[open the box] Júlio dos Reis Pereira

Deep within Portuguese modernism, around the magazine Presença, the figure of Júlio dos Reis Pereira (or of his literary pseudonym, Saúl Dias) occupies a central position – like that of his brother, José Régio, the founder of the magazine, with Branquinho da Fonseca and João Gaspar Simões. Yet his work is better known due to the late paintings from the series Poeta, which were greatly influenced by the overseeing figure of Marc Chagall. However, when one looks back into his artistic past we come across expressionist painting and drawing close to George Grosz.

The drawings belonging to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos are from this period, and in them there is a fluid figuration done in Indian ink which constructs a gallery of characters who correspond to stereotypes. However, their caricatural nature is countered by the complexity and violence of the spaces, in a view of the fragmented city that in some cases seems to come close to the spaces of Walter Röhrig in German expressionist cinema.

This cinematographic dimension to his drawings at the end of the twenties and early thirties marks a path that was not followed enough in Portuguese art before World War II, and thus signals the rare place that his more interesting and lively expression possessed in drawing.

Biography
Júlio dos Reis Pereira (Vila do Conde, 1902-1983) was initially trained in Engineering and also in Fine Arts (Oporto). Throughout his life he devoted himself to poetry, painting and drawing. In the nine- teen twenties he collaborated with his brother, José Régio, on the graphic design of his books. He col- laborated on the magazine Presença from 1927 to 1940, when it finished. His first solo exhibition was at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes (Lisbon, 1934), and a year later he participated in the Exposição dos artistas modernos independentes, along with Almada Negreiros and Vieira da Silva, and others. He worked in the Direcção dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais (Coimbra and Évora delegations, city were he lived between 1937 and 1972). In 1958 he won the First Prize for Drawing at the IV Salão de Outono in Estoril. His work was shown in retrospectives in 1979-1980 by the Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis (Oporto) and by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon) in an exhibition presented in both institutions.

Bibliography
Júlio – exposição retrospectiva (cat.), Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1979.
Júlio – uma estética da ternura. O modernismo e o Oriente (cat.), Lisboa, Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1992.