920s, he was not formally associated with the school, and he and Breuer had worked independently on the cantilever concept, thus leading to the patent dispute.)

The physical plant at Dessau survived World War II and was operated as a design school with some architectural facilities by the German Democratic Republic. This included live stage productions in the Bauhaus theater under the name of Bauhausbühne ("Bauhaus Stage"). After German reunification, a reorganized school continued in the same building, with no essential continuity with the Bauhaus under Gropius in the early 1920s. In 1979 Bauhaus-Dessau College started to organize postgraduate programs with participants from all over the world. This effort has been supported by the Bauhaus-Dessau Foundation which was founded in 1974 as a public institution.

American art schools have also rediscovered the Bauhaus school. The Master Craftsman Program at Florida State University bases its artistic philosophy on Bauhaus theory and practice.

Art at the Bauhaus

The first masters appointed to the Bauhaus were artists. “Countless ideas produced by modern painting once it shed its old constraints now lie fallow, awaiting their implementation in the trades,” Walter Gropius wrote in 1923. Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and other Bauhaus artists had departed from the traditional concept of images, turning to abstraction in the years leading up to World War I, and started to analyse the laws of artistic design with new theories and doctrines of art. Many of their works made a highly organised impression, contrasting sharply with a contemporary reality that was perceived as chaotic.

The initial years at the Bauhaus in particular witnessed heated controversies about the value of art and its place in the general order of things and the school’s training programme. Wassily Kandinsky responded in the first issue of the Bauhaus magazine in 1926, alluding to the pivotal role of the basic design course taught by the fine artists: “Painting is seen as one of the organising forces.”

The controversy reached a new stage with the introduction of free painting classes in the winter semester of 1927/28. The workshops were being increasingly subordinated to functional and technological considerations, while the output of fine arts was greater than ever. The visionary unity of art and design in a modern, more humane society began to crack. In the late 1920s, the editor of the magazine "bauhaus", Ernst Kallai, remarked that the Bauhaus displayed an objectivity shaped by stereotype mass production and determined entirely by considerations of utility and construction, on the one hand, and a metaphysical attitude born of dreams, visions, pure inner commitment or paradoxical wizardry, on the other.

The fine art produced at the Bauhaus ranged from late expressionism and abstraction to figurative, concrete socially critical and surrealist works. There is no trace of any Bauhaus-specific style. This holds true for the works of masters like Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, who were famous painters even at that time, and also for the students’ artistic output.

The Bauhaus stage, run by Oskar Schlemmer, played a special role. The study of the relations between man and space formed the starting point for experiments drawing on the elementary theatrical components of space, form, colour, light, movement, sound and language. The products of the “experimental stage for dancers, actors and directors” in the late 1920s included the “Bauhaus dances” in which the human form was reduced to an ideal type using masks and jerseys. Sociocritical plays developed after Schlemmer‘s departure in 1929 were no more than a passing episode.

Birch Gallery

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Gallery Birch is the oldest Danish gallery for contemporary art founded in 1946 by Børge Birch, the father of Anette Birch who owns the gallery today.

Børge Birch became a leading European art dealer and was in particular recognized for his work with the COBRA movement with artists such as Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel and Corneille.

In the 1950’s the gallery also had several one man exhibitions by major French and international artists such as Georges Braque, Poliakoff, Pablo Picasso, Leger, Laurens, Nolde and Pierre Soulages already in 1951.

Denise René Gallery

2011-01-28T00:50:00.000-08:00

Art is first of all a question of choice. At the end of the Second World War, when five years of German occupation had reduced cultural life to its strictest minimum, everything seemed possible for a young gallery. The first exhibitions organized by Denise René, as early as June 1945, bore witness to the fierce need for liberty and the desire to experiment, even when later channeled into geometric abstraction and then Kinetic Art, that are without doubt her most constant traits of character. From Max Ernst or Picabia to Atlan or Lapicque, during her first five years of activity, the pleasure of showing forgotten masters (and therefore unknown) from before the War, as well as new artists gave a new image to the already renowned Ecole de Paris. One common trait that was essential in the virulent debates shaking the world of all these "abstract" artists (even if today this title may be quite logically questioned by many of them), was that to create a new aesthetic they first of all refused any academism that could be tied to a figurative tradition.

Denise René took as her guiding principle the idea that art must invent new paths in order to exist; this was to be the basic intuition of her analyses. In this still confused grouping, that went under the term ‘abstract art’, where the non-figuration of a Manessier an Estève or a Bazaine was next to the informal research of Fautrier or Dubuffet, in order to keep the image subjacent she emphasized formal abstraction; that which in developing the fundamental ideas of Cubism transforms the painting into a purely plastic act, where emotion is born not from narration but finds its inspiration in the combination of the forms and colours. Having chosen this path, Denise René gathered together historical artists and young creators in a dialogue that the Gallery has always kept alive. In this way, from the early years, she put together Arp and Magnelli, Sophie Taeuber and Herbin, all first generation abstract pioneers, with young artists that she discovered and introduced, like Vasarely, Jacobsen, Dewasne or Mortensen. In the context of her work to highlight the pioneers of abstract art, she was also the first to manage what no French museum had ever done: in 1957, with the help of Dutch museums, she showed Mondrian, who had lived in Paris from 1919 to 1938 but had never had his own "personal exhibition".

This dialogue between the generations, this feeling of continuity in art history, and the idea that the work of a gallery is to discover and make familiar until museums take over, is the basis of the historical exhibition that Denise René and Vasarely held in 1955: Le Mouvement. In seeking historical antecedents, like Marcel Duchamp or Calder, and in recalling the articulations represented by the works of Vasarely or Jacobsen, the exhibition provided a framework and justified the research of young artists like Tinguely, Soto, Agam, Pol Bury who were unknown at the time, although this is difficult to imagine today, and who were laying the foundations of Kinetic Art.

Denise René developed this task of putting the different generation of abstract art into perspective by introducing to Paris the historical figures of the concrete avant-gardes of Eastern Europe. This tradition was unknown in Paris up until then and was highlighted by the retrospective of the Hungarian Lajos Kassak, Stazewski from Poland and the exhibition "Précurseurs de l’Art Abstrait en Pologne" (Precursors of Abstract Art in Poland) in 1957, with Malevitch, Kobro, Strezminski, Berlewi…(just as today she is showing the young Russian artist Jeltov). At a time when international exchanges were far less frequent than today, the gallery wanted to be open to creators from all over the world.

The Denise René Gallery became a natural gathering point for artists from the Latin American continent who preferred plastic research to narration: people like Cicero Dias from Brazil, Sot and Cruz Diez from Venezuela and the Argentinians Le Parc, Tomasello or Demarco are all witnesses to this. This privileged relationship with Latin America began in 1956 when Denise René published "Vénézuela", a Vasarely album that echoed the painter’s experience with the architect Carlos Raul Villanueva. A Vasarely exhibition organised and presented by the Gallery in 1958 in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Sao Paulo furnished the opportunity for new encounters during its inaugurations, and many exhibitions.

Denise René had not only been one of the first French art dealers to understand that a gallery must review international creation and not limit itself only to those artists who came to live in Paris, she also knew, rapidly, that after the War information had a tendency to be world-wide in character and that it was not sufficient to wait until foreigners took advantage of a trip to Paris to discover new artists. The militant Denise René Gallery sought out and found new structures, a new public and made the most contemporary creation available to them. From April 1948 she organised exhibitions in Denmark, finding partners in the big, local galleries (Birch, Tokanten, and Rasmussen) who could continue her action to make constructed art known. In 1951 the organization of the Klar Form exhibition that toured the museums of Scandinavia and Belgium for a year was the concrete result of this visionary conception of the work of a gallery.

From time to time a dealer who accompanies the art of his or her time becomes a part of it; this was the case with Kahnweiler and Cubism, Herbert Walden and German Expressionism, Castelli and Pop Art. In 1955, when Denise René organized the exhibition "Le Mouvement" she instigated a new artistic concept and created a movement at the same time as she revealed a new generation of artists. Kinetic Art, to use the term coined in 1955 by Vasarely, followed by the development of Op Art, became one of the major tendencies in international contemporary art for fifteen years. The rapid public success of Kinetic Art, and its immediate echo in Europe and the United States should perhaps be seen as the natural and indispensable counterpoint to Pop Art. Where the latter restored the image and its power to bear witness to the social world, the Kinetic artists questioned art again, interrogated vibration, virtual colour, and all that in a fixed image calls upon the optic nerve or, on the contrary, introduced with real movement a dimension of duration that modified the approach to visual arts by bringing them nearer to the developments in time offered by the cinema and music. The immediate echo of these ideas, the influx of new artists who joined them, bore witness to the correctness of the intuition of the initiators of the movement, and also swept away the seeds of academisation. Multiples, a generous social idea that consisted of putting art within the reach of the greatest number of people rather than only that of the rich collectors, in diffusing the artists’ works by the hundred, made these consumer goods little different from those that Pop Art boasted about. The Grand Prix for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1966 was given to Julio le Parc and showed official recognition of Kinetic Art, as the prize conferred on Rauschenberg two years previously had done for Pop Art, making Optical Art a fashion phenomenon. As is always the case with art, however, public recognition of a movement sounds its death toll. Denise René was not just a witness to the second half of the Twentieth century, but was a leading actor. Without her a part of the art of this century would have taken many more years to be discovered. Certain artists may not even have found the means to continue their creation without her support. In retrospect, one can take an inventory of that which the Gallery did not take into account, ask oneself why Bridget Riley or Takis did not find their place there, be surprised that Minimal Art was not the logical follow-up to the line of thought maintained by Denise René.However, aside from these lacuna, what remains is the admirable fidelity of a dealer with a guideline, the capacity to resist fashion’s sways and the financial or media ebb and flow that goes with them. If everybody agrees today with the severity and the importance of the choices made, what is perhaps most impressive is the moral dimension that Denise René gave to a profession of which few imagine that this is its major quality.

Abstraction in Poland

2011-01-21T01:45:00.000-08:00

In neighboring Poland, where we saw waving a current avant-garde, expressionist and "formists" constructivism led to the creation of the group "Blok" (1924-26), inspired by M. Szezuka that evolved from Suprematism Constructivism commitment to communism. The group's magazine Praesens "(which, with its" Unism "resume line malevitchean purified), would, in 1929, the group "RA" ("revolutionary artists"), with H. Stazewski and the sculptor K. Kobro, a new way by profit, while H. Berlewi was engaging in an online "Mecano-making, " the study of optical vibrations. In all this turmoil has resulted, in 1931, creating the first museum of abstract art and avant-garde in Europe, in Lodz, which might last.

Abstraction in U.R.S.S.

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These were years of ferment within the framework of the Soviet revolution in plant heritage by baking a politicized before, we observe - as we have seen its impact on architecture. The Department of Plastic Arts of the People's Commissariat for Education, IZO, Lucacharsky excited by the workshops free Svonsas, which replaced the Academy of St Petersburg in 1918 and professed where Malevich, as in the UNOVIS Vitebok, Institutes of Culture Arts, here in Moscow, the Inkhuk where Kandinsky taught in 1920, passing away To the "Bauhaus" since losing its tendency, and Suprematism and Constructivism where doctrines were necessary, the Vikhutein, Technical Institute of Moscow, dominated by Tatlin that there, rather monotonously made many disciples, among them the brothers G. and V. Stenberg and K. Medunetsky - were so many bodies active propaganda of an art, or an "agit-prop" in the theater, with its sets, played an important role, as the poster and the most graphic arts, abstract formulations which would otherwise also took to the streets in festive decorations, or in trains (and boats) that advertising across the vast country. In 1922, an exhibition of Soviet avant-garde in Berlin, was to some extent, the swan song of such action.

In reality, the USSR, beyond its immediate turmoil, the abstraction was not more than an accident, between the naturalist tradition more or less a modernized neoplasticism popular, nationalist, and his recovery as early as 1920, scholars adhering to the new political , which eventually annihilate, soon, the revolutionary vanguard.

Vitatline Vladimir (1885-1953)

2011-01-21T01:31:00.000-08:00

In 1919, Vitatline (1885-1953) declared that Suprematism was "the sum of all the mistakes of the past", it expresses its opposition to personal and ideological Malevich. Disciple Larianov, marked by a structured and whose colorful expressionism was not unconnected with the interest in traditional icons. Tatlin had an adventurous youth who took him to Paris in 1913, there admiring the buildings raised by Picasso, based on their own "counter-reliefs" which, with experiences of materials and applications in the corners of rooms, modifying its spatiality, created the constructivist movement in 1927, enriched by a new flying machine invented organic, "Latatlin" - but especially in 1919-20, the project of the monument to the Third International, we already know helical construction of a fleeting expression "Komfuturism. Artistic animator, teacher, victorious defender of the principle of "production art" against the "art lab" (which represented Suprematism) a "productivist" politicized, proclaimed in 1921, with rejection of easel painting, and that led to his craft, poster, the theatrical decor already practiced in youth (and who was prominent field of action of his movement, thanks primarily to the enactments (V. Mayerhold) - none of this prevented the misfortune of Tatlin, compared to the realism in the official 30 years. The his part, Mr Rodechenko (1881-1956), coming more or less of futurism, the author of geometric designs consisting of animated games curves made in step, methodically (1915-16), and a painting "Black on black," presented polemically against Malevich in 1919, he practiced construction surprises, mobile and linear metal with which participated in 1917, with Tatlin and the disciple of G. Yakulov at the famous Coffee Pitoresque decor, lively artistic center of Moscow, in these years fermentation. Reduced, like Tatlin, applied arts and design, "he devoted himself to photomontage and typesetting. In these areas stood out El Lissitzky (1890 - 1941), engineer and architect, for that matter, a disciple of Malevich, who went from Suprematism to constructivism, the "History of two squares" (1922) and their "prouns”, geometric constructions in space, originally painted. In large photomontage, made the decoration of the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition of Printing, Cologne, 1930 - and so too, as in 1920-24, the famous “Lenin Tribune”, we have seen, represented the dictator of an imaginary construction of the high iron. In 1926, El Lissitzky wrote the interior architecture of the "abstract case" to the International Exhibition in Dresden, which he considered his major work. Schwittors friend and collaborator and Arp, and V. Doesbourg, related to the "Bauhaus", as we know, it was for you to connect more regularly between the Russian and the current world West over the years 20.

Kazimir Malevitch (1878-1935)

2011-01-21T00:52:00.000-08:00

K. Malevich (1878-1935), from Impressionism and Symbolism and Art Nouveau, Cezanne, Matisse and Derain's, national painter of rustic scenes, composed in 1911-12 figures in a geometric cylindrical, cube-futurist ("Grinder” , 1912-13, Yale University, USA), influenced by Léger, to the ends of abstractization of geometric bodies of revolution, painted with careful modeling in 1912-13, the year he adopted a cubist imagery to a syntactic "transnational "(" Zaorum ", as we saw), or" alogic, compositions, not without humor confused with the spirit "given" ("An Englishman in Moscow, 1913-14, Amsterdam," Partial Eclipse with Mona Lisa " 1914, col. part. Leningrad). But in 1915, Malevich said he made the first works "suprematists," based on the elementary forms of square, circle and cross vertical-horizontal rectangles. The famous "square black on white" (Tretyakov Museum, Moscow), shown in 1915, is emblematic of this phase, possibly marked the work of decorating the Futurist opera "Victory Over the Sun" (1913), with music by M. Matinchine, translator of "Du Cubisme" of Gleizer - which would, in 1917, the painter of "realism in space," in large colored bands, interested in psycho-physiological research on the art visible.

The "Suprematism" as a supreme aesthetic state "monumental", "not objective" deduction based on a conceptual level, is rooted in the philosophical thought of the post-Kantian metaphysics P. D. Ouspenki (“Tercium Organum”, 1911) who, referring to a" higher form of existence" and announcing a "language of the future”, regardless of the real world, exercise (perhaps through Matinchine) great influence on the painter, also interested in "the fourth dimension" (Ouspenki, 1908, on "space-time continuum" of mathematics of Minkowski, 1908) - and still fascinated by the symbolist rhetoric inherent in that thought. "All they're ready to lose all hold new findings (Ouspenki, 1913) applies to the diligence of whom Malevich" Black Square "was" a flat-surface alive, now even born "(" From Cubism and Futurism and Suprematism, a new pictorial realism, 1916); test would be resumed in 1920, as we know, in From Cezanne to Suprematism, the first semantic unit building free pair of systems "flat surfaces" in space, unconditional freedom of movement (cf. A. B. Nakov, 1975) - "zero," which since 1915 has defined its pictorial experience, was a full, equal to the infinite and absolute, the "harmony, rhythm and beauty" (Mirror Suprematist, 1923 ), not the end of a speech earlier aesthetic, a kind of nillyism (cf. D. Valle, 1967). It always defended Malevich, a work that has consistently been to the "square white on white" (1918, MAM, New York), after three or four years of multiple compositions that have the volume, as those architectural possible, the "planitis ". Numerous texts by Die Welt Gegentandslose ("The world has no purpose," published by the Bauhaus, 1927), proclaim or defend a polemical aesthetic and philosophical doctrine that the painter was able to teach in Vitebsk, against the wishes of Chagall, and won, the group UNOVIS, which created in 1920-21, and within two years, the Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad - but that already attacked in 1919 by the Constructivists was supposed by idealism, contrary to official line aesthetic and hardly tolerated, as in 1927. Since 1930, the year he was arrested by secret police, conducted a Malevich painting figurative landscapes and portraits that are not without bitter irony - and, in 1935, was buried in a coffin suprematist that he had intended, causing painted on a white background a circle and a black square.

Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964)

2011-01-20T03:33:00.000-08:00

The Russian avant-garde, extremely varied and controversial, early Cubism fascinated adapted to a cube-Futurism, as seen, produced the first abstract works in 1910-11, with M. Larionov (1881-1964) and N. Gontacharova (1881-1962), the movement of "Lucism” ("Rayonnism" – "rayonisme" in French), presented in 1913 as a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism and Orphism, controversy and paradoxically organized against Western culture - although Apollinaire to defend his Paris show in the following year. The forms are painted "spatial forms obtained by the crossing of reflected rays of various objects"; located "outside of time and space", want a "fourth dimension" that had met the Cubist more speculative. The career of pictorial Larionov, coming a expressionist painting, popular and anecdotal, for ideological nationalism, and past, as seen by profuse decanted and pioneering activities in the founding of the groups "Jack of Diamonds" (1910), "Donkey Tail" (1912) and "The Target" (1913), ended in 1915, leaving Russia to integrate, set designer and costume designer as brilliant in the company of Diaghilev. Gontacharova, he followed his destiny, though, around 1955, he was reminded in Paris, retracing screens "Rayonnist" of recent cosmic inspiration.

But two other abstract movements, and violently opposed, would occupy more significantly the scene Soviet and then Russia since 1915: the "Suprematism" of Malevich (and Leporskaia A., V. Ernrolaeva, L. Khidekel, N. M. Suetine, G. Kluza, IG Ghaschuik, I. Kliuns, I. Puni, M. Menkov and futuristic O. Rezanov), as manifest in that year published, and "constructivism" of Tatlin and Rodchenko (and Yakulov G., J. Annenkov , W. Ermilov, V. Stepanova and earlier Cubist and Suprematist Vdaltsova and L. N. Popova, as Klium Vernine architects and brothers) and, between two situations (besides A. Exter, coming from the cube-futurism ), the movement "proun" Ed Lisitzky since 1919. Also in this range of options (and parties) realistic Manifest of Prevsner and Galv, in 1920 came forward, constructivist side, a proposal that would have more lasting effect on the sculpture.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

2011-01-20T03:05:00.000-08:00

The simultaneity of the abstract Delaunay discs in 1912 (and the "timing" of his disciples), the compositions of varied root cubist and futurist Picabia in 1912-13, the practice of "force-lines" of the Futurists and their "states soul" in Boccioni, Balla and Severini, provide many other situations aesthetic that integrate abstraction, as historically necessary conclusion. And if, "in the background, the Cubist movement and was wanted on a referral to abstraction" (L. Degand, 1953), this can be thought of experimentalism, from Van Gogh to Kandinsky. W. Kandinsky (1866-1944), lawyer qualified in its native Russia, was soon attracted by the folk art that made him "get into the paint and in 1896 went to Munich where the new art attracted him in the "Phalanx " who founded (1901-04) and in which he created his own school, a practice remembered pictorial color in landscapes of Moscow and "romantic paintings, something Symbolists (" Lancer in the landscape”, 1906; “Scream", 1907). Was through that landscape, improvising, Kandinsky activated your palette by Fauve and expressionist influence, coming from Jawlensky, his companion in Murnane where he settled in 1908, and which soon abandoned, to found "Der Reiter Blane" with F. Mara, in 1911. It was here that the painting Kandinsky developed into the abstract, through an ever greater uncertainty and a formal tone in color ("Landscape with bell tower”, 1909, MAM, Paris; "Improvisation on auburn”, 1910, MAM, Paris).

