Throughout practically his entire career, Amadeo explored references to the traditions and popular art of Portugal. During the First World War, when he was forced to return to his native country, it was already evident that he had distanced himself from the abstract trends that had dominated Parisian art immediately beforehand. In 1916, Amadeo staged two solo exhibitions – the first in Porto and the second in Lisbon – which he called Abstractionism. Despite choosing this title, the pictures that he produced in those years are replete with legible signs.

Popular Song  –  the Russian Woman and Le Figaro (1916) is one of the works that demonstrates this tendency, offering a fragmented, brightly coloured composition in which representation is explored via a non-illusionist mode. The figurative elements that float within the painting – the colourful crockery and pots, the windows and houses, the doll – have no descriptive vocation and do not point to just one reference. On the contrary, these signs expand the work’s signifying potential in terms that destabilize and enrich our interpretation by adding new possible ways of reading the work. The colourful crockery and pots, for example, refer not only to the artisanal objects that they denote but could also be seen as a reference to Sonia Delaunay’s fascination with markets and popular Portuguese art. This hypothesis is strengthened by the doll in the centre of the composition: besides alluding to the small rag doll that the painter owned and also depicted in other paintings (such as Popular Song and Bird of Brazil, 1916; coll. Museu de Amarante), this feature is open to a multiplicity of other possible meanings. In other words, it can be read as representing the ‘Russian woman’, in this case Sonia Delaunay, who was a native of Ukraine.

The meeting staged in Popular Song  –  Russian Woman and Le Figaro between the signs of a popular regional culture and cultivated international references, such as the allusion to the French newspaper Le Figaro (the newspaper which was read every day in the Delaunay’s house in Vila do Conde, offering a window onto the world beyond their local area*), evokes once again the need to overcome the logical dichotomies between these two, ultimately interdependent, worlds.

Joana Cunha Leal

July 2013

* Cf. Ferreira, P., Correspondance de quatre artistes portugais: Almada-Negreiros, José Pacheco, Souza-Cardoso, Eduardo Vianna avec Robert et Sonia Delaunay, Paris: FCG / CCP / PUF: 1972, p. 45.