Stuart de CARVALHAIS (1887-1961)

Stuart Carvalhais introduced the comic strip to Portugal. His talents were prodigal and plural: he was a draughtsman, a movie director, an actor, and a graphic artist, as well as a successful designer– in a number of fields– interiors, costume design and stage sets. Born the son of a Portuguese father and English mother in Vila Real de Trás-os-Montes in 1887, he died in Lisbon in 1961.

Although a perfectionist, he placed little concern on the exhibiting of the work, and ignored the dictates of collectors and collections. He began his career by participating in some group shows, such as the first Humoristas de Lisboa (1920) and the Exposição de Artes Plásticas of 1935. Stuart ultimately held his first solo exhibition in 1932. He was awarded the “Domingos Sequeira” Prize in 1949, but remained isolated from the so-called first generation of Portuguese modernists. During his Parisian sojourn (1912-13), his work built a bridge between the caricature inherited from Bordalo Pinheiro and some of the new language championed by Almada or Santa-Rita.

A republican who never spared anyone who deserved criticism, he put his talents to work in 1914 in the satirical newspaper O Papagaio Real. He began the humorous supplement O Século in 1916 with his Aventuras do Quim e do Manecas affording himself the opportunity for political satire and caricature. He criticised the poses of mundane bourgeoisie, counterpoising it with social sadness which he personified in the popular and miserable characters whose humanity had seduced him.

The 1920s mark the acme of his career: he worked for the Diário de Lisboa and the Batalha in 1921, ABCzinho in 1922, (reiterating his success in these pieces for children’s supplements), and A Corja, the Espectro, A Choldra and the Diário de Notícias, the Ilustração magazine (a magazine he helped launch) and the humorous weekly Sempre Fixe. During the same period, he completed a number of commissions in graphic design: the Bristol Club’s menu, a set of postcards for the Exposição de 1925 dos Mercados and advertising for Sassetti. In the mid-twenties, there was no other artist that could match his prolific output in book and sheet music illustration. He used his role as a graphic designer to investigate his letter type, winnning two international awards in Spain and Italy in this genre. His work as theatre and costume designer took place at the Teatro Nacional and the Teatro Politeama, and developed in tandem with his work in film (he worked on an adaptation of Aventuras do Quim e do Manecas in 1916), and eventual movement into film directing (O Condenado with Mário Huguin).

Although antifascist, as his work of the 1930s establishes, he never pursued the path of Neo Realism, where he would have found an artistic, social and political family. Though he enjoyed painting, his development was curtailed by his inability to free his work of its illustrative nature, thereby limiting his activity to drawing for newspapers. Perhaps this constant activity– which was never defined through the expression or style of a time, or by a division into periods, but only in the prodigally adaptable and masterly nature of his line– most clearly evidences his manifest desire for creative and experimental freedom.

However his success was tainted with the problems of alcoholism and financial instability, leading to his experimentation with unexpected, unorthodox materials, such as ruined supports (wrapping paper, and even some of his compositions traced in burnt-out matches. He was also a profound connoisseur of the Lisbon basfond. Crossing this style with his own, he successfully caught the feel of the capital. Within this register he often made surprising use of stains (frequently made with coffee or wine) and textures in the languidness of line, and the rhythm of his forms. Thus, elegant in illustration, essential in caricature, each of Stuart’s characters retains the associated concepts of each representation. Often dark and violent, misery, like addiction or solitude, is characterised with quick yet soiled traces, either smeared dirtily or outlined in the contrast of the black and white.

If the heterogeneity of his drawing hinders the definition of his work according to decades, we should however take the risk of defining the revelation of a contradictory, yet lively Lisbon (at times elegant, but at others bitter) as the element of unification, a trait which can be observed in Guardado está o café para quem o há-de pagar (Stored is the coffee for anyone willing to pay, 1927). All of Carvalhais’ qualities are given display in that drawing: in a rapid and confident delineation a female figure stands defined on an empty background. The darkness of her gaze and challenge of her cinematographic, cosmopolitan and eroticised pose, clarifies the affirmation of her power, at once negated by the “scraped” trace, whose sparse incision enables irony to insinuate itself against the solitude.

EMÍLIA FERREIRA