Kandinsky's influence was decisive in the evolution of German painting in Munich from his essay Uber geistig in der Kunst ("On the Spiritual in Art", written in 1910) defined a new aesthetic that situation anthroposophy R. Steiner scored. The artwork is a "living being" with an "inner life" from an "inner necessity of the soul expressed through the symbolic meaning of shapes and colors and communicating the arrival of the "Kingdom of the Spirit" on "time of great spirituality". For these statements, the author has prepared a new chance in artistic creation that a first abstract watercolor, composition of blemishes and fine calligraphy (MAM, Paris), proposed in 1910 - not without that, this year, and until 1913 in "Improvisations" and "Compositions", reference figuratively landscaping continued alternately present. In "With the black bow" (1912, MAM, Paris) in his great shock of ways, where "chaotic cosmos is born", Kandinsky made a definitive work that in 1914, "Table with a Red Spot" (MAM, Paris), "Escape" (Guggenheim Museum, New York), and the four panels made for a collector of New York ("Compositions" which have been designated by the names of four seasons, 1914, MAM, New York and the Guggenheim Museum, No. 1) complete, in its vigorous and colorful forms of conflict euphoric. That same year, with the war, Kandinsky left Munich to Moscow, leaving there his former student and colleague G. Munter (donation to the Municipal Museum in Munich), whose art influenced, along with Jawlensky. A new period of its production took place there, rather fruitful given the difficulties of war and occupation officials after they had as a teacher, founder of a foiled Institute of Artistic Culture (1919) and an Artistic Academy of Sciences in 1921, the year left Russia for Germany. Kandinsky's participation in the Soviet artistic policy was, however, enthusiastic, by temperament more isolated, that remained on the sidelines of a vanguard of committed groups and, in a revolutionary and Berlin Dada, its activity was also reduced. The "Bauhaus", appeared to him as a solution and there was an invite to assume there teaching, along with Klee that was already there. Since 1921, but the painter made frames where strict geometric shapes were articulated with others, calligraphy and free spots ("White Background", 1920, Leningrad, "Red Spot II", 1921, Basel, "Chess", 1921, Guggenheim Museum, New York), on what it was intended to mark constructivist view, to some extent acceptable, but of which the art of Kandinsky defended by denial of the mechanistic principle (cf. W. Grohmann, 1958). It was, rather, an investigation into the relationship between figures and background, located beyond the romanticism of the Munich period. And in this way the painter had to follow in subsequent years.

The encoding of a "new aesthetic that could only score when the signs become symbols", now under pure geometric shapes, circles, straight lines crossed and serpentine curves and distinct from each other within a determined color, reflected the renewed commitment of Kandinsky observation of structural forms in their relations or their "laws of supply". A new test, Punk und Linie zu Flach, "published in 1926, now notes on 1914, reflecting on these" preliminary problems, a science of art, "notes a number of pleadings that served the school professed in the "Bauhaus" however transferred to Dessau, it is also an "organic continuity" test of 1912. The pictures painted then continue to put the problem of space through various combinations of formal, more stringent or more flexible, from key figures used, circle, triangle and square, in a game serious or gay, between "The black circle" (1923, col. part., Paris) and 'Quiet Tension" (1924, MAM, Paris), "Some circles" (1926, Guggenheim Museum, New York) and "Yellow, Red, Blue" (1925, MAM, Paris).

In 1923, the Nazis closed the “Bauhaus" Kandinsky and forced into exile in Paris-Neville, where he died. ”Development in brown" (1933, MAM, Paris) was the last painting in Germany, sad in his allusion; Relations, 1934, (col. part. New York), with its fairy-like joy, is already a framework in Paris, a new period in which, amid considerable difficulties, because his art, then isolated, was met with reluctance and the painter has innovated a greater sense of "baroque exuberance " (W. Grohmann, 1958) that "Composition IX" (1936, MAM, Paris) is a noted example in its profusion of dancing figures on diagonal bands of colored light, or "dominant Curve" (1936, Museum Guggenheim , New York), or "Medium accompanied" (1937, col. part., Paris) in scenes that played at the end of his work, are subject to flight and the rise in spiritual symbolism. "The last frames are the echo of a transitory and transparent world" (W. Grohmann, 1958), which resemble primitive pre-Columbian so married to the memory of Russian folklore itself. The last frame done, "Enthusiasm tempered" (MAM, Paris), makes sail in a pink background, strange life forms, the life of an embryo again.

The "end of theory" that Kandinsky explained in his essay of 1926 was actually of his painting, "1. Find life, 2. Make visible your pulse, 3. Establish the laws that govern life." This organic phase showed a romantic source of Abstract Expressionism to near 1920, and phase equilibrium in a constant and wisdom never denied that, at its points of contact with the art of Klee, does not give up as a spiritualist convention does not forget folk art of his country, received the first invitation to the adventure of painting.

History of Western Art (1750-2000)

2011-01-20T02:36:00.000-08:00

The Abstraction

Developing in parallel to cubism and futurism, expressionism and Dada, and surrealism as well, receiving inflows of them revolutionary, a new aesthetic situation is defined, between 1910 and 1917, in Western art that dominate long, sooner or later : the abstraction.

Mental attitude and sensitivity whose roots lie in the Neolithic as the Romanesque art of the steppes and in the western Irish twists of the illuminations of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance rhythmic concerns, under Pythagorean lesson, she realizes that a spirit of abstraction to figuration spirit offers compensation, but the historical alternation, responding to cultural and indexes at the beginning of the nineteenth century erupted in mutation, in favor of an extreme evolution of contemporary aesthetic discourse - and already we've seen of Impressionism in the divide, but deny themselves fundamentally naturalism figurative earlier.
Reflection on the colors of Goethe (Zur Farbenlehre, 1810) unwelcome at the time, its psychological effect against the physical theories of Newton, the theory of pure visuality K. Fiedler (who died in 1895, with only collected writings in 1914: Shriften uber Kunst) adopted H. Hilderbrand (Problem der Form, 1893), with recovery of the sense "formal" non-free of classic criterion, and the thesis W. Worringer on Abstraktion und Einfühlung, prepared in German cultural circles in Munich especially (but not the French, who ignored such works), an awareness of the problems posed by an artistic creation "tautogoric" (Schlegel) - only to itself, contrary to due diligence "allegorical" of all figurative formulation. Or an awareness of the infinite as opposed to a finite implies that the naturalistic representation. The abstraction would thus be an "antifiguration" (C. P. Brue, 1955) that is sufficient in itself without external boundaries.

The aesthetic and philosophical speculations such must be added, in Germany, too, in the context of theorizing psychologistic call school in Berlin, around 1912, the influence of "Gestaltheorie" (theory of form, structure) with works of M. Wertheimer, K. Koffka and W. Kohler (Gestaltpsychology, published in the United States in 1929) that, opposed to analytical psychology, define the behavior of the set, in correspondence organized and interdependent components, which are just formal expression and formalizing in the field of aesthetics.

If Cézanne, in 1904, reported in the treatment codable geometric models of nature, and M. Denis, already in 1890, remembered that a framework is a priority, "a flat surface covered with colors" on it pointing to the fundamental situation of abstract painting to Worringer, the "abstraction" reflected the desire of separating hostile nature, and not "communion" in an anguished isolation or changed, that intellectual and sensitively, defended himself, as alien to the everyday world, but it also tended to "access to the underlying archetypal forms that random variations introduced the world today (H. Read, 1955 ), imparting a sense of this, through a pedagogical action. The demand thus rendered metaphysics leads, finally, amid a crisis mythology of the Western world, an "ultramitologie" (J.-A. France, 1959) of perfect geometric expression by one of two major ways in which art abstract was stabilized.

The other is located in, exacerbation of feelings - and its root expressionist (or surrealistic) Cubist corresponds to the root (or cube-futurist) of the first.

The names, descriptive or controversy, which received the abstraction, sometimes reflect their own rootedness, now a timing of steps walked or aesthetics than formulated. The "abstract expressionism" or "lyrical abstraction" marking the first situation to the borders of "informality" (M. Tapio, 1951) or "action painting" ("action painting" or "gestural") and "gesturalism "H. Rosenberg, 1952) or "tachisme" (from tache, "spot, C. Estienne, 1954). But theoretical situations or particularistic movements of geometric abstraction rooted in Cubist, are the names of Russian constructivism "and" Suprematism, "or the Dutch" neoplasticism "and" elementarism "- but they joined a new concept of Concrete "(TV Doesbourg, 1951), which sought to oppose the abstraction, considering it" over the period of research and experience speculative.” For G. Mathieu (1951), these situations (also known as "cold abstraction" as opposed to the expressionistic embellishments) fit into the generic term "aformalism. Later, around 1960, an art-based optical effects will take the name of American "op'art" while investigations led to the mechanical "kinetic art", and another in a geometric framework or formalistic.

The classification of "non-figurative" rather vague, sought to oppose the type geometric abstraction, ignoring the "figures" of this geometry and only thinking about the nature of what we thought were not well founded their own experiences. In the immediate postwar period, however, a new school of Paris "has adopted this name, rooting on her accepting an impressionist, retained by the emotion of the original natural subject. "No goal", for its part, label was proposed by H. Rebay, the United States in 40 years, a recovery that had not fortune.

In the two trunks herd of abstraction we thus define themselves both situations, a sentimental expression and expression of mental or other geometric, with that priority, immediately taken up in 1910 and 1920 by Kandinsky, after long experience figurative expressionist, while the second is exemplified in Malevich and Mondrian in 1913-14, in 1917 - both coming from Cubism to Suprematism or the neoplasticism, respectively.

The larger or more charismatic historical importance of Mondrian is the exemplary logic of his diligence as much of their persistence, one possible action that cannot benefit Malevich in the Stalin Soviet Union s. The forwarding logic of both objected to the accident that lies at the base of the abstraction of Kandinsky, unable to read figuratively a "Meda" Monet in 1895, and, surprised by a suddenly seen his own composition instead, leaning against a wall of his studio in 1908.

But beyond the current two or more channels of abstraction, it should be noted, with a focus on time (although other relations of reading should be made in various artists), the interpretation of a musical inspiration in visual terms of a universe of sounds, rhythmic affinity. In 1942 the Czech F. Kupka (1871-1957) exhibited in Paris (where he installed in 1895) a screen titled "Disks of Newton" with, by caption, "Amorphous, escape in two colors" (Prague), probably 1910. Then the painter traveled a long way to Fauvism and symbolism to expressionism, influenced by bright, dynamic, having illustrator acerbic humor ("L'Assiette au Beurre") and also attended the group's "Golden Section". The series of their "vertical planes" in 1912-13 (MAM, Paris, etc...), also represents a planned museum already detectable in "piano keys – the "lake of 1909 (Prague) with its vertical listing “planes of color." In the '30s, Kupka inspire would jazz ("Jazz-hot No. 1, 1935, MAM, Paris), a work illegally in many curiosities that changed the cosmic sciences such as music and led the test Creations dans les arts plastiques (1923), in a situation of isolated pioneer. In a similar musical inspiration can subscribe to the Lithuanian painter and composer M. K. Ciurhouris, who died in 1911, working in S. Petersburg since 1906, abstract compositions that mark since 1904, with arabesques of geometric shapes in the "Sonatas of stars, allegro and andante" (1908, Kaunas, Lithuania) took a diluted symbolic figuration, mentioned above. The Russian S. Charchouse, in turn, come and experience "given", he also drew on Bach or Beethoven, to compositions of fine monocronism, a painting so that the symbolism lurks.

Abstract Art Collection Millennium bcp

2010-12-09T02:45:00.000-08:00

In 2003 she launched the Millennium bcp brand, the result of successive mergers of several financial institutions in one group, linking history and heritage in a unique collection. Became part of him that came via the Portuguese Commercial Bank, line matrix and renewed based institution, New Network, Atlantic, and through him, Bank Commercial de Macau Bank Mello and Bank Pinto & Sotto Mayor. But the unique collection of artistic goods have passed over the years, also to make part of many goods that were incorporated as a result of mortgages, donations or purchases.

It is also the perception of multidimensional long narrative that is told through works of art, embodied in the choices of the works gathered here today and not by chance, under the theme of Abstraction, released through the core issue of works by Vieira da Silva and his contemporaries but that allowed a strengthening of visibility and dialogic reading with other nuclei present in the collection copyright Millennium bcp. Although it is notoriously absent in the collection of artists such as Fernando Lanhas for a more detailed review of the concept, it can create many situations of encounter between an approach borrowing from the experience of geometry, in which the rigor of the strokes to be confused with the symbolism of the vocabulary and appearance of the most convulsive gesture. Accordingly, and based on the suggestion to build in the works of Vieira da Silva, its landscapes meticulously organized or emotionally dysfunctional in raptures trace energetic and creative, was divided into two and the choice of exhibition space. Having such a prominent figure of geometric abstraction Nadir Afonso, brought to the route experiences grounded in the use of geometric symbols, the texture of its rhythms, chromatic and formal work that organizes. These proposals will reshape years later, in works such as Fernando Aguiar, making these elements of a vocabulary building visual poetry, or of Pedro Casqueiro in structure jarring screens.

The construction of meshes compositional element as the founder of painting or drawing is a recurring element that we find a suggestion in urban TOM graphics, support unstable equilibrium in the austere Angelo de Sousa, optical generator rhythms Eduardo Nery or inquiring of building space image with Artur Rosa. Among them were two key moments in this core work. One that brings together three paintings by Fernando Lemos, an artist whose pictorial intervention and its exposure was diluted in the face of photography and applauded their approval. Works are not seen for so long and which have had an accurate restoration work by specialized techniques and students of the Faculty of Science and Technology, New University of Lisbon in a fruitful partnership between the university and the Millennium bcp. The other, also operated upon for this exhibition brings together the work of Jorge Pinheiro, an artist of uncommon erudition in the seventies that embodies screens as large, chromatically uniform across the length over which scores are suspended fragile, as if a mapping or coded language of songs and silences it were. In connection with these works, we can still find works of Antonio Palolo, Eduardo Batarda and Manuel Cargaleiro.

But if the abstraction is generated in relation to the real, the desire to rescue the action on immobility, crossing the recognizable, the mimetic, the paradigm of figuration and to the environment that operates with an engine-building image, she has the greatest expression of the idea go. That is what is on the screens of Vieira da Silva or Nadir Afonso. But also on chromatic explosions Manuel D'Assunpção, dramatized in the visions of Nikias Skapinakis. A whirlwind of intensity gesture which acknowledges the work of Arpad Szenes, the delicate constructions of Andrew Lanskoy, paintings by Paula Rego accumulation in lacerations of Mário Cesariny envisioned in asparagus Antonio Areal.

There is, in many of these works, a landscape slowly disorganized or suggestion instead, recomposed away from what is recognizable. A sort of meeting between the visible and the inward journey with maximum expression in the exploration of matter of the painting. Zao Wou-Ki when they do happen the day of registration in a pictorial diary of sorts, in compositions of major and vibrant color palette, which is observed has the ability to focus on themselves a long history (personal and political, pictorial, graphic) in brief boost. The same applies to Manessier, even with the structural character of the spot stroke made it presents a mix weight that Zao Wou don’t have. It is one of the most important works of this core, built in the image of retable panel at the height of a moment of spiritual ecstasy. Another is the composition of Serge Poliakoff, great work, as in the formal ingenuity of its composition, the way the material and color are worked. It was one of the paintings restored for this show, the pair of Augusto Barros and Luís Demée.

At the tension between figuration and abstraction, making this productive meeting ground of creation, are the paintings of Louis Dourdil. But the figures also abstracts Júlio Resende Júlio Pomar or, here put into dialogue with the dark visions of Justino Alves and landscapes of blazing Menez and Teresa Magalhães.

Rather than create watertight compartments in reading the works were concerned with making the space as organic as possible, open to the discoveries of the viewer, suggesting more than a tight timeline, and unpredictable encounters mutual meanings.
Les chemins (paths) from Vieira da Silva, entry, set the tone...

Woman

2010-11-25T03:45:00.000-08:00

Manuel Pereira da Silva
Woman, 2001
Plaster on aluminum structure
78x185x50

Family

2010-11-25T03:42:00.000-08:00

Manuel Pereira da Silva
Family, 1958
Plaster on aluminum structure
52x128x30

Volume I

2010-11-25T03:40:00.000-08:00

Manuel Pereira da Silva
Volume I, 1961
Plaster on aluminum structure
58x83x35

Untitled

2010-11-25T03:37:00.000-08:00

Manuel Pereira da Silva
Untitled, 1962
Plaster on aluminum structure
58x83x35

Maternity

2010-11-25T03:34:00.001-08:00

Manuel Pereira da Silva
Maternity, 1965
Plaster on aluminum structure
10x105x50

Photos of the exhibition "Shared Art Millennium BCP - Abstraction"

2010-11-25T03:27:00.000-08:00

Video of two sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva

2010-11-25T03:22:00.000-08:00

In this video we can see two sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva, "Volume I" 1961 and "Woman" of 2001.

Video of the exhibition "Shared Art Millennium BCP - Abstraction"

2010-11-25T03:03:00.000-08:00

In this video we see the Director of the Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes, Delfim Sousa, presenting three sculptures of Manuel Pereira da Silva to de President of Millennium BCP Bank, Carlos Santos Ferreira, the Secretary-General of the Foundation's Millennium BCP, Fernando Nogueira and art historian and curator of this exhibition "Shared Art Millennium BCP - Abstraction" Raquel Henriques da Silva.

Exhibition "Shared Art Millennium BCP - Abstraction"

2010-11-25T02:37:00.000-08:00

Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes, after a period of closure for major refurbishment supported by EU funds, opens its doors on November 16, 2010 with the inauguration, by 18 hours of the exhibition "Shared Art Millennium BCP - Abstraction".

In this exhibition will be on display some sculptures of Manuel Pereira da Silva.

This exhibition, sponsored by a prestigious bank institution, which aims to highlight the important national artistic heritage, as well as contribute to the cultural enrichment of the country, brings together a selection of 74 paintings representing the abstraction Portuguese and foreign.

Covered with great interest by the diversity of exhibited works, of which highlights a significant core of copyright Portuguese painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, with twelve paintings. Beyond this, we stress the presence of works by the following artists: Alfred Manessier, Andrew Lanskoy, Angelo de Sousa, António Areal, Antonio Palolo, Arpad Szenes, Bual Artur, Artur Rosa, Augusto Barros, Eduardo Batarda, Eduardo Nery, Fernando Aguiar, Fernando Lemos, Jorge Pinheiro, Júlio Pomar, Júlio Resende, Justin Alves, Luis Demée, Dourdil Luis Manuel Cargaleiro, Manuel D 'Assumpção, Cesariny, Menez, Nadir Afonso, Nikias Skapinakisl, Paula Rego, Peter Casqueiro, Serge Poliakoff Teresa Magalhães, Zao Wou-TOM-Ki.

The Art Shared Exhibition don’t leave out the youngsters. Millennium BCP, Casa-Museu Teixeira Lopes and Gaianima, EEM, launched a contest called "Discovering Collection Millennium BCP" which proposes the creation of creative works from the works on display at the exhibition. The top three entries will be awarded individual and team prize will be for the Class of school work to do in presenting creations of "Shared Art".

The show will be open to the public until January 30, 2011 and admission is free, and where the guided tours on Tuesdays, from 14:00 to 17:00, Wednesday to Friday, 10:00 to 17 h00 and Saturday Sunday and holidays from 10:00 to 17:00.

Mirror of the world: a new history of art

2010-11-16T15:05:00.000-08:00

Julian Bell, himself a painter, interprets art from the standpoint of the creator, trying to establish a rapport between the viewer and the artist. Its purpose is to encourage the viewer to, first, look at the artwork, and only then, equate the essence and meaning. Challenge us here to look at art as a reflection - mirror - the human condition.

Mirror of the World traces the evolution of visual arts through time and space, breaking down boundaries between tribes, nations and religions, giving us an analysis - and cross-cultural - the diversity of works of art and how these may relate to from or even rooted in each other and in their social and political contexts.

Humans tell stories, and humans make objects to dazzle the eyes. Sometimes, these stories relate to those objects. This kind of narrative, which is called history of art, born from the desire to imagine how someone would live in another time, and be amazed at what these hands have done. Art historians have also tried to explain why objects are made of different ways, depending on the time and place. That is what this book intends to do.

But a report of this type has an inherent difficulty. A work of art seeks to capture and hold our attention: a story of art pushes forward, paving the way through the territories of the imagination. In an art history of general scope, like this, the voltage can be constant. At each step, the narrator and the listener will feel the desire to have a little more and look longer.

Why then insist on this model? We live smothered by images. Worldwide, streets and screens offer a diverse jumble of visual information and rambling. We are confronted with an amalgam of quotes art - Japan century. Nineteenth-century France, Thirteenth-century Rome XVI, Aboriginal Australia - and it would be good to know the vocabulary where it came from what. And it would be good to understand your grammar. How they interact images? How are rooted in the experience of others? What we have in common with the perpetrators?

Questions like these lead stories, not scientific certainty. The story below is told by someone in England in the early twenty. XXI, which tries to encompass thousands of items of clothing on six continents, hoping that on this basis, the reader can continue their own stories. It's more a general introduction to objects and subjects of art history than a comprehensive set of conclusions about them. Do not want to define or redefine what constitutes art, but describes its range of content commonly accepted. The aim is more amplitude than the depth, the opening than be precise.

However, the method of this work could be considered to be relatively thorough. The narrative is woven around objects that have a large reproduction seems good result on the page. The art is not just a question of image compact and easy to fit, although the reader may have that impression here. In this respect, I must admit a personal bias.

I undertook this task after a lifetime of painting. As such I have a habit of being in a room before a given subject that I hope will have a life and stick to a speech of their own. In this work, I see the images the same way: the kind of art on which it focuses less on what is around us - an environment, buildings, decorations, utensils, clothes, jewelry - than what we face, from painting up to the statues and monuments. The immobility of each image introduces another limitation to the discussion.

In writing this report, I worked under three general rules. First, if there is no way to show one thing, it is better not to refer. Choose something like three hundred and fifty works to encompass the history of world art means a difficult balancing act. Many will be disappointed with what was left out, others upset that I mention too many names, without giving them a face. When necessary proved to mention the name of some important figure or phenomenon that cannot be illustrated, I opted for a policy of "looks a lot like". In other cases, preferred to ignore what I cannot offer.

Second, keep the chronological sequence. This directive advantageous for the reader not always proved possible at all, because the analysis varies from one country to another, but I hope that, if working, have a perspective of contrasts from region to region, as well as the affinities between cultures.

