Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso: Portugal's lost modernist, born 1887

On the evening of Wednesday 1 November 1916, guests with invitations filed into the Salão de Festas of the Jardim Passos Manuel in Porto. The garden was a place for a night out: it had opened in 1908 with a cinematograph and put on variety shows and concerts. That night its function room was hung with 114 paintings, watercolours and drawings by a 28-year-old from Amarante, priced from 10,000 to 600,000 réis.2 sources2 sources

The catalogue called the show Exposição de Pintura (Abstracionismo). Most of the pictures were not abstract at all. They showed dark heads of madmen, mechanised men, gaudy masks, still lifes of fruit and musical instruments, houses in the countryside, dolls and village crafts.2 sources2 sources

The next morning O Primeiro de Janeiro ran a front-page piece by its editor-in-chief, headed “Quadros de Sousa Cardoso: uma exposição bizarra”. It called the paintings aberrant examples of the eccentricities of the Paris boulevards, which shocked eyes used to balanced and normal art. The Jornal de Notícias was friendlier, and noted how curious the bright colours looked at night under electric light.1 source1 source

The crowds came anyway. Stories kept in the family tell of visitors spitting on the canvases. His younger brother António recalled a stranger who stopped the painter in the street, asked if he was the author of “those mad works” and punched him in the face. António took him to the Hospital de Santo António with a bleeding nose.2 sources2 sources

Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso was born on 14 November 1887 on his parents' estate at Manhufe, in the parish of Mancelos, in the municipality of Amarante in northern Portugal. His father, José Emygdio de Souza-Cardoso, was a big landowner and wine grower; his mother was Emília Cândida Ferreira Cardoso. He grew up with eight siblings, between the house at Manhufe and summers at the beach at Espinho, south of Porto.3 sources3 sources

He drew caricatures early, encouraged by his mother's brother Francisco, “Uncle Chico”, and by Manuel Laranjeira, an older friend from Espinho who became a doctor and writer. His biographer Luís Damásio found that at 14 he failed a school year, and his father sent him to work at the family's Confiança factory in Porto before enrolling him in architecture.4 sources4 sources

In 1905 he went to Lisbon for the preparatory architecture course at the Academia de Belas-Artes. He was not a good student and did not like the capital. On his 19th birthday, 14 November 1906, he left for Paris with Francisco Smith, a painter born in Portugal, meaning to prepare for the entrance exam of the École des Beaux-Arts. His parents paid. By 1907 he had given up architecture to paint.4 sources4 sources

He settled near Montparnasse, visited the Louvre often and admired the early Renaissance painters known as the primitives. In 1908 he rented a studio at 14 Cité Falguière, where Portuguese artists in Paris gathered, and met Lucie Pecetto, a young woman of Italian origin who would become his wife. He never sought an official art education.3 sources3 sources

In 1909 he began attending the Académie Viti, run by the Spanish painter Anglada Camarasa, and moved his studio to the rue des Fleurus, next to Gertrude Stein's apartment. The Amarante museum dates his meeting with the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani to that year; Damásio says they met in 1908, through the poet Max Jacob. In 1909 he also changed the spelling of his first name from Amadeu to Amadeo, which Damásio links to the friendship.4 sources4 sources

In 1911 he and Modigliani showed together in Amadeo's new studio in the rue du Colonel Combes, a few months after he had sent six works to the Salon des Indépendants. He moved in a wide circle: the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, Robert and Sonia Delaunay. In 1912 he published an album of drawings, XX Dessins, showed at the Salon d'Automne and met the Italian Futurists Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini.3 sources3 sources

Critics then and since have struggled to file him. The Art Institute of Chicago describes his Paris style as a mix of Art Nouveau, Cézanne, Léon Bakst's costume designs for the Ballets Russes and Iberian tilework. The critic Alexandre Pomar argues that labelling him a minor Cubist made him look like a follower and undersold him.2 sources2 sources

