José Sobral de Almada Negreiros was a Portuguese artist and writer. Besides literature and painting, Almada developed ballet choreographies and worked on tapestry, engraving, murals, caricature, mosaic, azulejo tiles, and stained glass.
Background
Ethnicity:
His father was Portuguese and mother Portuguese-Angolan.
Almada Negreiros was born in Roça Saudade, Trindade, São Tomé, on April 7, 1893. He was the son of António Lobo de Almada Negreiros and Elvira Freire Sobral. He was brought up in Lisbon together with his brother António. José de Almada Negreiros also had a sister. After his mother’s death in 1896, the artist's father moved to France.
Education
José de Almada Negreiros and his brother attended a Jesuit boarding school in Campolide, Lisbon, since 1900. At the beginning of the October 1910 republican revolution the school was closed. After that Almada Negreiros started his studies at the Escola Internacional, which was also located in Lisbon.
Career
José de Almada Negreiros started his artistic career as a caricaturist in the year 1911. He took part in the I and II Exhibits of Portuguese Caricaturists, in 1912 and 1913, respectively. In 1913 he held his first solo exhibition at the International School of Lisbon, presenting 90 works. In March 1914 Almada Negreiros published his first poem. In 1915, he collaborated with Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro in the first issue of the literary magazine Orpheu and illustrated the prospectus for the magazine Contemporânea. The same year he also conceived the O Sonho da Rosa ballet.
In 1917 Almada Negreiros published together with Santa-Rita Pintor the Portugal Futurista magazine, becoming an author of the Ultimatum Futurista, às gerações portuguezas do século XX ("Futurist ultimatum to the Portuguese generations of the 20th century").
Between 1919 and 1920 the artist lived in Paris. Here, Almada Negreiros isolated himself, engaging in his apprenticeship outside the sphere of academies and workshops. He participated in the Exposição dos Cinco Independentes (Exhibit of the Five Independents) in 1923 and in the I and II Autumn Exhibits in 1925 and 1926, respectively. In the 1920s José de Almada Negreiros tightened relations with several Spanish artists and intellectuals, and left for Madrid in 1927. There, he became actively involved in the artistic and literary scene, collaborating with many significant painters, architects and writers of Spanish Modernism.
José de Almada Negreiros returned to Portugal in 1932, where he witnesseed the implementation of Estado Novo’s cultural policies, which establish a new way of working for artists. Almada Negreiros took on several public and private commissions, creating stained-glass pieces, tile panels, fresco paintings, mostly working together with architect Porfírio Pardal Monteiro. At the same time, he produced a number of drawings and paintings, graphic designs, literary texts, poems and theatre plays.
In 1935 Almada Negreiros founded the Sudoeste magazine, and the following year he took part in the Independent Modern Artists Exhibition in Lisbon. He was the creator of the fresco decorations for the Maritime Stations in Alcantara (1943 -1945) and Rocha Conde Óbidos (1946-1949). He was also the author of portraits of Fernando Pessoa for the restaurant Irmãos Unidos (1954) and for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1964).
José de Almada Negreiros always considered himself a futurist artist, nevertheless, his style was wider, and went beyond any category. Many of Almada Negreiros's paintings and drawings show common people in daily affairs or attitudes usual in the socialist art. His work as a visual artist extended to tapestry, printmaking, theater and ballet scenography.
His last commissioned work is the panel Começar (To Begin), for the foyer of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s headquarters (1968).