My title, Mirror of the World, suggests a third of my premises. I understand the history of art as a frame within which we continually reflected universal history in all its breadth - and not as a window that opens to an independent aesthetic realm. I admit that the records of the changes are related to artistic records of social changes, technological, political and religious, however reversed or reconfigured show that these reflections.

The mirrors can only work with the light they receive, although they may show us things in a different way. My title also indicates what I believe - that the works of art can reveal otherwise invisible realities and act as frames of truth. However, it is mostly the way these objects are made, not its final status, which will dominate the story. The main reason why I got interested in the history of art is the fact that she seemed to make me closer to some extraordinary things and the people who made them.

Questions, confluences

Europe, 1909-1914

Because in reality, the art consists of objects created so refined, is not it? Objects that demonstrates its intrinsic value: that is not what the market wants? Thus, any artist should create a niche for professional products, whatever their mode of expression.

The "imitation of nature", an old European recipe for paint, no longer relevant.

The doctrines of the "new era" gained momentum and visibility with the arrival of the century. XX. By 1910, several raids were on the march in pure visual music, the "abstraction," among the artists of Eastern and Western Europe - the Czech and Lithuanian Frantisek Kupla Mikalojus Ciurlionis, to mention just two. The moment of rupture of Kandinsky, as he describes it, occurred when he entered the studio one night and saw a bridge over the "image of elusive and glowing beauty who posed no identifiable subject." Did not recognize one of his vibrant landscapes, which was on its side. From that moment on, filed Kandinsky, the painting could go without representation. The visual elegance that pervades composition VII his masterwork of 1913, undoubtedly inspired by the Russian folk ornaments, with its lovely colors, however, he insisted, all the elements dictated by the spirit, and were filled with symbolic intent.

The visible world is not simply evaporated in the new art. Their essences had been distilled and freed, as formulas with which one could build a new pictorial universe. They were not only those things that the eye loves to do: recognize contrasts discern images and limited ways, wander, focus and twist, dip in intensity of color, rush and jump to the side. During a concentrated period of four days, the brush of Kandinsky raged on the huge canvas of three meters, with the joyful innocence of a bee to explore a flower.

Short of sight, beyond sight

Europe, USA, 1920-1940

So then, these were some of the tears of the world's leading artists after traumatic wars and revolutions of the 1910s: a series of new - and mostly "harder" and leaner - colors, meaning open. The hypnotic power of what came to be known as the "culture industry": Hollywood, advertising, photojournalism, etc. Plans progressive reduction of visual, the idea of revolution of the masses on the Left, the uncompromising desire to break with all previous forms of human experience. And in contradiction with this, or blending with it, the yearning for stability, restoration and tradition. In this part and the following will make a visit to the ways in which a few artists and groups have made their way through all these pressures.

Other initiatives of the twenties reflected the Russian constructivism. In the Netherlands, formed a group of avant-garde design around the magazine De Stiff in 1917, while in Germany Walter Gropius created the seminal progressive and social design when he founded the school known as the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1912. In both projects participated painters. Piet Mondrian was one of the most important members of the Dutch group, like many visitors to Paris for ten years, this landscape and theosophy had been inspired by the experiments of the Cubists. Than Picasso and Braque had done suggested one could systematically examine the clues that gave us the vision. Was willing to cut the components of the images of landscapes such as Brancusi silhouetted their figures, and with similar intent: the closer one is its simplicity, is closest to a spiritual ideal. In 1920, he was with an absolutely minimal signs of grammar: vertical lines, horizontal lines and primary colors. The sequence of the holdings that led to this abstraction seemed to proceed with an inexorable logic reduction.

Piet Mondrian, Composition I: with red, black, blue and yellow, 1921

From that moment the only way forward was to start building again. In Composition I: with red, black, blue and yellow, 1921, Mondrian asked the eye that has focused in their own ability to judge the relationships and balances, and their own desire for clarity. Initially, the exercise seems vigorous, fresh, stunningly cold (like this old Dutch resurfaces by austerity that we saw earlier in Vermeer). And then slyly begins to conquer. The closed rectangle in the center and its larger cousin in the upper left of the address space to dance, and everything seems to revolve around him, as if they were catalyzing a chemical reaction, an explosion of order. The red, black and yellow open to the world beyond the edge of the frame, projecting through redesigned the dream that you liked De Stijl was undefined spaces that are out. Perhaps the abstraction was in fact a parallel with the newly created figurative painting, a more potent to induce illusions.

The Bauhaus in Germany, had hoped to get an honest progressive and established standards for a clean design lines, ergonomically efficient than would be replicated across the world. However its internal history, over 12 years of operation and change of location, varied because of the excruciating tension between the charismatic host of innovators who were there. One was Vasily Kandinsky, who joined them with a friend who had met in Munich before the war, Paul Klee. Klee - a dry and obstinate presence personnel - carried out a visual investigation honored with enormous implications. Would give the democratic aspirations of the school a whole new level of resilience.

Paul Klee, Twittering machine, 1922

Like Kandinsky, Klee mattered to him relate the painting to music, but brought a more analytical intelligence to the subject. Like Mondrian, Klee separated and isolated the fundamental components of conducting a painting. But in your hands is converted in a box of playthings. Played by testing many things without limits. In his drawings and watercolors, logical thinking academic stretched a hand and communed with the anomalies of the imagination alone, who discovered the dignity and scribbles a resonant power in the fragile and wobbly. Klee's investigations were on par with those of psychology, a science that was expanding. From 1900 onwards, the researchers had opened his eyes to the children's art and the mentally ill. A kind of empathy turns the charm of a crazy experiment, pen and watercolor as machine chatter: in a sense, anyone take a chance to put their imagination on paper, whether skilled or not, is venturing into the absurd. The title contains that Klee had found himself doing: a device that geometric flowers organically, by clicking on a song. In fact, this sheet of 1922 is installed with a reciprocity between the hard and soft that it had begun to resonate through the field of "advanced" art. It is a masterpiece of innocent echo much wider and infinitely cooler than the absurd sexual mechanical Duchamp devoted his ingenuity between 1915 and 1923, called the Large Glass, one of the great black hole that absorbs all of the interpretation of modern art.

Klee and Mondrian, with his desire to re-educate the eye, seem to cast doubt on any possibility of painting based on observation.

Universal Art History of the XIX and XX century

2010-11-08T06:20:00.000-08:00

The abstraction will definitely be the great achievement of the XX century sculpture. Abstract art, without any specific meaning, shaped in three dimensions, allowing your gaze total, around, in all its facets and perspectives, turning on its axis, allowing the sculpture will develop a variety of ways and possibilities, and full fruit - except for color, which will be replaced by the type of material, although in some cases the paint is applied to the sculpture as a termination. The abstract sculpture, very similar to the architectural modules of the XX century, but without the functionality and size, the scale is much smaller, space conquest also the basis of the combination of modules and elements predominantly geometric, with density, design and related volumes, concatenated, which will show the actual value solidified material, standing in a vacuum, denser air, settling in an allegorical space in the same way that the paint adheres to the tissue. It thus suggesting a sculpture full of strength and attraction, eminently tactile, woven with metallic materials, organic or inorganic.

In short, for Ana Maria Preckler, XX century sculpture, results rich and varied, a large fertility and creativity, following the vanguard found their own paths, such as abstraction, where you find and hold its majority, a total and absolute fulfillment.

The Second Half XX Century

The Abstract Sculpture

Abstraction was the great achievement of the XX century, movements that constituted the historical vanguards brought the greatest creation, originality, and artistic innovation, changing its structures, proceeding to the moral destruction of traditional art and his amazing reinvention. Starting from Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, which were the pillars upon which it is impressive artistic change, this set of avant-garde movements had to be shut down and formulated in Fauvism and its anti-conventional variety of colors in Cubism, and rupture of the fragmented reality; in Futurism, which shaped the sequence, the dynamics and movement, Expressionism, which had a print man's spirit, in Dada, who idolized the absurd and the object of desire; in Surrealism, who played the subconscious the pictorial way, and abstraction, which broke even more.

Louise Bourgeois (1911 -)

Coming from France, Louise Bourgeois is the North American nationality, a country that arrived in 1938. His artistic training happens in Paris, his birthplace, the Ecole du Louvre, The Academy of Fine Arts and The Academy Julian. He began his work in painting in the decade to reach the forty to sculpture, which unfolds his true vocation, acquiring great fame in his adopted country. His style evolved from the enlarged sculpture, with notes surreal, preferably in painted wood, up to inconcrets forms, anthropomorphic and reports on matters more solid as bronze and stone, which unleashes your imagination and fantasy. From its first production: Spring, 1946-48, bronze painted in white, enlargement and bulbous forms Sleeping Figure, 1950, wooden, primitive, semiabstract.

Richard Serra (1939 -)

Abstract sculptor North American close of minimal art by the grandeur of his compositions, which usually includes a sculpture in her surroundings, turning it into a part of the architecture or nature in which it lies. In its production, uses industrial materials, we highlight: Right Angle, 1969, his series of Prop, quadrangular lamina in vertical construction on the terrace of a wall in the center of which juxtaposes a tape at a right angle with rounded edges.

Max Bill (1908-1994)

Architect, abstract painter and sculptor Max Bill was born in Switzerland in Zurich and studied first at the School of Arts and Crafts, and shortly thereafter the German Bauhaus Dessau, where it relates to Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, Klee and Albers, receiving his rationalist influence. It also has a relationship with the Dutch Neoplasticism by Mondrian and Vantongerloo, belonging to the group "Abstraction-Creation" of Paris, in which he focuses his entire artistic career to the constructivist geometric abstraction. It is considered a pioneer of abstract sculpture, performing with great freedom and without regard to rigid structural frameworks, using motion and curved line on some sculptures. In 1951 he obtained the Prize for Sculpture Biennial. Among his sculptures are: Endless Loop, 1947-49, corrugated tubular shape, simple and elegant.

Minimal Sculpture

Minimal Art was a form of sculptural and painterly geometric abstraction of such monumental despite their main condition of sculpture can enjoy themselves with their authors in the section of the Latest Trends in Contemporary Art in the general context of the painting, since these currents latest trends and extremes produces a differentiation between the sexes.

The Abstract Sculpture in Spain

As with abstract painting in Spain produces a real outbreak of sculptors in the chain, some of which may be termed extraordinary. Only Spain alone could fill the pages of the history of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, such is its richness, variety and originality, no wonder the principles Picassian Cubists were the origins of abstraction, but also the Hispanic print, the force of race, the fertile artistic streak Spanish accumulated over the centuries that shaped the early twentieth century, in virtually all styles and avant-garde, a distinctive art. Abstract sculpture in the second half of the century not just schools, only independent individual figures that stand out for themselves, and surprised by how many different shapes and styles that each of these artists can give a unique art as abstract as arid and austere at times.

Some of the most significant abstract sculptors of the generations that occur in the second half of the century, as a show of abstract sculpture of two types: the one corresponding to the first generation of abstract sculptors, artists were created in the first third of the century, and works in which matter However the following form and sculptural tradition, changing the nature of figurative to abstract, and the sculpture of the second generation, whose artisans are born in the second third of the century, in which matter is multiplied, and introducing new combinations of all sorts of elements (with abundance of organic material), and the way it expands in space, breaking the previous formal unity, sometimes doing architecture, sometimes air suspensions and other installations of great complexity whose pieces spread through soil, and some other inconcret morphologies of nature, pseudo-organic, a versatile and imaginative variety.

Enbil Jorge Oteiza (Orio, Gipuzkoa, 1908 - Donostia, Gipuzkoa, 2003) was a famous sculptor, designer, painter and writer Basque, born in the region of Navarra.

Modernist declared, in 1962 published the book Quosque tandem, which dealt with the prehistoric art in the Basque Country, during which much was inspired.

Of great importance to Spain and ultimately to the Basque Country, his works can be seen in the best museums of your country and Europe. The disarrangement of the space, for example, one of his best known works, is now exposed at the Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.
At their inception, Oteiza makes figurative work in which one perceives the influence of Henry Moore, for his return from Spain introduces herself completely in the path of geometric abstraction, with a free personal creation, influenced by the Master of Suprematism, Malevich .

Palazuelo Pablo de la Peña (Madrid, 6th October 1916 - Galapagar, Madrid, 3 October 2007)

Palzuelo, another large abstract sculpture of geometric forms that his work of great beauty of line and modeling, in the most advanced of its kind and poetic. The clean geometric lines, elegant and soft, finely drawn, modernity and beauty of great design, the basic geometric forged steel plates in laminar, with angles, plans, sections and meetings of great simplicity and play of light and shade; blades gently curved and the modules in L; Interception of plans found are some of the predominant characteristics of his sculptural work.

Eduardo Chillida (San Sebastián, January 10, 1924 - San Sebastian, August 19, 2002) was one of the most famous sculptors and engravers Spanish modernists. Along with Jorge Oteiza, Chillida is considered the most prominent sculptor in the twentieth century.

The tradition of Pablo Picasso, after abandoning his studies, he entered into a drawing course and starts, finally, to carve iron.

In 1948 he moved to Paris, where he became friends with Pablo Palazuelo, who influenced him deeply in his career, giving him a taste for abstraction.

Chillida sculptural abstraction applies to maximum strength, strength, structure and free expression, and in contrast, the maximum beauty, delicacy and poetry, which has already done since their early days in their beautiful titles. Large structures Chillida, full of poise and strength, rise up as volumes in space of freedom, the embrace solidified with air. Its buildings, never rigid in form, always free and moved about linear design, the alternate geometric compositions of lines and curves, projecting into the void and changing all laws of gravity, with the boldness of the sculptor poet who in his desire to sublimate the material, make it light enough to skim the intangible. Chillida is one of the greatest sculptors abstract Hispanics, emerging only in his climb to the impossible, in his work has a lot of poetry, a poetry that could link with the German poet of the sublime and the impossible was Rainer Maria Rilke, and much of musicianship that he had composed another superb German, Bach, with which the sculptor is identified, as has much of the thinking, perhaps by her attraction to Goethe and Heidegger.

Earlier in his career he used materials like wood and iron. But when he begins to explore abstract art, begins to concern itself with the most diverse materials as stone and light.

Six years later held his first solo exhibition, this being the first show of abstract sculpture held in Spain. After this exhibition, is invited by architect Ramón Vázquez Molezún to participate in the Triennial of Art in Milan, Italy, receiving then the Diploma of Honor.

Participated in 1959 in the second Documenta in Kassel.

In the 1970s, Chillida is dedicated to observe nature in search of information about the shapes and colors of plants and inspiration, and since the 1980s, begins to reconcile his art with natural areas, and minority, urban.

In 1987, it is academic of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and two years before his death, one realizes their dream, opening a museum dedicated to him, the Museo Chillida-Leku.

Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (Modern Art: Practices and Debates)

2010-10-11T15:15:00.000-07:00

This book was originally published in 1993 by Yale University Press in association with the Open University.

This is the second in a series of four books about art and its interpretation from the mid-nineteenth century until the late twentieth century. As a series, composes the main texts of an Open University course, modern art: practices and debates. They represent a variety of approaches and methods characteristic of the contemporary debate about the art history.

The chapters in this book consider aspects of visual and artistic culture of Europe from 1900 until the late 1920s. Though organized chronologically, each chapter investigates a period or art movement of the early twentieth century in relation to theoretical issues and broader issues of interpretation. In developing questions are raised about research and historical methodology, as well as on the status of "art."

In chapter three, Charles Harrison considers some problems of interpretation and evaluation made by specific examples of abstract art, exploring some of the relationships and differences between forms of figurative and abstract painting. He discusses the need to give attention to specific historical building on the career of Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, while the work of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian is considered in relation to the analysis of valuation.

Abstraction, figuration and representation

Abstract and abstraction

This essay deals with primarily the emergence of forms of abstract art in Europe during the second decade of the century, and some problems of interpretation and evaluation that they raise. Talk about "emergence" is affirming that these were somehow new forms of art. To understand the significance of some claims made on behalf of abstract art, we must first assess what is involved in a particular moment in history, in meeting the terms "abstract" and "art."
The term "abstract" is now widely used, and since the beginning of the XX century was applied as a label for many different art forms. When writing about art, the related term "abstraction" tends to be used in two related but distinct senses: to refer the case of certain works of art, the property of being abstract or "non-figurative" and to refer to the process by which certain aspects of themes or motifs are emphasized in works of art over others.

156, Vasily Kandinsky, Painting with Red Spot, 1914, Musée National d' Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

The illustrations 156-159 show examples of abstract art in the 1910s to 1920, produced by artists of Russian-speaking Czech, Dutch and Swiss. In describing these works as abstract implying that, whatever its appearance, the thing that they seem not to be explained by reference to a theme represented. Despite some obvious differences, they have that in common.

157, Hans Arp, Collage, 1916, Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel.

In fact, although in everyday use we refer to works with "abstract" in the absence of any obvious similarity with the world, might happen to be seen as an abstract work not because it does not look like anything, but because its theme or subject is difficult to identify. And this may occur because a process of abstraction led to the suppression of certain easily recognizable characteristics of the original theme. In 1932, the English painter Paul Nash referred to Picasso as "the greatest of all abstract painters." We call this a sense of "weak" of abstraction, since, according to the most stringent criteria to be applied in this test, no one could say that Picasso did not even an abstract painting during his long activity as a painter. Moreover, the processes of abstraction that he practiced on his themes were often those that made it difficult to understand exactly how these issues were represented in his paintings. It is easy to see that a Picasso painting as Fiddler, the summer of 1910, could be understood as an abstract in the weak sense (illustration 159). By comparison, the work shown in the figure 158 could be called the abstract sense of the term that means it is a work that has no apparent desire to be part of a scene or person. She introduces herself simply as a "composition".

158, Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1916, Guggenheim Museum, Nova York.

As we shall see, and like Picasso Fiddler helps to show the weak and strong senses of abstraction are linked both practically and in terms of art history.

159, Pablo Picasso, The guitarist, 1910, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

On the other hand, it is important to bear in mind that while cubism arose in the context of a Parisian avant-garde, most of the first developments in abstract art occurred some distance from the French capital in Germany, Austria, Holland and Russia. Abstract art was not simply a continuation of that form of modern tradition that had its center in Paris during the previous half century. Rather, the idea of painting a "pure" or pointless tended to invest predominantly against the direction of modern French painting, whose strength lies in its sophisticated exploration of the problems of realism and self-consciousness in figurative representation. Certainly, this tradition was an indispensable resource for all artists involved, but it was extended, diversified and changed under different historical conditions and intellectuals of northern and eastern Europe. The resolution of this process, coinciding with the period of I World War marked the beginning of the end of French dominance on the visual forms of modern. While Paris remained an important center until the beginning of II World War in the early 1920s the idea of modern art and design had been associated in many minds with the possibility of a universal aesthetic, and therefore internationally to which forms of abstract painting would provide prototypes and examples.

Abstraction and meaning

The process of abstraction typically emphasizes those aspects of painting that we see as formal. The artist Theo van Doesburg offered a schematic demonstration of the process of abstraction in his book The Principles of New Plastic Art Illustration 160 shows the stages by turning a photographic picture of a cow in a sort of abstract composition - presumably to highlight aspects individually and emphasizing its "essential." There is something patently absurd in the contrast between the first and last image of Van Doesburg. This absurdity was intended or not, the contrast serves to demonstrate an important point about abstract art in general and the possible ways in which it could be interpreted or regarded as significant. In the clash with traditional forms of painting, we are accustomed to being able to compare certain images with the world, to see where they match or not the appearance (or our expectations), and understand types of intention in the resulting similarities and differences. Given the sequence of illustrations of Van Doesburg, we can actually participate in a similar way of comparison. If we are informed of the stages involved, we can quite easily "understand" abstract painting referred to as "cow". This means that we can reconstruct the painting for a casual kind of story that begins, first with a real cow in the world and, secondly, with a set of intentions by the artist. The process of abstraction is, so to speak, the sequence of effects that these intentions have on the image "original" cow is thus implicitly reconstruct a chain of causes, intentions and effects, however strange they might have been.

160, Theo van Doesburg, aesthetically transformed Subject, 1917, Bauhaus-Archive, Berlin.

But if we were confronted only with the last image of the sequence (illustration 161), as could well occur in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he is now painting? Possibly it could see a pattern like a cow, but in no doubt that his title would take much to persuade us that our perception was accidental How else, then we might find meaning in the painting? The question has obvious relevance for the interpretation of abstract art as a whole. In fact, the sequence of Van Doesburg case presents a deceptively sharp. The illustration 158 can be seen as illustrating a similar process of abstraction, and, guided by the example of Van Doesburg, would therefore seem reasonable to assume that Mondrian's Composition in Line for 1916-1917 is in some sense a painting of the sea. But suppose this would imply a continuous connecting it to earlier paintings. This assumption is not that we can do it safely. In the years 1909-14 Mondrian also drew pictures of trees, windmills and church towers. A different sequence of illustrations would seem to connect the last painting a different reason naturalist.

161, Theo van Doesburg, The Cow, 1917, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

If we have to give up information that a sequence of illustrations appears to provide, we should seek another way to repackage an abstract painting to the world of things, and so understand how it was shaped by the artist's intentions? Or should we instead seek meaning in relationships within the painting itself, given the differences between forms and colors the way we hear the words of an unknown language, not to convert them immediately in terms of our own language, but to achieve that form of understanding that must accompany any act of translation as such, an understanding of grammar relevant? Instead of seeking to establish the meaning of the painting by placing it in a system of causes and effects, we consider the meaning as part of that formal system is that painting?

