The Family

Manuel Filipe translated paradigmatically in artistic creation the cry of rebellion, subversion. His called "Black Phase" (1943-1945), intensely Neo-Realist and of expressionist inspiration, from socialist realism, and Mexican contemporaries, is a dramatic expression of social issues and the fight against totalitarian oppression. Between humor or satire and the drama of human misery, he represents transfiguratively through black lines on paper, the ideals that he fights for, the " awareness of wise men" and nonconformists.
This is without any doubts the interpretation from this work: “The Family”, 1943. The Beginning of his artistic phase classified as "Black Phase".
The son of a farm labourer and a small shop-owner, while helping his father in his free time, toiling the land, gave his first steps in the art of drawing while still living in Condeixa; possibly the (self-) image pictured here. He had private tuition and later attended the school of arts and crafts. He studied in Coimbra at the General Course of Sciences, Arts and Humanities, yet his learning to become a teacher is linked to the drawing that he persistently practiced. The irreverence that characterised him in the early days of the Dictatorship cost him a month imprisonment at Fort da Trafaria.
He was professor of Arts at secondary school. In his teaching career, during the solo exhibitions held in Porto and Braga, and the 2nd General Exhibition at SNBA, he was threatened by the PIDE – the State political police – that he would be sacked if he would make another exhibition. In these exhibitions, his works, which were considered subversive, were removed, vandalized, and the exhibition itself was even shut down by the Civil Governor.
This repression, this censorship by the Estado Novo [New State] regime lead him to abandon the artistic activity till 1961, date of a second, distinct and very fruitful creative phase.
In the words of Manuel Filipe we can find the meaning of his art of mid-twentieth century, when he states: Neo-Realist painting "should be aesthetically beautiful (...) [but] thematically (...) boldly addressing issues that can improve the human condition". Reflection of a longed humanism, and also surely of a war that raged in the world, the artist shows in a dense expressionism, but always aesthetic, the crudeness of this condition, when figuratively represents the most glaring social injustices, the misfortunes of poverty, servitude and brutality. In the end, the characters he draws are survivors, with out of the ordinary hands and feet, a disproportion on the look always open to consciousness or for a rekindling of hope.