The International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the armoury of the 69th Infantry on Lexington Avenue, New York, on 17 February 1913 and ran until 15 March. Known ever since as the Armory Show, it was the first big exhibition to show American audiences the European avant-garde. Amadeo sent eight paintings. The CAM says Walter Pach invited him; Damásio says the invitation came through Gertrude Stein.5 sources5 sources

The show moved to the Art Institute of Chicago from 24 March to 16 April, then to Boston. On 10 April, through the American painter and critic Walter Pach, the Chicago lawyer and collector Arthur Jerome Eddy bought three of Amadeo's paintings. They went to the Art Institute in 1931 and are still there. The Gulbenkian Foundation and Damásio both say he sold seven of his eight pictures.6 sources6 sources

In September 1913, on Robert Delaunay's proposal according to the historian José-Augusto França, he showed at the first Herbstsalon, the autumn salon organised in Berlin by the gallery and magazine Der Sturm. In April 1914 he sent three works to a London salon. The Amarante museum and the CAM say it was cancelled because of the war; another Gulbenkian text says he did show in London that year.4 sources4 sources

In the summer of 1914 Amadeo and Lucie left Paris for his usual summer in Portugal, stopping in Barcelona, where he met the architect Antoni Gaudí. The Amarante museum says the First World War caught them in Madrid; the CAM says he was already back at Manhufe. Either way he could not return. He had been passed fit for military service in 1907, and once war began he was barred from leaving the country in case of mobilisation.3 sources3 sources

The couple married in Porto that year and settled at the Casa do Ribeiro in Manhufe, a house belonging to his uncle Francisco. He split his time between Manhufe and Espinho.2 sources2 sources

He was not cut off. In 1915 Robert and Sonia Delaunay, also escaping the war, settled at Vila do Conde on the coast north of Porto, and the couples stayed close. In Lisbon he got to know José de Almada Negreiros and the young writers and artists around the magazine Orpheu. In 1916 Fernando Pessoa, writing to the poet Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, called him “the most celebrated advanced Portuguese painter”.3 sources3 sources

Some critics think the work of these years, with its collage and its borrowings from village crafts, is his most interesting. In 1916 he published a portfolio, 12 Reproductions, in Porto, and in the autumn he booked the hall at the Jardim Passos Manuel. Shortly before the show opened, an army medical board in Vila Real exempted him from military service for “lack of robustness”.4 sources4 sources

The Porto show was open from two to five in the afternoon for twelve days. According to Damásio, Amadeo told Walter Pach that more than 30,000 people came; Marta Soares reads his letters as giving 25,000 to 30,000, an estimate based on the number of catalogues handed out. On the last day, he told his uncle, people were still arriving when he had the doors shut. Both figures come from his own letters.2 sources2 sources

The scandal is the part people remember, but the art historian Marta Soares, who went through the press cuttings Amadeo kept, found the coverage mostly favourable. Of 17 Porto cuttings, only two were clearly hostile, both in A Montanha, a republican paper. Several critics disliked the Futurist tendencies yet praised him as a colourist.1 source1 source

From 4 to 18 December he showed in Lisbon at the Liga Naval Portuguesa, then housed in the Palácio Calhariz-Palmela. It was a fashionable nautical club whose members included naval officers, aristocrats and intellectuals, and King Carlos I's oceanographic collection was on permanent display. Amadeo got only the reading room, and crammed 113 works into it.3 sources3 sources

Almada Negreiros, signing himself “futurist poet”, wrote a pamphlet for it dated 12 December 1916. It mocked José de Figueiredo, whose views, Almada claimed, were the only opinion on art in Portugal, lamented the “incompetence” of Portugal's part in the war and claimed the exhibition for the twentieth century.1 source1 source

Lisbon was calmer. Nobody hit him and nobody spat on the paintings. The Diário de Notícias followed the show from opening through sales and an extension to closing. In an interview with the paper O Dia, Amadeo refused every label: “I follow no school. The schools are dead. We, the young, now look only for originality.”4 sources4 sources