It is true that all types of human representation can be viewed as ordered according to some system. Indeed, call an object of our experience of a form of representation is to say that we perceive it in a form of a more intentional, i.e., an order form that is meaningful and significant human design in human terms. "Human Terms" are inescapably terms of human language. But it does not follow necessarily that the forms in art are like words or words as they are ordered, or that they are in a correspondence with a given word. They are not subject to the same kind of grammatical rules or the same principles of consistency in use and not come together to form language statements or propositions.

Essence, expression, spirituality

As the example of Van Doesburg suggests the idea of abstract as a process tends to involve a kind of essentialism: up at least half of the XX century, joining the trend in modern art abstract - at least in its more clearly geometric - tended to lead to the belief that a more pure, higher or deeper reality is revealed by eliminating the accidental aspects and "inessential "things. This kind of essentialism derives its justification from the Platonic idea that there are universal or fundamental entities of which the things we encounter are simply examples of imperfect or impure. The work of abstract art was, therefore, associated by many of its early practitioners and advocates a kind of "see through", the idea that the artist is the one that penetrates the veil of material existence to reveal a spiritual reality underlying and essential.

In the early years of this century, Kandinsky and Mondrian were both attracted by the ideas of the Theosophists, who taught that human beings evolve in levels of physical existence to the spiritual, and that certain fundamental laws, hidden from the mass of humanity, are revealed to the initiated as philosophers, founders of religions and - perhaps - the artists. By 1915, Mondrian was also strongly affected by Neo-Platonism theories of mathematician Dr Schoenmaekers published that year. Meanwhile, in Russia, Malevich was interested in pseudo-scientific speculation about the fourth dimension.

It is not difficult to see how the development of Mondrian's work may seem to an essentialist search a gradual that universal reality that is supposedly hidden in the accident. In a footnote to his first published essay on art, Mondrian himself explicitly characterized the artist as a kind of medium for the expression of the universal.

If this view is attributed to the artist a kind of prophetic role, it also gives it a special responsibility. Your practice should be exemplary and in tune with the highest degree. The circulation of such ideas (no matter how eccentric they may seem) in the early years of the century may help explain the powerful sense of mission that is transmitted by the writings of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Given the usefulness of the analogy between abstract composition and grammar, and grammar as they rely on the basic condition is to invoke a rational expression, we must not forget that each of the major artists involved in the initial development of abstract art was involved in some period of their training Neo-Platonism and mystical ideas - which means not rational. (We should be warned by the example of choice of Van Doesburg. Why a cow? "What a cow over a set of illusions Neo-Platonism should result in abstract painting is not, after all, a rational idea.)

Style and Meaning

Of course, not all forms of abstract art that presuppose an initial point of view or Neo-Platonism theosophical plausible. Nor is this view that a work of abstract art as necessarily commits itself to essentialism. Is not to exclude all other interests with what the work looks like or how she came to look like it has, nor is it necessarily deny that there may be other categories in which certain abstract works could be located in a more fruitful. Often is more informative look to material differences between the abstract works considered to realize that avoidance of figurative reference that they may have in common. If we want to discriminate between those works that meet the requirements of abstract, we need a range of appropriate subcategories in which to situate them, as well as labels for these categories.

The pictorial space is something we learn to understand, and we do so by reference to other forms of pictorial space. The history of painting in Western culture is largely a history of relevant forms of learning and the ways that learning was made. In his essay "A. And Pangeometry "written in 1925, El Lissisky said" The new optical experience has taught us that two surfaces of different intensity must be conceived as having a variable ratio of distance between them, even though they may be in the same plane ", the" new optical experience "he had in mind had been provided by the work of Malevich and Mondrian.

Another point to note is that the concept of non-figuration as a deliberately assumes that the figurative is what is normally expected. The consequence is that abstract painting depends for its status as art, the expectations created by paintings that are paintings, i.e. paintings by that, because of its resemblance to other things in the world can be seen as representations or illustrations of these things. It follows that the possibility of being seen as abstract paintings (i.e., as potential forms of high art) depends upon our tendency to look at their surfaces as other than purely flat - looking at them, in fact, potentially figurative. As the Greenberg noted, "The first mark made on the surface destroys its virtual plan" ("Modern Painting"), the effect of reading this mark is to split the screen visually and conceptually in "figure" and "bottom", and therefore , so to speak, to create space for any type of content or meaning (even though, again in the words of Greenberg, is not an illusion "in which someone can imagine yourself walking ... (it) is an illusion in which one can only look, just go with the eye. "To this point stating otherwise, it can be said that not only" see "the surface of a painting, we" see inside "surface of this evidence of some kind of intentional activity.

It is the invocation by the abstract paintings of this experience to "see inside", I think, that most strongly distinguished ornament. Abstract art assumes a critical position in front of figurative art, and the actual prevalence in European art and descriptive narratives of those functions that the procedures of figuration help facilitate and develop. But in order to establish this critical position, and to entertain the viewer to experience the real, the abstract work of art must first invoke and implement those same functions that you want to discredit. While we see the plan as Mondrian, we see it as meaningless (or, it may be said, see it as "pure design"). On the other hand, if we see something resembling the world, their identity and purpose as art are compromised. An abstract painting is something that is in place a framework which, however, is not a picture of anything.

Abstraction, design and decoration

Now we are better able to address an issue raised in the opening paragraph. Despite the universal and explicit assumptions of many of the artists themselves, the historically and culturally specific character of abstract art is emphasized when we consider how the two constituents - "abstract" and "art" - depend on each other. It may be useful to consider some counter examples. For example, in Islamic culture in which that less priority to the representative functions of art and more priority to the significance of the pattern or ornament, an art "abstract" does not in itself remarkable. Neither has she deserved any special attention in a culture that had no substantial basis for distinguishing paintings and sculptures from other forms of design and decoration. It is pertinent that theoretical pre-modernists like John Ruskin and William Morris, who wrote in the mid and late in the XIX century, have idealized the medieval period as one in which art and design were indistinguishable with respect to its statutes and aesthetic interests. To these critics, the realization of an abstract art - an "art" that is categorically distinct from "design" - could only have appeared as the realization of his worst predictions. This means that they probably would have seen as an extreme form of that tendency to isolate the "aesthetic" and "utility" which they saw as a negative consequence of industrialization.

In contrast, the modern theory of abstract art by Greenberg assumes that, for better or for worse, the practices of art and design are distinct but not really incompatible. A tension and a growing difficulty in relations between the concepts of art and design, respectively, are revealed in varying critical fortunes of the term "decoration". In the late 1880s, the Symbolists used the concept of decoration to refer to those who saw positive aesthetic values as independent of the requirements description and imitation. For Matisse, writing in 1910, the decorative aspect of painting coincided with its expressive function, in pursuit of which every single component was critically adjusted. In 1910, when presenting his translation of the article about Cézanne from Maurice Denis, Roger Fry wrote of "a new courage to experiment in painting that direct expression of imagined states of consciousness, which has long been relegated to music and poetry." He saw this trend as associated with a "new lease of art, in which decorative elements predominate to the detriment of the representative." Clearly the emphasis was thus placed in a decorative way to affirm the relative autonomy of art forms as vehicles of expression. With the beginnings of practical interest in the development of abstract art, on the other hand, the realization of "mere" decoration became the hallmark of aesthetic failure - or the failure to establish that promise of intellectual and emotional depth that was associated with painting as art form.

The intention to produce abstract art was then an intention to present works not as non-figurative forms of "mere" decoration or ornament, but as forms of modern art - that is, as forms of representation. In reviewing its development in 1913, Kandinsky wrote about the "frightening depth of issues, charged with responsibility," he thought he had before him. "And most importantly, what should replace the lost object?" The danger of ornamentation was clear, the death of alleged stylized could only drive me away. “As we shall see, the intention to produce abstract art was not made suddenly or by an individual who acted alone. She has developed, I think, as a partial consequence of those long-term changes in the relations between "art" and "design", and both with the "figuration," which we can follow along the nineteenth century - changes that are themselves associated, in some theories of modernism, the inception of the modern period in art. That is, the emergence of abstract art was specific to a modern European world in which the mainstream of economic and industrial development was to boost the distinctions between art and design, and between higher and lower forms of art, in which the meaning of high art was usually associated to figuration, and in which the paintings and sculptures were candidates to the status of high art, while examples of design and ornament were not.

A note on abstract art in his time

As noted, the evidence is that the problem of the value of abstract art was a pertinent question in particular the practice of European art at the beginning of the XX century. Why then? Some clues to an answer may extract from the previous discussion, namely, examining the relationship between abstraction and non-figuration. At the end of the century. Century, the practice of critical configuration - the critique of illusion and all that the techniques used to provide the illusionistic art salons and academies in Europe - often tended towards abstraction. The emphasis on "purity" of the potential form was both a means to challenge the traditions in their own merits classicizing Neo-Platonism, as a means to depreciate the superficially descriptive, anecdotal and the imitative. Coincidentally, the idea of a universal reality and the underlying served as a kind of symbolist contrast critical to the burdensome requirement of truth in appearances. Meanwhile, the idea of a spiritual truth served by some as a light which revealed what they saw taking the generally materialistic values of the contemporary world. The initial justification of abstract art not only resorted to criticism well exercised in the traditional way, but also a varied literature of thought "anti-materialist," to which the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Wagner the composer, the poet Malarmé, mystics and Ouspensky Madame Blavatsky and many others had contributed in various ways, although not equally. In the early years of this century has won a feature utopian anti-materialism. This means that he was associated with a positive ideal of human potential and human society. In a decade that includes World War, a failed revolution in Germany and a successful in Russia, the new art forms were associated with optimistic forms of opposition to the prevailing political and social order, although not usually organized to socialism.

The idea of abstract art - the vision of a universal aesthetic potential and its extension to the "daily life" - was part of the conceptual apparatus by which certain persons, individually and in groups, have tried in the early XX century imagine your way to a better world. That is, the intention to produce abstract art, though an artistic intention, and was formed in a world that was not simply a world of art.

Geometric abstraction

2010-10-04T15:48:00.000-07:00

The book Contemporary Art: Splendor and Agony; of Ilda Rodriguez Prampolini, was written for students of Art History and Contemporary Art at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the Autonomous University of Mexico. With this text they would know the art history of the XX century. Starting, of course, to understand his development, with the Impressionists and the approach to historical problems, artistic, aesthetic and moral relevance.

When in 1916, the Dadaists launched his cry of defiance from the Cabaret Voltaire were probably not aware of the profound transformation that began in the artistic production of the western world

In this book, the author focuses on the history of Dadaism, as well as the different artistic movements that preceded and followed it. This work offers a critical appreciation of the evolution of art from the end of the XIX century (Impressionists and Expressionists) to the mid XX century (Surrealists and Abstractionists) in an exhaustive attempt to cover the “entire panorama of contemporary art”.

It is the Abstractionists that we will point out, since they relate to the content of this blog.

The line is a reference for understanding the drawing Manuel Pereira da Silva. You know it creates pure, simple, without flourishes, or waste analytical, full of substance, serious. Manuel Pereira da Silva has the power to simplify the synthesis features and shapes. Easily dominates the formal elements-building: stylistic symmetry, harmony, poetic, aesthetic balance, where the white paper is part of imaginary architecture.

The early modernist sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva emerged in the sculptural abstraction of the pioneers in Portugal, admittedly played from the late '40s, in Porto, by Arlindo Rocha, Fernando Fernandez and even a few years later by Aureliano Lima, after their removal to this city. These facts confer the production of abstract Manuel Pereira da Silva, held up with obvious stylistic analogy; in the same period and situation of those living with sculptors, unquestioned framework generation, must be credited.

In fact in the period immediately following World War II, in precisely that which started the career of Manuel Pereira da Silva, there were changes, important in the world of art controversies, including the two largest urban centers in Portugal: the quarrel " classical and modern, "added the debate between supporters of modernity - the neo-realists, surrealists and abstractionists - but was almost always in the studio that some modesty, very few, sculptors restless, rehearsed new avenues for his art, in productions sparsely that became public, and that, beyond a narrow elite, long ignored.

The Abstract Art

Geometric abstraction and constructive

The reconstruction of the world through painting has rarely been a problem so aware, confident and confessed to a series of artistic events that arose at the end of World War I.

No doubt the artists as they embark on the table abstraction, they were driven by a utopian need for spiritual life

Socrates had already stated these issues, the ideal of beauty through the representation of non-living beings, but of solid and plane figures created through the line, circle, etc..:

"Why should I maintain that these figures are not like other beautiful by comparison, but they are always beautiful in themselves and by their nature they seek certain pleasures that belong to them and have nothing in common with the pleasures produced by sensory stimuli."

It is through these signs of unchanging beauty that some artists try to rise above nature and themselves, to recover the art make it the expression in the service of higher ideals.

The 1930 and 1945 seem to be the triumph of geometric art with his Constructivist tendencies of abstract art trends lyrical and spontaneous. Numerous journals are created to disclose the geometric, continuous exposures at galleries welcome artists, exhibiting in legal proliferating, and the art of constructivism seems to oppose their closed forms or "concrete" composed in endless constellations to highbrow games subconscious screaming by the Surrealists absurd.

The Syndicate of Antique Dealers in Paris (1925), the exhibition also Circule et Carré in Paris, the publication of the single issue of Art Concrète performed by Van Doesburg, the group Abstraction-Creation and numerous magazines in various countries are evidence of the emergence of this new ideal language that comes with authentic validity. One of the pioneers of this art seeks to link up with the architecture is, without doubt, the wife and collaborator, the sculptor Jean Arp, painter Switzerland-Arp Sophie Trauner, whose simplified forms rigorous and fair voluntarily come to some niceties powerful proportions wisely experienced and highly intellectual.

In England, the emergence of The Circle, in 1937, organized by the sculptor Naum Gabo, the painter and architect Well Nicholson Leslie Martin marks the impact that the country, heir to the tradition of William Morris, had this constructive formalism, which addressed re-engage the work of art to life and enjoy the new language to speak universally. This crucial sense of communication through universal formulas (abstract and geometric) and not individuals is the impact of constructivist theory adopted by the same Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner in Russia 17 years earlier. The intention to establish an art of "pure" form goes beyond perfect aestheticism of "art for art" since the first case; it is the dynamic principle that moves the artist to "rebuild" the world and second to separate not at first, but the purpose of art that drowns itself.

We could hardly exhaust the review of all the artists that are somehow linked to the geometric art. One of the most extreme cases is the Felix de Marle, for whom art collective team and subordinate to architecture is the only position that justifies saving the artist, he shall be given by an art that must collaborate in the streets, cities, joy to live, not an elite, but all men.

Modern Architecture in Portugal

2010-06-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

The "Athens Charter" published in 1935, is on the conclusions of the IV International Congress of Modern Architecture, 1933, entitled "Functional City", and resulted in a manifest urban programming, as opposed to the chaos of the Industrial City. The proposals are on the four functions of the City, Housing, Recreation, and Work Movement, measured on a human scale, where the private interest should be subordinate to the public interest.

In Portugal, in 1945, there is the insertion of the chairs "Urbanism" and "History and Theory of Urbanism" in the Courses of Architecture School of Fine Arts, introducing several concepts, such as the hierarchy of road networks the nuclei and steered zoning.

At the National Congress of Architects in 1948, an event concurrent with the exhibition on "Fifteen years of Public Works," which reflected the principles of urban tradition and nationalism emerges in opposition to the idea of a new concept of city, by three architects who stood out in defense of the "Radiant City" and "Athens Charter": Viana de Lima, Arménio Losa and Lobão Vital.

Is it not possible to understand the evolution of Modern Architecture and Urbanism without taking into account their ongoing relationship with the Arts and the relationship between "Art" that during the twentieth century boosted increasingly debates, a conceptual and critical spirit. These influences were manifesting themselves in several variants, either through formal mimicry, or by a methodological and procedural parallelism.

Internationally, there was a period at the beginning of the century, where painters and architects worked side by side with the request reciprocal links to dismantle the inherited tradition. The avant-garde movements of Europe fostered an exchange of results between the experiences of Architects and Painters, which sought to change the cultural conventions.

The Bauhaus, established in 1919 in Weimar, said in his proclamation that was created for "the new building of the future, covering the architecture and sculpture and painting in this unit, and that one day will rise to the skies for more than a million workers like a crystal symbol of a new faith. "

In Portugal, it was found that integration with the adoption of codes of the Brazilian architecture of postwar architectural elements reflecting the work plasticizers, dynamism, joy and desire for freedom. The color is used as part plastic, painted surfaces, or operated through the characteristics of materials

The ceramic panels emerge as a desire to resume a traditional finish, with strong roots in the Culture and Art Deco Portuguese, but a current mode, with a contemporary attitude of "Vernacular Review of the Modern Movement." The tile panels, with speeches by various artists, thought of as a work of art integrated into architecture, they obtain a result of large plastic force in architectural production of the 50s.

In Lisbon stand out in collaboration with Almada Negreiros Pardal Monteiro, and as a remarkable example of "global work", the Block of Free Waters by Nuno Teotónio Pereira, 1956, with a color study of Frederico George, low-reliefs by Jorge Vieira, mosaics of Almada Negreiros and stained glass of Cargaleiro.

Shopping Centre Restelo of Chorão Ramalho, with the collaboration of plastic Querubim Lapa, which together with Victor Palia, intervened in several Primary Schools.

Keil do Amaral developed in Campo Grande to regionalist themes, integrating panels and ceramic sculpture pieces, with the sense of an idea of "Public Art": a mosaic of Julio Pomar, a sculpture by Canto da Maya and a ceramic Jorge Barradas.

In Porto, the students in all courses, Architecture, Painting and Sculpture, lived together intimately, not only because they have common history, and because of the three arts are considered inseparable. There was discussion of Modernism in art, and a latent nonconformity in relation to teaching classic. There are numerous examples of close collaboration of Artists in works of architecture.

Apart from that will be mentioned in more detail, we have the Amial House, designed in 1953 by Celestino de Castro, with a color study of Julio Pomar.

Also there are some partnerships between architects and artists, with some longevity, and proven with many testimonies as Arménio Losa with Augusto Gomes, José Carlos Loureiro and Agostinho Ricca with Julio Resende, Carlos Neves with Manuel Pereira da Silva, Julio de Brito and Rogerio de Azevedo with Henrique Moreira.

Interventions of this sculptor, pupil of Teixeira Lopes in Oporto Academy of Fine Arts, a current proto-modernist, occurred in various collaborations with Rogério de Azevedo, as we have seen in buildings of “Comércio do Porto” newspaper and the Hotel Infante Sagres in a model where the architecture serves to support the sculpture, also experienced in refurbishing the Rivoli Theatre, Julio de Brito in the 40s, the interior painted plaster friezes and cornice in low relief, which also collaborated the sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva.

This partnership with Rogério de Azevedo, also are his own in 1947, a marble bas-relief in the Rialto Building, a marble bust of João de Deus, in the Garden School of the Constitution, and a sculptural element in bronze and granite in the Garden of Passeio Alegre, a tribute to Raul Brandão.

In addition to various different sculptures that punctuate public spaces in the city, in their creations for the buildings are: the "Eagle" in bronze, of the “Café Imperial” in 1936, the "Indian" in “Café Guarany”, a low-relief in marble, in the Chapel of N. S ª de Fátima a low-relief in marble, in 1939, low-reliefs in granite for the Exchange of Fish by Januario Godinho and the Cod Refrigerator, a low-relief in Stone of the St.º António Congregados Church, in 1949, low-reliefs in stone for the N. S ª da Conceição Church between 1945 and 1949, and 1957 for the Oporto City Council.

All these examples of the work of Henrique Moreira follow a more classic model of integration of Sculpture in Architecture.

In building the Silk Factory, in the Street do Monte dos Burgos, designed by Arménio Losa in 1943, there are salient in volumes, two low-reliefs of Augusto Gomes, with an integrated approach in the proposed architecture, corresponding to two figures, one male and one female, with vegetal elements and alusive to the Labor, Industry and the Sea, recurring themes of the work by this author.

“Cinema Batalha”, Artur Andrade project, dated 1944 and completed in 1947, had the artistic contributions of Júlio Pomar and Américo Braga. From the first, fresh in foyers along the stairs, the second, a bas-relief on the facade facing side the Square “Batalha”. Both interventions provoked a political and social unrest, following the complaint of the Oporto City Council to the Ministry of Interior. The works were covered with plastic paint and low-reliefs were removed the hammer and sickle.

Panel placed without any kind of shot on the flat plane of the side wall of the building, with male and female figures arranged in three heights, representing real and allegorical figures on a background here and there punctuated by stars referring to the world of film.

On the bottom the only characters include dresses and shoes in a realistic way, constituting the symbolic support of the entire composition, in allusion to the work. On the left, next to a tree of life and ahead of a harvest, a farmer with forearm secure a bunch of wheat, and stands with his right hand a sickle.

In the center, a laborer at a construction carries on his shoulders a thick iron chain that holds his left hand while his right hand, before being mutilated wielding a hammer. Even this plan, a seated figure conceived in idealized form, displays a book, an allusion to artistic creation. In the higher planes, bodies originating in traditional design in the universe seem to metaphorically hover ethereal and timeless, aesthetically integrated combination of classicism, which is characteristic of neo-realism. "

The avant-garde spirit of Arthur Andrade does not refer solely to the radicalism of the remarkable architectural design solution to the street corner where you can simultaneously connect to the urban fabric and the highlight mode, but also the insertion of a set of works of art, whether neo-realist, which appear clearly as opposed to the regime. In this case, "Synthesis of the three arts" actually contains the very formal evolution of flight from sobriety geometric shapes using more complex than the slang of the day designated as "forms of chicanery."

In the 50s, the Cavan began to be publicized and used as a coating of buildings, beginning a search to take advantage of their aesthetic plasticity, since it was possible by the additive color and type of granules of marble or limestone used to draw diverse reasons, where the colors were separated by a metal.

