Out of the Blue

I was so happy to witness the success of my dear friend Joaninha Costa Rosa's first Lisbon exhibition. The pictures speak for themselves, she's a wonderful artist. Her paintings are dreamy and impressive, a window to her beautiful soul.

We've been friends for many years, and I feel privileged to have been able to follow her development as an artist. I admire her talent and the courage to express her inner world in such a beautiful and sensitive way.

This was the happiest moment I had in a long time. Such an extraordinary artist, and she's my dear friend.

Uma Maneira de ser Moderno - exposição de Almada Negreiros na Fundação Gulbenkian

I always liked the work of Almada Negreiros, and the Gulbenkian exhibition is an excellent show. Almada was part of a brilliant set of artists that brought modern art to Portugal - Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro in literature, himself, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Santa-Rita-Pintor in painting, to mention the most remarkable. They were all outstanding artists by any standards, and they brought a breath of fresh air to Portuguese art, distinctively Portuguese and yet cosmopolitan, in synch with what was going on in Paris at the time. They were the perfect modern artists, and Almada Negreiros was the one who lived longer. He was a kind of Renaissance man, painter, poet and writer, but I think he mostly excelled as a draughtsman. He had that rare ability of drawing the perfect picture with a few apparently simple lines.

Irreverent as he was at the beginning, his longevity and quality made him become the modern Portuguese artist par excellence, accepted and recognised even by such a backward regime as we had at the time. He decorated major buildings, from cafés to universities to the dockyards buildings, doing mosaics and stained glass windows, and his 40s style became somewhat of a standard in illustration - I remember my childhood books and grade schools books being illustrated by him or in his style.

The Gulbenkian museum keeps doing a great job showing Portuguese art; this show is another great contribution, a par with the one they did a few years back with Amadeo Souza-Cardoso, my favorite Portuguese painter.

David Hockney, the biography - A Rake's Progress, by Christopher Simon Sykes

I first knew about David Hockney when I saw a reproduction of his probably most famous painting, A Bigger Splash, later I saw Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and Percy, and then a series of paintings of the same trees in different weathers. I like his style, very sharp and colourful, a kind of sunny version of Hopper, he's one of the contemporary artists whose work I enjoy. I knew nothing about his life, but am usually curious about the lives of artists I like, and enjoy reading biographies, they're so informative not only about their subjects but also about their times.

So it was interesting reading about his life and the art scene in London in the Swinging Sixties. He seems like a nice man, devoted to his work and able to escape from the traps of contemporary painting, that so often is just pretentious and unoriginal. It's curious how the author depicts his work and ideas as ground breaking and original; I don't agree, think most of what he does has lots of similar precedents throughout the history of European art - just consider Flemish Renaissance portraits, for instance -, but he's certainly a very talented painter and has known how to masterfully depict his contemporaries and California.

A moment in life

Recently, a post on the facebook page of A Máquina da Arte - a site created by young Portuguese artists I recommend - reminded of a brief encounter I once had with Mário Botas. I was 16, and out Portuguese teacher took our class to the National Library to see an exhibition of drawings inspired by Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and the painter, Mário Botas, was there to show us around.

I was captivated and charmed by the drawings - small compositions, soft and delicate colors, of a kind of dreamy, fantastic and childlike nature. They were strange and enticing. The artist, a tall young man (I have a terrible memory for faces) went around with us, occasionally making vague remarks about a drawing, like "I was thinking of Mário de Sá-Carneiro at the time..." or "I kept listening this line in my head..." (this was about the first line of a poem by Pessoa, Antinous: The rain outside was cold in Hadrian's soul, written in a drawing - it was the first time I read it, and it has also haunted me ever since).

At some point, in front of a particular surreal drawing, somebody asked him: "Yes, but was does it mean?" "What do you mean by that?" "Yes, this figure, what is it? And who is this guy, and why is he flying?". He looked at us with an attentive and slightly puzzled expression through his thick round glasses, and answered very seriously, not at all condescendingly (we were after all a bunch of teenagers, and only a few were paying attention): "What does it mean?... Well... I wouldn't know... I know what I felt when I painted them, but I didn't plan them. I painted what I felt was right... Then sometimes a friend sees something, another something else. I myself see different things at different times when I look at them, you might call them meanings, but don't know if it's that... You know, after I finish it, I really don't feel it belongs to me; someone may see something, or other... I really couldn't say it means this or that."

