Almada and Portuguese Futurism
Introduction
The present work aims to introduce and reflect on Portuguese futurism and its legacy in art, culture and fashion, as well as discuss how futuristic aesthetics and ideology permeate the postmodern and globalized scenario today. When trying to demonstrate how the futuristic experience has contributed to the development of contemporary art, we intend to launch a look at futurism as a aesthetics of time, a movement that has become a kind of archetype of future artistic experiences and their legacy in current fashion in current fashion.
We will highlight the extreme importance of José de Almada Negreiros for the Portuguese avant -garde of the twentieth century. We will focus on his artistic career from 1913 to 1917, his most striking period as a futuristic. We will address issues related to their literary works, their revolutionary role in society through their works and the use of black humor or mockery to criticize the followers of Dantas and all those who cling to the comfort of the ‘tradition’ andThey are afraid of change.
A brief look at futurism in art and painter Almada Negreiros
Futurism begins to include elements outside the aesthetic sphere, but, unlike finisecular aesthetics, it does not impose restrictions on the limits of aesthetics and the concept of beauty.
Topics, figures, techniques and referents communicate within the different artistic areas. Then, the progressive inclusion in the work of art of elements outside its scope and the process of deacralization of art ended up destroying the notion of preexistence of the beauty category. Cubist collages are expressive examples of the art deacralization process, since they are composite pictorial works from elements outside the art -newspaper resources, for example-. Marcel Duchamp’s readmades lead to this process of ‘loss of uniqueness’, ‘unique character’ and the ‘cult character’ of the work of art, for using the expressions of Walter Benjamin.
José Sobral by Almada Negreiros, as mentioned several times, was one of the great Portuguese artists of the twentieth century. self-taught par excellence, he got, as someone said, to be ‘modernist, futuristic and … all’. Also bequeathed many paintings. Almada’s eyes were the eyes of modernity, the eyes that saw a future and fought against tradition and canons. Without ever submitting to the rules of academic representation or to the still dominant naturalistic taste in Portugal, its very personal way of drawing, characterized by the ‘clarity of the expressive force of the synthetically elastic and definitive line’ is present in the drawings of 1917. In fact, although declared a futuristic in several texts, Almada never approached the options of futurism in the plastic arts (there is nothing that identifies him in the least with the works of Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni or Gino Severini) and only incorporatedElements of Cubist Language Several years later -unlike Santa -Rita or Amadeo, which in the early 1910s, during prolonged stays in Paris, established forms of tune with the avant -garde of the time.
While the autonomous drawing is a constant in his artistic career, over the years the painting has not occupied him so regularly. More cartoonist than painter, in Almada’s painting it will always be the drawing that plays the main structuring role. Almada also fascinated the possibility of giving life to the drawings and putting them in motion, and he intended several times to try his hand in animation, but never achieved his desire.
A futuristic work? Analogy with Marinetti’s futuristic ideals
‘To Cena do ódio’, a fundamental composition of the first Portuguese modernism that has remained in the dark, apart from the numerous studies dedicated to other founding poems of the modernist literary movement in Portugal, such as ‘Maritime Ode’ and ‘Ode triumphal’,by Álvaro de Campos, ‘Chuva Obliqua’, by Fernando Pessoa, or ‘Manucure’, by Mario de Sá-Carneiro. In the poetic panorama of the early twentieth century, this extensive composition is one of the strongest contact bridges between Portuguese literature and avant -garde European literature, in a country in which, except for some cases, most writers alwaysThey have demonstrated the need to approach what was done abroad. In this sense, we must consider ‘the ODIO’s dinner’ as one of the first and most marked manifestations of the ‘international feeling’ in the national literary landscape of the early twentieth century and its author as the maximum exponent of the cult of the literary avant -garde inPortugal-‘Almada’s personality concentrates the avant-garde as an interpreter and author’-, as the manifesto’ anti-dantanas e by extensive ‘, the’ futuristic ultimatum às gerações Portuguese do Senculo XX ”. Critical literature is almost unanimous when declaring ‘a dinner of the oda’ as a futuristic composition;Such a statement has thus become a fact among critics, even if they are well informed. If it is true that Almada Negreiros’s extensive poem intended to appear on the pages of Orpheu 3 presents several affinities with the violent aesthetics of Italian futurism, to what extent ‘A dinner do odio’ can be considered really futuristic?
