Signs of “critical regionalism”: on the “decorative-style” in the painting of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso

Abstract

This article discusses at its outset the way Portuguese art history acknowledged and debated the relation that Amadeo Souza Cardoso’s painting establishes between international modernism and its regional Portuguese provenance. This debate imposed the idea that Amadeo’s national origins brought about, by way of the putative Portuguese disregard of main cultural and aesthetic standards, a trace of provincialism, eventually making his work unable of any critical stance. This provincialism is diagnosed on the basis of Amadeo’s decorative appropriation of Robert Delaunay’s simultaneous color circles. This article discusses this thesis, demonstrating that, far from the reactionary drive associated to it, Amadeo’s decorative interpretation of such element must, instead, be understood as a symptom of resistance, one that can be acknowledged as approaching the idea of “critical regionalism”. A final hypothesis suggests that the invisibility of this symptom arises from a perspective that associates modernism to the overcoming of representation in art.