The “New” and the “Elastic Boots”. 100 years ago Lisbon witnessed the “controversy that shook art” – Observer
You have free access to all Observer articles by being our subscriber.
This Friday, Lisbon relives an almost forgotten episode that marked the second decade of our 20th century and during which avant-garde and conservative groups measured paintings in the field of plastic arts. From 10 am at the Faculty of Fine Arts, and then at 3 pm at the National Society of Fine Arts (SNBA), researchers and university professors will speak on the Question of the “News”, which a century ago dominated the attention of an enlightened elite in the capital.
More specifically, it is proposed to bring to light the Rally of the “News”, as a public meeting of great repercussion became known, held in the then cinema Chiado Terrasse, on December 18, 1921, in which the “News” of modernist painting intend to defeat the “elastic boots” of naturalist painting.
The episode, according to João Macdonald, one of the organizers of this Friday’s colloquium, constituted “the most violent artistic and intellectual debate since scandal of orpheus in 1915”. It was “the controversy that shook Portuguese art”. If the magazine in which Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Almada Negreiros collaborated had shocked like old-fashioned minds – due to the “formal and stylistic novelty in the literary and artistic domains”, as he wrote in researcher Patricia Silva -, the “Comício dos Novos” would also spark passions in society and in the press, but this time I respect painting.
1921 was a particularly eventful year and somehow condensed on a Portuguese scale the “crazy 20s”. World War I had ended three years earlier, Republic I marked 11 years. During 1921 the English poems Fernando Pessoa, set to be published in the “Diário de Lisboa” and the “Seara Nova” magazine, the Portuguese Communist Party was founded, legislative changes were carried out, the first national football championship was organized, the carnage took place gives Bloody Night in Lisbon. To close, came the Rally of the “News”.
In conversation with the Observer, João Macdonald – who is a journalist and is completing a master’s degree in criticism, curatorship and art theories at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (FBAUL), with a thesis on Brazilian coffee from the squeak and cabaret Bristol Club in the 1920s – he explained that it was his idea to organize the meeting this Friday, to mark the centenary of the “News” Question.
He added that the subject is in the dark and “there is not a single study that is exclusively dedicated”. According to Macdonald, only two works deepen the episode a little: Pacheco, Almada and ‘Contemporânea’ (1993), coordinated by Daniel Pires, and A National Society of Fine Arts – A Century of History (2006), by Cristina Azevedo Tavares.
The colloquium is open to the general public, with free entry, and is organized by the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (through CIEBA – Center for Studies and Research in Fine Arts), in collaboration with SNBA and the Instituto de History of Art at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Includes communications on themes parallel to the “News” Question.
Fernando Rosa Dias, professor of Fine Arts and another mentor at the colloquium, will talk about the Algarve artists and intellectuals who participated in modernism, while researchers Raquel Henriques da Silva and Inês Silvestre address the theme of modernist paintings in Brasileira do Chiado. Next year, according to João Macdonald, a book will be published with texts from the meeting and press clippings at the time.
It would have been a rivalry in the field of fine arts, but apparently only a chapter of what we would now call a left-right war. João Macdonald made a synthesis to the Observer. It all starts in the spring of 1921. Political and social instability contaminates the fine arts. THE modernist painter Eduardo Viana is prevented from participating in the SNBA Annual Exhibition, the most important painting exhibition in Portugal, a commercial showcase like no other. The country was a desert of art galleries and only the Chiado Museum was dedicated to contemporary art.
Our modernists, not to mention Macdonald, were to some extent a mental periphery of what was happening in large centers like Paris and Milan, they sought to assert themselves and even had, not as far as painting was concerned, a growing market among the urban bourgeoisie. that, despite the crisis, he wanted to buy works that would give him status.
“The greatest resistance to modernism is not from the general public, but from academic circles and from the SNBA itself”, explained the researcher. “By saying that Eduardo Viana could not participate in that year’s exhibition, the SNBA added a signal to the modernist generation.” The exclusion was not of the concrete works that Viana proposed, it was symbolically an exclusion of modernism. “SNBA wanted to put the brakes on and show that they were the ones who decided what was art or not. They wanted to dictate their vision of art. ”
Among those responsible for the SNBA were former teachers at the Escola de Belas-Artes, where the modernists had passed. They remained a supporter of naturalistic academicism, although they did not see themselves as conservatives. In the expression coined years before by cartoonist Christiano Cruz, they were “elastic boots” – they literally wore elastic boots, a symbol that they would cling to the past, even in dressing.It can be said, in a simplified way, that the names that dominated as fine arts since the 1870s, as naturalists, were people of the left. Naturalism, being an artistic school that intended to show reality, had an underlying socialist thought, as Antero de Quental defended”, contextualizes João Macdonald. “Now, the modernists in general, although their purpose was not political, were monarchical or were somehow linked to the right, to Lusitanian Integralism.”
For months, between the exclusion of Eduardo Viana in the spring and the rally in Chiado Terrasse in December, the press will narrate the case and serve as a stage for the debate – the radio would only arrive in the following decade. Everyone had an opinion on the matter, not least because the SNBA was a central institution in the country. João Macdonald studied the press at the time and conceived that many dozens of articles were published in the 15 diaries that were printed.
However, José Pacheko, who is a partner at SNBA and supports the “News”, raises a controversy by proposing the entry of 180 new members, with the aim of changing the institution’s statutes and functioning. Beside him are Leitão de Barros, António Ferro, Almada Negreiros, Raul Leal, Fernanda Castro, and many others. On December 18, 1921, the Comício dos “Novos” finally takes place, a public meeting of redress in which Almada Negreiros is one of the main speakers.
It is imperative to say that, at the time of the rally, the modernists already know that the SNBA will not budge. The result of the initiative, and of the Question of the “News” as a whole, ends up in failure. The episode that marked Portuguese public life a century ago lingered on the pages of newspapers for a few more months, but the modernists did not manage to get the 180 new members to join an SNBA, nor did their avant-garde aesthetic proposals be accepted by the elite.
However, the way was open for an acceptance that would take place in the following years. From 1925 onwards, the Brasileira do Chiado and the Bristol Club, replacing the official circuits in a certain way, invited some “News” to exhibit there permanently: Almada Negreiros, Eduardo Viana, Jorge Barradas, António Soares, José Pacheko . Portuguese art would never be the same again.
“As they said, and rightly so, at the time, as these artists were not suitable for entering the Chiado Museum, at the time directed by Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, Brasileira and Bristol were our first modern art museums”, explained João Mac Donald . “The owners were illustrious people and wanted to sponsor modernism. From 1925 onwards, it was no longer necessary to go to the museum or to the SNBA. It was a phenomenon that happened in many other European cities. ” If the modernists had no space in the official salons, they were now on the streets, in plain sight.