Journey To The Collection With Amadeo De Souza-Cardoso

This is one of the references to landscapes that we find in Amadeo's pictorial work. In 1906 he left for Paris, but the colour reference of the Amaranthine landscapes never left him. On several occasions in his letters, Amadeo mixes the concept of physical journey and incorporeal journey.

"My destinies are only right with me. Either I triumph by them or I am crushed by them." 

[Letter from Amadeo to his mother, on the occasion of his departure for Paris].

In Amadeo's drawings, in his first years in Paris, it's clear the influence of the "Futurist Manifesto" signed by Marinetti and Sergei Diaghilev's "Ballets Russes". This drawing is an example of that mark, where movement becomes the engine of the creative process and where movement becomes the engine of the creative process and where the cosmopolitan city is the landscape chosen as the symbol of a life in movement.

"I am convinced that I live a profound life of art - and I am glad" 

[Letter to his mother, Paris, June, 1907].

Amadeo's artistic travels are also marked by his participation in exhibitions, namely in France, the USA, England and Germany. The work presented portrays how Amadeo contributed to the internationalisation of Portuguese culture and also how he was influenced by the Delaunay couple.

"...distinguished Portuguese cubist, whose works have achieved international reputation..."

[Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture in "The Modern Spirit, Milwaukee Art Society, 456 Jefferson Street, USA. 16 de Abril a 12 de Maio.]

Despite Amadeo's reference as a cubist, he himself did not identify with any movement and sought his own language. This is an example of a work in which the mixture of languages and movements (abstractionism, cubism, Dadaism, etc.) is evident.

"Artists should keep their distance from official currents; I, for example, do not even use myself, neither in invoicing nor in artistic vision..."

[Fonseca, João Fortunato de Sousa - Futurismo em Lisboa. Falando com Amadeo de Sousa Cardoso. Jornal de Coimbra. Nº 560, 6.º Ano (21 Dez. 1916)]

"The landscape is not an inanimate thing; it has a soul which acts with love or pain upon our ideas or feelings, transmitting to them whatever is of its essence, of its vague and remote quality which, in them, wins moral and conscious action." 

[In Art of Being Portuguese]

This mountainous landscape of Teixeira de Pascoaes appears as a pretext to make it known that the writer and poet also drew and painted as an integral part of his creative process of building worlds, places and characters.