One watercolour in CAM's collection is certainly related to this canvas. And even though it is still unclear if it was a study, this work clearly demonstrates Amadeo's agility in the métier of oil painting – through deft and fluent brushstrokes that amplify colours and widen space as if they broke free from the constraints of oil. The “simultaneous contrasts” between these lively colours have a precedent in Robert Delaunay, who was then exiled in Vila do Conde, and continued to theorize and reformulate contrasts since he invented them, curiously enough, in a series of Fenêtres [Windows] (1912). In part, the simultanée was formed as a reaction against Cubism's use of light and shade. But ultimately, this painting of colour for colour's sake was chiefly encouraged for being a specific pictorial phenomenon that corresponded to a state of poetic sensiblity, and it was immediately hailed by Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars.

 

Amadeo wasn't the only artist fleeing from Paris because of the War. Matisse also isolated himself in Collioure with Juan Gris, in 1914, where he painted the renowned and grim Porte-Fenêtre opening to the absolute dark of an endangered world. The contrast with Amadeo's early exile years in Manhufe is striking, in that his was a veritable regressus ad uterum, giving rise to a painting bursting with vital energy and radiant colours, in works that impose themselves on the geography of modernism as “off-centred”, but at no time insular. The series of windows painted by Amadeo between 1915 and 1916, as this work, with their abstract shapes and communicating colours, makes us understand why it was written at the time that they contained “red, reeeeed, yeeeeellow; a green intensely green, the colours of joy, of happiness, conceived in time but not in space, the colours of the most extravagant and raucous carnival!”*

 

 

* Excerpt of a text posted alongside Amadeo’s pictures at his solo exhibition in Porto in 1916. Unknown author. Cited in Amadeo de Souza Cardoso: Diálogo de Vanguardas, CAM/FCG, Assírio & Alvim, Lisboa, p. 483.

 

 

AR

 

March 2011