Portuguese Artists in London

Shaping Identities in Post-War Europe

Leonor de Oliveira

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000764093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: European Art

This book centres on four Portuguese artists' journeys between Portugal and Britain and aims at rethinking the cultural and artistic interactions in the post-war Europe, the shaping of new identities within a context of creative experimentalism and transnational dynamics and the artistic responses to political troubles.

Leonor de Oliveira examines the contributions of the work of Paula Rego, Barto dos Santos, João Cutileiro and Jorge Vieira, among other artists, to shape referential images of Portuguese identity that not only responded to the purpose of breaking with dominant iconographic and aesthetic representations but also incorporated a critical perspective on contemporaneity.

This title will appeal to scholars interested in art history, Portuguese and European art, and the mid-twentieth-century art scene.

1Images of Resistance

Artistic Apprenticeship and Experimentalism at the Slade School

Years ago, Orhan Pamuk remembered the story of his first passport, which prompt the question ‘what does it mean to belong to a country?’

Although I applied for a passport with happy excitement at the idea of getting to know Turkish readers in Germany, it was during that trip that I came to associate my passport with the sort of ‘identity crisis’ that has afflicted so many others in the years since then—that is, the question of how much we belong to the country of our first passport and how much we belong to the ‘other countries’ that it allows us to enter.

(Pamuk, 2017)

The experience narrated by Pamuk and the question he poses, points to a complex trilogy of self-identification that follows any author on his/her international journeys: his/her creative individuality, the affinities and new references that naturally emerge from the contact with foreign artistic forms, and the persistent identification (by him/herself and by others) with a specific cultural, historical, and geographical universe. In the case of the Portuguese artists analysed in this book, although they found in London the artistic context and motivation they were looking for, their creative experiments dwelt on cultural, historical, and personal memories of Portugal. At the same time, a critical distancing from the present political situation in their country and the official discourse on Portuguese identity and history marked their experience abroad. In their case, the answer to Pamuk’s question lay in a commitment to an individual creative voice embracing international vocabulary that allowed them to articulate new expressions or narratives about cultural identity.

This chapter focuses on the initial experiences of Paula Rego, Barto dos Santos, João Cutileiro, and Jorge Vieira in London, from early 1950s to early 1960s, questioning how their formative experience was essential for the definition of dissenting voices that confronted the images and narratives of Portugal promoted by the New State with alternative subjective experiences, critical historical accounts and visions of contemporaneity. By examining these artists’ production in the context of their education at the Slade School of Fine Art, I argue that this period was especially challenging not only for the adaptation to a new cultural, artistic, and formative environment, but also for the projection of a critical position that would enable future experiments in London and in Portugal throughout the 1960s. I identify that positioning with an attitude of resistance that is implied in each artist’s approach to specific formal and conceptual instruments.

The idea of resistance guides my analysis of the creative experimentation carried out by the Portuguese artists in London. Although they were neither actively and publicly opposed to the regime (they even participated in exhibitions in the country and abroad that were promoted by the dictatorship), nor engaged in ideologically based movements, such as neo-realism, their artistic practice, based on autonomous and subjective expression, conveyed conflicting visions in relation to propaganda of the New State. Resistance is therefore enacted through creative productions that challenge ideological, historical, cultural, and artistic formulae through which social codes of behaviour and national identity are crystallised. In this chapter, I associate the migratory experience and, in particular, the experimentalism stimulated by their training at the Slade with a permanent dialogue with contemporary events that were occurring in Portugal and an enquiring perspective on the cultural heritage of the country. Accordingly, geographical, political, and cultural distance reinforced a critical outlook and the transcultural environment of London enabled new ways of articulating not only an assertion of individuality and authorship, but also the identification of the individual with a specific cultural and historical territory; a self-defining creative path and a sense of belonging to a collective destiny. This double awareness emerges as a common thread in the experiments of Rego, Santos, Cutileiro, and Vieira, and would eventually guide them towards a critical intervention in the Portuguese context based on an existentialist and subversive attitude with regard to the canons of self and collective representation.

A New Artistic Itinerary

Rego, Santos, Cutileiro, and Vieira explored London as an artistic destination for the first time during the 1950s. When compared with Paris, the city of light, London was still considered to be rather obscure, demanding a different immersive experience that would reveal its landscape and corresponding cultural and psychological tones and at the same time as the artistic formulations that emanated from it. The most eloquent account of the confrontation with the multifaceted surface of London was provided by Barto dos Santos, who was first attracted to British art through the Penguin Modern Painters series, published in the late 1940s. The artist recalled that these books opened his ‘eyes to an art with particular characteristics that I had been ignorant of until then’ (interview with Sarre, 1988).¹ But it was another book, Charms of London (Charmes de Londres) with Jacques Prévert’s poems and Izis’s photographs, that convinced him to settle in the city. While Paris ‘seemed to be arriving at the end of a long tradition and starting to live from its own past’ (interview with Sarre, 1988),² London appeared as a mysterious place that was still to be explored. Indeed, the bombing scars in the British capital contrasted with the image of an unscathed Lisbon, with its picturesque, traditional neighbourhoods and the new modern and fashionable avenues. Moreover, the hidden and less touristy side of London, which Prévert and Izis favoured in their book, produced a surprising and inspiring effect. It was, for Santos, ‘a dark city, prone to fog and smog, and where Sundays meant deserted and desolate streets. The “City” was still a heap of ruins, and I wandered around it with my sketchbook and pencil. I realised then the veracity of the images of the Thames painted by Whistler in the previous [nineteenth] century’ (interview with Sarre, 1988).³ London itself, with its war-wrecked landscape, became a space for creation. The main incentive was not to rebuild or order it, but to penetrate its mysteries.