I remember listening and being fascinated by his words, it felt like something was finally making sense. I knew nothing about Surrealism at the time, didn't know Klee, Kandinsky or Pollock, but the question of the meaning of works of art was a frequent subject of conversation with a group of older friends I used to hang out with at the time, around cuba libres in bars; I was the kid and looked up to them, and the subject came up usually about the meaning of poems or more or less abstruse rock lyrics, not painting. They used to say: if the author says it means this, then it's what it definitely means, you don't have to look further; but that statement somehow never satisfied me (how I wish I would have known then what Neil Young said about the purported meaning of the lyrics of After the Gold Rush: "I think I wrote each line under a different drug, how am I supposed to give it a meaning?"). And now, here I was listening to the real thing, a real artist telling what I suspected but never had been able to put in words. Somehow, I remember this casual encounter as a defining moment in my relation to art; maybe it's silly to attach importance (meaning?) to these small things, but I somehow believe our views in life, our life actually, is actually shaped by these kinds of moments, that often seem quite insignificant at the time.

Our teacher commented a few days later that Mário Botas was very ill, and in effect he died a few months later from leukemia, barely 30 years old. I think it was a great loss, he was an excellent artist and seemed genuinely a very nice guy. I remember I read Almeida Faria's books because the covers were designed by him. And I still feel grateful for having helped to shape me in some, even if modest, way.

(Note - This teacher - I was in 11th grade - was by far the best Portuguese teacher I had; I owe him the discovery of the beauty of the Troubadours' poetry, that I still love, and of Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro. He was a passionate and talented teacher, he even made Almeida Garrett look interesting!)

(Second note - I couldn't copy the drawing with the Pessoa line, but it's on the Mário Botas foundation website - very worth a visit.)

Debussy, la musique et les arts, at the Orangerie

Another superb exhibition I saw in Paris! The exhibition about the times of Claude Debussy is an extraordinary gathering of art works from a period I'm particularly fond of, with paintings, photographs, sculptures and designs related to and contemporaneous of the composer. I love his music, though far from being a connoisseur. And the works are all great and splendidly exhibited, from the impressionists and Hokusai to the Pabst figurines, Nijinsky's photos and Kandinsky.

And I finally visited the Musée de l'Orangerie, with its superb collection - the beautiful Monet Nymphées rooms, but also an impressive ensemble of works by Cézanne, Derain, Picasso.

Matisse at the Pompidou

I absolutely loved the Matisse exhibition at the Pompidou Center. I came to admire Matisse more and more ever since I saw some of his paintings at the Musée Picasso the first time I went to Paris. He's undoubtedly one of the fathers of modern art, in some ways greater than Picasso. I love the art of the early 20th century, when our way to look at beauty changed so radically. And this exhibition is superb, not only the works are many and excellent, but they're extremely well arranged, the way the paintings are shown in pairs or series of the same motives is very interesting and insightful, we "look" at the themes with the eyes of the artist. And the chronological order makes us aware of his evolution, which was the evolution of modern art, from post-impressionism to an ever more simplified and schematic take on the subjects, until near-abstractionism. Watching the work of these geniuses of modernism, like Matisse himself, Klee, Kandinsky, Malevich, Picasso, is always fascinating, they really changed the way we perceive the world, they tried it all. And it makes us painfully aware of how poor and unoriginal most of painting is since the 50s.

Museu do Oriente

No último fim-de-semana, visitei finalmente o Museu do Oriente. Gostei bastante; a colecção não é uma grande mas parece-me bastante boa. Gostei particularmente das peças japonesas e de Timor-Leste (estas muito poucas mas muito interessantes); as imagens dos biombos japoneses, os desenhos chineses, os inúmeros deuses e cenas mitológicas indianas mereciam mais tempo para descobrir e apreciar detalhes. Em relação à exposição em si, achei a iluminação demasiado fraca e algumas obras, como os biombos, mereciam um espaço maior para serem mais bem apreciadas. Nas exposições temporárias, gostei muito dos desenhos de Graça Morais.

Bons complementos da exposição, e que ajudam a atrair público, são o restaurante com vista sobre a doca, onde se come bem e que não é caro, e a loja do museu. E sabe bem fazer turismo em Lisboa de vez em quando.

