With the news of the Great War onset, Amadeo retreated into the mountains of Manhufe in Portugal, to the family house whose inaccessibility blessed him with a chance for inexhaustible work. The following years would be lived in a spirit of creative partnership with his friends Robert and Sonia Delaunay, exiled nearby in Vila do Conde, and with Eduardo Viana, all of them thrilled by the vibrant multicolour of Portuguese folk art, creating pictures which time and again feature artisanal objects from the Minho region as their main subject, thereby revitalising the iconography and drab coloration of Cubism.

Between 1915 and 1916, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso painted a series of isolated windows inspired in the local popular houses, in motives that are similar to the disks-targets of the Delaunay couple. This plastic recreation of the windows would be recurrent in his compositions during the following years, made of grids that are never symmetric and delimit fields of acid colours (blue, purple, yellow) with contrasting frames all around (black, orange, green). One can never see through Amadeo’s windows, for these have attained an abstract value of their own, as his painting was seeking ways to become more direct and immediate, giving up all illusions of three-dimensionality in order to affirm its own pictorial surface – an effect to which it was also decisive that he began using varnish in his oils, thus bringing out more vividly the glaze and contrast between the colour areas.

AR

March 2011