Monday, July 25, 2016

Adriano Sousa Lopes, Portuguese Semi-Modernist

As best this blog's internal Google search tool can tell, I've never posted about a Portuguese artist. Perhaps that's because there are no famous artists from Portugal. Consider this Wikipedia list -- none of the names mentioned is familiar to me.

Not even listed there is Adriano Sousa Lopes (1879-1944), some of whose work I've noticed on the Internet. His Wikipedia entry mentions that after studying art in Portugal, he went to France and studied under Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard and "from 1904 to 1912, he exhibited regularly at the Salon d'Automne." In 1917-18, during the Great War, he was commissioned as a war artist to depict Portuguese troops serving on the Western Front.

The entry mentions that Sousa Lopes was a modernist, but later changed to a more traditional style. To me, his modernism was tepid. Mostly it boiled down to sketchiness in his paintings and the use of bright, faintly Fauvist color.

On the whole, his work doesn't excite me, though a few paintings are interesting.

Gallery

As Ondinas - 1908
A painting done in traditional style even though his French teachers were modernists. Perhaps this was done with the intent of pleasing the Portuguese art establishment of his time.

Le Moulin Rouge - c. 1910
More a sketch than a finished modernist work.

Narcisos
I don't have a date for this, but guess from the clothing and hair style that it was painted around 1915. Sousa Lopes did a good job here.

Ferme du Bois, distribuição do rancho
A Great War engraving.

Margerite Gros Perroux - 1920
This surprised me, because it's so different from other Sousa Lopes paintings. For now, I'll have to trust the source site, but let me know if another artist painted this.

At the Park - early 1920s
This might be his wife.

Blusa azul - 1925-28
This is probably Sousa Lopes' best known painting, probably of his wife.

Retrato Madame Sousa Lopes - 1927

Great War mural panel in Museu Militar de Lisboa - early 1940s?
Other artists might has assisted in the painting because Sousa Lopes' health was deteriorating.

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