This exhibition emerged from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s (FCG) wish to emphasize the work of the painter Árpád Szenes (1987 – 1985), focusing on the artist passion for the Portuguese light and landscape: “After his marriage to Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, in 1930, Arpad Szenes visits Portugal almost annually and falls in love with its light. And thus, numerous canvases named after places, cities and even beaches from Portugal emerge; after the 1950s, they reach a purity and simplicity that turn it into one of the top names of the second École de Paris” (Arpad Szenes. Luz – Portugal, 1987).

The Gulbenkian Foundation Modern Art Center (CAM) had honored the painter, in the beginning of 1985, by organizing the exhibition Retratos de Vieira por Árpád Szenes [Portraits of Vieira by Árpád Szenes]. However, according to José Sommer Ribeiro, this homage, done shortly after the artist’s death on January 1985, had been “incomplete because it didn’t show the series of works about Portugal’s light” (Arpad Szenes. Luz – Portugal, 1987).

For this reason, in 1986, the FCG decided to organize this exhibition, presenting it, firstly in Paris, at Calouste Gulbenkian Paris Branch, the Centre Culturel Portugais (CCP), and, months later, in Lisbon.

The Lisbon exhibition layout had a slightly larger dimension than the one from Paris, presenting around thirty paintings produced between the years of 1949 and 1982. All the paintings had Portugal’s luz [light] as a common theme, a motive that was explored mainly as a pretext to point out the post-impressionist abstract luminal values, from a landscape reference.

The two editions of the exhibition benefited from both the direct collaboration of the painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Árpád’s widow, and the commissioner Guy Weelen, the secretary and a close friend of the couple and learned scholar of Árpád’s work.