The residential building in the Square D. Afonso V, designed by Francisco Pereira da Costa, in 1953, has decorative elements, in Cavan, on the tops of side walls. The ground floor, to trade, has a portico that provides the transition between the private and public space of the square, corresponding to the structural system, which finds itself in a standardized geometric mesh of the remaining floors. The existence of the decorative elements on the facades side refers to a clear reference to the Modern Movement.

Primary School of the Constitution, a project of Alexandre de Sousa, Architect of the Oporto City Council between 1956 and 58, can be observed in a stairwell, a mural by Costa Martins on blue marble, which is the technique of Cavan as well as one tempera by the same author, in the cafeteria and multipurpose, a child and playful theme.

Other examples of application of Cavan, as coating aesthetic feature, is a chalet of Arménio Losa in “Avenida dos Combatentes”, the 50s, where the wall has a side panel with an abstract design, and the “Paranhos” Neighborhood, or “Outeiro”, where its design as Social Neighborhood City Council initiative of the early '60s, did not prevent its classification plastic panels in each block, and a variety of reasons geometric figuration. The creation of the “Via de Cintura Interna” came a difficult perception more closer.

Creations by Jorge Barradas in 1950 for Atlantic Palace, 1946 draft of the Society of Architects / ARS, refer to a panel disclosed in the faience, inside, and a set of ceramic panels on the roof of the arcade outside. The mythological theme, focusing on references to national folklore and practice of grassland work, fits the use to which the building was intended, the desired exaltation of nationalistic values of "Portugal beyond the Seas."

At the Church of S ª da Boavista, draft Agostinho Ricca, 1979, in addition to fifteen glazed ceramic plates of 16.5 cm, dated 1986, titled "Steps of Christ's Passion and Resurrection," there are other works of Júlio Resende, as The windows, "Christ on Calvary" and a carpet that covers the central area of the church. This case shows that, regardless of academic training of the architect, devoted to the artistic conception, when an artist involved with the versatility of disciplinary Júlio Resende, all the architectural work earns a substantial depth.

FERNANDES, José Manuel - Modernist Architecture in Portugal. Lisbon: Gradiva, 1993.

Africa Generation

2010-05-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

Architecture and Cities in Angola and Mozambique, 1925-1975, Ed. Livros Horizonte, is an important book for several reasons. The trail iconography of Portuguese architecture in the overseas areas during the twentieth century, 'a new central colonial', conceives of a 'vision' and an ability to deliver on those territories that the 'Metropolis' hardly reproduced until very recently. Or rather, the 'recasting' of architectural territories overseas, said the former colonies of Angola and Mozambique, was an opportunity to expose the work of a lot of architects, whose number of outputs is, on the whole, a remarkable testimony to the heritage of the collective attitude towards the application of planning and deployment of 'African space', and 'empire'.

Cycle, the inevitability that history often plays, whether it is currently widely repeated, with a new lease that will surely also relevant results.

Jose Manuel Fernandes, architect and teacher in the School of Architecture at the Technical University of Lisbon, invited the seminarian course in architecture at the Autonomous University of Lisbon, is one of the few architects with a literary work that can be considered relevant, and has written about the Portuguese architecture (and world) in a consistent and systematic in the past twenty years (at least), either in book or in articles written for the press.

Has chronicles published in the weekly magazine Expresso, carried along with architect Manuel Graça Dias - another author of books on architecture - strangely discontinued in favor of a new profile of the magazine (s) - questionable, it is true the lack of space for these kinds of texts - have always been an epitome of quality and rigor, by reflecting on the genesis and architecture for a personal reading (nay), with particular attention to all forms, styles, trends (without exception) and a great respect for history and the facts.

'Africa Generation' is assumed as a demonstration of how the work of Portuguese architects in Angola towns, such as Lobito, Nova Lisboa (Huambo), Benguela and Malange, and cities in Mozambique, Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Nampula , Beira and Quelimane. Registration of the text, between the use of historical fact, artistic and sometimes personal, architects involved, especially in the first part, is substantiated by the black and white photographs of various authors and the very José Manuel Fernandes, illustrating the leitmotif. In particular, some of these photographic reproductions are part of the private collection of Victor Pavoeiro Ferreira ('Victor Ferreira,' my father), who was always with a NIKON (NIKORMAT model) and a tripod in hand, even when he was at war overseas. And, indeed prescient, very well photographed architecture. He had a fondness for 'framework', which the extensive collection of slides just to confirm. We were then waiting for the second edition of this book, about to be published, perhaps in color.

This work starts from the notion that architecture and urbanism of Portuguese roots, affirmed throughout the twentieth century - and who have received extensive study in the Iberian and European area, in recent years - will only be fully and coherently explained if we studied the presence and parallel statement in overseas areas.

Choosing the territories of Angola and Mozambique - the most significant time considered, among several ex-colonial areas -, this essay seeks to provide a first contribution to that study, which are to come to be increasingly global.

It is also important to note what is meant here and interprets the "Twentieth Century" as having the Portuguese context, the real or actual beginning after World War I, about the dawn of the second quarter to nine hundred. Moreover, this study focuses on the historical stage by 1975 - that is, until the time of independence of the spaces considered Africans - because obviously we are concerned here to examine the urban-themed architectural roots, Portuguese influence and cultural context, something that becomes fully thereafter. Thus, speaking of architecture, urbanism theme at the "Portuguese Africa" is mostly talking about half a century situated between 1925 and 1975.

In this work it is the articulation of historical information, published or unpublished, with more recent data, and an audiovisual collection and oral testimonies direct result of trying to organize a discussion and an initial summary of this documentation and these testimonies. It is also necessary to mention that the understanding and justification of this study is to articulate the urban experience and urban planning with the work and architectural practice - especially since many of the professionals listed here and worked in both fields simultaneously - because we believe those two fields creation and knowledge as complementary and inseparable, in a sense interactive.

A generation of Portuguese architects left a vast work in Angola and Mozambique. Held in the third quarter of the century, this was an extremely avant-garde production of innovative and accomplished within colonial African who must now protect.

Little or nothing known, nor in his life nor in his work, were nevertheless applied builders Africa's century, in planning and urban design, architecture and arts. We speak of the "heroic generation" of Portuguese architects who, born mostly in years 10 and 20, formed in the postwar schools of Lisbon and Porto, have been living and working mainly in Angola and Mozambique over the decades of 40, 50 and 60.

Some have lived there, inserted in the middle colonies, and then came to the metropolis of completing their studies.

This was the case of Vasco Vieira da Costa (1911-1982), born in Aveiro, who studied and worked with Le Corbusier is a remarkable work in Luanda. Vasco Vieira da Costa set up in Luanda in 1960, having gone to Oporto in 1982, a few months before his death. With a small stake in the Exhibition-Fair of Angola in 1938, its kick-off with the draft Market Kinaxixi (1950-52) at Piazza Kinaxixi (1953), built by the firm "Castillos" a block for servants of the State, at Rua Amilcar Cabral (Set OBRES Modernes ... 1996), the whole pavilion, though incomplete Engineering Laboratory of Angola. As their own, the building's Diamang Rua Lopes Lima, the building of Versailles, at Avenida Rainha Ginga, an outstanding building of the Ministry of Public Works, commonly known as building Mutamba (1968-69), with a strong Corbusian mainly in the grids, the English School (Futungo Fine), Gedaliah (workshop and booth), Secil the tower and House of Brokers in the February 4, the Anangola and still factory Fabimor. There were many other works that he left here, the aesthetic quality and remarkable versatility in its functionality. Vieira da Costa deserves much more than these few words, and I think that with the growing number of architects Angolans, he will have the honor that has been repeatedly delayed.

But others, then recently graduated, went to Africa "to be free ', to get his professional life in a more open and modern, something simple and seemingly normal, but they felt they were somehow denied or impeded in the homeland Europe.

Was the case with talented José Pinto da Cunha, reputed author of numerous houses' for the rich "here, including the current residence of the ambassador of Portugal, designed the first duplex on Marginal, but above all creative works and bold Luanda innovative, between 63 and 67, as the modern Quarter Hold (a vast array type Olivais lisboetas 'in good'), the building of the National Radio of Angola (Built on land where there was an exhibition, "Overseas, whose halls participated some architects living in Luanda in the 60s). The great work of this architect, in association with the Costa Pereira Cyril was the building built in downtown Luanda, Rua Major Kanhangulo Opened in 1958, which is work still to take, within a certain period of architecture in colonial Africa.

José Pinto da Cunha was the son of one of the most repressive faculty of the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon, which came to lead an authentic "forced migration" of students, collectively leaded in 42, to complete the course in Porto.

It was also the case of Francisco Castro Rodrigues (1920), the remarkable 'architect of Lobito', which generously offered their talent and professional life to the time it became the second city of Angola. Although overseen by the PIDE, Roberts managed to establish himself in Lobito on 53 and there conducted a real 'global work', whereas a slight but active municipal official. Was planner, urban planner and architect, performing for the new urban expansion areas many of the best equipment (between 64-66), in characteristically light and modern design, such as school, market, the airport, the elegant terrace cine Flamingo.

Only since 1975, started working in the capital, Luanda has so few papers with your signature.

Robinson was an exceptional course in Angola, as 'was', by adhesion and taste, since independence, contributing to the organization's current architecture of the young Republic of Angola until 87. Their work, while teaching at the faculty of architecture at the University Agostinho Neto, was colossal importance.

When you leave Angola in 1988, leaves at Lobito "every corner of your risk and the dash.
Invited by the city of Lobito to the celebrations of the city, returned there in 1993, honored and touched.

Already the architect of natural Luanda, Jonathan Simões de Carvalho, who also tyrosine in the atelier of Le Corbusier, is a figure of more diversified business, with works in Luanda, but also in London and Brazil. Between 63 and 65, was author, with Pinto da Cunha, Hospital of Lubango (Sa da Bandeira former) and also with Alfredo Fernando Pereira, Barrio Hold Luanda. Intervention had a persistent and continuous training in municipal planning of Luanda.

Many other writers and works with modernity could be part of this list in Angola and Mozambique, a first search, can be grouped more than fifty names of architects there set.

In Angola, still refer to such names as Antonio Campino with the President or the Auto Hotel Avenue in Luanda, the Brothers Garcia de Castilho, pioneers of the '50s, which he built in Luanda Film Restoration or the grand building Mobil (1951), the Battle of Fernando (1908), who worked for the National Monuments in Angola, of the Pereira da Costa (with the Building Cyril, the 'cycle of coffee', 59), the Louis Taquelim (born Algarve, it seems the author of Moxico Hotel / Vila Luso).

And not forgetting the most fleeting passes, but marked by an uncompromising action, such as Francisco Silva Dias (1930), which earned her resignation from the Board of Luanda (dared publicly to advocate that the planning was led by local architects!) - yet the author of the draft technical school of Saurimo, in the remote Lunda, 59 (work discovered that there are days, surprised to have been built) or Teotonio Pereira and Nuno Bartolomeu Costa Cabral, authors of a small 'mini city industrial 'Modern Pulp Enterprise (High Catumbela, Benguela - 58-59).

In Mozambique there are also a number of authors and works of great quality. Besides Amancio Guedes Miranda (or Pancho Guedes, Lisbon, 1925), already better known and prized for its unique and diverse workforce Laurentian, and other newer (Jose Forjaz, Coimbra, 1936) - there is mention architects unfairly unknown or forgotten John Joseph Taylor (1983), author of notable modern works adapted to the climatic context (Terminal Nampula; seat of Government of Niassa, Lichinga, - 66-68); José Porto (1963), author of the wonderful Grand Hotel Beira and several buildings in the city center, the years 40-50, Francisco Castro (designer of the Beira railway station) or Garizo Carmo (Cinema S. Jorge, Beira). And not forgetting, again, the authors point passing through the territory, as José Bastos Gomes (1914-1991), author of the splendid and super decorated BNU Lourenço Marques (now the Bank of Mozambique in Maputo).

What is striking in all these works, the scale is innovative and modern, with no shame, fear or hesitation, although established in the middle of the colonial situation, and in many cases 'super provincial'. What we admire and esteem is the greatness of sights, cultural, and artistic techniques of a generation of "professional migrants", who, working often in contexts of the administration official was able to launch 'new towns', full of brand new modern architecture the various and vast areas of the territories then Luso-Africans. Especially between 1950 and 1975. Because it must be said, a quarter century after management ended with some objectivity, this architecture and urbanism have reached this size and quality higher than that practiced at the same time the 'Metropolis'.

And just a situation of complete confidence in the innovation of collective enthusiasm, despite the line of differences (between state, private developers, municipal action) and understanding and acceptance of a new scale geographic, economic and social development (with some ingenuity and a taste for discovery, which is beneficial in these cases) may explain this. In contrast to a metropolitan society, who resisted modernization in 'Portuguese Africa' in the third quarter of the century it was possible to try and even food and bring newness and modernity of spaces and architectures in a period of 25 years, in fact the only context Europe, since European countries (democracy in post-World War II) had almost entirely abandoned since the colonial territories in Africa to 60-61.

During this time, ironically, Portugal was thus the 'unique case' of a nation with retrograde political system at European level which had a production leading innovator in its space colonial Africa.

Now, looking at the possible future of this great legacy material, between cities and buildings, we must know the insert (what's left, and it is recoverable) in the new context of post-civil wars, new nations of Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and hopefully soon in Angola. Knowing the value of what is, better able to recover, reuse and integrate.

Antonio Veloso, did the project for the plant Jomar, the road of Cuca (N'Gola Kiluange), and even some buildings in the avenue, on land divided between various owners from the north of Portugal, who gave these works to their "fellow countrymen "with a strong regionalist, since the architects chosen were all from the College of Fine Arts of Porto (Gennaro Godinho, Vieira da Costa, Adalberto Dias Pereira da Costa Pinto da Cunha and of course, Antonio Veloso).

The architect designed the George Clark Fosforeira Angola and a tube factory in 1958, and water treatment plant in Gika Commander.

The BCA, the work "flagship" in downtown, is authored by Gennaro Godinho, and a curiosity it should be noted that the design of Bank of Angola is the architect Vasco Regaleira, who like Paulo Cunha (who did the work zone Port of Luanda and wide front) cannot be considered "generation African" because he never lived or worked continuously in Angola.

There is still some work to architect Troufa Real, stressing among many, the project of a bank branch in Largo Maianga.

To end this tour by "African Generation" of Portuguese architects who have worked in Angola, it would be unfair to omit the architect Fernando Battle, the only one who at one time worked in heritage preservation, and his book "Architecture in Angola" will talk another time. This is a matter of utmost relevance come to be touched, any time soon, given the eagerness with which some vested interests are manifested by the "slaughter" of buildings, which are inseparable from the sustained growth history of the city, in certain periods of its history of centuries.

One day, Fernando Batalha, a nearly century architect and very lucid, will appear as a source of studies on the colonial era, having been the only one over 45 years in Angola, working on the property.

They say it was a lonely man who at the time, defended values discarded. Was writing these memories and continues to do so every day in an office where you can see the Tagus. He is the author of numerous publications on architecture, ethnography, history, and archeology.

It all began in January. º Cruise Vacation Students' Metropolis at Colonial, with a cultural director named Marcelo Caetano, who "told him to do many lectures and essays" during the trip. In the end, Fernando Battle let himself enchanted by Africa. He stayed. 1935: "There was only in Luanda century architecture. XVII, XVIII and XIX. From the century. XX, nothing! The city had no paved streets or sewage system. He took to bathing with a bucket of holes, from where he pulled a twine to leave yellow water. "

Had meetings marked. With the king of Congo, D. Peter VII, when, in 1942, showed him the debris of the first church of the Portuguese city of San Salvador (1491), now M'banza Congo. "It was old man, but nice and friendly, simple in dress," recalls Fernando Battle, who later learned of the site have turned airstrip.

Longevity has made it a living voice of history. He was among the first architects to step on the former colony, which led to immediate calls and work done. But the stop-start development takes young people to compete for South Africa in World War II, given the lack of technicians, called to combat. "The intelligence was operating in Angola, a bridge between Europe and Africa, and 'they' wanted to examine my condition. But when it comes to authorization, since the war ended, and the architects were in their posts."

He was grateful to fate. "I did not like, despite the South African cities are highly developed. When the Boers won the elections in 1948, lived in a guerrilla war without weapons, because the population was accustomed to the English, more lenient. There was open communication between ethnic. In Angola, the coexistence was different. “He walked a lot.”I visited the sites where there was the Portuguese presence. I confirmed ruins missing information gathered. I have a list of what there was." Was concerned with saving buildings, classifying all that way, restored what they could. Had problems because he wants to preserve centuries-old homes that were destroyed in Luanda. All documentation is on its enviable file.

The great work comes after the war. "The price of coffee has risen greatly. The Americans, who did the Vietnam War with stimulants, continued to drink coffee when they returned home. Europeans also. And Luanda begins to grow with private investment." And official. "Salazar did not want Angola to stay behind other colonies. He made the port of Luanda, roads, school buildings, finance with four floors, and opened up construction neighborhoods for whites and blacks."

Time to write, so do not miss. "At the time, not giving me work, but had an office in the palace with beautiful view to the garden of the governor. There were editors or readers, but took notes and wrote articles and short essays."

The interventions were in the hundreds. Engaged in land development plans, expansion of commerce and palaces of governors, launching offices in Angola. When age 75 came to Lisbon, he left the inventory of assets of the new country. A numerical palindrome of stay (1938-1983) in Angola did - you go through ancient times and continue, after independence, to transmit knowledge as a professor in the Faculty of Architecture of Luanda.

You have to edit the original seven. "I just wanted to live up to the launch of the forthcoming book, The Historical Populations of Angola." Frail but confident voice, he lives surrounded Battle of maps, old files and projects. He writes on yellow leaves, perhaps coming from Africa.

This "Africa" Generation are also included painters such as: Abel Manta, Almada Negreiros, António Quadros, Dórdio Gomes, Henry Medina, Isolino Vaz, Jaime Isidoro, John Hogan, Júlio Resende, Lourdes Castro, Manuel Pereira da Silva, among others; sculpture, highlight: Arlindo Rocha, Henrique Moreira, Leopoldo de Almeida, Manuel Pereira da Silva e Sousa Caldas.

In 1955, Manuel Pereira da Silva designed the statue of Ulysses S. Grant, 18th U.S. president won the tender launched for that purpose by the Ministry of Overseas, erected opposite the building of the Town Hall of Bolama, in Guinea-Bissau.

Ulysses Grant was an American general and statesman, born in 1822 and died in 1885. Walked in the Mexican War in 1847 and actively participated in the Civil War, fighting alongside the Northerners, having given the coup de grace in the Southern 1865. Candidate for U.S. president, won overwhelmingly, and ruled from 1868 to 1876, as 18th President. From 1877 to 1880 made a triumphal trip around the world, where he was always warmly received. "
"For it was this famous statesman who openly defended the possession of Guinea to Portugal. In memory of someone, being large, generously learned advocate a just cause, the Government commissioned the Portuguese Manuel Pereira da Silva their statue, despite the Guinean revolutionary winds of independence, is still in place. "

In 1960, Manuel Pereira da Silva performed, "Africa", this low-relief, polychrome faience, for the decoration of the facade of a building situated on the waterfront of the Bay of Luanda, Angola. To this end Manuel Pereira da Silva improvised studio in a vacant industrial collection, on the outskirts of Porto.

This with the bas-relief of the Palace of Justice had the same treatment bas-relief running to Angola where there are plenty of geometric shapes. Figures of the Gentiles, plants and animals are on the immense work in a modern design that Manuel Pereira da Silva sought to impose on their works.

Sculpture in Portugal in the XX century (1910 - 1960)

2010-05-10T15:56:00.000-07:00

Lúcia Almeida Matos is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto (FBAUP), graduated in Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts, University of Porto, obtained the degree of Master of Arts (MA) and Master of Philosophy (MPhil) at Syracuse University (USA) and his doctorate from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto.

Develops research work and teaching in History and Theory of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Museology. Directs the Museum of FBAUP coordinating the publication of a bulletin of the museum and museum and exhibition projects. He has organized scientific meetings and international exhibitions commissioner.

The bibliographic series "Texts University of Social Sciences and Humanities" is proposed to publish important works in a field of knowledge in modern critical studies that fit also valuable classical culture. Many of these investigations are going counter to the contemporary technocratic tendencies, just facing the problems, perceived as larger, quantitative. The return to classical sources of knowledge must be the universal characteristic sign of a new Humanism.

This philosophy inspires and guides the program of this series of doctrinal issues, whose responsibility fell to the defunct National Institute of Scientific Research and the Foundation for Science and Technology wishes to pursue, in partnership with the Calouste Gulbenkian.

This book reproduces, with slight adjustments, the text of a PhD thesis that Lucia Almeida Matos defended at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto in November 2003. Within three years that separates the public presentation of the dissertation and the publication of this book in 2007, published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Foundation for Science and Technology, the international and national literature was naturally enriched.

In the Preface of this book, authored by Professor Raquel Henrique da Silva, responsible for scientific guidance, "Sculpture in Portugal in the twentieth century (1910-1969) has the evident marks of having been written for doctoral dissertation. But, unlike the usual connotations in connection with such type of work, the book presented here is extremely accessible read, clear in its organization and, I think, interesting for several reasons. However, it has considerable critical apparatus, and collapsed into footnotes, and a laudable ambition. In summary, Lúcia Almeida Matos held an in-depth research and extension on the Portuguese sculpture, through journeys and works of the artists in this area, stood out among the early twentieth century and the 1960s. To select, analyze and enhance naturally had to respond to successive cultural contexts of our recent history, linking it with the ever dynamic international (mainly European) that were influencing. The purpose of tracing the history of nineteenth-century Portuguese sculpture in dialogue with several crucial scenes of art - the French in the early decades, English, in the past, still considering illuminating markings of Catalonia and Italy in the '30s and '40s - is the fact that differentiates this work and become a mandatory reference in our art history. "

The methodology followed by Lúcia Almeida Matos does not, however, only bring the history of Portuguese sculpture of the twentieth century as a specific reality but part and parcel of European sculpture from the same time. She allowed two broad conclusions that should be highlighted.

