Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso

Known for:

modernist art

Where to see:

Museum Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Calouste Gulbenkian MuseumMACAM

Not so fun fact(s):

He died at just 30 years old, leaving behind a remarkably ambitious body of work

About

Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso was a painter, caricaturist, and one of the first modern artists from Portugal, experimenting with Cubism, Expressionism and abstraction.

Born in Manhufe, Amarante in 1887 he left for Lisbon and then Paris at the age of 19. For the next few years, he moved through several studios, working with other notables in the Parisian art scene and exhibited internationally, from Berlin to New York.

At the 1913 Armory Show in New York, the first major modern art exhibition in America, he showed alongside Degas, Renoir, and Matisse, and sold seven of the eight works he presented.

When the war broke out in 1914, Amadeo returned home and worked intensely from his family house in Amarante. He died at 30, during the 1918 flu pandemic. His importance would only be fully recognized decades later.

Today, he’s seen as the key figure who connected Portuguese art to European modernism, and the best place to see his work in context is here, at the Museu Municipal Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, housed in the former São Gonçalo Convent in Amarante.