Francis Smith
Francis Smith (Lisbon, 1881 - Paris, 1961), also known in Portugal as Francisco Smith, left for Paris at a young age to study at the Julian and Grande Chaumière academies. A well-known member of the École de Paris, married to the French sculptor Yvonne Mortier, his work had a remarkable commercial success in France, always with good reviews, and exhibiting together with the most renowned artists of the time. Member of the first generation of Portuguese modernists, in Portugal his work was, however, perceived as naïf. Focusing on the subjects (popular Portuguese scenes that, over time, he blended with modern French daily life), the reviews ignored his formal innovation.
Exhibiting with the modernists, in Lisbon, since the Exposição Livre in 1911, his first solo show in 1918, at the Bobone Hall, was a commercial flop. The bad reviews would persist until 1934, when an exhibition organized by the SPN got him greater notoriety among us. In spite of the acquisition of two works for the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the mismatch with Portugal led him not to return. Nevertheless, he continued to participate in group exhibitions in Portugal and was one of the artists that worked in the decoration of the Portuguese Pavilion of the Paris International Exhibition, in 1937. According to historian Jorge Costa, these circumstances contributed to the creation of a national mystique of a painter of saudade.
An educated traveller, Smith had an artistic and coherent practice with modernist aesthetic stylization and simplification. His first participation in a group show in Paris, in 1912, was commercially successful, and had good reviews. Indeed, apart from some setbacks (namely during World War II), his success was constant from the 1920s on. This fauve-inspired author, of colourful works with a popular, everyday approach, got, in 1931, an impressive order of thirty canvases on the pavilions of the Paris International Colonial Exhibition, for which he would become Knight of the Legion of Honour.
In the last decades of his life, he would return to his more cheerful palette and to increasingly synthetic formal proposals, close to some abstraction.
His work is represented in several French and Portuguese public museums.
EF, dezembro 2020