The first is that, unlike opinions less reasoned and more ideological, the then Portuguese sculptors (including youth of 1960 who, fortunately still active today) contacted with the disruptions of sculptural practice in the time they were occurring, nor more late or earlier than the other national schools. However, in the years 1900 to 1920, this attention to modernity was conducted in a marked fidelity to the models of teaching and academic output without reaching the avant-garde practice that at the time, they rarely are public recognition. Comparing with the painting, it may be said that there was, in sculpture, an Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, and the sculptor who most comes to him (by attention to the international scene where he worked with recognized success) was the modernist Ernesto Canto Maia. By contrast, in 1960, the young Portuguese sculptors entered with enthusiasm and commitment in the field of artistic vanguards then, mainly through London, though, in developing their careers do not always have remained uncertain in this taut string which is the novelty.

The second conclusion is that this book proposes that, contrary to what was intended (in political and ideological), the least interesting period of twentieth century sculpture is the Portuguese of the 30s and 40s, who, paradoxically, would, in desiring words of António Ferro, the "golden age" of the National Sculpture. The sculptors were dominated by activity in excess of orders for content monumental quite outdated, less traveled, did not receive grants processing abroad (unlike its predecessors and successors) and surrendered, more or less, the intent of celebratory nationalist content .

But beyond the depth of history, the book addresses topics Lúcia Almeida Matos ever in Portugal, had been treated and which relate to the field theory of sculpture. This applies to the special constrangements craft, regarding, for example, greater autonomy of the painting, determining the sculptor's face heavy reliance on technology and order, but in the territory of output to the situation, the author introduces the fundamental distinction between the large and small format, which is the best way to research and innovation. These issues are very important in the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth century, when Rodin was the most beloved master of sculpture in Europe. One of the most innovative contributions of this dissertation is to examine how the complexity of that time, distinguishing, effectively, the fields of modernity and vanguard. Regarding the difficult period of 30 years and 40 pages devoted to aesthetic and monumental sculpture and the differentiation between office is bright, and the approach to the ideological future of art in the service of a story of heroes. Indeed, the subchapter "Rise and fall of a statue" suggest the continued relevance of this original research that combines art and urban space in the complex contexts of the most intense vibrations and ruptures of history.

The proposed study of sculpture in Portugal in the period called the modern consensus, that is, until the moment when the very concept of sculpture is called into question by imposing and simultaneously assuming a paradigm shift. The late 60s was then taken as the chronological limit of this work, since, together with the international art scene, those were the years that marked the first major changes in practice and theoretical reflection of Portuguese artists working in the country, or beneficial internships abroad.

The third part of this book is to emphasize that we want and that fits with the purpose of this blog of art, to study and investigate the work of the sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva. This Part III has the theme "From 1949 to 1969: From the office to sculpture" and is the second chapter: "First disruptions" in subchapter "Neo-realism in general exhibitions of plastic arts" that comes the first reference to Manuel Pereira da Silva. In 1946, Portugal José Augusto France as he admitted "it was necessary to support the neo-realism, even if in ignorance of anything else.

The neo-realism mark out of modernism, which considers formal, empty, and outdated, a very different era, that the divorce with eager real, that should belong to the past, and which also includes surrealism through all phases of modern art, it is noted a common aversion to reality. Creating another reality, here, in outline, the thesis of the table-object claimed by Cubism. Creating another reality, to capture "surreal," a reality get "total", is the obsession of the surrealists. All large and small shocks of modern art are generally seen as revolutions. But according to Júlio Pomar, we must distinguish revolutions only within the plane of modern art to modern art ever surpassed its status as art for a circle and hence its crisis, the result is a vicious circle.

The birth of a neo-realistic expression in the arts happens first, to a certain theoretical level, with features manifest in the pages of new journals, including The Devil and the Rising Sun, is gaining artistic form, particularly in painting, student initiatives Fernando de Azevedo, Julio Pomar. Marcelino Vespereira and others, in Lisbon on 42, then the shares of Julio Pomar and Victor Palla in Independent Exhibition in Oporto on 44, with an issue at the Instituto Superior Técnico in the following year. The year 1946 will be the decisive year in the formation of motion, the décor of the Cinema Batalha, Porto, by Júlio Pomar, the exhibition at the Athenaeum Commercial Port and finally, I General Exhibition of Fine Arts at the National Society of Fine Arts.

In 1946, inaugurate, as two exhibitions, one in Porto and Lisbon in the other, both "freely and independently organized by the artists themselves, who came to work" as stones were thrown onto the surface of a lake parade, "according to Adolfo Casais Monteiro. In the spirit of what many would assume already so distant that they could not recover it, the participating artists exhibited in unity, reminding the independent initiatives of 30 and presenting an alternative model to the usual division between "San Pedro de Alcantara" and "Barata Salgueiro ". It was the spring I Exhibition, opened at the Athenaeum Comercial do Porto, June 15, and R General Exhibition of Fine Arts, the National Society of Fine Arts, the following month.

In a speech that accompanied the exhibition, with the title "Art and Youth", Júlio Pomar reminded young people that "art is the earth, puts down roots in life" and that, in addition to "reflect the rhythm of life" can still "contribute to accelerate this pace." Other lectures on "Painting and Cinema", "Art and Audience" and "Urban Planning and Architecture" shows the ambition of reflection and questioning of the initiative.

The general press has reported extensively from Porto whole event in general noting the comprehensive nature of the exhibition, which included "artists categorized and some that are still early in his career, documenting various genres from classical to pure Modernist stranger." According to art criticism, sculpture displayed in the exhibition was "balanced" and indicated power "to get very far." Were highlighted Eduardo Tavares, Mário Truta, Margaret Shimmelpfenning, Augusto Gomes, Cruz Caldas, Herculano Monteiro and Manuel Pereira da Silva.

In the catalog I General Exhibition of Fine Arts in Lisbon, it is recommended not to put aside some puzzlement by "an apparent lack of unity" that the diversity of the works on display may appear, and before that turns attention "to the intentions of the show "to promote cooperation among the artists who" want to serve not only the life, savor it, enjoy it, but to serve it, improve it, make it worth living.”

The exhibition is received by art critics in a favorable way that highlights the "sense of solidarity" of artists; it seemed to him the cooperation "a wonderful lesson" and welcomes the fact that it may appear a "regular comparison of several trends from different generations.”

In the subchapter "The abstraction and exposures independent" appears several references to Manuel Pereira da Silva. The abstract art, specifically painting, signed in Portugal in June 1935, on the screens of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, on display in Gallery UP, by António Pedro as "the first exhibition of abstract paintings that are done in Portugal since the time of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso.” By the way still painting Vieira da Silva (and Arpad Szenes), Joao Gaspar Simões explain, at 36, be "the ultimate stage of pictorial expression which disowned the sensible reality" and cites André Lhote to designate the "abstract".

The abstract art is historically linked to the Portuguese independent exhibitions, whose main organizer and entertainer, Fernando Lanhas, coincidentally is the central figure of this abstraction. After a I Exhibition in April 1943, the premises of the School of Fine Arts in Porto, where they already can check the presence of the future "hard core" of independent, such as Julio Resende, Fernando Fernandes, Nadir Afonso, Arlindo Rocha Altino Maia, Mário Truta, Serafim Teixeira, Augusto Tavares and Manuel Pereira da Silva. The exhibitions are independent to take place outside the school and several times outside of Porto in the first example of decentralization and will broadcast that, despite everything, will not avoid a certain marginalization of artists of the Port regarding events and initiatives greater visibility and impact of the capital.

The Independent Exposure II is presented in February 1944, the Athenaeum Commercial Port and is from there that the action of Fernando Lanhas will be felt in the consistent quality of the catalogs and mounts exhibitions, as well as with the persistence in keep alive the initiatives. In this exhibition of sculptures were present Altino Maia, Arlindo Rocha, Eduardo Tavares, Joaquim Meireles, Manuel Monteiro da Cunha, Maria Graciosa de Carvalho, Mário Truta, M. Felix de Brito, Manuel Pereira da Silva, and Serafim Teixeira.

The Independent Exposure III takes place in the same year, the hall of the Coliseum of Oporto and those involved in the sculpture: Abel Salazar, Altino Maia, Antonio Azevedo, Arlindo Rocha, Eduardo Tavares, Henrique Moreira, Manuel Pereira da Silva, Mário Truta, and Sousa Caldas. In the exhibition catalog, roaming in Coimbra in January 1945, it was clarified that the name of "independent" is not a name at random, but involves the awareness that art is a world heritage site and hence our very varied presence it being understood that this should wake up to underpin the future, one cannot deny the right of the month noted.

Unlike what happens with the Surrealist exhibitions or general, much identified with neo-realism, the flag of abstraction will not be held independent exhibitions, which merely incorporate abstract experiences of their increasingly numerous followers.

A more refined and homogeneous III Exhibition that will be presented, also 45, in Leiria and Lisbon, where he criticized the emerging neo-realist.

Twitter of the sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva is the Portuguese most followed

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According to the blog eMuseu, the Twitter of sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva is the Portuguese that has more followers ... curious.

Contemporary Artists

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Jean-Pierre Blanchon, a Frenchman in love with painting, wrote a book with the quotations of 1500 Portuguese artists, the Quotation Portuguese Artists in Auction - Guide 2006/2010 (Author's edition). The author has an antique shop in the Chiado area and an auction house.

Once arrived in Portugal in 1991, lived up to his addiction to not lose any auction. Economist by training, the lack of data for cataloging artists bothered him. He went to work: analyzing auction catalogs, able to evaluate the evolution of 50 Portuguese Painters between 1974 and 1994. He concluded that only the investment in stock market had gotten over the average return of Portuguese paintings in this period - whose values ranged between 6.6% and -2.8% - relative to inflation.

In this guide we can see that the sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva scored 10 of his contemporary paintings at auction, during the referred period (2006-2010), was sold 7 paintings in Watercoulor.

Art Auction

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Palácio do Correio Velho Art Auction House, sold four compositions with Mixed Media, a Gouache composition and a Charcoal composition of the Sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva in the Contemporary Painting Auction.

Contemporary Painting Auction

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The Sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva was represented on the Auction of Modern and Contemporary Art, held at Palácio do Correio Velho, with an oil painting on canvas, two Mixed Media compositions and a Watercolour composition.

Three sculptors with value

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The publication of this literary work is biographical and critical and is related to three sculptors from Avintes, Portugal, named António de Sá Fernandes, Henrique Moreira and Manuel Pereira da Silva - three glories of our land.

Julio Pomar - Abstract Expressionism

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Born in 1926 in Lisbon, and set up in Paris in 1963. Currently lives and works in Paris and Lisbon. Attended the School of Decorative Arts Antonio Arroio and the Schools of Fine Arts of Lisbon and Porto, in 1942 and participated in a first group in Lisbon, and made the first solo exhibition in 1947, in Porto. Devoted himself particularly to painting, but his work also includes works of drawing, engraving, sculpture and "assemblage, illustration, ceramics, tapestries and scenery for theatre.

Has, also, works of decorative tile mural for the station in the Windmill High Lisbon Metropolitan, (1983-84), the Circus of Brasilia (Gran'Circolar, 1987), the Station of the Metro Jardin Botanique in Brussels (1992) the Court of Moita (“Justice of Solomon ', 1993) and the train station of Corroios (1998). Participated in the Biennale de São Paulo, 1953, and also in the editions of 1975 and 1985. The Gulbenkian Foundation in 1978 organized the first retrospective of his work, which was exhibited in Lisbon, Porto and Brussels. In 1986, a new retrospective exhibition was presented by the museums of the Gulbenkian Foundation in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia and also at its headquarters in Lisbon.

Camões, 1988

Other exhibitions anthology of thematic scope took place in 1990, works with themes of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Lisbon, in 1991, with paintings and drawings on literary subjects and portraits of writers (Pomar et la Literature), in Charleroi, Belgium

Edgar Poe, Fernando Pessoa e o Corvo, 1985

in 1997 with work on the theme of D. Quixote, in Cascais, and paintings on the Indians of Brazil, in Biarritz, France. Other anthologies of paintings were presented in 1999 and 2000 in Macau and Beijing, in 2001, in Aveiro (Recent Paintings), and in 2003 in Istanbul. Published in 2002, the volume of tests "and then painting?" And in 2003 the poem "TRATAdoDITOeFeito. Exhibited new paintings (Méridiennes - Meres indienne), in 2004, Patrice Trigano Gallery, Paris, and the Sintra Museum of Modern Art - Berardo Collection presented a retrospective of his work organized by Marcelin Pleynet under the title "Autobiography", where out the first part of a series of sculptures in bronze. Also in 2004, the CCB has set out an anthology of recent works entitled 'Human Comedy'. The first two volumes of the catalogue "raisonné 'of works of painting, sculpture and assemblages of iron were published in 2001 and 2004, the Éditions de la Difference, Paris.

Gadanheiro, 1945

Orchard has become a strong opponent to the fascist regime. Joined the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD) and participated in student fights, which cost him the expulsion of ESBAP. The political activism is also reflected in his work. In painting, in works such as The Gadanheiro, exposed in 1945 the National Society of Fine Arts, the texts published in newspapers, which advocated a neo-realist aesthetic, and the promotion of the 1st Exhibition of the spring Ateneu Comercial do Porto in 1946.

Almoço do trolha, 1946

In 1947 organized the 1st solo exhibition of drawings, in Porto. However, the mural that runs the Cinema Batalha was ruined by the PIDE.

Cegos de Madrid, 1957

Soon after leaving the port, returning to the capital. There was jailed for four months and saw your picture in the Resistance be confiscated II General Exhibition of Plastic Arts of the National Society of Fine Arts in 1947.

Maria da Fonte, 1957

Fernando Lanhas changed the art scene at the end of the 2nd War

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Fernando Lanhas, (born Oporto, 16 September 1923) is a Portuguese painter and architect. He studied architecture but became known as the leading name in Portuguese abstract painting. He started painting in 1944, influenced by music, astronomy, and the international abstract movement. Since then, he's been one of the most innovative and original Portuguese painters.

In the years spent in Oporto School of Fine Arts was a student attentive and engaged. In this institution addressed the Group of Students of Fine Arts. Had Colleagues such as Nadir Afonso, Manuel Pereira da Silva and Julio Pomar, with whom talked about art. He began painting figurative paintings, which quickly turned into abstract works. Involved in the organization of the Independents Exhibition, in 1944, and collaborated on the page "Art" of the daily newspaper of Oporto, "The Afternoon" in 1945. Shortly travelled to Paris, where he visited and enjoyed the Art of major events such as Sallon des Réalité Nouvelles, in 1947.

In the field of the drawing, he is in the large family of modern design, combining the ability to express the virtuosity of form.
Pure Design, in search of an asceticism which always renders, the drawing as a mean and end in itself.
Stripped of any accessory, its design leads us through a firm registration, but with a ductility open to higher sensitivities. The fascination leads us to believe that the design is where does not exist!

His called abstract painting, reduced to a few colours and minimal shapes, carries the same fascination and meditation on the same scales of time and space that Fernando Lanhas. research in the scientific field. Some canvas came from graphic compositions, other, denser and unexplained, more metaphysical then geometric, pursuing the movement of natural forces and forms, the dimensions of the cosmos. Sometimes symbolic representations cease guess: sun, tree, bird.

His involvement with the Independents Exhibition, who changed the art scene at the end of the 2nd War, promoting the debate on the abstraction along with the first neo-realistic statements. At 45, working with J. Lanham Pomar and V. Palla in the organization of the page 'Art' of the daily 'The Afternoon', of Oporto (which is itself listed in the catalogues of 49-50), where the future Surrealists Cesariny, Oom and Vespeira also defended the 'useful arts'. Lanhas then publishes studies for Drums (Old with Handkerchief) and Old White, which forms the set of paintings, is now exposed. Later works are abstractions and provide the first evidence of the ambitions of the painter and the debate about the social implications of art, which is represented by The Artist Abstract (only shown in photo) and Catherine (The Magnificent ugliness) of 46; Lanhas visit Paris on 47 and returns to abstractionism.

Honorary member of the National Academy of Fine Arts, a man of rare culture, has acknowledged taking a journey of original demand of rationality in art. In a time of tension in encysted cultural crisis of the subject, has been able to understand it as a learning experience for the integration of man in the world, the inevitable game of ephemeral passions and affections.

Monument to José Maria dos Santos in Palmela

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This monument, made by Manuel Pereira da Silva, was to honour José Maria dos Santos (1832-1913), by the Palmela City Council. He became the largest Portuguese wine producer at the time.

Arlindo Rocha, a pioneer of the abstract sculpture in Portugal

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Arlindo Rocha and Manuel Pereira da Silva.

Arlindo Rocha, 1921 - 1999
Graduated in sculpture at the School of Fine Arts of Porto, in 1945.
In 1953 he obtained a scholarship from the Institute of High Culture, for Italy, and in 1959, a fellowship of BCG to Egypt and Greece and visits the major museums of Europe.
Was a member of the Oporto Group "Independents" (years 40).
Was awarded a silver medal at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels (1958).
Has works in public places - schools, palaces of justice, gardens, etc. Egg in Setúbal, Oporto and Viseu.

Oporto Bishop.

Arlindo Rocha is considered a pioneer of abstract sculpture in Portugal, among with Manuel Pereira da Silva, Jorge Vieira, and Fernando Fernandes in the emancipation movement of the sculpture from his vocation statuary. The pieces "Woman and Tree" in 1948 and "Science" of 1961, this one was radical abstract, are milestones in Portuguese sculpture of the last century.
His work tended to be geometric inevitably absolute. However, in recent years returned to a hard Figurative, with orders to local authorities.

Setúbal: The Poetry, The Sea and The Earth.

The abstraction, true the School of Paris, in two parts, sometimes more geometric and in other moments more lyrical. The most relevant national figures were: Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, exponent of the "Ecole de Paris", and here, in Portugal, Fernando Lanhas, Nadir Afonso, Manuel Pereira da Silva and Arlindo Rocha.

Bust of Fernando Fernandes made by Manuel Pereira da Silva

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1946 Bust of Fernando Fernandes made by Manuel Pereira da Silva.

Born on 11 April 1924, in Braga. In 1949, concluded the Course of Sculpture in the Oporto Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1952, participated in the exhibition at Modern Art of the National Intelligence with the work Piet. The logic and syllogism, in 1953, the first abstract sculptures presented in a school, getting the classification of 19 values.

The logic and syllogism.

After finished the course, Fernando Fernandes attends the School of Fine Arts in Paris and the Slade School of Art in London. It had a fellowship of the Institute of High Culture and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Represented Portugal in the II and V Biennial of Modern Art of São Paulo in 1953 and 1959

Fernando Fernandes was colleague and fiend of Manuel Pereira da Silva in adventurous stay in Paris in 1946 and 1947, along with the Painter Júlio Resende and the Sculptor Eduardo Tavares who came to be user of the Manuel Pereira da Silva studio, which also occurred later, with the Sculptor Aureliano Lima and the Painter Reis Teixeira.

Henrique Moreira - Sculptor

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In 1991 the sculptor Henrique Moreira was honoured by the land that he was borne, Avintes.
On the centenary of his birth, the Board Council of Avintes decided to erect this monument, the work was made by the sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva.

Monument to the Sculptor Henrique Moreira in Avintes.

Henrique Araújo Moreira (Avintes, Vila Nova de Gaia, 1890 - 1979) was an important Portuguese sculptor.
He had study in the Oporto Academy of Fine Arts, where he was student of Master António Teixeira Lopes; Henrique Moreira left us a remarkable work, recognized in numerous awards, including those of gold medals that were awarded in exhibitions in Lisbon and Seville.
In his vast work, which perpetuates the legacy of naturalist Eight hundred, there is already an updated recipe for the emergence of Art Deco aesthetics, such as denouncing the decorative buttonhole, “The Boys” in the Allies Avenue, Oporto, it is obvious the convergence of a natural harmony of lines and volumes, this naturalist expression gives to the artworks an immense serenity.

The Boys, Allies Avenue in Oporto.

“The Lady Nude” Work of Henrique Moreira, was held in 1929 and is on Allies Avenue, Oporto. Represents a naked woman, seated, with arms supported on a plinth which four faces with masks throw water into a small tank.

The Lady Nude, Allies Avenue in Oporto.

“Tenderness” in the S. Lázaro Garden, Oporto.

In Carlos Alberto Square, a monument to the Portuguese killed in The Great War of 1914-18, Oporto.

The Unknown Soldier, Carlos Alberto Square in Oporto.

Priest Américo (1959/61 - Bronze) in the Republic Square, Oporto.

The Garden Antero de Figueiredo is a small garden located in front of the Foz Market, predominantly consisting of beds of flowers. At the centre there is the bust of the writer who gives name to the Garden.

Antero Figueiredo, Foz Market in Oporto.

Aureliano Lima - Sculptor and Poet

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Aureliano Lima was born on 23 September 1916 in the Carregal do Sal, homeland he saw growing up to five years of his childhood, and in 1921, went live for a few years for the Lagares da Beira (Oliveira do Hospital) with his parents.

Sculptor, designer, poet and Portuguese medallist, self made man, comes to the arts in the mid-40s, after having exercised the most different professions (pharmacy assistant, a prison official ...). In 1939, it is in Coimbra. In the city of Mondego, writes, works in literary journals and, for the first time at the Exhibition of Coimbra Artists in 1948.