For the four Portuguese artists who arrived in the British capital in the 1950s, the most important place for artistic training and practice was the Slade School of Fine Art. Rego was the first of them to enrol in this school, in 1952. Cutileiro made his first contact with the Slade through Rego in 1955, and suggested to Santos that he also attend the school in 1956. Vieira began his training at the Slade in 1954. The Slade was then considered the most prestigious art college in England, with a history dating back to the nineteenth century and an affiliation to the University College of London, which granted its students an academic degree in art. William Coldstream’s pedagogic reform, already mentioned in the introduction to this book, was evocative of his previous experience at the Euston Road School, which he co-founded in 1937, and at the Camberwell School of Art. He introduced a new approach to teaching drawing and life room practice that was based on his own working method that consisted of establishing the relations of proportion and spatial distribution of the observed elements through careful measurement. He also promoted a social realism aimed at capturing everyday urban life and domestic environments. As Hester R. Westley concluded:

Coldstream’s legacy at the Slade rested on the modifications he effected to the teaching in the life room itself. Perception and process trumped outcome or anatomical precision; observation and sincerity trumped style and method. Ironically, Coldstream feared that his own approach to draughtsmanship might become a basis for teaching. […] Anxieties over a subjective ‘method’ or ‘style’ thus led him to open the Slade to a diversity of approaches and influences.

(Westley, 2015, p. 62)

I would argue that despite this diversity, a specific creative approach became referential for the Portuguese students and was epitomised by the presence at this school of Henry Moore, Reg Butler, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and the art critic David Sylvester. Sylvester’s championing of ‘Modernist Realism’ provided a formal and conceptual framework with which tackle at the same time authorial definition, subjective experience and a collective destiny. Yet, the Portuguese artists had to face several challenges at the beginning of their apprenticeship at the Slade. The rigid methods of drawing advocated by its director were not easily apprehended, which made it difficult for some students to integrate with the school’s system, and also established hierarchies of preference among the undergraduates.

There was an additional challenge for the Portuguese artists who came from a conservative institution like the Lisbon School of Fine Art and from a political atmosphere where conflicting opinions where repressed. Indeed, Santos noted in his early days at the Slade that its ‘different atmosphere, where work and teaching were based on critical discussion and the analytical observation of the model, caused at the time serious issues for someone who had recently left a School in which research was not favoured and intelligent critique was discouraged’ (interview with Sarre, 1988).⁴ All of the Portuguese students agreed that there was a ‘total freedom of expression,’⁵ which contrasted with Portugal’s political environment. Their early experiences in the artistic world of London were, therefore, coloured by their discovery of new forms of expression and by new cultural and artistic encounters. Inevitably, their work would come to register the creative itinerary of their migratory experience, that is, the dialogue between their Portuguese and British backgrounds.

Paula Rego: Identity Sedimentation

Paula Rego’s first passport was requested in 1951 to allow her to travel to England where she should attend a finishing school in Kent. Her father, José Figueiroa Rego, was an Anglophile electronics engineer who had completed his training at the Marconi factory in Chelmsford, Essex. Having grown up in a Republican and anti-clerical social environment, Figueiroa Rego disapproved of Salazar’s dictatorship and its corporative and pious ideology. For this reason, he planned for his child an Anglophile education that would eventually enable her to settle in the United Kingdom, which was in his view a less repressive and more liberal country. Rego would eventually settle in London and live and work in this city permanently, spending every summer in Portugal.

Most of Rego’s pre-Slade compositions were focused on the human figure and particularly on human relations, which were depicted with naïve technique, but coloured with caricatural and sardonic tones. Among them we find a glamorous scene at the Wonder Bar in Casino of Estoril, a group of three grotesque women gossiping over tea or a voyeuristic episode with three other women, who are fashionably dressed and kneeling to spy on what is happening on the other side of a small window. Rego already showed capacity for a very sharp observation of society’s petty behaviour and sordid inclinations. But while these paintings are especially comical, others from the same period set a more sombre tone. Political themes such as the repression of the Portuguese dictatorial regime emerge in a painting where a contorted figure seated on a chair is flanked by two faceless guards in a claustrophobic atmosphere. The title, Interrogation (1950) and the dramatic expression of the central character suggest that the figure at the centre is being subjected to a painful inquisition. In another painting Meal (1951), a portrait of a family conveys a cold and gloomy environment rather than the conventional happiness and warmth. While the man seems to contemplate the bottom of his wineglass, the woman stares blankly at the viewer while breastfeeding her child. A small girl, who is seated with her back turned to us, looks out with an icy expression.⁶

Rego was still a teenager when she arrived in England and enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art.⁷ Inevitably the experience of settling in a different cou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Plates
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Britain and Portugal – Universalism and Modernity at the Crossroads of the Mid-Twentieth Century
• 1 Images of Resistance: Artistic Apprenticeship and Experimentalism at the Slade School
• 2 Expressions of Contemporaneity: Dealing with Dictatorship and Colonialism in the Post-War Period
• 3 Travelling Images: Exposing Identity on the International Stage
• 4 Collective Imagery: A New Iconography for New Generations
• Conclusion
• Index