Abstract
This article discusses at its outset the way Portuguese art history acknowledged and debated the relation that Amadeo Souza Cardoso’s painting establishes between international modernism and its regional Portuguese provenance. This debate imposed the idea that Amadeo’s national origins brought about, by way of the putative Portuguese disregard of main cultural and aesthetic standards, a trace of provincialism, eventually making his work unable of any critical stance. This provincialism is diagnosed on the basis of Amadeo’s decorative appropriation of Robert Delaunay’s simultaneous color circles. This article discusses this thesis, demonstrating that, far from the reactionary drive associated to it, Amadeo’s decorative interpretation of such element must, instead, be understood as a symptom of resistance, one that can be acknowledged as approaching the idea of “critical regionalism”. A final hypothesis suggests that the invisibility of this symptom arises from a perspective that associates modernism to the overcoming of representation in art.
Highlights
“La estrategia fundamental del regionalismo critico consiste en reconciliar el impacto de la civilizacion universal con elementos derivados indirectamente de las peculiaridades de un lugar concreto
O facto de o Estado português não ter desempenhado cabalmente nenhuma das duas funções – diferenciação face ao exterior e homogeneização interna – teve um impacte decisivo na cultura dos Portugueses, o qual consistiu em as espáciotemporalidades culturais local e transnacional terem sido sempre mais fortes do que a espácio-temporalidade nacional.”
Summary
“La estrategia fundamental del regionalismo critico consiste en reconciliar el impacto de la civilizacion universal con elementos derivados indirectamente de las peculiaridades de un lugar concreto.
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