In the same year, was present in the III General Exhibition of Plastic Arts, organized in Lisbon by the National Society of Fine Arts. At the time, the first sculptural work - busts, as expressive of Teixeira de Pascoaes in adobe - remains bound by the precepts of figurative statuary that, later, abandoned in favour of a search not figurative, interested in exploring the poetic qualities of materials - the stone, wood or plaster and also the iron.

In 1958, goes to Oporto and shortly after to Vila Nova de Gaia, where he arrived to work in the studio of the sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva. It was the final entry in to the artistic and cultural resources, an open door to new experiences, new creations and activities. "Still remember the first visits to the studio loaned Rua Afonso de Albuquerque, near the Torne School, which with Manuel Pereira da Silva, Aureliano Lima, shared that act almost starting to modern sculpture, outside the channels of official or academic, away from eyes of the critics that are rarely interested in sculpture in Portugal.”

In 1950, Manuel Pereira da Silva made this bust in plaster of Aureliano Lima.

In Serafim Ferreira - The Art in Portugal in the séc.XX: The Third Generation. Lisbon: Livraria Bertrand.

He worked in various newspapers and literary magazines, as Vértice, Seara Nova, Diário de Coimbra, The Commerce of Porto, Jornal de Notícias, Diário de Lisboa and Symposium / Lyrics.

In Lisbon, he participates in the II Exhibition of Plastic Arts of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1961). His sculptural work is, at the time, a major makeover. In further experiments not figurative perceives to be a dual voltage, reflected in the dialogue between form and form filled hollow between the line (the rods of iron, for example, the two works Untitled collection that belong to the CAMJAP, dated mid - 60) and the volumes relieved of its three-dimensional solid or in works of biomorphic feature or anthropomorphic.
Then left to work the masses compact. Prefers the emergence of expressive form in the vertical space, that the interaction with it, letting it penetrate the area, sometimes sublimated in colour, sometimes reinforced their presence in raw (through textures, contrasts, manufacturing marks ...). Later, the tension seems to hang the sculpture as an understanding of geometric shapes elementary game. And here also, since the 60s and 70s, the work of sculptural Aureliano is reflected in an innovative manner with which the artist works the contemporary language of painted iron and plastic.

The sculpture is then reduced to an abstract signal that interrupts the continuity of physical space (e.g. the number of polychrome sculptures of the 70 and 80). In these works, the contrast between full and empty, the reduction of the sculpture to a strict structure of plans, lines and circles painted in single colour, is close to a question about the value and visual identity of the sculpture, very rare in Portugal.

Between 1965 and 1967 was fellow of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, where he attended as a sculptor of "Ateliers Szabo.
It has works of sculpture and paintings in various museums, public squares and private collections. Among them, focus on three sculptures: "Homage," a piece of bronze with 2.10 meters in height, within the Municipal Library of Vila Nova de Gaia, "The Cry," Monument in Nelas with 4.30 m, and the monument Fernando Pessoa, in Vila da Feira, with 5 meters high. He has made also several busts: Miguel Torga, Afonso Duarte, Paulo Quintela, Antero de Quental, Camilo Castelo Branco, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Edward Lawrence and Mario Braga.

The Cry, Monument in Nelas

In poetry is the author of several books: "Behind Rio" (Galaico Prize for poetry, 1961), Porto 1963, "The Circles and Signs", ed. Author's, Oporto 1974, "Inside-Out Time", ed. Author's, Oporto 1974, "The Gray Man or the Alchemy of Numbers", ed. Author's, Porto 1975, with foreword by Fernando Guimarães, "Song and Eucalyptus", Brasília Editora, Porto 1979, "Parallel Mirrors", Brasília Editora, Oporto 1983, "The bed and house," Brasília Editora, Porto 1986, "The Dr. De Vila Seca, Col. Blue Leopard, Oporto 1990.

As poet, Aureliano Lima was to publish a first collection of poetry in 1963 (Rio Underlying, "Galaico Prize") in the same year that held its first solo exhibition (Oporto, Alvarez Gallery). Over the following decades, participating in some major national exhibition of art (III Salão Nacional de Arte, Lisbon and Oporto, 1968; Exhibition of contemporary artists selected by AICA, 1972, III Vila Nova de Cerveira Biennale of Art de 1984 ...) and also runs some projects of medals.

In 1983, it opened in Vila da Feira a large monument dedicated to the poet Fernando Pessoa. The sculpture, a large (five meters high) in bronze, reflects how Aureliano Lima felt the plastic creation: energy and concentration, as a synthesis of form, reduction of a sequence of fragmented plans, an expressive grammar would take another monumental project, The Cry (Nelas, 1982-1983).

After his death in December 1984, the Municipal Museum has incorporated in its collection by Helena Maria Barata Lima, widow of that eminent sculptor, a set of sixteen pieces sculpture, whose donation in 1990, would be implemented as a gesture of affection and love for the mother land. In this collection we can see artistic productions in iron recovered and polychrome in a geometric and abstract trend language, that he was one of the precursors as well as sculptures in stone, plaster, bronze and wood that can be appreciate.

The iron sculptures in the years 50/60 mark the meeting of Aureliano with the steel construction of Julio Gonzalez and Picasso. The creation of Aureliano launched it in a game of three-dimensional metal rods welded on line, suggesting the presence of volume, lay in its transparency, a symbolic relationship between surface structure and abstract space where they operate. Result anchors plunged in thought of man, the artist, who seeks and finds.
Important for new paths explored, especially in the context of the Portuguese art of the 60s and 70s, his sculptural works remain relatively unknown. The difficulties in the assertion of a personal artistic career, the scarcity of resources, on the discretion of your creative journey, helped to hide the sense of a trial marked by creativity and irreverence plastic models to the traditional aesthetic. Self by circumstances of life was also, by temperament, an anti-academic for whom the sculpture could not confine itself to a program or illustrative apologetic because he was, above all, an independent presence in the world.

Aureliano, even in the 60s and 70s, working a series of sculptures in stone, marble and wood. In these works sit down to read the study, Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore in which Aureliano explores the properties of natural materials which, assuming a simplified, stripped of roots become germline. Thus, nature appears to be polished coated pure abstraction of a value which is close to unveiling the contemplation of works of art.

Aureliano Lima's work is marked by constructivism abstract. His creative spirit expressed in the sculpture in various materials (plaster, bronze, wood, marble, stone, polychrome iron, iron recovered) as well as in his painting highly abstract and with a clear traces of contemporary minimalism.

Aureliano Lima deserves our attention and admiration for the novelty of his art that tore the apathy of the figurative art of his time.

Independents, Oporto artist group

2009-04-09T07:11:00.000-07:00

The abstract art is historically linked to the Portuguese Independents exhibitions, its main organizer and coordinator, Fernando Lanhas, coincidentally is the central figure of abstractionism.

After the I exhibition in April 1943, in the of Fine Arts School of Porto, with sculptures of Altino Maia, Mário Truta, Arlindo Rocha, Serafim Teixeira, Augusto Tavares and Manuel Pereira da Silva, the Independents exhibitions will be place outside the school and several times outside the Oporto, a first example of decentralization, does not avoid a certain marginalization of Oporto artists on events and initiatives for greater visibility and impact of the capital.

The II Independent Exhibition shows, in February 1944, at the Atheneum Commercial of Oporto, with sculptures of Altino Maia, Arlindo Rocha, Eduardo Tavares, Joaquim Meireles, Manuel Monteiro da Cunha, Maria Graciosa de Carvalho, Mário Truta, M. Félix de Brito, Manuel Pereira da Silva and Serafim Teixeira. It will be from there that the action of Fernando Lanhas will be felt in the consistent quality of the catalogue and exhibitions, as well as persistence in keeping alive the initiatives.

The III Independents Exhibition takes place in the same year, in the hall of the Coliseum of Oporto, with sculptures of Abel Salazar, Altino Maia, Antonio Azevedo, Arlindo Rocha, Eduardo Tavares, Henrique Moreira, Manuel Pereira da Silva, Mário Truta and Sousa Caldas. In the catalogue of the exhibition, that goes to Coimbra, Leiria and Lisbon, in 1945, states that the name of "Independents" is not a name at random, but involves the awareness that art is a heritage of humanity and hence the "Our presence varied, it being understood that this should enable it to build the future, can not be denied the right to remember the past (1).
For Fernando Lanhas the "Independents Exhibition" of Oporto is a significant historical moment in our painting and sculpture. First, because together painters and sculptors of different training (the reason for the word "Independents" has no affiliation of an "ism" particular), also engaged in a collective action and immersed in the same enthusiasm. Second, because there appears, without pre-concepts or complexes, this original and fruitful abstraction. And thirdly, because they escape to the centralized voracity of the capital.

Between 1946 and 1950, there are four more independent exhibitions in the Bookstore Gallery Portugála, in Oporto, on 46, 48 and 50, and one in Braga in the 49. From 1943 to 1950, exhibited in almost all expositions the painters Amândio Silva, Aníbal Alcino, António Lino, Chambers Carlos Ramos, Dordio Gomes, Fernando Lanhas, Júlio Pomar, Júlio Resende, Nadir Afonso, Rui Pimentel and Vitor Palla.

Nadir Afonso - Painter

2009-03-10T14:00:00.000-07:00

Nadir Afonso, (1920, Portugal) is a geometric abstractionist painter. Formally trained in architecture, which he practiced early in his career with Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, Nadir Afonso later studied painting in Paris and became one of the pioneers in Kinetic art, working alongside Victor Vasarely, Fernand Léger, Auguste Herbin, and André Bloc.

Aliados Square, 1943. Early works: Nadir Afonso already displays a preference for urban themes, which he will extensively develop in the Cities series.

As a theorist of his own geometry-based aesthetics, published in several books, Nadir Afonso defends that art is purely objective and ruled by laws that treat art not as an act of imagination but of observation, perception, and form manipulation.

Nadir Afonso achieved international recognition early on in his career and currently holds many of his works in museums. His most famous works are the Cities series, which depict places all around the world. As of 2007 he is still actively painting.

Évora Surrealista, 1945. Surreal period, denoting a drift to abstractionism at age 25.

Formative years
Nadir Afonso Rodrigues was born in the rural, remote town of Chaves, Portugal, on December 4, 1920. His parents were Palmira Rodrigues Afonso and poet Artur Maria Afonso. His very unusual first name was suggested by a gypsy to his father on his way to the Civil Registry, where he was due to be registered as Orlando.

By the age of four, he made his first "painting" on a wall at home: a perfect red circle, which anticipated his life as under the signs of rhythm and geometric precision. His teen years were dedicated to painting, earning him his first national prize at age 17. It was only natural that he was sent to the bigger city of Porto to enroll in the School of Fine Arts for the art (painting) degree. However, at the registration desk, he took the advice of the clerk, who told him that his high school diploma allowed him to enroll in Architecture, which was then a more promising career. As he later admitted, he made a mistake by listening to that man.

Composition, 1946. Iris period: first purely abstract works.

Still, Nadir Afonso took on the challenge and completed the graduation in Architecture, but he had to flunk the third year because some of his professors could not accept Nadir Afonso's artistic style. Settled in Porto, he started to design houses and industrial buildings, while at the same time painting the city around him under his other surname, Rodrigues. As a member of the artist collective "Porto Independents", he took part in all their art exhibitions until 1946 and became a favourite with the national critics. His oil A Ribeira was purchased by the Contemporary Art Museum of Lisbon (the country capital) in 1944, when he was only 24 years old.

Deux Styles, 1952. Egyptian period (and Baroque period): looking for the geometry imbedded everywhere and in every object.

Art and architecture
In 1946, Nadir Afonso left Porto for Paris with a number of unfinished works from his iris period, and changed his signature with the surname Afonso. There, a Brazilian painter Candido Portinari helped him secure a scholarship from the French Government to study art and painting at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He resided at the Hôtel des Mines in the Latin Quarter and spent his time regularly at students hangouts. Nadir Afonso recalls this period of his life as the first time that he was in contact with the great world of Art. Because his scholarship lasted only one year, Nadir Afonso worked until 1948 (and again in 1951) with the architect Le Corbusier who, knowing his passion for painting, gave him the mornings off without cutting his salary. He also worked for a while, with the artist Fernand Léger.

Espacillimité, 1954. Espacillimité series: still and moving paintings resulting from the pioneering Kinetic art studies.

While working under Le Corbusier in Paris, Nadir Afonso gradually developed his own style of geometric abstractionism. His new fundamentals of aesthetics reoriented his concepts of the origin and essence of art that resulted in his 1948 research thesis controversial to his architectural work, Architecture Is Not an Art. "Architecture is a science, a team elaboration", and therefore a means of expression that cannot satisfy a solitary soul like him. In 1949, Nadir Afonso leaves Paris and for a while immerses himself fully in his paintings. He goes through a period of inspiration in the Portuguese Baroque, followed by an Egyptian period.

Venice, 1956. The beginning of the long-running Cities series, still very connoted with the Espacillimité series.

From December 1951 to 1954, Nadir Afonso crosses the Atlantic to answer an invitation to work with the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer; it was three years of "necessary architecture and obsessive painting." That obsession forces him to return to Paris, looking for artists researching Kinetic art. He joins the group of the Denise René Gallery, connecting with French-Hungarianpainter Victor Vasarely (father of the Op-art), Danish painter Richard Mortensen, French painter Auguste Herbin, and French architect André Bloc, culminating in 1958 in the public showing, at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, of his animated painting Espacillimité (now on display at the Chiado Museum in Lisbon). His first book, La Sensibilité Plastique, is published the same year with the support of art critic Michel Gaüzes, patron Madame Vaugel and Victor Vasarely. In 1959, his first anthology exhibition takes place at the Maison des Beaux-Arts in Paris, while initial exhibitions of his new style in his native country fail initially to raise as much interest as in the early expressionist years.

Occident, 1966. Cities series: the geometric alphabet devised by Nadir Afonso expands beyond Espacillimité.

Full-time painter

Paris is the world center of the arts but the fierce competition between artists proves too much for Nadir Afonso. In 1965, conscious of his social inadaptation, he moves back to his hometown of Chaves and little by little takes refuge in isolation and accentuates the orientation of his life towards the creation of his art. He terminates the architecture practice and pursues his aesthetics studies based on geometry, which he considers the essence of art. Once in a while, he leaves his hideout to return to Paris and meet with friends author Roger Garaudy, painter Victor Vasarely, and critic Michel Gaüzes. By indication of Garaudy, he travels to Toulouse to meet aestheticist Pierre Bru, with whom he reviews the syntactic form of his studies, before publishing Les Mécanismes de la Création Artistique (The Mechanisms of Artistic Creation), the book where he introduces his original theory of art as an exact science.

Port of Copenhagen, 1975. Painting city by city, Nadir Afonso's style will get more abstract in years ahead.

In 1974, he makes a solo exhibition at the Selected Artists Galleries, in New York. U.S. critics acclaim him as "one of the first proponents of geometric abstraction in Portugal [and] one of the new generation European artists."

Living in reclusion, Nadir Afonso defined himself in 2006 as "Portuguese and a son of the inner country. I learned from tradition to be humble, to praise the masters, and to live these eighty-six years with the simplicity that my lowly status has always guaranteed me. To do a balance of my existence and of my work now is absurd." He has spent the last three decades painting, exhibiting, and writing with regular and growing comfort. He is twice married, with five children, born between 1948 and 1989.

Nadir Afonso exhibits regularly in Lisbon, Porto, Paris, New York, and all over the world, and as of 2007 is still active at work. He is represented in museums in Lisbon and Porto (Portugal), Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Brazil), Budapest (Hungary), Paris (Pompidou Center), Wurzburg and Berlim (Germany), among others. He has formed a foundation bearing his name, to which he donated his personal artwork collection, and has engaged Pritzker Prize-winner architect Alvaro Siza to design its headquarters in his hometown of Chaves.

Dresden, 1985. The geometric alphabet is still evolving.

International recognition
The recognition of Nadir Afonso's talent came early in his career, both in his home country and internationally. Aged 24, an oil of his, A Ribeira, had already been purchased by the Contemporary Art Museum of Lisbon and the Portuguese government invited him twice to represent Portugal at the São Paulo Art Biennial. By the age of 50, he was well known and regularly exhibited in New York and Paris.

However, his reclusive personality and the memory of his first attempt in 1946 to show his paintings to an art gallery in Paris, which was snubbed and left him humiliated, have since meant that he shies from publicity and no exhibition has ever been promoted by himself. Victor Vasarely, the father of op art, had already noticed it in 1968:

"This artist I have known for over 20 years is undoubtedly the most important Portuguese contemporary painter and his work is unjustly little known across the world."

Moscow, 1995. A colorful period in the Cities series, even though Nadir Afonso declares that color is secondary and an afterthought.

Personal aesthetics theory
Art is usually conceived as subjective, but for Nadir Afonso it is purely objective and ruled by laws. "Art is a show of exactitude", "a game of laws in spaces but not of significations in objects". From these axioms, his own personal theory of geometry-based "rational aestetics within an intuitive art" evolved, which he published in book form, alongside his philosophical thoughts on the Universe and its laws. These works are the key to understand the artist and his art, and are summarized by himself in a few words:

"Searching for the absolute, for an art language in which shapes possess a mathematical rigorousness, where nothing needs to be added nor removed. The feeling of total exactitude."
Because of his rationalism, Nadir Afonso confronted Kandinsky, the father of abstract art, and criticized him for subduing geometry to the human spirit instead of making it the essence of art. This "geometry of art" is not however the "geometry of geometrists", as it is not about symbols nor anything in particular; rather, it is the spatial law itself, with the four qualities of perfection, harmony, evocation, and originality.

His work is methodical, because "an artwork is not an act of 'imagination' (...) but of observation, perception, form manipulation." "I start with shapes, still arbitrary. I put ten shapes on the frame; I look at it and suddenly a sort of spark ignites. Then the form appears. Color is secondary, used to accentuate the intensity of the form." Nadir Afonso does not renege on his early expressionist and surrealist works: "An individual initially does not see the true nature of things, he starts by representing the real, because he is convinced therein lies the essence of the artwork. I thought that too. But, as I kept working, the underlying laws of art, which are the laws of geometry, slowly revealed themselves in front of my eyes. There was no effort on my part, it was just the daily work what led me to that result, guided by intuition." The illustrations of this article are a chronological representation of the evolution of Nadir Afonso's style and thought towards the original geometric alphabet with which he creates his artworks, as explained in his books and seen most prominently in his Cities series.

Tile panels on the Lisbon Metro (1998)

Aesthetic Feeling

Nadir Afonso
A) We can feel emotion before an object:

1) Because it reminds us of another object (evocation).
For example: we feel emotion before the tree trunk that reminds us of somebody crucified; before the cloud that suggests an eagle, the garden that appeals to our childhood, the portrait that evokes a loved one;

2) Because the intended function of the object satisfies a need in us or responds to our notion of need (perfection). For example: we feel emotion before the utensil, the glass, the chair, the table, the machine, the functional, practical, light, portable, comfortable vehicle;

3) Because the object presents to us special features (originality). For example: we feel emotion before the black flower, the elegant giraffe, the polar landscape;

Ribeira, Porto (years 50)

B) We can feel emotion before a law:
Because the space itself contains metric laws pertaining to geometric form (harmony). For example: we feel emotion before the lunar circle; before the hexagon of the quartz crystal; before the skyline over the sea.

Paris (years 70)

C) “The creator tries to convey emotion to us”... and it is here that the first aesthetic conflict is born! How can man convey emotion (which comes to him sometimes from a pure feeling of love) when he paints, for example, the portrait of a “loved one”? This emotion is intransmissible! If the artist considers that his picture of the “loved one” is a work of art (because it arouses his emotion), so can the critic consider that it is not (because it does not arouse his emotion) … The same work cannot be declared “artistic” by some and “inartistic” by others!

Brussels (years 70)

But there’s more. When the art critic is a “renowned authority on aesthetics” he classifies, for example, the picture of the “tree trunk” under works of art (because it suggests to him, as to the artist and the like, a crucified being) and does not classify the picture “loved one” (because it does not suggest any loved one to him). And if we are careful enough to look into the illusion under which both the art critic and the artist fell, we will see that the same mistake extends to all significations inherent in all objects.
Conclusion of the aesthetic conclusion: it is not in the representation of objects that the characteristics of a work of art lie. Meaning evolves through the environment, the time, the race, the people, according to function, need, belief, culture, affection… and everything that depends on them is an incidental, transitory, individual emotion. Only the laws of space, independent from evolution, contain accuracy, and only they can reveal eternity and universality to us – the absolute to which every true work of art aspires.

Madrid (years 90)

Of course, to counter this statement, traditional aesthetics have an argument they consider an inevitable “check mate”: “not all works of art represent geometries – “lunar circles” or “crystal hexagons” and many of the works that represent them cannot help being, despite that, mediocre products”! The answer is right in terms of reasoning and wrong in terms of perception: the laws of space have their most evident expression in the simple forms of Nature: the circle, the square, the equilateral triangle, the hexagon... and in the act of making the work of art this data and its intermediate components becomes more complex according to structures that obey a correlative law: integration and disintegration which we call morphometry. It is these structural rules that weave this factive feeling of perennially and accuracy as if represented things were revealed to us full of “mysterious meanings”. Such a structuring norm is, however, irreducible from intuitive mathematics to constituted sciences and only accessible to the faculties of perception.

