Artworks
O homem das louças [The crockery man]
painting
Date
1919
Technique
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
131,7 x 114,4 cm
An essential painting in Eduardo Viana's oeuvre, “O homem das louças”, from 1919, is much more than a portrait of an anonymous figure surrounded by objects and colours that evoke the simultaneist painting of Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Despite the solidity of the body and the ease of the portraitist's frontal pose, it is in his gaze, which seems to stare at us and yet turn away, and in the objects he presents as - memorabilia
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of shared interests and common work, that we realise this is a painting where the record of a separation has been left behind.
After the departure of the Delaunays, who returned to Spain in January 1917, and the death of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso in October 1918, Viana was deprived of a close circle of artists who were also stimulating points of reference. Works such as “A Revolta das Bonecas”, “K4 Quadrado Azul”, or the collage “La Petite” are clear examples of this sharing.
It was from the winter of 1916/17, when he painted “A Rendeira de Vila do Conde”, which he described to Sonia as his “great Vermeer, (...) battlefield for the winter”, that Viana seemed to integrate the principles of simultaneist painting more deeply with the constructive matrix of his pre-war figurative painting. A third painting, “As três abóboras” (The three pumpkins), dated 1919, follows the same typology, with Viana returning to the representation of the figure in black, in this case male, characteristic of his older paintings, and which appears on this canvas surrounded by pumpkins that are dematerialised in complementary colours.
“O homem das louças” was Eduardo Viana's favourite painting and he exhibited it for the first time at the 2nd Lisbon Autumn Salon in 1926. It has already been written that, with this painting, the artist “re-enters himself” at a time when, in the European cultural context, there was a “return to order” after the euphoria of the avant-gardes of the decade before the Great War. But both in his personal sphere and in the wider European cultural atmosphere, the transformations had been profound and irreversible. Here, Viana says goodbye to the colourful clay dolls that seduced him and which he had painted in 1915, probably before the Delaunays arrived in Portugal. This is witnessed by this “crockery boy”, forever immobilised among a background of paintings with strong multicoloured textures left behind.
-
of shared interests and common work, that we realise this is a painting where the record of a separation has been left behind.
After the departure of the Delaunays, who returned to Spain in January 1917, and the death of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso in October 1918, Viana was deprived of a close circle of artists who were also stimulating points of reference. Works such as “A Revolta das Bonecas”, “K4 Quadrado Azul”, or the collage “La Petite” are clear examples of this sharing.
It was from the winter of 1916/17, when he painted “A Rendeira de Vila do Conde”, which he described to Sonia as his “great Vermeer, (...) battlefield for the winter”, that Viana seemed to integrate the principles of simultaneist painting more deeply with the constructive matrix of his pre-war figurative painting. A third painting, “As três abóboras” (The three pumpkins), dated 1919, follows the same typology, with Viana returning to the representation of the figure in black, in this case male, characteristic of his older paintings, and which appears on this canvas surrounded by pumpkins that are dematerialised in complementary colours.
“O homem das louças” was Eduardo Viana's favourite painting and he exhibited it for the first time at the 2nd Lisbon Autumn Salon in 1926. It has already been written that, with this painting, the artist “re-enters himself” at a time when, in the European cultural context, there was a “return to order” after the euphoria of the avant-gardes of the decade before the Great War. But both in his personal sphere and in the wider European cultural atmosphere, the transformations had been profound and irreversible. Here, Viana says goodbye to the colourful clay dolls that seduced him and which he had painted in 1915, probably before the Delaunays arrived in Portugal. This is witnessed by this “crockery boy”, forever immobilised among a background of paintings with strong multicoloured textures left behind.
