Portuguese Art of the 1970s

Portuguese Art of the 1970s and 1980s

It is difficult to speak of truly contemporary art in Portugal before the Democratic Revolution of 1974. The dictatorship that was in place in Portugal up to this point had effectively prevented Modernity from spreading throughout the country; thus art in Portugal for much of the 20th century was derivative of other national models and periods. Perhaps the sole exception was the work of Rene Bertholo and Lourdes Castro, both of whom were able to emigrate in the 1950s and integrate themselves into the international vanguard art scene. Seeing as how contemporary art really begins in Portugal in the mid-70s, this essay will analyze the early evolution of contemporary art in Portugal by focusing on the first two decades - the 1970s and 1980s. We hope to show how the emergence of a Portuguese avant-garde could be considered on a par with similar trends happening elsewhere in the art world during this same period.

At the time of Portugal's liberation from an oppressive dictatorship, conceptual practices were all the rage in the Western art world. Such practices immediately piqued the interest of Portuguese artists upon exposure, and many Portuguese artists of the 1970s began to integrate such an approach into their own work. Helena Almeida was chief among these for whom older models were no longer valid; she imbued her work of this period with a confrontational strand that often served to question the very medium in which she was working. One startling example of this is the photographic work Tela Habitada of 1976, in which the artist covered a photograph of her head with a line of blue paint, effectively erasing her own image while disrupting the alleged purity of the photographic medium.

Another important artist to have emerged during the 1970s was Juliao Sarmento. While he would eventually find fame in the 1980s as a painter, his work in the 1970s was more in the conceptual vein and included performances, installations, and interventions. In the words of Pedro Lapa, "Ever since his first conceptual works desire has been his central theme. Desire seen as a circular movement with no end, preceding social codes underlying any representational concept and becoming his very production" (Lapa 15).

It was in the 1980s that profound changes began to take place in the Portuguese art scene. This had a lot to do with the major economic crisis that hit the country in the first half of the decade. As a result, much of the revolutionary fervor of the 1970s was lost. Instead, artists began to return to the art object itself as a means of questioning its status in an increasingly uncertain world.

The paintings of Pedro Calapez during this period are emblematic of artists' concern with the nature of art history itself. Calapez's paintings from the 1980s attempt to analyze memory in its relation to historical analysis. Calapez's paintings also link Portuguese art to the wider Neo-expressionist art movement of the 1980s.

Another artist who dealt with these themes - this time in the sculptural realm - was Rui Chafes. The art critic and historian Joana Cunha Leal has suggested that Chafes's earliest work from the 1980s already asserted some of the structural postulates of his subsequent artistic production: the creation of delimited objects, the predomination of organic-like forms, the suggestion of lightness and dematerialisation enhanced by fragile materials. Furthermore, the work gave priority to the question of the relationship of the objects to space, in the sense that his pieces refuse the literal logic of the monument, and often have the effect of an installation.

In a series of untitled black-and-white self-portraits, Julia Ventura effectively continued the work of such experimental artists from the 1970s as Helena Almeida. These portraits also put her in league with other Western photographers as Cindy Sherman who explored the fluid nature of feminine identity through the self.