Almada Negreiros Women Gone to the Beach

We could say, ironically, that Almada Negreiros’ Modern Women went on vacation to Tavira, Algarve. And they were, but not on vacation.

 

They left their usual home, the Gulbenkian collection, and headed south. They did not take a bathing suit or beach towel: they are modern but on artistic side, and they look at us from the side of the canvas for 100 years ago; modern yes, to the marrow, truly and profoundly, maybe the last great moderns; since then we haven’t seen proper modernity: many pastiches, little modernity.

Do you live at Algarve and would you like to see Almada Negreiros oeuvre without heading Lisbon? Are you on holiday in the south, already yearning for culture after so much sand on your shoes, sun burned shoulders and lunchtime spent at the grill, inhaling roasted sardines smoke?

 

Come and enjoy the cultured shade of Palácio da Galeria do Museu Municipal de Tavirauntil October 14, to see the new exhibition dedicated to José de Almada Negreiros, focused on the female representation in the artist's work.

The exhibition is curated by Mariana Pinto dos Santos and brings 55 drawings and paintings, the vast majority belonging to the collection of the Modern Collection of Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, as well as excerpts from her literary work and texts published in newspapers and magazines at the time.

In the art of Almada, emancipated women emerge constantly: starting certainly by his friends and ‘road companions’, imbued of the fashion of the twenties – at time, the first feminists as we know them today, the smoking women, the seductive ones, the rebels, the artists, the singers, the dancers, the actresses, the sportswomen or acrobats, all representations of the woman incorporated in the really Modern life.

However, Almeida Negreiros was a man, that's what counts, especially in last century’s first quarter, and therefore the Woman is still subject to a masculine and voyeur look, which dominated the history of art - and still dominates, in so many artists -, making the female body an object, being in this way a substantial part of the tradition of Almada Negreiros.

The Modern Woman of Almada also includes all the other women who would not make a point of being 'modern': in the exhibition we can also see examples of female figuration as a work force, with the portrait of the hardened and suffered expression of sea women, the fishermen’s wives and mothers, in images who announce realistic concerns, present in his art work from the thirties.

This exhibition is part of a policy of decentralization of the Gulbenkian Foundation exhibitions, which had as its starting point the exhibition José Almada Negreiros: a way of being modern, held in Lisbon, followed in Oporto by José de Almada Negreiros: drawing in motion, held at the Soares dos Reis National Museum.

 

 

Modern Women in the work of José de Almada Negreiros

Until October 14

Tavira Municipal Museum / Gallery Palace

Calçada da Galeria

8800-306 Tavira

Tel: 281 320 500

Tuesdays to Saturdays - 9:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

 

 

Pictures by Miguel Andrade, provided by the institution