Although many believe that yes, that a futuristic ‘shout’ should be considered, it shows the absolute contrast between some statements by Italian futurists and certain ideas transmitted in ‘to dinner do ódio’, revealing the ethos of futurism and that of ‘A Cena doHatred’. While Marinetti and futurists applaud militarism and glorify war, ‘the only hygiene in the world’, Almada subverts the value of the military institution, denounces the ‘science of killing’ and proposes to ‘Roberto in uniform’ take off the uniform and abandonweapons. In this sense, this work is simultaneously a cry of war and an antibelic shout, or rather, it is a war cry with antibelic content.
One of the principles that define futuristic thinking is the acceptance of technological progress and faith in the benefits of scientific development. Almada Negreiros, on the other hand, ridicule the discoveries and technological inventions and devalues the systems of scientific knowledge in general, continuing the attitude of radical insubordination that is in the origins of modernity.
Finally, to the euphoric vision of the modern city of the futurists, Almada Negreiros opposed to ‘oda dinner’ a dysphoric vision of the polis, described as a place of dirt and rot, the dilemma of the disease, and a purifying return toThe Earth, in a regeneration proposal through the elimination of rationality and sensory contact with nature, in symptomatic formulations of a deep telluric nostalgia. This therapeutic proposal, which echoes the poetics of Alberto Caeiro, states the nuclear and agonizing problem of the Pessoa universe: the question of intelligence, lucidity or consciousness.
If the ideological content of ‘The scene of hate’ was not different from the futuristic ideology, futurism was a movement that was not limited to the field of aesthetics, but extended to the social and political sphere and shared traits with fascismItalian, as is well known. Thus, when talking about futurism, we must not neglect that it is endowed, from the beginning, with a global ideology that informs all the activities of the movement and that results from ethical, aesthetic, political and social conceptions.
The question of Portuguese literary futurism
Is there a Portuguese literary futurism? Marinetti defends in his manifestos that there is not really futurism as such. What would have been in Portugal would have been avant -garde aesthetic movements, parallel to Italian futurism, or perhaps even facets of European futurism. Some say that orphism would better characterize the avant -garde revolution of generation that is part of the so -called first modernism. It cannot be denied that there are analogies among the avant -garde movements of the first Marinetti manifest.
Orpheu is, therefore, the most significant avant-garde initiative of those years and affirmed, within the framework of Portuguese literature, the most important names and that would have so much influence in future generations: Almada Negreiros, Mario de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa.
The name ‘Orpheu’ was not chosen by chance: Orpheus was the mythical Greek musician who, to save his wife Eurídice del Hades, had to return it to the world of the living without looking back.
And it was this metaphor that mattered to the men of Orpheu, including Almada, this never looks back, this forgetfulness, this forgetfulness of the past to concentrate attention and strength on the way forward, in the future, in ‘buildThe 20th century Portugal (Almada Negreiros). The Geração d’ Orpheu not only contributed to the modernization of art in Portugal, but also responsible for the dissemination of some of the best artists in the world, as well as the publication of revolutionary and violent texts, characteristic of the futuristic movement.
The futuristic conference of May 14, 1917, organized and presented by José de Almada Negreiros, at the Republic Theater, was the first public demonstration of the Futurist Committee of Lisbon. In November of that same year the only number of Futurist Portugal was published. These events were innovative and broke with tradition, producing a movement of renewal and/or change that could be radical, operating transformations at the level of ideology and language, using it as a simple communication vehicle.
The futuristic inspiration and vanguardism of Orpheu
It was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the idea of the magazine with Luís de Montalvor and Ronald de Carvalho was born. In 1915, the magazine was almost ready;It would be quarterly and would have two directors: Ronald de Carvalho, in Rio, and Luís de Montalvor, in Lisbon. At the end of March of that year the first issue of Orpheu was distributed to the subscribers and sold to the bookstores.
