Carlos BOTELHO (1899-1982)

Carlos Botelho was born in Lisbon in 1899 (died Lisbon, 1982). The son of musicians, Carlos Botelho almost became a professional violinist, before he embraced the visual arts. He spent a brief time at the Lisbon School of Fine Art, where he studied with painter Ernesto Condeixa in 1919, but chose the path of the autodidact, and abandoned the school.

His career had an early start. He worked with industrial ceramics, graphic arts (posters and illustrations), cartoon, caricature, decoration, tapestry, stage scenes for the theatre and ballet, and of course, painting– having received the “Souza-Cardoso” Prize, in 1938, being selected from the Modern Art exhibitions, organised by the SPN/SNI. By 1940 he was exhibiting on a regular basis and picked up the “Columbano” Prize that same year. Like almost all artists from the second modernist generation, Botelho initially developed his work in the fields that offered an immediate market, and thereby provided a sustainable income– these being caricature and illustration. These areas granted artists room for experimentation, innovation and the oppportunity to air their modern, cosmopolitan desire. His first years thus testify to his vast production for the press, particularly, the children’s magazine ABCzinho. He began publishing cartoons in this magazine in 1923 and created the weekly page “Ecos da Semana” (in Sempre Fixe), in 1929. Published for 22 years, “Ecos da Semana” was a space for reflection on human identity, where Botelho developed his work as a writer and visual thinker.

His drawings in illustration and caricature took their initial inspiration from the satirical inheritance of Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro; expressed through a clear and lucid line, they exhibited a greater freedom than was found in his painted compositions of the time. Botelho superseded and personalised the influence of Pinheiro through incorporating of his daily experiences and travels into his drawings, never doing without the great expression and irony he used to define his characters as they went in their pursuit of urban elegance. Yet, this humorous register did not quite reach his work in painting. After a period dedicated to portraiture, between 1930 and 1941, his preferred theme would be the city. He dedicated himself to the endeavour of inventing multiple sides to the city of Lisbon, according to the inheritance of the vedutistas (paintings of Italian urban views from the eighteenth century), but in a somewhat capricious and fanciful manner. This can be observed in the way some buildings are deliberately recreated or how the river twists according to the artist’s composition. Botelho also transformed Lisbon into a laboratory of impressions and experiences of other cities and painters. He overlapped these impressions with his own journeys through Lisbon, whilst electing his motifs and ways of registering them.

As decorator of the official pavilions or representative of Portugal at the Venice Biennial (1950), Botelho was able to travel, and he used this opportunity to ensure he saw as much painting as possible. His journeys, determined by professional necessity, were used by Botelho as field trips, for the purposes of research and study. Botelho traveled to Paris for the first time in 1929. He returned in 1931 as one of the people responsible for decorating the Portuguese Pavilion at the International Colonial Exhibition of Vincennes and again, in 1937, as a member of a team of decorators for the International Exhibition. This last stay in Paris enabled a more direct contact with the oeuvre of Van Gogh, occasioning a visit to Brussels, where he also saw the work of Ensor. This added to the research he had already made in his time spent in Italy in 1935. His trip to New York in 1939, on the occasion of the International Exhibition, also enabled him to witness the opening of the Museum of Modern Art. From his stay in New York, Botelho retained the visual impact of the city’s impressive verticality, already a central theme in his work. The city’s sky-line would become a motto in his future compositions.

During the 1930s, besides his chronicle “Ecos da Semana”, he mostly explored the portrait, a pretext for his systematic personal training and the adoption of drawing as a study prior to painting, a foundation that is well expressed in his self-portrait from 1930, where a drawn painting, with clear and precise outlines, is served by fluid brushstrokes that hardly disturb the painting’s structure.

From the 1940s on, his preferred subject was already the city of Lisbon. Botelho progressively represented the city landscape, destitute of the human figure. He rendered these images according to the orientations of a geometric grid. His first incursions denote a tactile and textured quality to the mark, obtained with thick, voluptuous brushstrokes, directing the viewer’s gaze to the drawing and luminous nuances in the composition. At the term of the 1940s, compositions of abstract lines already loomed in a Lisbon characterised by demolitions, which were accomplished, in assumed experiences, in the 1950s. During the following decade, when the artist’s work already affirmed a clear complementary between drawing and painting, his cities disposed of their grid pattern (which had become almost labyrinthine) and his pictures became progressively less textured, according to a desire for greater transparency. Botelho’s expressive, warm palette pulsates with an intense light. His colours are the result of a lyrical staging that he sustained within his drawings. Lisbon was a place of multiple plastic experiences, a synthesis where the artist overlaid an Expressionism of German roots, and modernised the time of these landscapes. The city affirmed itself as a poetic and dynamic motif, a pictorial space, intimately revealed by the artist’s gaze.

EMÍLIA FERREIRA