This is one of seven paintings specifically created to accompany a special edition of the poem Mensagem (Clássica Editora, 1985) by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). This work testifies to the profound dialogue between the pictorial and the literary which permeates a good part of Júlio Pomar’s painting from the 1980’s. To the poet’s title, Mensagem or Message, the painter added his own: 7 Portuguese Stories.

 

Similarly to other portraits Pomar made of writers and artists from the past, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire or Fernando Pessoa, the images of their faces, based on old and tarnished photographs, are somewhat phantasmagorical, unfocused, scratched. In those other portraits the poets’ faces are redefined by a graffiti-like application of Warholian colors, but here the faces are left neutral, framed by the large and free brushstrokes Pomar returned to in his paintings of this decade.

 

The two painters and writer here portrayed all died precociously: Mário Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916) committed suicide in Paris, while Amadeo Souza-Cardoso and Santa-Rita Pintor both died in the 1918 flu pandemic. But they also are the main representatives of what came to be called the First Portuguese Modernism, of which their contemporary Pessoa was also a protagonist.

 

Amadeo, standing with his hands on his waist, is the only one with a distinguishable body, in the imposing, assertive and promising pose he adopted in a well-known photograph. Brushstrokes sketch, almost scribble, other recognizable elements: a café table, an airplane from the early twentieth century, the Eiffel tower, a Portuguese guitar (a classic object in painting, explored particularly in Cubism). When related with the painting’s title and the context of its production, these elements allow for symbolic readings revolving around the notion of a Portuguese fate (fado). A fate that expels its talents from the country (to the Latin Quarter in Paris, artistic epicenter of the early twentieth century), causes the premature death of its most promising artists and relegates the greatest Portuguese creators into oblivion, recognizing their value, and indeed sanctifying them, only many years later.

 

It is a strategy – not without irony – of criticism and a self-deprecating vision that has become common in Portugal. One can also argue that the painter, who in 1963 established himself in Paris, creates a somewhat cautionary parallelism between his own history and the life of these artists.

 

 

MPS

November 2010