Four Perceptions of Almada Negreiros

Abstract

In 2017 the Portuguese-speaking world celebrated the centennial of the magazine Portugal Futurista. One of the main characters of the wave of Portuguese avant-garde artists was Almada Negreiros, who was known as “a total artist”: he was a painter, draftsman, dancer, novelist, poet, and playwright. This artist occupied a central position in the first generation of modernists. He performed ambiguous artistic works during the Salazar regime, and his legacy was systematically refused several years after the Carnation Revolution. Today the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum displays an apolitical anthological exhibition of paintings by Almada Negreiros, thus rehabilitating him as a great Portuguese artist. This study intends to show that there are four different perceptions of Almada Negreiros’s oeuvre, which were both celebrated and rejected by the public.