Natacha should be considered within the broader context of the attention that Soares devotes to the depiction of women, including other works that are part of the CAM collection, such as Retrato da Irmã do Artista and Retrato de Maria de Mello Breyner, alongside other pieces in the field of graphic arts which display women’s newfound status following World War I. During this decade the artist gained recognition on the national artistic scene, as proven by the canvases commissioned for the café A Brasileira and for the Bristol Club in 1925.

 

In 1929 Soares was awarded the second prize by the salon of the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes for Natacha, which is considered his best pictorial work. The quality of his offerings was later confirmed when he won the Columbano Prize from the 1st Salon of the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (SPN) in 1935, followed by the Grand Prix at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937. If the Columbano Prize consolidated the legacy of the painter Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, it also demonstrated the approval of the Estado Novo, represented by António Ferro*, who saw Natacha, despite its unorthodox shapes, as a prescient paragon of an official taste that sought to recruit into the SPN salons any artists who were showing unrest. The work brings together masterful drawing and loose, expressive brushstrokes, and the treatment of the space occupied by the woman exhibits an anatomical rigour which is apparently abandoned in the elongation of the thighs. We are faced with this ambiguity again in the woman’s figure, elegant yet tinged with eroticism, and the way she appears uninhibited while avoiding our gaze, against a background which, appearing almost like a stage set, unleashes the Russian ballerina’s voluptuousness.

 

As with the Retrato de Maria de Mello Breyner, the background is not strictly based on perspective, revealing the fundamental underpinnings of Soares’ oeuvre. This painting shows the care given to the pose, the use of blots of colour to animate compositions that tend towards the monochromatic, the vibrancy of the whites, the skilled treatment of volume in the figures, the background, which has an increasingly unfinished look as the gaze of the viewer moves from the central figure towards the edges of the pictorial surface, and the attention given to the main lines of the composition. The painter directs our gaze towards the woman’s skin, diminishing its contrast against the deep black of her dress by animating the edges with greyish brushstrokes. This subtle balance in tone is, in fact, extended to the relationship between her legs and the objects to her left, or between the pink bow and the upper coat of paint on those same objects. Nevertheless, the pose of the dog, on a slight slant, which is emphasised by the vertical alignment of the bow, also contributes to the compositional dynamism of the surface as a whole.

 

André Silveira

May 2010

 

* António Ferro directed the SPN/SNI (Office of State Propaganda / National Information Office) from its foundation, in 1933, to 1949. As the mentor of this institution, Ferro developed a policy of cultural promotion as well as the dictatorial regime’s propaganda.