José de Almada Negreiros

Almada Negreiro produced this Retrato de Fernando Pessoa [Portrait of Fernando Pessoa] in 1964, commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The painting consciously replicates another portrait of the poet painted in 1954 for the restaurant ‘Irmãos Unidos’, in Lisbon, an establishment in which fellow avant-guard poet Alfredo Pedro Guisado (1891-1975) had a share and where Almada and other modernist artists used to stop at. What linked these artists and poets was their association with the short-lived but highly influential avant-guard magazine Orpheu (in which Pessoa had a mayor role), of which only two numbers were edited in 1915.

Almada would often revisit and reinvent earlier works, both as an artist and as a writer. A Self-portrait from 1950 in the CAM’s collection is, for example, a recreation of another self-portrait made in 1919 in Paris. But his re-visitations are never exact replicas. This new Portrait of Fernando Pessoa – in which we can also see traces of a drawing Almada made in 1935 – mirrors the 1954 portrait. Almada – who insistently searched for a unified core in his many-sided artistic expressions, through the repetition of themes and the recreation of works, finding himself at last in the work Começar [Beginning] (1968-1969), installed in the head office of the Gulbenkian Foundation –, discloses, in a portrait which conceals many portraits, Fernando Pessoa into the many poets he was and would become.

Sara Afonso Ferreira
May 2010