New York (years 90)

Only thus is it understandable that elementary forms – the circle, the hexagon, etc. – do not make in themselves a composite set, as it is understandable that a composite set does not present to scientific reason these primordial geometric elements. Hence, in the same order and sequence, it is understandable that, in the aesthetic view of those who do not grasp these principles, the illusion is formed that the sense of artistic creation emanates from a “revelation” of meaning inherent in objects.
My major concern has been to mark the existence and set out the rules of integration and disintegration of spaces: unsuspected morphometric laws of traditional aesthetics and keystone of my whole work. In particular, my work Le Sens de l’Art seeks essentially, from the first to the last line of text, the natural norms of this geometrisation.

Rio de Janeiro (years 90)

Aesthetes do not agree with me because, if it were as I say, “art would have no mystery”.
Nadir Afonso

Seville, 2007. At age 86, first oversized painting (176x235 cm), using his full geometric alphabet.

Artworks
Nadir Afonso has produced mainly paintings and serigraphs. His current preferred materials are acrylic paint on canvas (bigger works), and gouache on paper (smaller works, often studies for bigger works). His best-known and most distinctive work is the Cities series, each painting usually representing a city from anywhere in the world.

Júlio Resende - A great painter

2009-02-19T06:14:00.000-08:00

2001 Júlio Resende and Manuel Pereira da Silva in the Foundation Lugar do Desenho.

The vision of the place

"The accumulation of folders and drawing pads, records of experiences (so many!) awoke in me the need for a dispassionate reflection on what their fate should be.
Distance in time and space allowed me to judge the consistency of material in the light of a course that befell me by obscure laws – and I felt no “pain” at destroying a large number of these drawings; the old muffle in the studio would bear witness to this had it been able to speak....
I was relieved to observe that as soon as the hesitations along the way were eliminated, that course, that started in the 1930s and covered 60 years, and whose main Expressionist characteristic necessarily matched my own nature as a man, would become clearer.I confess that in my mind there was a desire to maintain the integrity of the collection and that would be enough for me. My friends did not agree; they argued that this material could set an example, amongst many others, perhaps worthier, and they would find a way, and a space, for it. Hence the creation of “Lugar do Desenho” and the Foundation with that institutional weight that has always been alien to me. However, if “Lugar do Desenho” corresponds to the aims I have always striven towards, so be it! Let Drawing be understood in its widest sense and not simply restricted to the Plastic Arts but to all creative attitudes of Man. It is not the monopoly of a particular time or a society. Drawing is the expression of a consciousness that distinguishes it "

Memories

"... But, actually, I wanted to be a painter!
Maybe fate offered me the first step. Aurora Jardim, a known figure in literary and journalism circles in Oporto, spoke to the painter Alberto Silva who, in turn, negotiated with the Silva Porto Academy so that I could attend painting lessons there.
I bought my first “serious” box of paints, and learned how to mix them on the palette, according to the rules."

"... At school, during classes, I would await with great anticipation the critical opinion of Master Dórdio, the possible referential “bridge” with what we understood as our geographical boundaries... A nonconformist movement was taking shape among us, comrades, against the passivity of the town. It was to oppose this situation that the idea of forming the “Group of Independents” arose. “Independent” in stylistic attitude; “dependent” in terms of a commitment that would turn into the awakening of the collective awareness of reality."

"... Maestro Dórdio Gomes headed the “National Fine Arts Academy Aesthetic Mission”, which was held in Évora. Some of the members of the “Independents” met there."

"... In the middle of winter, particularly harsh this year, I began my acquaintance with Paris, looking for every opportunity for revelation. In order to understand the teaching methods and, above all, to evaluate kinds of critical analysis, I attended the School of Fine Arts and the Grande Chaumière Academy."

"One morning, in a heavy snowfall, I went to the window of my room in a small hotel overlooking a cemetery, and saw an old woman trudging through the whiteness of the snow.
She was just a silhouette of pain held up by two filaments ending in huge boots. Without wasting any time, I rushed to the studio of Pierre Dubois, and did this painting in a breath."

Júlio Resende in Paris 1947/48

It was a pivotal period in the life of the artist, fitting in an ever timely way into the educational aim that is a relevant historical constant in a post-War period in which France and the World were seeking to re-establish Peace. The painter Júlio Resende had finished the course at the Fine Arts School in Oporto, and was making his first contacts with the theories and practices of the aesthetics resulting from the movements at the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th, of which Paris was the cultural centre.

1947, Paris.

Drawing in Two Times

1940/1950

History and Society have a duty to speak about the past. The works exhibited here had a specific context in my career and they should be analysed in that context. Various limitations, in particular those resulting from the political regime and world conflict, not to speak of the vaunted loneliness of a country enclosed in specific geographical conditions, would explain the cultural anachronism of the environment, often taking refuge in an outmoded mythology.
One of the works, dating from the 1930s, marks a passage along this path through the desert of ideas and unawareness of the real world beyond our borders. For me, this exhibition shows how much life has evolved in six decades.
Short of another, it will at least have this merit.

Drawing in two times.

Júlio Resende – the years 1940/90

In confession mode

The object of my search? Perhaps the reconciliation of two things apparently irreconcilable.
To discover the form that suits "feeling" and "reflection".

The truth is that the analysts claim that my work reveals a lyrical expressionism. The person who first said that was a Flemish crític, 36 years ago.

If the expressionism in me is not deliberate, maybe the lyricism occurs for reasons underlying a whole people, viewed as submerged in the Atlantic mists, as seems to be the case for Portugal.

That’s probably it.

Ambivalence in feeling and reflecting, is certainly to blame for many hesitations along the way, but it is really justifiable in creative research that is based on a desire for authenticity which I have never moved away from, and do not relinquish now.

The proof is in the fact that I missed out on neo-realism (1940s), abstractionism (1947/48) and all others “isms”, not arrogantly, but always faithful to the feeling and aesthetic thinking that were born with me.

I accept, therefore, to be placed in the "Index" of a contemporaneity marked by the lack of definition of “ephemeral”, “minimalist” things, even if credible, and even by all the resulting humbug of consumerism. I also accept the aesthetic testimony of this contemporaneity, despite its vertigo making it difficult to establish time boundaries. Would a week not be enough for the contemporaneous to cease being so?

The History of Art analyst will respond later.

It is very clear that I do not speculate with painting, although I accept and can understand that others do.

I am only a plastic painter.

The Drawing on the Wall

The role of the plastic artist in society is largely understandable and requires no justification. In an urban space its function is to enhance rather than intervene. Something felt rather than seen. A sufficiently encompassing feeling in the overall space which remains latent throughout time. Thus, it seems that one should require from the artist the humility to acknowledge the right moment to participate in the movement outside his studio, indeed the space of experimentation.
The painter, should he really be the one operating through the plastic medium (…), requires a physical support, its nature and sturdiness depending on the characteristics of the place.
The wall has always been for me a kind of obsession, especially since 1947 when, for the first time, I travelled through Italy. Then, on my return to Paris, Duco de La Haix taught me the potential of "mortier", “discharging” me so I myself could erect a wall for fresco painting. Everything has a story and mine comes from afar and is marked by a commitment to murals. Not always straightforward, I recognise that. Over the long period of 50 years between the first and the last mural, the world was shaken up, the winds blew strong and men degraded themselves endlessly. The signs of art have not gone unheeded by them.
How to understand straightforwardness in this so-called evolutional sense? However, the decoration of a mural is always a consequential reference of a time, like the Berlin wall, or of a faith, like the Wailing Wall. A wall in itself always has a meaning, either physical or psychological. The former remains a reality, the latter is submissive, not because it is sidelined, as it is part of a unity resulting from both realities.
The mural artist faces many questions of a technical, aesthetic, functional and other nature. My purpose over this period of time was to answer them, a purpose to serve a society deeply enslaved to the hands of the clock, to traffic jams and to the anguish of having lost the meaning of life. In my view, mural art, rather than emphasising the status quo that numbs society should, on the contrary, awaken it by the new harmony that is the responsibility of today’s artist to find.

The drawing on the wall.

The Face of the Sea

The works collected together under the title "The Face of the Sea" resulted entirely from a direct contact with those whose life depends on such imponderable factors: such is the struggle of the Sea.
Expressions, gestures and faces shaped by the unbroken waves. Of course! What I am showing are not doctoral theses (!...), but simply recordings (and some of their developments), in the unique circumstances of convergence that facilitates them. They are, after all, mostly drawings that seek a truth conforming to my feelings. They date from different times. Another aspect that I believe the exhibition shows is the contribution of the geo-human situation to the expressiveness of drawing. The Atlantic was, in a way, the great accomplice of my small, yet enormous, adventure! From the northern Portuguese coast to the north-eastern shores of Brazil, passing through the islands of Cape Verde, the same Atlantic. Only the men are different because the expressions, the gestures and the faces are different! The awareness of this difference is always an invaluable challenge for feeling alive!... A drawing made in Póvoa de Varzim bears an emotional charge of a very different nature from another made on some Pernambuco shore.
Even though this is just an aspect of a much wider issue, maybe it is enough to highlight the importance that I give to emotion in the act of drawing.

The face of the sea.

Drawing at the Time of Dance and Theatre Illustration

I do not conceal the paths that life has so often made me tread.
They are part of a long journey and rightly make sense of it.
From the publicity drawings of the 1930s to the tile panels of "Sete Rios" spans a long bridge...
From one bank, already lost in the mist, to another that is awaited… The world, like Art, develops at a maddening pace.
So long as man is not lost, all is well.
This exhibition is thus a “presence” from the past. I only wonder what interest it may arouse in the vortex of modern time.

From comic strips to illustration and costumes, one foot here and one foot there, from Dyas to the Resendes, maybe I lost my bearings!...
This is a doubt, amongst many others, that will always be with me, though I keep a smile on my face that explains the two small lines on it.

1949, People of the sea.

Recurrent Watercolour 1946//1989

Watercolour was Resende’s favourite technique during his various travels, mainly in the 1940s and ‘50s, and it regained its importance in the 1980s when the author became a strong admirer of the Black Forest and the northeast of Brazil.
Some of these works and many others of mixed technique, originals of which many have never before been displayed in public, belong to the Lugar do Desenho collection, and the moment has come to show them, in accordance with the foundation’s statutes.
Dating from different times, the exhibition will help the viewer to see and reflect on the evolution of the painter, an analysis that will offer periodic cultural conclusions, one of our constant objectives.

Recorrent Watercolour.

The Flight of the Palette

A significant number of works by Júlio Resende have been born out of the painter’s many travels, on which he encountered reasons for constant evolution in terms of structural space and means. In his understanding, these works are records, and it is as such that they should be perceived. The experience of the senses corresponds to the instantaneity of gesture. Amassing these works under the title “Flight of the Palette”, the geographical reason behind them becomes immediately clear, as well as the emphasis the author gives to the manifold factors from which he departed and, above all, the diversity of sources of tropical culture: Continental Africa and the African Islands, South America and Asia.
Beside others, this seems a subject to arouse not only the viewer’s sensitivity but also his thinking. It has indeed been a rule of these exhibitions to provide didactic materials supplied by the author to accompany the original work, which we include in this edition. (…)

The flight of the palette.

Gazing on the Immediate

"Do you know what will happen to you as you practise pen and ink drawing? You will become more clever, practical and able to draw a lot inside your head."
Cennini

The material exhibited should not be regarded as the product of a thesis, a final result of reflexive/emotional understanding. As a principle, it is material safeguarded by its own “intimacy” which few would agree to reveal.
The title of the exhibition, “Gazing on the Immediate”, explains from the outset the instability pertaining to the record and the emotion put in it.
The movement of the tool translates the feeling of experienced vision, though expectant and unique, given credibility by the cortex but respectful of the thalamus. Drawing thus becomes a reliable testimony to a vital experience of the being at a given moment.
This exhibition comprises many of these experiences, some of which were fleetingly recorded but no less relevant for it in my life. I recall Turner, acknowledging that many of his late watercolours were sketched in a very schematic drawing to be watercoloured later. His capacity for emotional memory would respond to the particular chromatic solutions in question.
By showing these works in an attitude of apparent indiscretion, I will make myself known, not as an example, as a model… I am just one amongst many!

Gazing on the immediate.

Woman and Drawing

"A considerable part of the work of Júlio Resende has an insistent motivation in the female figure, not only isolated, but inserted in groups in subordination to the compositional structure.

During the course of a decades-long career, the painter’s expressionism rarely submits to viewing in woman the fragile ornamental figure of conventional beauty, rather the contrary, in her silhouettes, she radiates an earthy image, a vital essence that ennobles her.

This path is one of the reasons for this exhibition, taking the viewer to diverse places, from the Oporto riverfront to the Atlantic shore.(...)"

Woman and drawing.

Drawing Techniques

I dare state that in art, technique goes unnoticed. Lest I am misunderstood, I shall add that all statements are valid in themselves, and this also means that I do not belittle the ability to externalise this statement.
Technique is a means of …
For some reason, I find myself resistant to the exhibitionist techniques of a Paganini, although he is recognised as having been the greatest of virtuosi.
In principle, the painter has no violin, but rather various methods that require as many techniques, which he uses according to circumstance. Watercolour, pastel, gouache, pencil, China ink, etc, are “quick” techniques that I use in my frequent ramblings. I rarely used photography, believing that the use of a pad of paper would bring advantages to emotional annotation.
Other techniques, let’s call them “studio” techniques, such as engraving, monotype, collage, mixed technique, form the reference link to oil, acrylic techniques, etc. It is easily perceived that the former result from what I call in loco experience, while the latter are subject to a state of mind.
They all have variable relevance according to the aesthetic profile of the technician, and can even be considered useless for their association with other creative proposals such as those that are based on a performance project. So it should be said that these are the works that are part of the collection exhibition. It will be up to the visitor to make the small effort of telling them apart in terms of the purposes that generated them. Let it be once more stated that they are not conclusive works but rather personal records, fragments which in the circumstances were grouped here for the overall understanding of a whole.
I was moved by no other purpose, when exposing these bits of paper, humble physical presences, than to account for a life of searching, through the dim mists of doubt, with the hope of glimpsing a light that might correspond to the supreme objective of my painter’s conscience.
This search will make no sense without being shared as a brotherly sign of a hopefully universal Harmony.

Drawing Techniques

A House in Korntal

Family circumstances meant frequent stays in Korntal, a few kilometres from Stuttgart, where my daughter Marta and my only grandson Daniel live. Korntal is a word derived from two others, which means “Valley of Wheat”, and explains the nature of the place in topographical terms. In fact, from Stuttgart to Korntal, we can imagine continuous forest surrounding the Solitude Palace without any difficulty. The forest, of which Germany is proud, is maintained with natural discipline by all who accept and defend it. Korntal, therefore, is a small urban zone which is almost disguised in the landscape since the buildings do not extend beyond the houses surrounded by gardens carefully tended with visible pride by their owners at weekends. The small town obeys the rules of social composure of a class linked to the automobile industry.
But Korntal stands out socially for another reason: a “sect” with a moral ideology and “pietist” religion had its base there for many years, which still today is reflected in the collective behaviour of the residents.
In one of my stays, as I walked along the immaculately tidy streets, I inadvertently dropped a scarf.
The following day, when I noticed it was missing and took the same course, I found it carefully folded and placed on a low garden wall. This is Korntal.
This is where Marta’s house is, where Daniel is growing up. My memories are naturally in the company of my grandson to whom I taught the first Portuguese words and who, as he grew up, walked with me to the forest, making his small watercolours.
It is normal for the private gardens to have no walls to stop passers-by seeing in, and the owners relish their gardening. Although with the passing of time, Marta has become part of this social scene, her garden is not exactly like the rest.
Perhaps it is such a subtle matter it is impossible to explain.
My expressionist temperament, as if "pacified" by the scenery of this house, accepted an “intimacy” I am not used to. The atmosphere of a harmony of images and sounds, not only captured at first hand, but emanating from the surroundings, proved propitious to recording these notes.

A house in Korntal.

A river that is left to die amongst us

Far from wishing to speculate on a matter of such obscure reflection as the fate of living things, it is true that the title found to group the works in this exhibition lent itself to my perception of the possible analogy of the character of a river and that of man. "A river that is left to die amongst us" deserves every risk.
A river without a history is just a watercourse in the hydrographic scheme of the earth’s crust.
Unlike most, perhaps, the River Douro experienced in geological adversity the traits that made it the scene of epic memories, but also of others more soothing such as a requirement of what is vital. In the fearsome terraced layout, man turned the rock into the womb of miracles for sustenance and breathtaking works of art. As it ends its laborious course the Douro reflects on its banks a ravishing beauty that recalls in us the final chord of a Mahler symphony.

A feeling of involvement dominates the powers of absorption, making us a part of a whole.

The river, like a body, reacts to the physical confrontations of a vital space. To the average observer, this contemplation will be devoid of significance.

Painting is not an entertainment. It results from the intent to respond to a kind of provocation of a phenomenon. The response is at the risk of the painter, who recognises in advance that this response will not be entirely satisfactory.

A river that is left.

Painting Auction

2008-09-25T07:29:00.000-07:00

Palácio do Correio Velho leilão de 23.06.2005 - Upload a Document to Scribd

Contemporary Art Auction

2008-09-25T06:47:00.000-07:00

Palácio do Correio Velho Leilão de 25.11.2004 - Upload a Document to Scribd

Contemporary and Modern Art Auction

2008-09-25T06:35:00.000-07:00

Palácio do Correio Velho, Leilão de 25.11.2004(B) - Upload a Document to Scribd

General Ulysses S. Grant, 18º President of the United States of America

2008-06-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

Sculpture in Bronze of General Ulysses S. Grant, 18º President of the United States of America between 1868 and 1876. This monument was ordered by the Portuguese Government to Manuel Pereira da Silva for the capital of Guiné-Bissau. (1955)

Oil Paintings

2008-06-05T06:09:00.001-07:00

Busts

2008-05-27T15:46:00.000-07:00

Bust of Prof. José Hermano Saraiva
Bust of the Painter Reis Teixeira
Bust of the Sculptor Aureliano Lima
Bust of the Sculptor Henrique Moreira
Bust of the Sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva
Bust of the Dr. Adelino Gomes
Bust of the Priest Missionary José Araújo
Bust of the Priest Luís
Bust of is father
Bust of is father-in-law
Bust of is granddaughter

Paintings in the Church of Saint Luzia

2008-05-20T07:39:00.000-07:00

Artreview

2008-03-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

Find more photos like this on artreview.com

SHOWDOWN

2007-04-16T18:26:00.000-07:00

My illustration "Hands” is part of the art contest "SHOWDOWN" at Saatchi-Gallery from London!! Vote for my artwork and let me know your thoughts!!
Thank you

Art Blog

2006-11-27T07:07:00.000-08:00

Thank you for visiting our Blog!

pereiradasilva.blogspot.com is a blog that intends to show the artworks of the Sculptor Manuel Pereira da Silva.

The workmanships displayed here are original, are dated, signed and belong to the collection of his son Pedro Nunes Pereira da Silva, responsible for the creation and maintenance of this space.

Pedro Nunes Pereira da Silva
R. General Humberto Delgado nº246
Portugal
Phone: +351966779055
Web: http://www.pereiradasilva.net/

Biography

2006-11-27T06:50:00.000-08:00

Manuel Pereira da Silva(7 December 1920 - 2003) was a Portuguese sculptor. He was born in Oporto, Portugal.
The workmanship of Pereira da Silva has an abstract formal orientation inspired in the human figure, in particular the man and the woman.
In 2000, the Medal of Cultural Merit was attributed to Pereira da Silva for the City Council of Vila Nova de Gaia

Education
In 1939, he entered the Oporto University College of Arts. In 1943, he finished his coursework with the final classification of 18 values. During his coursework he was distinguished with two awards, "Teixeira Lopes" and "Soares dos Reis".

In 1947 and 1948, he studied in Paris, France at the Paris College of Arts.

Selected works

I Exposition of the Independents, in the Oporto University's College of Arts. (1943)

II Exposition of the Independents, in the Atheneum Commercial of Oporto. (1944)

III Exposition of the Independents, in the Coliseum of Oporto. (1945)

Low-relives in Stone in the Rivoli Theatre and in the Coliseum, in (1945)

Exposition of the Life and the Portuguese Art in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique (1946)

Exposition of Modern Art in the city of Caldas da Rainha (1954)

Sculpture in Bronze of General Ulysses S. Grant, 18 President of the United States of America between 1868 and 1876. This monument was ordered by the Portuguese Government to Pereira da Silva for the capital of Guiné-Bissau. (1955)

Paintings in the Church Saint Luzia, in the city of Viana do Castelo. (1956)

Paintings of the "Snow White" in the Street of Saint Catarina, in Oporto(1957)

Sculpture in Bronze in the Square Marquis do Pombal, in Oporto(1958)

II Exposition of Modern Art in the city of Viana do Castelo. (1959)

Low-relief in Ceramics in the capital of Angola(1960)

Low-relief in Stone of "D. Pedro Pitões exhorting the Crusades" in the Courthouse, in Oporto (1961)

II Exposition of Plastic Arts of the Foundation Calouste Gulbenkian, in the city of Lisbon(1962)

Retrospective Exposition in Homage to the workmanship of Pereira da Silva by the Artists Association of Gaia. (1987)

External links
Pereira da Silva Art Gallery
Manuel Pereira da Silva
Blogspot
Wordpress
Myspace

Man and Woman - Oil

2006-11-27T06:48:00.000-08:00

Man and Woman - Sculpture

2006-11-27T06:46:00.000-08:00

Man and Woman - Gouache

2006-11-27T06:44:00.000-08:00

Man and Woman - Watercolour

2006-11-27T06:42:00.000-08:00

Man and Woman - Indian Ink

2006-11-27T06:39:00.000-08:00

Man and Woman - Pen

2006-11-27T06:36:00.000-08:00

Man and Woman - Charcoal

2006-11-27T06:34:00.000-08:00

Man and Woman - Crayon

2006-11-27T06:25:00.000-08:00