Mário Eloy

Mário Eloy (Lisbon, 1900 – Lisbon, 1951), after attending the Lisbon Fine Arts School (1913-1915), which he gave up because he didn’t identify himself with the teaching, went to Madrid, in 1919, escaping the banking employment his family wished for him. This voyage was the beginning of a trajectory, essentially self-taught, marked by the search for his artistic language. When he returned, he showed his work for the first time, at the Portuguese Illustration Salon, in 1924, and the following year at the Modernists exhibition organised by Eduardo Viana – the Autumn Salon. The paintings reflected not only the contact with the modernism of Viana, but also with the naturalism of Columbano and, above all, a social conscience which does not annul, however, a self-manifestation. He went to Paris in the same year, where he expanded his universe of references, with cubist researches and other references he found in the work of Picasso, Matisse and Braque, and which he assimilated in his own way. In 1927, he left Paris for Berlin, where he absorbed the expressionist tendencies, and where he had the privilege of being the only foreigner chosen for the Plastic Artists Society. He also collaborated with German magazines, such as Der Querschnitt. Even from a distance, he remained present in the Portuguese cultural milieu, sending works that would be presented in 1928, at Sindicato dos Profissionais de Imprensa and, in 1930, at the 1^st Independents Salon. In 1932, back in Portugal, he received the Amadeo Souza-Cardoso Prize. In the first half of the 1930’s, he explored new techniques, colours and shapes in his work, inhabited by Russian ballerinas, popular festivities and other scenes of Lisbon daily life. However, at the end of the decade, he began to feel the signs of Huntington disease, and his work showed a sombre atmosphere, a disconnection from reality that reflected not only the uncertainty in the mind of the artist, but also the world around him. The intensifying of the disease led to his internment, in 1945, at the Telhal Clinique. In 1996, the MNAC organised the exhibition Mário Eloy: Retrospective Exhibition, with its respective monographic edition. His work is represented in major public collections – The Chiado Museum, Casa de Serralves Foundation, Modern Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, as well as in private collections.

 

FMV, October 2020