Painting Lesson

On the reverse of the painting-assemblage «Lição de pintura» [Painting Lesson], Júlio Pomar wrote «Leda aprende a pintar» [Leda Learns to Paint]. This alternative title helps to clarify the attribution of the characters and their relationships. We are therefore under a mythological sign whose principal figures are the great god Zeus, transformed into a swan, and Leda. In the painting we see the heavy, curved body of the enthroned animal, what appears to be a cook, and a third face that is familiar, as we recognise in it a self-portrait of Júlio Pomar.

Considering the myth, one of these two figures must be the queen of Sparta, and it is she who learns to paint. Reflecting on the two figures, it seems that the painter portrays himself as the apprentice (and not the master), and if it is the queen who learns, then the artist presents himself in the feminine. In several interviews, Pomar emphasised this feminine side of himself through an aesthetic indifference in the way he paints, privileging what painting suggests and reveals, rather than a more systematic, masculine approach.

The figure of the cook recurs throughout the repertoire of his painting, and the act of cooking serves Pomar as a metaphor for the act of painting. Painting is cooked, simmered slowly over a gentle flame, and the canvas is the table on which the artist prepares a dish - the flesh of painting, always seasoned by light and, indeed, by myth; or, as the painter himself said: «Myth is the salt of the dishes that best suit my appetite.»