In an unprecedented edition, dated October 1934, Almada Negreiros tells us how the Orpheu Group emerged. Living in a decadent era and a hostile environment ‘congested from political realities that tyrannized exclusively to the whole country’, such was the reality that new generations of writers and painters had to face. There were both to destroy and build. The most daring wanted action. ‘If they didn’t understand us, at least they should hear us scream’. Almada confesses: the group soon discover the hatred of those who had the truth. The modernists thought that the mistakes they attacked and the routine they wanted to break were everyone’s fault, and not only of a few who felt affected in their privileges. It was always like that: the privilege did not give anyone and less to the young people who formed the Portuguese aesthetic avant -garde.
In 1912, Almada continued, ‘The group prepared and published a literary magazine, called Orpheu. Shortly after, there was another, Futurist Portugal, which was completely retired by the police. Then I was contemporary, but this one, already materially defended, would have really lasted more than it lasted if the meaning of the group in their own pages ’had not been distorted’. A fourth Athena magazine would appear, but the group was practically finished in its presentation action. Only the authors remained. What was the meaning of the group? Interrogates Almada, and replies: ‘None address, unanimity guest collaboration among all collaborators. We consciously proceed to form an elite group, without bosses and all authors, which is only possible among art people. Therefore, our desideratum was just one: the authors. And that’s what has remained. It was also Almada who spoke of the group on the twenty -anniversary of Orpheu, writing for the Lisbon Diário on March 8, 1935 in the article ‘Um Anniversário – Orpheu’. In addition to highlighting the names that participated in the movement and telling the story of the magazine’s appearance, Almada says it was an aristocracy of the spirit, overturned towards the true essence of values. What Orpheu’s writers wanted was ‘that there was Portugal and also Portuguese’. Portuguese especially because Portugal already exists ’.
Sá-Carneiro recognizes the genius of the ‘little’ Almada Negreiros, explicitly referring to the text of a poem that defines as ‘superb’, ‘a dinner do ódio’, which will appear at number 3 of Orpheu. And he says that the young author must be courted: first because he can help the magazine financially, and second because he is a great author. From then on, Almada, Magician and seductive poet, became the key figure of the futuristic movement that would shake Lisbon and the entire continent, already scandalized by the ‘follies’ of Orpheu.
conclusion
It can be concluded that futurism was more an ideological movement with a defenestration of ideas than of guidelines and techniques. The movement was revolutionary, with a new way of seeing the world, and above all to want.
The movement is born from an era in transformation, the era of the machine, or the second industrial revolution.
It is in this context of revolution that the futuristic ideal is explained, the ideal of the movement that can now be felt, of the new, of the machine, now present in the daily life of all. The way of seeing war is understood by the convulsive times that precede the First World War and the phase of nationalist Italy. Futurism was aggressive and radical, but in a way it was also very bold. In terms of Banham, ‘Marinetti was able to give a very widespread feeling of disgust for the old and desire for the new, a positive orientation and a connection point in the world of the arts: Marinetti sent his generation to his generation to thestreets, with their manifestos, to revolutionize their culture, in the same way that the political manifestos of which it took literal form had ordered men to go out to revolutionize their policy ‘.
We also deduce that Almada Negreiros, as a futuristic, transcended the mere condition of an artist. Not only was it a creator, but the art itself. It was not enough to be a mere designer or author. It had to be more than that. Almada wanted the world and wanted even more. Almada wanted to represent what went beyond the eye and body, which went beyond himself but only he knew. Futurism is also a revolution. And this futurism of Almada was a movement capable of breaking its own walls and staying until today in the collective imaginary, in one way or another, either in ideological or aesthetic issues such as fashion. ‘When it comes to the future, we face something that still does not exist, and therefore the possibilities are endless’.
References:
- Negreiros, Almada
- Complete work 6 vols. Published, Lisbon, Editorial Estampa, 1971/1973
- Saraiva, Arnaldo
- To Genese de Orpheu and do Modernismo Português and Braziliro ’in Orpheu
- Introdução to Leitura de Orpheu No. 3 Lisbon, Edições Actica, 1984
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