Ficam algumas imagens das peças de que mais gostei.

Dois livros de Paul Gauguin

Li recentemente Oviri- Écrits d'un Sauvage e Avant et Après, de Paul Gauguin. As partes mais interessantes do segundo estão incluídas no primeiro, que é uma excelente selecção - correspondência, artigos, memórias, e o fabuloso relato sobre o Taiti "Noa Noa".

Gosto imenso da obra de Gauguin, e os seus escritos ajudam a compreendê-la melhor, e ao homem. Apesar de repetidamente se intitular "um selvagem", Gauguin revela-se profundamente civilizado, naquilo que a civilização tem de melhor - a inteligência, a moral, a arte, a busca do conhecimento e da compreensão; e se tentou fugir àquilo que odiava na civilização do seu tempo (aliás, de todos os tempos) - a hipocrisia, a mesquinhez, a pequena autoridade, a igreja - manteve-se sempre em contacto com o seu mundo de origem, e é tocante imaginá-lo doente e refugiado nos trópicos, o mais longe possível da Europa, a ler atentamente o Mercure de France.

Tal como no caso de van Gogh, cuja correspondência com o irmão me levou a procurar estes livros de Gauguin, é deprimente pensar na ironia das dificuldades económicas por que passaram e nos preços obscenos que os seus quadros atingem hoje em dia - pagos pelo mesmo tipo de pessoas que os desprezavam quando eram vivos.

Lettres à Theo, de Vincent van Gogh

Gostei muito de ler as cartas de van Gogh ao irmão. Tocante, a escrita de van Gogh é apaixonada e intensa como os seus quadros (segundo Émile Bernard, “There, pulsating with life, one would find the whole of him.”), e é muito interessante seguir a evolução da sua vocação - de pregador protestante a pintor - e a génese de alguns dos seus quadros.

"...le monde ne m'importe guère, si ce n'est que j'ai une dette envers lui, et aussi l'obligation, parce que j'y ai déambulé pendant trente années, de lui laisser par gratitude quelques souvenirs sous la forme de dessins ou de tableaux qui n'ont pas été entrepris pour plaire à l'une ou l'autre tendance, mais pour exprimer un sentiment humain sincère."

Vincent viveu a sua curta vida de forma algo desastrada, mas sempre convicta, apaixonada e sincera, lutando com dificuldades financeiras (como é tristemente ir´nico ler: "C'est une perspective assez triste de devoir se dire, que jamais peut-être la peinture que je fais aura une valeur quelconque. Si cela valait ce que cela coûte, je pourrais me dire: je ne me suis jamais occupé de l'argent."!). Theo foi sempre o seu suporte inestimável, não só financeiro como afectivo. "Quand existe l'amitié véritable entre deux êtres, ceux-ci ne se fâchent pas facilement l'un contre l'autre, même lorsqu'ils en arrivent à se brouiller. Même si l'on se fâche, on ne tarde pas à se réconcilier."

"Ouf - le faucheur est terminé [...] - c'est une image de la mort tel que nous en parle le grand livre de la nature - mais ce que j'ai cherché c'est le «presqu'en souriant». C'est tout jaune, sauf une ligne de collines violettes, d'un jaune pâle et blond."

Joseph Cornell

Descobri a obra de Joseph Cornell em 1993, quando visitei o Art Institute of Chicago - que é um museu soberbo, dos melhores que já visitei. Não o conhecia, e fiquei fascinado com aquelas caixas com representações de uma realidade estranha e onírica, simultaneamente surrealista e realista. O museu tem uma excelente colecção destas obras, maior do que qualquer outra que vi até hoje, mesmo estando atento a todos os trabalhos deste artista em todos os museus de arte moderna que visitei desde então. Não sei o que me atrai exactamente nestas composições de colagens e pequenas peças, mas gosto imenso delas. Considero Joseph Cornell um dos grandes artistas da arte moderna do século XX.

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza - alguns quadros

O Museu Thyssen-Bornemisza tem uma excelente colecção, uma mostra da pintura ocidental desde o século XV até ao XX, com uma óptima selecção de obras. Alguns períodos estão menos bem representados, como os impressiobistas e os pós-impressionistas, mas no conjunto é um museu muito bom, de que deixo algumas imagens.