In April 1917 a Futurist session at the Teatro da República in Lisbon led to the magazine Portugal Futurista, which printed three of his works; in its pages Almada called him a genius. Almada also dedicated his book K4 O Quadrado Azul to him.3 sources3 sources

In 1918 a skin disease stopped him painting. A 2014 paper in the journal Acta Médica Portuguesa describes it, from the surviving accounts, as an eczema of the hands and face, for which a Dr Martins treated him at the Taipas spa in northern Portugal. The authors think it was probably an allergic reaction to his paints or other materials, but the cause was never established.2 sources2 sources

That autumn the flu pandemic, called the pneumónica in Portugal, was in its second wave. The official Portuguese toll for the epidemic was more than 60,000 dead.1 source1 source

In his last letter to his brother António he mentioned “some symptoms of malaise”. He died in Espinho on 25 October 1918, less than three weeks before his 31st birthday. Damásio's account of the day is brief: after a night of great distress, he died.3 sources3 sources

Lucie kept most of the estate and never put it on the market. The critic Alexandre Pomar regrets that there was no sale after his death: artists hold their place, he argues, when their work circulates and museums compete for it. For several decades his work was hardly seen.1 source1 source

The Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime of the Salazar years, eventually took him up. An exhibition at the Casa de Portugal in Paris in 1958 was, in Freitas's words, part of a diplomatic strategy and a folkloric presentation. It did produce one sale: the curator Jean Cassou bought Cavaleiros (The Horsemen), of 1913, for the national modern art museum, now the Centre Pompidou. A show at the regime's propaganda office in Lisbon followed in 1959.1 source1 source

The turn came through the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. From the mid-1960s the family sold and gave it paintings, drawings, photographs and letters; the architect José Sommer Ribeiro and the painter Paulo Ferreira are credited with persuading Lucie. Today its Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) holds about 200 of his works. “The Gulbenkian bought almost everything,” says Pomar.2 sources2 sources

Retrospectives followed at the Gulbenkian in 1987, in Washington in 1999 and in Chicago in 2000. The breakthrough was Diálogo de Vanguardas, opened at the Gulbenkian on 14 November 2006, his birthday, with about 260 works by him and 36 of his contemporaries. In its last weekend the museum stayed open through the night and visitors queued for over two hours.3 sources3 sources

The Foundation has also published his catalogue raisonné. In 2016, for the 50th anniversary of its Paris office, it took his work to the Grand Palais from 20 April to 18 July: about 200 pieces by the Foundation's count (the Soares dos Reis museum in Porto says about 250), alongside works by Brancusi, Modigliani and the Delaunays. A plaque was due to be unveiled on 19 November 2016 at 20 rue Ernest Cresson, where he lived from late 1912 to early 1914.3 sources3 sources

In Porto and Lisbon in 2016 and 2017, the Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis and the Museu do Chiado rebuilt the 1916 exhibitions, each with more than 80 of the original works. The American art historian Robert Loescher once called him “one of the best kept secrets in modern art”. After the Paris show, Freitas said that in the French art world Amadeo was no longer an unknown.3 sources3 sources

Most of his surviving work belongs to the Gulbenkian, so little of it reaches the art market. In 2018, by Observador's count, only three institutions outside Portugal owned his paintings: the Centre Pompidou had one, the Art Institute of Chicago three and a museum in Michigan one. The historian José-Augusto França called him the greatest, or the only, “modern” painter of the 1910s born in Portugal.2 sources2 sources

In Amarante, the municipal museum that bears his name occupies part of the sixteenth-century convent of São Gonçalo, beside the church. The architect Alcino Soutinho converted the convent's second cloister into a library and museum, adding a new wing, in a project that ran from 1970 to 1987. The museum reopened on 5 December 2025 after refurbishment and new climate control.2 sources2 sources